Should organizations limit collaboration ?

April 12, 2011 By 1 Comment

Summary :with the coming of social media in the workplace, organizations began to dream of a spontaneous self-driven collaboration that would get rid of rules and organization frameworks to deliver outstanding results. Today we all have to acknowledge that reality is quite different. Facing an impressive amount of possible options, employees are lost, all the more since the value proposition that’s been made to them made no sense regarding to their daily goals and constraints. Tom Davenport suggests us to limit the scope of collaboration in order to reinforce sense and focus : specific tools for a specific goal for a specific amount of time. But even if this way of doing things was proven successful with average uses, we should not throw the to throw the baby out with the bath water and forget community and serendipity principles : both can work together but are not about the same tasks, the same needs. However, Davenport’s idea may work for most people and, mot of all, directly applies to what’s key for them and impacts value creation.

With the coming of social media in the workplace, came the myth of a global, organic collaboration where everyone would collaborate with others not only to do their job but also to do awesome unexpected extra things, out of organizational silos. Years after, we have to acknowledge that it does not work. Or, at least, not the way we expected to.

The reason is quite simple to get and has been dealt with many times on this blog and many other ones. Everything started with the supposed universal and inevitable nature of networks and communities. But…

- networks shoud not be mistaken for communities…that are not teams either…

- communities are communites…and only exist by the will of people who want to more than their work, go beyond, out of the flow of their work. What is not what organization usually mean by collaboration.

- unlike the web where people using a given tool and sharing the same practices gather to do things together, most of work in the workplace happens in structured teams with known and defined people what implies that practices and tools have to be standardized within these teams There’s a big difference between gathering those who changed and change those have been gathered.

So, the “2.0 paradigmp” is still incomplete in the context of traditional production activities if not slightly improved. What reminds me of two things : [Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Project Management needs social signals

October 8, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Summary : It’s obvious that in many cases traditional project management methods need to become more agile. That’s not without bringing new issues due to the need to keep eveyrone informed of the status of a project that is continuously being re-designed. Social media are very good at addressing the need of narating a project beyond the traditional quantitative indicators of traditional tools. But there’s still something missing in the enterprise social media offer : even if some niche players offer project socialization features, most of generalist social software vendors don’t while it would make a lot of sense next to the conversational spaces that are the heart of their product.

In more and more fields it’s becoming obvious that agile methods are becoming the most relevant to manage any project and this approach, that used to be restricted to IT projects is nom being used in more and more areas. The reason is quite easy to undersrtand : in a world where cycles are becoming shorter and shorter, plans that aims at delivering something in 2 or 4 years are not relevant. Proceeding step by step, having functional deliverables that comes progressively and continuously redesigning the project in order it meets actual current needs instead of delivering something that meets what was needed years ago but is irrelevant to the current context seems to be wiser and more efficient way of managing a project.

When, during a projet, some specific expertises and resources have to intervene on certain specific parts, it brings an added complexity. In a classical project, anyone knows what to do and when because the project follows a well defined path. In an agile project, where the roadmap and the specifications continuously evolves, resources are often lost because they don’t know how things have evolved from the original project. It’s a matter of awareness.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Is there a 2.0 way to draw an org-chart ?

February 11, 2009 By 2 Comments

When talking about enterprise 2.0, something we offer hear is “sounds interesting but our company is not designed to work this way”. Understand : we decide to do something and we “push” it, don’t even think of allowing a bottom-up flow to exist in this context. Of course, that causes gaps, the company isn’t able to meet clients and employee’s needs right away, many realignments being necessary while the exchanges that would makes it easier are not facilitated at all. In  a colorful language, companies use the existing pipes, hoping all pieces will fit together at the end.

That’s why I suggested to think about a Service Oriented Organization, which starting point is not the top of of the pyramid but the goals the organization has to achieve. Don’t forget that the purpose of any company is not to keep people busy or give to what already exist a reason to live but to meet the market’s expectations, even if it means to change what already exist.

Now let’s play a little game.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

What kind of social networks do companies need ?

February 4, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Need for synergies, for connections, to do more with less ? Whatever the official reason is (and sometimes the unofficial one), companies are now turning back to the gool old network, renamed “social network” to stick to the the current climate, to find new pools of performance.

