More or Less Milestone Detail

The button at the bottom right of the screen now lets you switch between three different levels of display:

• Milestones with all details (name, owner, status and date).
• Milestones with less detail (titles and status only).
• Milestones with no detail (status only).

Simply click the button to step through the different modes. Clicking to the lowest level of detail, and zooming right out (using the ‘max’ zoom button) now means that you can see most plans on a single page:

Which brings me on to another new addition: The time sweep now works backwards, and per workstream. You’ll notice that each workstream is slightly greyed out before the first and after the last milestones on each workstream, and that the area between the first milestone and the next milestone due is highlighted in blue. This makes it much easier to see how each workstream is progressing. You can still see the overall time sweep up in the date bar (just under the dates).

Focusing the Activity Stream

The Professional Edition’s Activity Stream could always be focused, by clicking on a milestone or workstream name, or on the image of anyone in the plan. Now this process also happens automatically. When you click on a milestone to edit it, or drag it to a new date, the activity stream will focus down on the history of that milestone. When you complete your change, it reverts back to showing all the recent changes in the plan. Similarly, when you edit a workstream, it will focus on the changes within that work stream.

As ever, feedback and suggestions welcome either here, via twitter, or via the usual feedback link!

“The first thing is: There is a presumption that entrepreneurship is about science and technology, whereas entrepreneurship, in large part, as far as I can tell, is about friction. It’s about collision. It’s about things running into each other. It’s about two people sparking off of one another, and not solely in the areas of science. In fact, I would say it is more so in the creative arts. One of the things that I really find quite astonishing, coming from California in particular, is the prediliction we have for assuming that the great new innovative entrepreneurs are in large part flowing out of universities, direct from the science labs, when in fact they are sneaking out of most of our art colleges, without any due regard for the any of the provenance that they might have…”

“…but I do know that entrepreneurship is largely successful when people collide. That is – and you guys are choosing to use the word collaboration, I would use other words that are slightly more violent, because I like to see people forced into an incubation, into collision with each other – because it is out of those creative tensions that interesting ideas come, and quite frankly functional projects; things that you can do something with.“

“Whether they are for a social entrepreneurial outcome, an artistic outcome, or an entrepreneurial outcome, it makes no difference. The goal is to take people who are wrapped up in their passion and to find ways to express that passion, whether it is through a social route, or through an economic route. And, interestingly enough, I believe that’s all entrepreneurship, because at the end of the day you cannot solely depend on others to bring things to the world, you have to bring things to the world yourselves.“

The bold text is my emphasis. Doug went on to talk about the newly launched C4CC, which you can read more about here. The big take away from the evening for me is that it is far too easy for us to forget how creative the process of business is. Businesses create – make if you must! – things; products and services. We often view that as a mechanical process, which it perhaps is for the mass manufacture of products, but the process of generating a new product or a knowledge-based service is essentially a ‘creative’ one, in the traditional sense of the word. That creativity is stimulated by collaboration. As Doug puts it, the sparks that come when people collide. The knack is to capture that creative spark, and harness it into a plan – a set of aims, objectives, commitments – that can be easily flexed and adapted.

Integrating creativity and process, that’s the entrepreneurial business, and what we are aiming for in Milestone Planner. Perhaps art and business aren’t so far apart after all.

“We’ve developed bi-polar thinking” Fons declared, before running through a series of examples of the polar opposites and apparent contradictions that businesses find themselves challenged by daily (interjected by a steady stream of jokes at the expense of MBAs of course). The most obvious dilemma is the age old “centralising versus decentralising.”

We’re riding the wave of decentralisation right now, supporting increasingly distributed organisations, but Fons pointed out that the only reason for a business to centralise is that it was decentralised in the first place, otherwise there would be nothing to centralise. If you follow. Is the body centralised or distributed? “yes” said Fons, with the finesse of a seasoned business consultant, or as a scientist might put it “I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that.”

Now, from my perspective, I think ‘distance’ is being steadily eroded by technology – many of the traditional reasons for centralising are being mitigated by presence, social computing, mobile technology and increasingly high bandwidth. I think distributed will be with us for quite a while to come.

Fon’s thesis is that innovation is the art of combining these contradictory ideas (like central versus distributed) that are apparently contradictory and turning them into concrete and measurable actions, to realise tangible business benefits. That’s quite a challenge, but this integration of opposites has a process to it:

• Recognize – increase awareness.
• Respect – appreciate the cultural differences.
• Reconcile – resolve those cultural differences.

The concept is built on a model of culture – a dynamic process of solving human problems and dilemmas – and the assumption that as humans we are loaded with values that are “half killed by our culture”. What we do and what we want to do are rarely the same. Fons made liberal use of cultural stereo types to illustrate that we live in a world that is more culturally diverse than we realise. Increasing international travel and population mobility has made us more aware of those differences. The themes across the bulk of innovation literature, which Fons outlined,  are these: Inclusion, Diversity and Leadership – and a particular type of leadership at that.

“Successful leaders have the competence to help organizations and their teams reconcile dilemmas for better sustainable business performances.”

One lens through which to view an organisation is a classic 2×2 grid, with the axises being:

• Hierarchical versus egalitarian.
• Person-orientated versus task-orientated.

