Archive for the ‘Milestone Planner’ Category

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Social Graphs – The Power of Connections

Monday, February 1st, 2010

Interest in “social graphs” has increased exponentially in the last year or two, with the rise of social networking platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn. At its most basic level, a social graph is a digital record of the relationships (or ‘connections’) around an individual. In the business context they are an interesting way of mapping the informal relationships that really power the business. It might not be obvious, but Milestone Planner operates off of social graphs. In our case, the social objects that bind people together are the individual projects. Each collection of projects that a person is on, and the people that share some or all of the same projects, forms a social graph:

I’ll talk more about that in a future post. At the individual, consumer level social graphs are a map of the relationships people have, and have had. It isn’t unusual for a student entering the workplace to have thousands of contacts on Facebook. Social Graphs are big news, so when I heard that Social Media Week’s London Partner, Chinwag, were running an event titled “Understanding Social Graph Optimization” I headed up to town.

While we aren’t about “monetizing” social graphs at SocialOptic - we’re about helping people to be more productive – for big media companies Social Graphs spell h-u-g-e o-p-p-o-r-t-u-n-i-t-y. The event was at the IAB’s offices, and sponsored by instant messaging provider Meebo, and with an interesting line up for the panel:

There was lots of talk about how BT is (and isn’t) using Twitter. Interestingly I’m currently having a Twitter exchange with @BTcare about an issue accessing Milestone Planner from a BT OpenZone hotspot, which they have been most helpful about. The focus was more about “leveraging the social graph” than optimising it, something that made me feel a little uneasy.

The general feeling from the panel was that users are happy to share their social graphs for providers to use, as long as it is done with their permission, and they get something back from it. However, Facebook’s Trevor Johnson said ”it’s not about monetization, it is about users.” Facebook isn’t a stranger to concerns over how data is used, and Chinwag’s Sam Michel pitched in a question about user privacy, and more specifically users’ understanding of privacy issues. It’s definitely an emerging challenge, worthy of consideration. The convestion spread to Twitter, a few quotable highlights:

@juliusduncan: Social Graph Optimisation SGO has taken over from SMO in the past 6-9 months Carter Brokaw – CRO, Meebo #smwldn

@benjaminellis: LOL, @mazi on content: “sharing is caring, but love is not free.” #smwLDN

@zoe9: #smwLDN Maz Nadjm, BSKYB says social media is a collective effort in an organisation not just for marketing.

@yay_tar: RT @juliusduncan: #smwldn ‘if you can’t get the buy in of the CEO up front, you are in trouble’ Vincent Sider, BT Strategist

The panel’s closing comments on social media contained some gems:

  • BT :- It’s all about education. Create an eco system where customers can be rewarded.
  • Sky :- It’s all about iteration. Test out something small and take it forward.
  • Facebook :- Don’t put yourself under pressure to do something big and immediate. Iterate.
  • Meeba :- Enable people to interact with content. Watch and learn, and listen, and itterate against your content.
  • Future Text :- Think of what the customer wants.

So, the theme seems to be start small, learn, and grow. That’s advice that’ll go down very well here! By the way, for anyone involved in Social Media week that would like to, sign up for Milestone Planner Standard Edition and @ or DM us on twitter (@SocialOptic) for three months free Milestone Planner Professional Edition – this week only!

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Milestones to Talk About

Friday, January 29th, 2010

The week started with a major update to Milestone Planner that gives a taste of where we are heading. There are lots of new features, and it’s been fun to hear how people are using them already. I’m not going to list them all, but  I will pick out a few of the big ones:

  • Edit milestones – no more pop up box! Just click the title to change it. Click the Milestone ‘triangle’ to pop up the status chooser and select red, yellow, green or blue (completed) – or delete the milestone. It’s whizzy, you’ve got to try it!
  • See the owner – click on the person icon and choose an owner for the milestone. Type a name, and click ‘invite’ to bring them into the project. If you hover over the milestone owners’s name, any milestones belonging to  that person will glow. You might want to zoom right out on the timeline for the best effect!
  • Scroll Wheel Support – for those of you with mouse wheels and track pads, you can scroll up and down using them.

A Greater Sense of History

The biggest change has been to how “history” is handled. When you hover a mouse over a milestone, it will reveal the when the milestone was last updated, and what the most recent change to the milestone was – with little icons for date, owner, text update, etc – and who may the update. If you click on the “Show history” pull down, you can see more of the change history:

In the Standard Edition of Milestone Planner, you have the last few changes, in the Professional Edition you have access to the full history since the milestone was created. You’ll notice the history isn’t just what happened to the milestone (created, slipped, status change, …), it can include an explanation or comment as well.