Because companies focus on efficiency, people’s network is not a collection a business cards lying about in a drawer. More, it’s more usual to collect external’s business cards than colleagues’s. The network got “webized” and companies are wondering of to professionalize a Facebook, internalize a LinkedIn. So social networks becomes entreprise-class applications, specialists quickly took a stand, traditionnal vendors tryid to add a “network” thing here and there. The fact remains that, behind an unique word and a sotfware feature hide many realities which embody the many visions company may have of social network. To make it short the question is : what is the useful kind of networks for a bsiness. According to PWC the future is “business networks”. But what are they ?

My point here is not to discuss what a network is. I’m convinced there is no generic and ideal form of network and that we need to adapt the one that matches our needs to our purposes.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Intranets and digital workplace, Management & HR, Web & Usages Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

External social networks are not only for marketing purposes

January 21, 2009 By Leave a Comment

Generally, when I talk about social networks for other people than employees, I’m answered “ah ? I thought you were not interested in all these marketing things”. This is the obvious proof that, for many people and many companies, when you aim at an external audiance it’s for communication and sale purpose, following a one way flow. Said differently : “outside we talk, inside we work and both have nothing in common”. Seen with a little distance it embodies the idea according to which it’s the company that condition its environment and not the opposite.

Preconceived ideas that were true at a given moment but shows we are now entering a new era.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Project Managers should focus less on processes and more on people

August 26, 2008 By 1 Comment

A second post on project management, not so far from the first.

As written in this post, if current methods reassure people, they obviously show their limits. At a matter of fact :

  • KPMG’s survey results which contrasted 2005 with 2003 revealed the following:
    • There was an 81% increase in the number of projects globally
    • There was an 88% increase in project complexity globally
    • There was an 79% increase in project budgets globally
  • The Standish Group survey results for 2004 revealed that only 35% of Information Technology projects were deemed to be successful as measured by being within their original budget, on schedule, and delivering all user requirements satisfactorily
  • Ernst & Young and numerous others state that there are three categories of Project Management issues:
    • People-related issues which on average represent 80%
    • Process-related issues which on average represent 10%
    • Technology-related issues which on average represent 10%
  • O’Neill’s 1999 study results revealed that on average the typical Project Manager spends 70% of his time on Non-Value-Added project activities

Do you find this inspiring ?

Filed Under: Management & HR Tagged With: ,

Do you know a good, free, online, project management app ?

July 11, 2008 By 3 Comments

This morning I received an email from a shattered friend.

She works for a company that organizes conferences and have something like 45 projects to manage at the same time, each of them being at a different stage of its life, and a lot of incoming and outgoing contacts (with both internal teams and outside people). She’s close to become really crazy if she don’t find a tool to help her.

Of course her employer won’t spend a euro for this.

Of course she needs an online solution since she won’t be allowed to install anything on her computer.

Do you have any idea ? Any suggestion ?

Filed Under: Management & HR, Software & Tools Tagged With: ,

One day, every project will be agile

June 27, 2008 By 1 Comment

The time is not far when the question of reinventing project management will be a key issue. The purpose will be to reconsider a project as something that have to fulfill a need and not an objective by itself as it’s so often. How can we see a project is its own purpose ? When, at the end, what is delivered totally matches with what what decided at the beginning and, at the same time, people realize it doesn’t fulfill the need because the need has evolved in the meanwhile, or that the client (internal or external) agreed to something that didn’t was not really what he expected, perhaps by lack of communication or bad understanding to what could actually be done.

By being next to developers all day long, I looked at the way they were working and it seems to me these guys discovered a kind of Holy Graal called agile method.

Of course I immediately tried to find if it could be use for other kind of projects than software development.

[Read more...]

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Is creativity the only answer to complexity ?

May 21, 2008 By Leave a Comment

Basically that would make sense. In an industrial economy everything is product-centric : we know what it is, what it’s made of, of which pieces it’s composed, there’s one and only one to produce and assemble them, and everyone knows exactly what he has to do. It’s a system based on infinite repetition of totally scripted actions whithout any deviation : each production has to be the exact clone of the previous one.

In a knowledge based economy, things change. Most of times, the product consists in “finding a solution to a problem”. That makes things much more complex. Each steps depends on the the result of the previous and the product (ie the solution) is unknown at the starting of the production.

So there’s no suprise to see projects failing when people try to apply them what used to work before.

But we can get throught that : let’s see how.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Economy & New Models, Enterprise 2.0 & Social Business, Management & HR Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,