Its a model we’re already familiar with, but what was interesting to me is that these four quadrants lead to four distinct styles of employee motivation:

• MBS – management by subjection – the boss is the boss.
• MBO – management by objective – things to do are the things that matter.
• MBJD – management by job description – the role defines the individual.
• MBP – management by passion – the vision drives the action.

Businesses don’t live out their whole lives in one quadrant, the transitions between the quadrants are the crises that define distinct phases of a business. They key is to understand what sort of business you are in, and tool up appropriately. Finally, back to that culture of innovation, how do you build it?

• Start with the creative individual.
• Build the inventive team.
• Create the innovative organisation.

There. Simple. It’s always the implementation that’s the challenge isn’t it? Fons gave us a word for it – “xnovation” – partnering with people outside of your industry, and learning from business models outside of your industry. Reminds me of the Medici effect. More learning happening here on the Orange Business Live Blog…

I’m in Amsterdam, at Orange Business Live 2010 – An event Orange Business Services runs each year, looking at the challenges and changes in the communications space. At the pre-event evening event one thing that really struck me was the value in networking and networks. Not just the global data networks that have been built (and many of which Orange Business Services run), but the human networks that drive business, and the value of person-to-person communication.

The activity of meeting industry peers, exchanging ideas, and sharing experiences and challenges, is an intensely valuable one. It’s an interesting time for the CIOs here. While there is conversation about the place of machine-to-machine communication, the bigger buzz was about building the “human network” within the business, enabling people across the globe to work as if they were standing side-by-side.

Business agility is a key theme here. The speed of change today is phenomenal, to borrow an example from Helmut Reisinger, Senior Vice President Europe, Orange Business Services: ”Days to a million” is shrinking. Apple took 724 days to sell a million devices with the first iPod, 74 days for the first iPhone, and just 3 days for the iPhone 2. Business has to move faster, react faster, make decisions faster. That means getting information around the organisation more quickly, but meaningfully.

“Gen Y” is becoming an increasing percentage of the work force, brining with them new expectations about connectivity and communication. A new generation of IT users is coming into the work place, and for them their first experience of IT was their mobile phone. It’s something that’s true from India to Europe.

From a SocialOptic perspective, this is not news. Milestone Planner has always been about building human networks with plans and people as nodes in that network. We’ve seen how rapidly human networks build, and how effectively information travels when it traverses across social graphs (human networks again!) rather than org charts. What is news it quite how quickly the shift is happening. You can see it in people’s faces as they interact with the blogging team. There’s curiosity, and less caution, about understanding social computing and what it can do for business.

Data networks’ value is in supporting the human network, and the most valuable software is that which joins the human network to the global network. Now, I might be a bit biased in that, but I challenge you to tell me that that isn’t so!

Much of my reading these days is about the psychology of work, particularly collaboration and motivation. A recurrent character in that reading is Dan Pink, an almost-lawyer, turned psychologist. The topic of this post is wonderfully covered in his TED talk last year:

Essentially what Dan says is “Our motivations are unbelievably interesting… … We are not as endlessly manipulable and as predictable as you would think.” – what science tells us about human motivation, and what we do in business, are heavily at odds with each other. Dan talks about three keys to getting people motivated, which we’ll come back to in a moment.

“There’s a mismatch between what science knows, and what business does.”

Rewards that Don’t Work

The fact is that higher incentives lead to poorer performance. For simple, rule-based tasks, the ‘carrot and stick’ approach does work. But for more complete problems, the kind we face in business today, it doesn’t. Motivation is more complex than that. Now understand, if you don’t pay people enough, they won’t be motivated. You need to pay people enough to ‘take money off the table’, as Dan Pink puts it.

I love this infographic approach to the podcast from Dan’s more recent talk at the RSA – thanks to Eaon Pritchard and Geraid Hensel for bring it to my attention:

Back to the three factors Dan mentions, and you can set about putting things right.

Autonomy

“you probably want to do something interesting… …let me get out of your way”

One of the subtexts behind the move to more ‘distributed’ businesses, which is driving the growth of our business, and Milestone Planner, is the move to a more autonomous work force. Describe the problem, not the solution, and let your greatest brains get to work on it. Which leads on to:

Mastery

People want to be good at things. Actually, scrap that, good people want to be BRILLIANT. Let’s face it, no-one wants to suck at what they do – we all know that isn’t fun. Let people do what they are good at, and help them to be good at what they do. Provide the right tools, environment and training to enable that to happen.

Purpose

I’ve written about this at length here and elsewhere, and many other people have too. People want to make a difference, and the easiest way to connect with that is to give them a purpose that links what they do to making the world in which they live “a little bit better” – Does everyone in the business know what it’s purpose is? Do they understand how that makes a difference, and who it makes a difference too? That simple connection makes a huge difference (and it’s one of the reasons we provide a view across projects in Milestone Planner – so that people get to see the bigger picture).

If you like what we’re thinking, please support us by giving Milestone Planner a try, spreading the word, or by contributing your own comment or blog post.

A Better Sense of History

Plans, as we call them in the app now – a nice, friendly short hand for projects – have always had a history. The basic version of Milestone Planner keeps a limited history, while the Professional Edition gives a full history. The activity stream makes this history easier to see, by displaying it across all milestones in the project. It is now quick and easy to see what has been happening since you last accessed the project.

