THE INFOBLOG
Company news, plus our musings on Enterprise 2.0, organizational culture, knowledge workers, and information management.
Review: Making Things Happen
I really enjoyed reading the Myths of Innovation. So when I read that Scott Berkun had also written a book about project management (via this Joel on Software post), I decided to check it out.
Making Things Happen by Scott Berkun
Making Things Happen: Mastering Project Management is the title of Scott Berkun’s revised second-edition book on project management. It contains the lessons distilled from a career in getting a team of people to work together to achieve common goals.
The book doesn’t spend time on any particular methodology. Instead, the focus is on the practical skills you’ll need to determine priorities, manage tasks, and lead teams. There’s no grand theories here; just things that have been proven to work.
If you’re an accomplished project manager, you’ll probably find the book a bit basic. But for someone like me, who accidentally finds himself in charge of teams from time to time, it contains down-to-earth descriptions of the essential tools and skills you’ll need to get things done.
The book is organized well, with clear section headers, lists and diagrams. It makes it easy to find the sections you need. The revised edition also contains discussion questions and what-if scenarios, which I found useful for putting the advice in context.
I really appreciated Scott’s focus on pragmatism and real-world issues. If it’s more complicated than making prioritized lists or checking in with the members of your team regularly, you won’t find it here. But those simple reminders are just the sort of advice many of us occasional project managers need to keep things on track.
Two Strategic Visions for Enterprise 2.0
Enterprise 2.0 advocates seem to be splitting into two camps. Their goal is the same: finding ways to apply collaborative tools to improve the way businesses operate. But they differ on what strategy to use. Dennis Howlett cautions Enterprise 2.0 advocates to tread carefully.
The root of the debate is whether you feel it’s better to focus on organizational effectiveness or individual productivity. Oscar Berg highlights some influential articles from both sides and notes that there seems to be a bias toward personal efficiency in most of the arguments made to support Enterprise 2.0
I think he is right that there is a bias for personal efficiency. I think it’s a healthy one, though others disagree.
The two strategies
Every organization is composed of multiple functions. These are normally grouped into logical departments such as accounting, marketing, product development, and so forth. The proponents of organizational effectiveness ask the question, is there a better way to arrange these parts? Can we reduce the friction between these components?
Now, let's see... should marketing report to sales or...?
If you fall in this camp, you want to do things like improve interdepartmental communications, establish clear lines of authority and areas of responsibility, break apart organizational silos, ensure smooth hand-offs, and improve business processes.
Those that focus on knowledge worker productivity, on the other hand, focus on whether the parts themselves can be improved.
Adopting bright ideas to save time and effort.
If you fall in this camp, you’re concerned about knowledge sharing, expertise location, cultivating talent and skills, and making sure that individuals have the right information for making decisions and the right tools to take action.
Power to the people
Both approaches are valuable and necessary. Which one you prefer has much to do with where you sit within the organization, as this article on productivity points out. But there are good reasons why we should favor the personal productivity over organization effectiveness.
- Web 2.0 technologies follow a user-centered approach. Applying Web 2.0 sensibility to organizational problems will require lots of customization and re-engineering. Applying those designs to knowledge workers is a much better fit.
- Many employees are already familiar with the conventions of these social tools. They use them at home. You lower training costs by following those models as closely as possible.
- User adoption has been a major stumbling block in most Enterprise 1.0 technology deployments. It makes sense to highlight the benefits to employees.
- While there have been at least two or three different waves of enterprise products targeted at organizational effectiveness (ERP, portals/KM, BPM, CRM, etc.) the suite of office tools used by knowledge workers have changed very little since the early 90s. There’s simply more opportunity for improvement there.
- Small changes applied across all knowledge workers can lead to dramatic gains. Just like in finance, productivity improvements yield compounding interest. If you can save a few extra minutes per day or per week, over time it can add up to something revolutionary.
For these reasons and others, I believe that companies pursuing Enterprise 2.0 should start — and think — small. What can we do to simplify, streamline or eliminate the tasks that prevent our knowledge workers from producing their best work? How can we provide support to small, agile, ad-hoc teams?
For me, the defining characteristic of Enterprise 2.0 is that it is about the individual, not the organization. There would be no need for an Enterprise 2.0 approach if Enterprise 1.0 approaches had worked.
Instead of Enterprise 2.0, perhaps it should be Employee 2.0?
You get what (someone else) paid for
Dean’s post about the impending failure of Enterprise 2.0 got me thinking a lot about the strange nature of selling enterprise software, and of selling things in general.
