Technology and Organizations

…“I’m working on the Acme revision” …versus microblogging, say, at a party: “I’m so drunk.” Microblogging is blogging, but posts are limited in length (say 140 characters). Twitter is one of the most famous microblogging platforms. The key question for me is whether (and how), microblogging can help with coordination at work. In prior posts I’ve discussed the value of situational awareness amongst team members and the possible value of Twitter, but there hasn’t been a serious push for microblogging in work organizations – until recently.

Claire Cain Miller’s article in the WSJ Business Innovation Technology Society (BITS) section focuses on Yammer and the possible value of microblogging in organizations. Yammer is similar but different from Twitter in that Yammer’s key questions are “What’s happening at your company?,” “What’s happening on the project” versus the less formal Twitter “What are you doing?” (“Thinking about what’s for lunch”).

Miller’s article touches on the value of short updates and speaks to Yammer’s founder, David Sacks, about microblogging versus email and IM:

E-mail no longer serves its proper purpose, which is to request an active response, Mr. Sacks said. All the rest of the stuff that clogs in-boxes — mass e-mails sharing a link to an article, for example, or notifications of company events — makes e-mail less efficient. He wants to move all that to Yammer.

I certainly agree with the idea that email is broken for many of our organizational and team coordination needs, but I’m not sure if a stand alone microblogging platform is the solution. I’m still thinking about how we can support collaboration and work performance more as a symphony and perhaps less as jazz improvisation. Even with jazz, collaborators understand the possible instruments and how they best intertwine. We aren’t there yet with our understanding of work collaboration and its support. We do need to support situational awareness within teams – especially in virtual work situations.

Knowing when and how to communicate, document, and discuss are key to team performance. Tools like Yammer are an additional method, but the value will be in how the tool is interconnected with the team’s process.

Further reading:

Whitepaper on microblogging and Twitter 

Discussion of Twitter for enterprise use

Twitter hall of shame 

I’ve been getting questions from students about quick and easy ways to run their team projects. They correctly believe that they could do better than Yahoo Groups and/or Google Groups. In August I wrote a basic post about designing communication and workflow infrastructure for multi-organizational project teams. More recently I created a short “audit” to help people think about their requirements and options. Today my research assistant said she’d be interested in a “how to” about how I created the Google Sites project site she and I are using to work together.  This approach combines a useful technology tool (Google Sites) with basic ideas of team and project management - including some implementation tips.  Here it is:

Disclaimer – Limited QA here – I may have left out a click or two – be sure to save your work at each stage.

Simple (using a student project as an example) — See bottom for a more sophisticated version.

Three basic components – To Do list, Discussion Tool, and a File Repository. Here’s the demo site.

Create a Google Site for your project (you do need a Google account – free):
Go to http://sites.google.com
Click on Create New Site
Give it a Name and a URL (they don’t have to be the same, e.g., Primo Project for Name and http://sites.google.com/site/primoprojectsite for the URL)
Click appropriately for adult content
Click on whether sharing is with the world, or just with people you will specify
Pick a theme
Enter the funny text that proves you’re human

Presto! Now you have a site.

Immediately “Create a New Page” and choose Dashboard as the format. Click that you want this page created at the “Top Level.” I like to name my Dashboards –ok, Primo Project Dashboard. Very creative. Click on “Save.”

---

{This section is my kludged way of getting the Dashboard as the home page – Google Sites automatically creates a “Home” page – but I want a Dashboard at the top of the site and I can’t figure out how to do that initially. I’ll edit this section if I ever figure out how to do it more simply.}

Click on Site Settings (top right of page)
Click on the “Other Stuff” tab
Change the “Landing page” to your dashboard page. Click “OK” then “Save Changes”.

Return to the site and delete the page with the title “Home” (go to the site, click on the link called Home, click on the “More actions menu” then “delete”). Now your dashboard page is your home page.

Create another new page. Choose the “List” format. Call the page “To Dos” and have it put underneath the Dashboard page in the site structure (this is an option you have to pick). I like the “Action Item” style, though you are given other choices.

Create another new page. Choose the “File Cabinet” format. Call the page “Files and Documents.” Put it under the Dashboard in the site structure.

Create yet another page. Choose the “Announcements” format. Call the page “Comments and Questions” and put it also under the Dashboard in the site structure.

Now for the fun. We need to link these pages to the Dashboard. You can’t create the dashboard links until you’ve created the pages to link to. Makes sense.