Zoom in on an Aspect of the Plan

If you click on one of the gravatars (hovering over the image will show the person’s name) in the activity stream, it will zoom into just the updates made by that person or to Milestones they own. You will see a “show all” button at the top of the stream. Clicking on this zooms back out to the full view.

By Milestone or by Work Stream

The same idea works for milestones and work streams as well. If you click on a work stream name in the text boxes on the right hand side, the stream will zoom in to show just updates in that work stream. Clicking on a milestone title filters out all activity except changes to that one milestone. Again, clicking on “show all” at the stop of the stream zooms back out, removing all of the filters.

Simpler Hovers

The change has also allowed us to reduce the size of the hovers on milestones. When you rest the mouse pointer over a milestone in the time line, you will still see the most recent change. By clicking on the “show history” text, the activity stream will focus on that milestone, so you can see all of its changes clearly, or zoom back out to the full plan.

And it’s Real-Time Too

The activity stream is real-time. Each entry shows how long ago (in minutes, hours or days) the update was made, and if someone else is also updating the plan, the activity stream will notify you of those changes and can load them into the timeline. The Professional Edition receives changes more frequently than the basic version, but you still get the idea.

Happy planning – and let us know how you get on, either here, via twitter, or via the usual feedback link!

For “commissioner” in his talk, you could substitute “customer”, “boss”, “investory” or many other business parties! The ‘not’ view is a great what of pointing out what you SHOULD do, starting with NOT doing these things:

• As a small organisation:
• 23. Go all the way on the first date – ask for money on the first meeting.
• 22. Only call at the top levels of the organisation.
• 21. Cloak your pitches in buzzwords, jargon and boss-speak.
• 20. Don’t support the commissioner’s aims (the buyer). And don’t supply evidence.
• 19. Don’t ask for anything specific…
• 18. Be sure to include minute detail.
• 17. Confuse useful challenge with being lippy – ideally via the press.
• 16. Never give contacts tools to persuade others.
• As a large organisation:
• 15. Design pilots to test the easy things.
• 14. Develop a handy one-size-fits-all procurement process.
• 13. Stubbornly misinterpret European procurement law.
• 12. A tender should come as a nice surprise.
• 11. Frequently introduce surprising new rules – and make them tricky to understand.
• 10. Keep ‘em keen – make people jump through as many hoops to make it hard to do business with you. Make sure that preconditions are hard to find, that dresscode is changed on presentation day.
• 9. Call distant meetings at short notice.
• 8. Government lawyers always know best.
• And both ways:
• 7. Specify first, then get technologists in.
• 6. Choose bad measures.
• 5a. Confuse project-management with editorial vision.
• 5b. Never do a storyboard together.
• 4. Confuse a neat idea with strategy.
• In communication:
• 3.Reinforce prejudices – it’s reassuring.
• 2. Misjudge the knowledge of your audience.
• 1.Avoid understanding who your audience is and how they work.

And, of course, I’d add another, never use a tool like Milestone Planner to co-ordinate and track your commitments .

The ‘negative’ frame is a great way to surface the mistakes that we so easily make. Clearly, having a well communicated, common plan is essential to success, but beyond that, is it also important to avoid building in too much process and too little communication. It’s striking how many of Jonathan’s points come down to communication.

The Harvard Business Review blog has a post on “How To Ignite Creative Leadership In Your Organization” which draws on the IBM 2010 Global CEO Study. The report talks about the rapid escalation of complexity, and CEO’s doubts about their ability to manage it. It’s a time of rapid change for businesses, with global integration causing the world to operate in different ways. From volcanoes to volatile markets, business leaders are constantly being confronted by blind spots.

That doesn’t bother the kind of outcome-based, collaborative leaders we get to interact with. They aren’t phased. The Harvard post puts it like this:

Creativity in this context is about creative leadership — i.e., the ability to shed long-held beliefs and come up with original and at times radical concepts and execution. And this requires bold, breakthrough thinking. We believe, however, that this isn’t about having a lone creative leader at the top but rather about creating a “field” of creative leadership, by igniting the collective creativity of the organization from the bottom up.

We put it like this: Plan across the social networks that exist within your business. Let information and change propagate through them in real-time. Set milestones, aim for them, adapt them, adjust them, put everyone in charge. A “field” of leadership, rather than a point of leadership. In our world, people propagate the key information between plans and projects. People, with the right social tools, do a much better job of getting the right information to the right place, and innovating with it, than any of today’s computing power possibly can.

Creativity isn’t the enemy of good planning, it is its absolute best friend. Back to that Harvard post:

Creative leaders in these firms are more prepared and willing to make deeper business model changes to realize their strategies. To win, they take more calculated risks and keep innovating in how they lead and communicate. They are ready to upset the status quo even if it is successful and are committed to ongoing experimentation with disruptive business solutions.

Frank Kern: Senior Vice President, IBM Global Business Services talks about the background to their report: “We’re entering a pivot point…”

The 2010 CEO Study is here. Of course this isn’t new news. Dr Anne Marie McEwan of The Smart Work Company has been shaping our thoughts on what we can learn from the past for quite some time (Smart Working: Learn From The Past). What makes for good leaders hasn’t changed. What is different is that technology is moving from being a barrier to good leadership to being an enabler. Here’s to creative (and collaborative) leadership.

There Must Be a Better Plan?