Okay, so imagine you walk down to the local store and buy a lollipop, which you then proceed to happily lick all the way home. In this instance, you’re the purchaser and the consumer. You have a direct relationship with the company that makes the candy. You buy it, so you are funding their existence, and you eat it, so you are also the direct judge of the effectiveness or quality of their product.
This direct relationship is exactly what happens when people buy products for themselves. Per sale, the company has one customer, and that leads to the product being developed and grown with a linear relationship — feedback from customers is meaningful, and important. It’s this model which led to “The customer is always right” — after all, you’re not going to argue with your customers. If your latest Snozzberry flavored candy isn’t selling well, it’s safe to assume it’s because consumers are not fond of it. Hits and misses become immediately apparent. An increase in purchases can be attributed directly to an increase in satisfaction.
Me and My Shadow - Combined Purchaser and Customer
Sadly, the world isn’t often this simple. There are many situations when the consumer and the purchaser are different people. Let’s consider the scenario where your twelve-year-old daughter is trying to convince you that she really needs those designer sneakers.
In this instance, the consumer and the purchaser are different. You won’t be wearing the sneakers, so your criteria for purchase is likely to be much different from your daughter’s. As the purchaser, you’ll be looking at price, and value for money. You might be looking for things like good quality stitching, materials or the country of origin. Your daughter, on the other hand, doesn’t care about any of those things. She only cares that they are awesome and that her friends will be soooo jealous.
The sneaker company has a dilemma – to optimize the product for purchase by parents, or for its appeal to teenagers? An increase in sales may not actually indicate satisfied customers (as any kid who was forced to wear sensible school shoes can attest). Per sale, the sneaker company has two customers to keep happy here. And the criteria for success are different.
Split Personality - What if the purchaser isn't the consumer?
If push comes to shove, and the shoe company has to decide between a feature that delights a teenager or a requirement that satisfies her parents, we know which ones will appear in the final product. He who pays the piper calls the tune.
The other shoe drops
If the central tenet of Web 2.0 is, in Tim O’Reilly’s words, that “users add value,” a Web 2.0 company wants as many users as they can possibly attract. To build the largest audience for their Web 2.0 tools, these hot new companies developed a razor-sharp focus on the user experience. Every other imperative — including profitability — was secondary.
The wave of innovation that followed was all about design. Simple, attractive, usable and useful sites sprang up everywhere. Emergent, free-form sites that generated communities and empowered individual users.
All of this was possible because the customer was the user. Individuals could vote with their feet — or their wallet — for the solutions that worked for them.
When Web 2.0 software gets translated to the corporate environment, where the customer is not the user, you have to be extremely careful that the features that get cut aren’t the ones that employees were clamoring for in the first place. Did you sacrifice an intuitive user interface because it didn’t match the look and feel of your company’s intranet? Did you substitute free-flowing, spontaneous conversation for a lengthy edit-and-approve cycle? Whoops. You just forced your 2.0 employees back into a 1.0 solution.
It’s no wonder that most users in the enterprise are wearing uncomfortable, tight-fitting sensible shoes.
In the Interest of Disclosure
As a company, we haven’t been shy about sharing our opinions on topics of interest, linking to interesting blogs online, or recommending books to read or software development tools to use.
But we have been hesitant to make money from our website or from blogging in any other way than by selling our software product, also called Infovark.
Many other start-ups sell books or seminars or advertise related products on their websites — it’s a matter of survival in this tough economy — but we’ve always felt that it would somehow dilute our message and our company focus.
We’re also a bit worried that our reviews and recommendations would seem less honest if we joined any partner or affiliate programs. I think it’s a healthy trend that more and more bloggers are disclosing these relationships, and that readers are becoming more comfortable with them.
So, in an effort to help subsidize our coding (and reading) habits, we’ve signed up for the Amazon affiliate program, and we’ll be linking our book reviews through Amazon from now on. If you buy a book from via one of these links or from the Infovark bookstore, you’ll send a nice bonus our way. We’d sure appreciate it.
And we’ve had a CafePress account for some time. We use it to make some of the swag we take to conferences. Buying a button, sticker or T-shirt from our Infovark shop will also help us continue our Infovark experiment, by giving us some free advertising and a small percentage of the item’s price.
I’ll add both these disclaimers to our about page, and I’ll also describe our participation in the Microsoft Partner Program.
And now, back to our irregularly scheduled varkiness.