Go to the Dashboard page. Click Edit. You should see four place-holders for “gadgets.” These gadgets are the tools of the dashboard – they keep track of changes in the other pages you created. Click on the first gadget – use the dropdown box to insert the “Recent List Items” gadget – this will now keep track of and provide a link to your To Do page. Click on Save. Click on the next place-holder and link to “Recent Files.” Click on Save. Click on the third place-holder and link to “Recent Posts” (links to your Comments and Questions page). Click on Save. Go crazy. Use the fourth place-holder to add a link to an existing shared Google calendar (you’ll need the URL from the calendar’s site. For more info click here).

Click on the save tab near the top of your page and you will see your dashboard page with its three gadgets (four if you added the calendar). The site map will let you go directly to the underlying pages – or click on the links provided by the gadgets. (I like to put in a test “comment” so people know how to use the comments and questions section).

Click on the Files page and add any files you already have. Decide as a group whether you want to post separate files (e.g., stand-alone Microsoft Word or Excel files), or whether you want to use Google Documents – see this education focused discussion on Google documents.

Take on the hard but critical task of deciding as a group how to do the work. If possible, do this over a beer or coffee in a place with wireless.

• Bring a laptop and do some group design on the site.
• Ask people to bring their resumes so you can get to know their strengths.
• Convince everyone to “subscribe” to changes to the site – this means that they will get an email each time a change is made (under the “more actions” tab, click on “subscribe to site changes”.
• Add any other gadgets to your dashboard that the team thinks will help you get the work done. (I added the Santa Clara logo by using the “Insert” tab and then uploading the image from my desktop.)

Dylan Salisbury (SCU http://www.Scu.edu MBA student and author of a thoughtful blog) http://blog.dylansalisbury.com/ had some additional suggestions after he read a draft of this post (he’s also suggested a post on team roles, I’ll do that next):

For an actual MBA class project, I think that e-mails directly to the project mailing list is the best format for all group discussion — announcements and discussion boards are not as useful (but you knew I was going to say that!). It’s very common to see an e-mail from somebody that comments on all the three current open issues and expresses an opinion about what to do next, which is good. The quarter moves so quickly that I *want* multiple discussion threads to be consolidated whenever it’s appropriate, and I want a linear view of all the communications at the potential expense of not seeing the threads so clearly. I don’t want any chance that I update a discussion but only 3 of the 5 team members sees it right away. Also, each of us has our own e-mail client that we can use to create a threaded view — we own our tools! {TG asks: Dylan (or anyone else), do you still feel this way if you are getting email announcements of changes to the page?}

Announcements and Q&A pages are really helpful for some of my real-world projects where we have a team of 4-5 people but 20 or 30 possible stakeholders who occasionally want to browse the web site to understand what’s going on.

But it may be good to start some wiki pages for various ideas and things that need to be collected during the project, outside of the discussion format (List of URLs of relevant articles, list of open questions, ideas for the paper, etc). {TG notes: To create a basic wiki page in your team’s Google Site, create a new page and choose the “web page” as the format. This format has the ability to “see earlier versions” and then the possibility of reverting to an earlier form if you need to}

Get an “A” on the project because you have an excellent collaboration process.

More sophisticated version (includes project status, background on project, background on team members – site example provided by www.enterprise-dashboard.com)

In my post “First there was Yahoo Groups” I promised an audit as a starting point for building a team or project “information architecture.”  I’ve had both on-line and face-to-face conversations with readers offering that email with distribution lists is still the best option for short-term teams.  I’ll try and respond to some of those points below.

Disclaimer: This is not an overview of the full space of available tools.  These are questions to ask as you think about the design of your team’s portal architecture.