Enter Milestone Planner. Here it is easy to set up a project space that all of the different collaborators can be involved in, regardless of whether they are inside or outside of your organisation. When one person needs to know where folks are at with a particular aspect of the project, they simply check the history of that milestone to be brought up to date – no need to trawl through emails or arrange an unnecessary meeting.

Working Independently Together

Each person can update the individual aspects of the project autonomously, without needing to worry about whether they have informed the right people – anyone who needs to know will be able to see at a glance.  Effective communication is key to the smooth running of a project, but as Craig Buckler warns:

“Be careful not to bombard them with multiple calls and never make assumptions about their decisions.”

Milestone Planner can provide the forum to strike the balance between effective communication and overdoing the phone calls and meetings.

The general consensus was that we do communicate differently. Comms are more direct and real-time, and more public and discoverable too. It is also, arguably, more cautious because of that.

Milestone Planner gives us an unusual perspective, sitting both within businesses and across them. Early on we saw a pattern that the best external users of Web 2.0 and social media were also the best internet uses – or visa versa. It’s something that Lee Bryant of Headshift talked about at Being-Social, and has blogged about as well: Social on the outside needs social on the inside. Effective communication is as much a cultural thing as a technological one. Of course the right tools help, and can accelerate the cultural change – I guess we would say that wouldn’t we! Here’s what Lee has to say:

“‘You’re coming of age in a 24/7 media environment that bombards us with all kinds of content and exposes us to all kinds of arguments, some of which don’t always rank all that high on the truth meter,’ Obama said at Hampton University, Virginia,” AFP reports. “‘With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, — none of which I know how to work — information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation,’ Obama said.” via macdailynews.com / AFP

Now, Obama’s comments were in the context of democracy and learning, but the tech press and bloggers have latched on to his comments:

President Barack Obama was rarely seen without his BlackBerry, he has criticised the current crop of popular consumer gadgets for helping make information a “distraction.” Mashable

And The Huffington Post has run with a poll that currently has a 50/50 split between agreeing/disagreeing that too much information is a distraction. It seems we are divided in our opinion, but the fact is that too much information is a distraction.

In order to get things done, and to be effective in making decisions we need just the right amount of information. Sufficient to make the right choices, but no more than necessary. The human brain becomes overwhelmed by too much data and too much choice. Our perceptual systems are not just sensors, they are censors too, keeping extraneous information at bay, to stop it being a distraction that slows us down, or causes us to drift off task.

It’s a design constraint we are aware off, and something that frequently features in conversations about how Milestone Planner presents information. We’re focussed on getting the right information to the right place at the right time. Keeping conversations threaded around milestones helps with that, because it provides context, which helps us process information more efficiently, but we are also exploring other ways of focussing the interaction and the presentation of the plans and activities.

Information should be free flowing – I don’t think President Obama was saying anything different – but it also needs to be focussed and timing. I know that I have consumed a huge amount of data, in real-time, about the UK election over the last week. The reality is I would have probably been just as well off with the summary, and got a lot more done in the meantime!

Making Plans... Benjamin and Jim

OK. Draw a square. Now draw a triangle on top of the square. On the right hand side of the triangle, just on top, draw a rectangle. Now inside the first square you drew draw four other squares – but make sure they don’t touch each other, or the edges of the first square. In the bottom middle of the first square draw a rectangle, taller than it is wide. Pop a little circle half way up on the right hand side of the rectangle.

Done that?

What have you drawn?

Here’s the alternative, simpler and more effective way of doing it: Make me a picture of a house.

We’ve done this exercise countless times with people we’ve worked with over the years. Usually, out of a group of 10 people, maybe 2 or 3 will follow the first set of instructions and produce something that looks like a house. Most people follow the instructions to the letter, but don’t produce a picture that looks like anything recognisable. Clearly it’s not because they couldn’t draw a house… it’s because the instructions are ambiguous.

OK, so it’s a trivial example, but it has important implications for planning.

When you are building a plan you can choose to describe the journey in terms of ‘activities’ or ‘outcomes’.
Activity based plans are like the first set of house drawing instructions. You start at the beginning and work out the set of tasks that need to be done to achieve the end result. If you are really keen you might even draw out all of the activities on a Gantt chart, or issue people with a spreadsheet stuffed with tasks.

Outcome based plans are like the second statement. They start by describing the end result that you want to achieve and the key outcomes you expect along the way. The individual steps that you need to take to get there are left up to the person who is responsible for producing the output.

In our experience Outcome based plans win almost every time because…

• Everyone knows what the target looks like. With the simple set of instructions above, our experience is that they only result in a recognisable picture of a house around 30% of the time. For the person who wrote the instructions it was obvious that it was going to be a house, because that was the picture they had in their mind, but when you have to work out the goal from the instructions its much harder. When you plan using activities and tasks its really easy to think you have completely described what needs to be done, but its really really hard to actually (I’d argue impossible) to build a completely infallible plan. By describing a set of Milestone outcomes that need to be achieved along the way, everyone can understand what the goal is and you don’t just rely on your ‘instructions’ being interpreted correctly.