Whenever you update a milestone, the history box will pop up and ask you for a comment. It is optional, but sometimes it is helpful to add an explanation. For example, if I slip a milestone back 5 days I might want to add a note to explain that it will be late because Dave has been stuck at home in the snow. You can also add a URL into a note, for example linking to a relevant document or an image. The link will be hyperlinked in the history view.

Conversations Around Milestones

As you see, your team can now have conversations around any milestone, interwoven with the changes to it. The conversation is kept in one place, so everyone working on the milestone can see who and what is being affected by what they are working towards. This makes it much easier to distribute the management of the project, but ensure that things still remain on track. Even users with standard access to a project (who can’t add or move milestones) can add comments.

Conversations Face to Face

That’s probably enough of a brain dump for one post! Starting next week is Social Media Week, with events all around the world  - It is going to be great (I might have a slight bias). I’ll be at Social Media Week London (event schedule here – the tickets are almost all gone) and speaking at “Social Media in Enterprises”  on at Cass Business School on Tuesday (more detail on the Business Two Zero blog) and “Social Media Measurement” at Sun’s offices on Friday. Do come and say hello – I’m always very happy to chat about Milestone Planner!

Keep your browser warm, there’s more coming very soon!

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10 Questions for Project Success

Monday, January 18th, 2010

I read these 10 questions on the Priority Attitudes blog. The post is from an article written by Richard Maybury’s colleague, Paul Stacey and is worth clicking through to read. I’ve met Richard and some of his clients, so I know that he gets results. Paul and Richard point out that a firm foundation for a project is critical to its success. Get it wrong, and cracks will appear down the line.

Of the many projects I have seen over the years, I often seen a pattern of over thinking the details, while under thinking the purpose of the projects. The former creates rails for things to go off, while the latter means that people are unclear of what to do when things go off track, as they do inevitably.

Focussing on outcomes, the steps to get to them, and the constraints around them, actually creates more flexibility than focussing on activities and who will do them.

Here are those ten questions:

  1. What’s wrong with the current situation?
  2. How will things be different when we’ve finished?
  3. What are the performance criteria?
  4. What’s the scope of the assignment?
  5. What are the cost constraints?
  6. What are the time constraints?
  7. What project specific constraints exist?
  8. Who is the project sponsor?
  9. Who is the project manager?
  10. What authority is being delegated?

Lots of people have asked us to add multiple owners for milestones and workstreams in Milestone Planner. We hear you. We are working on a way to do this, but one which keeps points 8,9 and 10 clear. Clear ownership means clear accountability and less risk of “hot potatoes”. Clear responsibilities and ownership are key to ensuring that projects progress along. The feedback we are getting is that Milestone Planner really does help to keep things on-track, and provide clarity for everyone involved.

I’ll leave you with a last quote from Richard’s post:

Of course, laying a firm foundation is only the first step to creating the project deliverable and many potential pitfalls remain for the unwary project manager. But without clear answers to these ten questions it is highly likely that the project will encounter significant problems later.



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It’s People AND Process AND Systems

Friday, January 8th, 2010

Ric Hayman has posted a piece on his blog: No – it’s “people AND process” which I strongly agree with. The more extreme end of the Enterprise 2.0 spectrum have placed a huge emphasis on the “people” side of the equation in business. I think that’s a good thing, and it’s part of the reason we chose to have the ’social’ in ‘SocialOptic’. Businesses have become overly obsessed with processes and process optimisation in recent years. The pendulum does need swinging back.

However, as Dennis Howlett has been saying for a while, that doesn’t remove the need for process. As Ric puts it:

I subscribe to Alistair Cockburn’s thought that people are key variables in any project, problem or process (Cockburn’s article is directed at software development, but I believe it is generalizable to most if not all “knowledge work”), so I tend to think “people over process” anyway, but my response to Dennis’ post was via Twitter, where I said that I was tiring of the binary “people or process” argument – notably I was tiring of BOTH sides; I think the framing is wrong, it should be “people AND process”.

A productive business has to tackle both the process and the people issues. What seems to be taken as a given, or at least I rarely see mentioned, is the key glue: Systems. Systems glue together the people and process. The right systems bring a balance between the two and tightly interface them. Introducing process, while keeping things people-centric is always a hot topic of discussion amongst the team here – with the different backgrounds and personalities there is a shared view, but from many different perspectives.

The systems relationship works the other way as well, good systems help people see what is happening, and stop process turning bad. That was a common background thread at the Dell Huddle event. Social media helps businesses listen, see when things have fallen outside of working process, and get them fixed. From our own business perspective we are convinced that taking a visual approach (hence the ‘optic’ in SocialOptic) is the best way to tackle things.

In the last few weeks it has been cheering to hear Milestone Planner referred to both as a “social gantt chart” and a ‘visual wiki’ – while we wouldn’t choose those descriptions ourselves, it gives us confidence that we are building in the right direction.