1. Who are the participants?  Key to this is whether they are all inside your organization or not.  This matters first because it determines whether or not they will have access to platforms provided by your organization.  For example, are they included under your Microsoft Sharepoint license?  Are they allowed to make design changes to a Sharepoint site you set up?  What happens if you leave the group? Will the group lose access to the site? 
2. What tools do you have access to?  Will your company allow company work to sit on external servers (e.g., Google Sites)?  Will your company allow non-company work to sit on their servers (e.g., you have access to Sharepoint and/or Basecamp, can you put your grad-school team’s work on the company servers)?
3. Cost.  If you are using a fee-based tool, who pays? Is it your account and you can bring others in as you choose (see my concern about what happens if you leave the team)? Is it by the team member or by the project?
4. Who do you want to be able to redesign the site? Different wikis have different features around how you can free up or close down permissions.
5. What capabilities do you need for your site? 
   1. File storage
   2. Versioning of files
   3. File syncing – systems that are passive are more likely to be up to date as the system is managing the uploading of the most current version.  Right now I’m running several team projects via Google Sites, but I have yet to enact the part that would manage syncing.  This means that team members have to remember to upload the current versions of the files to the site. 
   4. Notification of changes to the materials on the site – I may wish email dead for moving information in collaborations, but it’s perfect for being notified when new work has been done, or a question has been asked.
   5. Threaded discussions
   6. To-do lists
   7. Gnatt-charts
   8. Calendars
   9. Personal blogs.  Socialtext keeps team members up to date by having members blog about the work they are doing.  Think of this as stopping by a team member’s office and saying “what’s up?”  This gives needed unstructured visualization into member’s work, and helps the rest of the team coordinate.
6. How long-term is this team? Are any learning curve issues acceptable given a longer view?
7. Ease of design.  I’m having good luck with modular/Lego-like sites.  Google Sites, Facebook, web-versions of Blogger, WordPress, etc. don’t assume you have a personal website, know how to program, etc.

Why not just use email with a distribution list? Besides the issues raised in my Kill Email post, who maintains the distribution list?  With a portal strategy people are having to go look at the portal and are actively involved in their own account maintenance.  How do you know that your version of the file is really the latest version? You may have a date on the file you have, but your spam filter may have eaten the version that came after (I speak from experience).  Discussions around the material are piecemeal and may be distracting to other work you’re trying to do.  You don’t have control (or even awareness) of how the material looks to other parties (do they read from the top down, bottom up, or via Gmail and so in a full conversation?)  How much email do your team members get a day – will they even see yours?  When they are ready to work on the project, do they have the skills to track down all the different related emails that have come through since they last took action?  Email is asynchronous with little control over permanence of the materials.  You’re relying on the skills and attention of your team members, and that may or may not be a good idea.

Yes, there are start up costs to a “portal” versus email approach.  But I’ve gotten it down to about 15 minutes per Google Site.  In a following post I’ll describe the basic format I’m using and talk about plusses and minuses.

What have I forgotten in this audit?  I see this as a starting list, please help us build it out.

I developed the term “Immersive Performance” while working with a Fortune 100 Tech company. They have over 3000 employees focused on combining personal expertise with information from the company business units in order to design better products and services for their clients. These employees use their organization’s world-class intranet, third-party applications, and electronic access to their peers to do this work. Their world is one of constant information search, knowledge development, and continuing education. Done well, it is like watching a conductor pull the best from musicians and their instruments.

Many organizations are beginning to work with “Embedded Learning” where learning is part of doing the work. With embedded learning, tools are easily at hand during performance to support learning when needed. (IBM calls this “On Demand Learning”- pdf link.) Embedded learning can combine formal learning (e.g., formally designed e-learning) or access to sources for informal learning (e.g., video-on-demand, intra or internet knowledge bases).

I think we can go steps beyond embedded learning by integrating learning with the rest of performance. In an ideal world, which I believe is technically possible today, knowledge workers can seamlessly (while staying immersed in their work) access the information they need from within their established workflow. This is a sociotechnical process (see earlier post on intertwining technology & organizational practices) in that people need to know what technologies are available to support their workflow, need to know what they do and don’t know about the task at hand; and they need to know how to react when they don’t know: learn formally (e.g., attend training), learn informally (e.g., find it on the Internet), or find someone else to help. Performance becomes a process conducted by the knowledge worker with their own knowledge, tools, and services available within and outside the firm.

Immersive performance is a different form of performance where the focus is on understanding what you know, what you need to learn, as well as “doing.” The required knowledge, skills, and abilities for immersive performance include:

• ability to judge what you do and don’t know
• knowledge of the tools and services available
• ability to make judgments about the best course of action for the situation
• access to a solid social network of experts

What’s left out in the above approach is an initial assessment of self-knowledge (do you really need to learn this, or do you already have an approach that will work?), an assessment of the available tools and processes (do you really need to learn this, or is there a system that will already do the job if you just turn in on), and an assessment of who is either better for the job or would be a perfect mentor to learning about the task (I do raise the issue in class of better team formation through figuring out who in the class knows what – but we generally still are focused on “do your own work”). I let myself off the hook in that my job at the university is to teach the individual, not to get the work of a particular organization done. However, within organizations, the focus should be on the above “Immersive Performance” approach. Organizational performance is not done within the boundaries of a single employee’s head. We need to move to supporting employees to be more effective within the open and evolving systems of their organizations and communities of practice.