• The team can find creative solutions and different routes to the goal. When you plan using activities and tasks you map out a single route to the goal. There may be countless other ways to get there. People in your team will have their own experiences and ideas which will lead to better solutions. But, if you constrain people to a set of tasks you lose all of that. This especially important when things go wrong (and who has ever worked on a project where there wasn’t at least on slip up). If you define the outcomes, when things go wrong you give people the freedom to think on their feet and change the tasks they do to cope with the new situation. If you are in ‘task-world’ when things go wrong, everything has to stop while you define the new set of instructions.

• You can measure progress by Outcome Milestones achieved, rather than by the amount of work done. If you tried to follow the first set of instructions above you would have no idea of how close you were to actually producing the intended result. You could have measured how far through the set of instructions you were, but that’s about it. Having done 100% of the work means nothing unless you have produced 100% of the intended outcome. By tracking against Milestones which are tied to outcomes you know that every time you complete one you have made tangible progress towards your goal.

In essence if you communicate what the goal is, the tasks will choose themselves. If you just tell people what tasks to do, you risk missing the goal completely. Its why we built Milestone Planner to be outcome focussed. Each Milestone in the plan is a tangible outcome. When you share your plan with your team everyone can see what needs to be done, when it needs to be done by and who is responsible for it. That’s what Milestone Planner is all about.

Our symathies go out to those who caught up in the travel chaos caused by the ash from Eyjafjallajoekull; we trust you have made it back home now! It has certainly pushed remote working up the agenda, and although we weren’t directly affected ourselves, remote working is a way of life for the SocialOptic team. You’ll usually find us with a Skype video conference in one window and Milestone Planner in another. There has certainly been a fair bit of real-time adjustment of plans with the number of  events that were rescheduled. We still managed to get out to a few events in London, and will blog about them shortly – face to face meetings definitely still have their place!

A New Dashboard

Back to the new release. You’ll find much more information on the dashboard. It now loads dynamically and gives a clearer view of what has been done, is due and is coming up next. If you haven’t seen it yet, just click on the projects page and add a new project – so that you have more than one project active. Click over to the dashboard, or wait until you next login; you’ll see it in action.

While you are on the projects page you will notice some other new features. The most visible one is the addition of gravatars to each project in the projects page, so you can see at a glance who is on each project team. We have also tidied the look and feel for the projects page, my milestones and dashboard views, as well as adding a couple of small fixes into the main timeline application.

Passing a Milestone

There is a big difference between agreeing a later date for a dead-line (slipping a milestone) and missing it. Obviously neither of the two are great, but the first is at least a bit more controlled. The difference between them wasn’t that obvious in Milestone Planner, so after much thinking and discussion we have added a new type of history item to record when a milestone is passed without it being completed.

On the morning after a milestone falls due, a message is automatically added to the milestone’s history to show that its date has passed. If you are using the RSS feed, that means that you will receive a message there. So, when it comes to review time, you can see if the milestone was missed then pushed out, as well as slipped or brought forward.

Moving Milestones Between Workstreams

We’ve gone vertical! Well, sort of. As well as dragging milestones backwards and forwards to change the date, it is now possible to drag them up and down, to move them between workstreams. The change is noted in the milestone history, as well as by an event in the RSS feed.

This new functionality makes it much easier to evolve and adjust bigger plans. The first iteration of your plan can be built without having to worry about workstreams, simply add milestones as you think of them. Then create workstreams and distribute the milestones, simply by dragging the milestones into them.

It is also useful for larger plans, where you want to ‘refactor’ them. Adding a “key milestones” workstream and dragging the most important milestones into it has become popular in the SocialOptic offices. Remember, if you are the project owner, you can also re-arrange the order of the workstreams, simply by dragging them up and down. In the case of the “key milestones” workstream, it seems to make sense to have it at the top, so we simply create it and drag it up there.

Happy to be Blue – Blue Means Done

Blue has always meant ‘done’ in Milestone Planner, however it has become less obvious since we removed the old-style dialogues and added in place editing. But blue is back! We’ve made it easier to remember that ‘blue’ means done by adding a new icon when you click on a milestone, with a nice blue tick. Thank you to @jenniwheller for reminding us that it wasn’t as obvious as it used to be.

We have also given the ‘time line‘ a bit of a blue tint too. As well as being ‘blue means done‘, it also makes it easier to see on low contrast screens, or if you are outside working in the sun – a bit hopeful in the UK in April, but we like to look on the bright side! While we are on the subject of the sweeping time line, it now also sweeps all the way to the right when you mark a project’s last milestone complete. It might just be because I’ve watched one episode too many of Dr Who, but it does give me a little buzz as it whizzes across the screen.

Feedback, as ever, is very welcome. Share and enjoy! Almost all of Milestone Planner’s biggest fans come via personal recommendation from people like yourself, so please do share, tweet, blog and generally spread the word.

Milestone Dependencies in Projects

We often get asked if Milestone Planner supports dependencies. In traditional project tools you build tasks, then link them together: Task A and B have to finish before Task C can start. For projects where you know the exact sequence of tasks from the outset, then this is a really good way of planning. However, for emergent projects and projects subject to lots of change, this method can trip you up.

We’ve all been part of projects where the dependencies between tasks keep changing, as we find out more about the tasks or requirements. I suspect we’ve all also seen Project Managers spending more time trying to keep the changing dependencies in the plan up to date than actually leading the project! That said, we know that it is a real pain to have to move 20 individual milestones when the entire project has slipped by a week. So we have introduced “soft dependencies” into Milestone Planner.