By way of an illustration of where we are heading, here’s a visualisation from one of the tools we have in development. It takes the Twitter stream during the Dell Huddle B2B Social Media event (nice series of posts on Joining Dots blog). Can you tell who the speakers were and the topics of conversation?

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Building a 2010 Plan

Monday, January 4th, 2010

After reading “Create a 1-page strategic plan” on the Church of the Customer blog, I was inspired to try out an idea: Building a personal plan for the year in Milestone Planner. New Year’s resolutions have never really cut it for me – a few weeks and they are a distant memory. I prefer to start out the year with a set of goals. However, the plan never seems to “fall out of the sky” fully formed, so Milestone Planner’s emergent style seemed to fit the bill. Here’s how you can build your own personal strategic plan for 2010:

1. Create a plan!

Plans are a great statement of intent. They provide something to benchmark progress against. No plan, no benchmark. So, sign up at milestoneplanner.com if you haven’t already (A trial account is free, and will last you through the year). You’ll have a blank project plan waiting when you sign in. If you are already signed up, just login and go to projects, then click the button to create a new plan.

2. Map Out Your Roles and Responsibilities.

To make some sense of your goals I suggest dividing them up. There are a number of ways to do this:

  • By role – e.g. Father, Musician, Husband, etc…
  • By area or domain – e.g. Family, Job, Community, …
  • By theme – e.g. Health, Wealth, Social, …

Simply create a workstream for each role or area – you’ll be prompted for the first one, or click “add a workstream”. After you’re done, you’ll have some horizontal groupings with spaces ready to add your goals for the year. If you aren’t sure which approach to take, try a couple and see which one works best. It is easy to delete workstreams – just click on their title.

3. It’s a Whole Year!

Think marathon, not sprint. You don’t need to achieve everything in January, but you also don’t want to leave everything until December. At the top left of the screen, by the project name, click edit and change the project start date to 01/2010, change the end date to 01/2011 – you might want to give it a sensible name at the same time. There, the plan is now a year long. Thats a good few hundred days to spread things out over, but first…

4. Begin With the End in Mind.

To borrow a Covey phrase, begin with the end in mind. Scroll right to the end of the plan. Think about the end of December 2010. What would you like to have achieved in each of the areas you’ve defined? Click on the time line and create a goal, or two if you need to, in each workstream. Capture your thoughts and go for big, but specific goals. More than seven workstreams with more than one or two goals in each is probably biting off too much, but you know yourself. Choose what you think will work. Remember, you can always update the milestones and add or remove workstreams later – this is an emergent strategic plan.

5. Work Backwards – Little by Little.

Now, zoom out and look at the year. Thinking about those end goals, what the smaller milestones on the way towards them that you can achieve throughout the course of the year? If I wanted to play live in a band at a local music venue by the end of the year, I can think backwards: “Rehearse a full set” – I’ll put that in at the end of October. “Choose and learn 12 songs” – I’ll put that in at the end of July. And so on. I might start with “Guitarist Recruited” in February. You hopefully get the idea.

Take those big end-of-year goals (you might want to change them to yellow or red to mark them out – just click on them) and break them down into smaller goals. Look up and down the plan at the milestones in each of the different streams – are there any opportunities for synergies? If I had a goal around more time with the family, I might want to have them in the band. Of course the rule for truly realising synergies is to avoid compromises, so you might want to leave that one.. In all seriousness, it is interesting how a personal plan starts to mesh together when you look at it this way. Sometimes the opposite happens too – you spot areas of your life that really aren’t fitting in. This might be a time to tweak some ‘big’ things.

6. Sleep on it…

With your first cut of the plan done, take one last look at it, then log out. Let the sun go down and them come up again. Let your brain digest all of those thoughts you’ve just had. Now, login and look at the plan. Does it still make sense? Can some of the milestones be better defined, or rearranged? Drag things around until it is right.

7. Share Your Plan.

This might not be for everyone, but if you have a trusted friend or partner, you might want to share the plan with them (it’s simple to add them – just click on ‘people’ and enter their name and email address). Having someone else look at your plan can help in a number of ways:

  • An independent set of eyes see what you might miss. It is good to be challenged.
  • Sharing your plan creates a sense of accountability and motivation to achieve it.
  • A shared load… Having someone who will cheer you on is good when things get tough.

Of course, you might feel your plan is too personal to share, and that’s fine. I’d ask yourself why you aren’t comfortable sharing it – the answer to that question is surprisingly full of useful insight.

8. Live the Plan!

Now live the plan! Email yourself a copy and print it out and put it somewhere you’ll see it. Come back and login to the plan – I’d say once a week. Look at the upcoming milestones and watch the red “today” line mark your way through the year . Mark each milestone done as you achieve it, and update goals and milestones if things have evolved during the year.

2010 – Have a good one!

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