In earlier posts I’ve discussed my colleagues’ and my work on designing social and technical systems for better performance (there we described it as weaving a fabric versus conducting a symphony). Think about your own organizations training, support, and/or on-boarding processes. I would appreciate examples of how firms are helping employees be better conductors, rather than soloists. Is it training about what tools and resources are available in the firm, who’s available in the firm with what skill set, performance appraisal that’s focused on building teams and processes rather than individual work, or something more creative?

I’m getting ready to update my syllabus for my Executive MBA course on Managing Innovation and Change. We cover the same material as in the regular MBA program, but with a greater focus on issues for the experienced manager. In my course we focus our attention on the creation and management of innovation, motivation/compensation, negotiation/change management, and the integration of technology tools with management practice. For each major course concept there is a written assignment where students explain the basics of the concept and provide citations, apply the concept to the student’s work or other related organization, and design an evaluation method to assess the ROI of the application. This last section is a major roadblock for most students, and I’m trying to understand why. I’m planning on changing the final project such that students must select, implement, and evaluate one of these concepts – not just write about how they might do these things.

Given the trouble that students have with even just writing about this process, how successful will they be at full implementation? That said, if they can’t implement what they are learning, and show value, then what’s the benefit to the organization? Even if you have good ideas about intertwining technology and organizational practice — if you can’t implement and evaluate, how will you be able to manage the situation as it unfolds?

(Pure speculation begins here.) Is this difficulty because the earlier portions of the Executive MBA program – accounting, operations management, finance, marketing, international management – imply that only certain kinds of objective outcomes have value? Do they imply that their measurement techniques are only valid in their particular disciplines? These students have been in the program for over 14 months when I meet them. They have gained the majority of the skills available in the program. They (and MBA students world-wide) have measurement and evaluation skills based on accounting, operations, finance, marketing – but why aren’t we teaching them measurement and evaluation skills for general management and organizational change, or at least showing them how these other, more traditionally empirical, disciplines may help them evaluate their management/technology practice?

I’ve mentioned evidence based management before/, but Tracy Allison Altman’s recent post on the loneliness of the evidence based manager made me look at my industry to see if we were doing our students a disservice by not formally teaching research methods appropriate to management. I have added a couple of class sections on the topic, but the underlying skills (survey design, experimental design, etc.) are generally given a full course in industrial psychology degree programs. Measuring more subjective outcomes is difficult and requires a specific skill set (bad surveys, for example, being far worse than no survey at all). An extensive search turned up very few appropriate readings (see below for links). Harvard Business School Press lists 997 cases and articles on negotiation. Eighteen cases and articles come up when you search on evidence-based management – and eleven of these are by the same two authors (Jeffrey Pfeffer & Robert Sutton) largely focused on their excellent “Hard Facts,” ideas, but you’d hope that this critical topic were addressed by more management scholars (again, see my list below for what is available). We don’t have room to add whole new courses in most MBA programs, so we better find a way to teach this material more efficiently.

The students have good intuition. They realize that their decisions may impact only a few and so fancy statistical assessments may not work with such small sample sizes. They also understand that a control group would be of value for being able to discern differences – but they don’t see how they can manage both an “experimental” and a control group in the real world. I am surprised by how rarely before and after measures are considered. I believe this has something to do with the limited culture of measurement, let alone evidence, in many of their organizations (i.e., they don’t have the “before” data). This harkens back to my earlier visualization posts. How can we know that what we implement is working if we didn’t know from where we started?

I’d appreciate thoughts on how you or your firms are working to build a culture of evidence. Both technology focused and general management practice can be measured, and as a result, adapted as need be. Evidence can also provide the background to make changes your intuition alone cannot support. On the other hand…

Background material:

• Pfeffer & Sutton’s website/blog. Includes teaching materials and case examples.
• Thomke’s Enlightened Experimentation: The New Imperative for Innovation
• Perla’s Do your Metrics Measure Up
• Lawler’s Why HR Practices are Not Evidence-Based
• Roussea & McCarthy’s Educating Managers from an Evidence-Based Perspective
• World Bank Selecting an Evaluation Design