In each workstream you can switch soft dependencies on or off, by clicking the icon by the workstream title. With dependencies off, you can move individual milestones by clicking and dragging, just as you always have. With dependencies in a work stream turned on, when you drag a milestone, all of the incomplete milestones after that date will move as well.

This is a super-quick way of rescheduling complete workstreams. We hope it makes Milestone Planner even easier to use, without creating any additional work.

Introducing the Hoover: Time Sweeping

Knowing where you have got to in a project, both as a team, and personally, is obviously a key piece of feedback. It is now easy to see this at a glance with Milestone Planner. There are three pieces of time information that are now visible in the timeline view:

1. Today – the vertical red bar indicates today’s date, which shows how far through the project you are in elapsed time.
2. Project Today – You’ll notice that the time line to the left is greyed out. Where this ends indicates the ‘project today’ – that is where you have got to, in terms of achieved milestones. In an ideal world this should be level with, or slightly past, today. To explain it another way, the project today is the date of the first uncomplete milestone. It represents the project progress in terms of progressed time.
3. Your Today - The yellow vertical bar indicates what we call ‘your today’, which represents the next milestone you are working towards. Just like the project today, in an ideal world this should be level with today, or slightly into the future.

Get More Done

If it all sounds a little complicated, don’t worry. It isn’t. Just create a project and try marking some milestones done, and clicking on the link-milestones buttons and moving milestones around. It is very intuitive. As you start marking milestones complete you’ll enjoy watching the project today sweeping forwards!

The eagle eyed amongst you might have picked up on our latest time related project. More on that in the next post. As a hint, if you have any time-tracking related requests, now is a good time to drop us a message via the feedback form!

With immediate effect we are pleased to announce our latest release, which incorporates social gaming functionality right into the heart of Milestone Planner: Projectroulette. In keeping with our core philosophy, it is based on a simple, but amazingly powerful concept: When a new user signs in, after a few seconds they are randomly assigned to a new project. This instantly creates a new and diverse global project team, delivering on-demand-motivated-team-creation(tm). This directly meshes with current resource allocation methods often found in use by the world’s largest professional services organisations, and removes the traditional project challenges of matching both skills and personalities when building a project team. The built-in “nexting” functionality enables the immediate replacement of troublesome team members at the click of a button. A feature that has proven especially popular during beta testing.

Based on user feedback, and customer-CIO concerns over bandwidth usage, we have removed both the video and audio conferencing features from the initial release, leaving users free to provide their own sound track, and keep their hands and eyes on the project plan. We recommend fellow UK-based start up, Spotify, to share music playlists between team members, and visualisation techniques based on user Gravatars to augment the project experience. Unlike traditional telepresence applications, users no longer have to change out of their pyjamas before starting a planning session, recreating a key element of the chatroulette experience that seems popular with its main users.

If you would like more information, or to schedule an interview, please contact Benjamin Ellis at +44 (7785) 998006. Calls must be placed by 1st April 2010.

The session that most stuck in my mind was ”Do The Right Thing: Building Respectful Software”, hosted by Matthew Rothenberg and Gavin Bell. I caught up with Gavin at the Digital Mission stand later, which was a great chance to chat about his new book, “Building Social Web Applications” – available on Amazon UK,Amazon US, or O’Reilly. – and to talk social software.

Building web-based applications in a responsible fashion is much harder than it seems at first glance. From privacy issues, to sensible default settings, “doing the right thing” isn’t always that easy. The session was a useful chance to reflect on many of the recent changes to Milestone Planner, and where we go next, from the names used in projects, to how the RSS and calendar features work.

When we added RSS and Calendar support to Milestone Planner, we went for the most secure option available. Secure RSS feeds aren’t that common or well understood. We use them because we want to keep people’s project data as secure as we can. When you login to Milestone Planner, via the web, and choose a project and you will see an RSS Feed icon in the window. If your browser supports it, you will also see it in the menu bar. The first time you select the RSS feed, depending on your RSS reader, you will need to sign in again. From an application point of view, this is ‘the right thing to do’ as each one application uses a seperate copy of your user ID and password, so that you can control access by application. From a user perspective, it seem a little bit of a hassle, but from a security perspective, it is the right thing. The alternative is to leave RSS feeds open, or protect them via a ‘feed key’ which is publicly visible.

Once you add a project feed to your RSS reader (or email client – both OS X’s mail.app and Microsoft’s Outlook can read Milestone Planner’s RSS feeds), you are good to go. You can choose to authenticate the RSS feed once or every time. The settings are controlled by your RSS reader, not Milestone Planner. Whenever someone updates a project, you will get an update via the RSS feed – very handy!

Calendars have their own interesting twist. When you click on the calendar icon in a project, it will fire the a calendar feed. This is a dynamically updated calendar, which you can sync to OS X iCal, Microsoft Outlook, Thunderbird’s calendar or any app that supports the web calendar standard. Whenever a milestone moves, the calendar feed is automatically updated. Just like RSS feeds, you will need to login to the calendar feed separately. If you allow your calendar program to store the login details, you only need to do this once. Remember to set the calendar to auto-update – not all calendar clients do this by default. Even though the standard allows us to specify the default refresh time in the feed, sadly many of the Calendar applications tend to ignore this. That’s definitely not doing the right thing!

We have also added Gravatar support. If you have one, you already know what it is. Very simply, a gravatar is a Globally Recognised Avatar – a nice picture of you that can be used (in a project) to identify you. It is more recognisable than the email address on which it is based, and better represents the social nature of Milestone Planner. If you don’t have a gravatar Milestone Planner generates an icon for you, which you will see in the people bar at the top of the page. Setting up your own Gravatar is very straight forward.

We hope you enjoy the new features in Milestone Planner. Here is a request from us: If you see a place where you think we might have set the defaults wrong, or things could be better, let us know. Milestone Planner isn’t just a team-based tool, it’s a team effort, and we’d be very glad to have you on the team!

It was a far cry from the ‘fluffy’ end of Social Media, instead the conversation was grounded and practical. It was fantastically well run, with a format that mixed presentations with panels, lunch-time discussions and theopportunity for one to one discussion. It even managed to highlight a number of local charities in the format. A huge amount came out of the day, but for this post I’ll focus on the things that most directly impact what we are doing here at SocialOptic. Much of the press coverage around social media has been on the consumer space, so it was refreshing to have a lunch hosted by Madlen Nicolaus of Kodak that focussed on social media in the field of Business to Business. With people like Stuart Baines of Futurity Media, Yann Gourvennec and Adam Tinworth around the table, ideas flowed. Three key bullet points for me were:

• Think about your use case. Are you looking for new uses for an existing product, or new customers? They require different strategies.
• Social media can be used to augment market research, but what people ask for and what they will buy are very different. The need for product management skills has increased, not decreased.
• Is your business the right focus for building a customer community? Sometimes it is better to support an existing topical community and be part of that. Any one product is just a small part of a business person’s life.

Something that, for me, there isn’t enough discussion about is using Social Media inside of the business, and as part of the business processes for internal and external communication. I might have a slight bias (given that we see Milestone Planner as social software – Like Minds folks can try the pro version for a month on us), I think it provides one of the biggest returns for business. Olivier Blanchard’s keynote: ‘Integrating People-to-People’ did an excellent job of providing an integrated look at a potential operational framework for social media, which Olivier has blogged about here. I joined Oliver for a panel, moderated by Andrew Gerrard, with Steve Bridger, myself and Gabrielle Laine-Peters. It was interesting that, while we all have wildly different perspectives, our thoughts and conclusions were broadly the same. The key notes for me were:

• The age of Social Media means thinking differently about who you hire. On the one hand, as I often repeat, we are all in PR now, and on the other, collaboration trumps management in an innovative business.
• Social Media isn’t just about marketing, it is about all forms of communication, from customer service to facilities management. Tactical use of the technology can miss the major benefits.
• Leaders need to give staff ‘permission to act’. Demanding that employees use social media, while punishing them for doing so, is never going to have a constructive outcome.

There is a long way to go in understanding how the use of social media is changing employees expectations around communication, and a huge depth of opportunities for the use of the technology. Like Minds provided a great framework to think about both of these and some steps forwards. I am sure it will be driving many of the milestone updates in our plans, and posts on our internal blog for a good while to come! Thank you to Scott and Drew, the attendees, those that watched on line and to the speakers and panellists.

That was the topic for my talk at Social Media in Enterprise (#SMiE) at Cass Business School – with much thanks to David Terrar and Alan Patrick for putting on a great event.

Recently someone said to me “Two types of people look at you funny.” – those two types of people being undertakers and psychologists. The sad thing is that most businesses would rather see an undertaker than a psychologist, even though the heart of all of their business problems is people-related. Worse still, when businesses look to deploy social media or any other form of collaborative technology, they tend to tackle the technical-feature decisions, rather than the social-people ones. If you approach social media without the psychology, you just end up with the media – you may as well just pay your staff to watch TV. And, sadly, that’s what many businesses do with their communications – they broadcast information out, and don’t build in the vital return paths that provide the business intelligence that is needed to excel.

Is your business social? Or is it anti-social?

A distinction has to be made between process-centric and knowledge-centric businesses. All organisations feature both aspects, but the balance is radically different. For example, a manufacturer of commodity items in a market with little competition will tend to be highly process-centric. It is all about doing the same thing, those processes, faster and cheaper. Better and smarter would be good, but it isn’t mandatory. At the other end of the scale, a market analysis company in a highly competitive market is highly knowledge-centric. Cheaper and faster might be good in such an environment, but ultimately better and smarter win out. In a knowledge-centric business informal communication is a key component of value creation. As soon as you define that informal communication in its context you are talking about social interaction. The leap to seeing the business value of social software isn’t a big one, but before we go there it’s worth pondering the social nature of business a little further.

Hired for a purpose or for a higher purpose?

Even a cursory perusal of the literature that covers running a successful business is likely to convince you of one thing: Businesses that succeed, and continue to succeed, are driven by a big vision that reaches beyond the walls of the business itself, and towards some higher (social) goal. I challenge anyone to name many successful business where the initial staff were hired just to do a job. From Cisco Systems to Zappos, from Google to Innocent, you will find companies full of motivated staff who spend most of their time more convinced that they are changing the world than changing the balance sheet. Before you join, invest in or do business with any company, ask these questions:

What is the (social) purpose of the business? How does it contribute to society? How does it support community?

The answers will tell you more about the health of the business than any annual report. Businesses are, and have always been, social. Business leaders may have lost sight of the imperative need for a social purpose in recent decades, but consumers are marching to remind them that the right to make money is predicated on the responsibility to serve the society which the business is, in reality, totally reliant on. It has always been so. The social enterprise is not a new concept, and while Cadbury may now be Kraft, a new generation of socially aware businesses is starting to spring forth. Now, before I get accused of being a hippy, let me be the first to point out that running a business is fundamentally about bringing in the cash. However, the permission to make money is granted by the customers and their influencers (society and societies). Ignoring that is a guaranteed path to failure.

Does money grow on trees – or in networks?

Whenever someone engages with a new business, there is the inevitable, and sensible, desire to know how it works. What baffles me is that more often than not, the answer to such enthusiastic enquiries is to thrust an org chart into the inquisitor’s hands. Never, in my entire life, has one of these curious artefacts reflected the current employee reporting chain in any business with more than a dozen or so staff. Even if, by some miracle of information engineering, it did, that would still tell me precious little about how the day-to-day operations of the business proceed. That branch of the tree diagram on the right, that seems to have a cluster of titles related to accounting – do those individuals just spend their days talking to themselves, never interacting with the other parts of the organisation? Of course not. A functioning business is a network of people connected by communication channels and focussed around projects (points of purpose), documents (information) and meetings (interactions). It’s not about individuals, as much as an organisation may build its policies that way, it is about teams and teams of teams. It’s social.

Belief is the first step to behaviour

Social systems require trust, purpose and commonality to persist. They require other things too, but these three are key health indicators. Without trust factions form and fiefdoms emerge. Without purpose effort is applied in conflicting directions, or not at all, leading to dissipation and disillusionment. Without commonality, the social mesh is fractured and broken by misunderstandings. I’m sure you’ve never worked in a business that has been wrecked by fiefdoms, dissipation and continual misunderstandings, but let’s say that you have a friend who has. Now you know why. Putting the ship right requires changing what people believe, and that isn’t easy. And yet “just believe” seems to be the leading business case for most social software in business. That’s no way to make a business case. This is business, and it’s all about the Benjamin’s. Changing what people believe starts there. However, I have an issue with “ROI”. I’ve run a billion dollar P&L, which carried the joyous privilege of having to review ROI-based business cases every week. The problem? Randomly Ordered Integers, the lot of them. Admittedly they were sometimes created with passion and care, but every existing ROI spreadsheet is a case of garbage in, garbage out – or as one fellow exec put it “a barrel load of assumptions carefully chosen and arranged to summon up the letters Y, E and S.”

Let’s start with a different question: Where is the intellectual property in your organisation? If it is a knowledge-based business, a good guess is that it is in the heads (and conversations) of employees and buried in inboxes on laptops. Just before you say “but it’s on the server,” what’s the size limit on your employee’s mailbox? And where does it go after that? This is the fate of enterprise 1.0 software and mobile email. Email has to be one of the singularly most inefficient ways of moving information around a network of people. Almost any tool that frees employees from unproductive hours tending to their inbox will pay for itself in weeks. If it can rescue the millions of dollars worth of information that is lost each time an employee leaves an organisation, through the information that walks out of the door in their heads and the email archive that becomes deleted or inaccessible once they leave, you have a gold mine. That’s the ROI.

“Are you here to set up the socialist system?”

Neatly filed under “you couldn’t make it up,” the cordial greeting from an employee at a recent customer – “are you here to set up the socialist system?” – I wish I could claim to be such an idealist, but actually I was just there to train a few people to blog. This is about software, not politics, but social software deployments often cause more politics than an election campaign. Effective social software distributes communication across the human network. In doing so it can wipe out the power-bases of middle managers and those that exercise influence through the creation of information vacuums. Those folks are smart enough to spot the change coming and don’t take kindly to it. That’s no reason to avoid social software though. The scarcest resource in any business is not financial capital. Financial capital can be created from thin air, at least on a temporary basis (see compound debt products as a proof point). The scarcest resource in any business is human capital. Human capital does not appear from thin air, it has to be attracted, nurtured and maintained. If you can find the right human capital for a business, the financial capital will follow.

Making a change

To break down the fiefdoms and fix the dissipation and misunderstanding requires transparency, an emergent plan and building some common understanding within the organisation. Once these three take root, trust, purpose and commonality will emerge. The challenge is that transparency, emergent plans and common understanding can be highly illusive when all you have are fiefdoms, dissipation and misunderstanding. Time for a plan B. That plan B is to look through the organisation for groups that already exhibit the very behaviour that social media promotes and equip them with the tools. It will usually be in the most innovative areas of the business. Enable the teams and let them lead by example.

Business is changing, and success rests in enabling change to propagate more quickly, and that happens through more efficient human networks. Business is social. It needs social software.

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:

• Antony Mayfield (Chair) – SVP Social Media, iCrossing
• Carter Brokaw, CRO, Meebo
• Ajit Jaokar, Future Text
• Vincent Sider, Head of Strategy: Social Media, Gaming & Presence, BT
• Maz Nadjm, Online Community Product Manager, BSKYB
• Trevor Johnson, Head of Strategy and Planning, EMEA – facebook

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!

• 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!

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.

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?

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!

Benjamin Ellis by SylwiaPresley (cc)

Last week I shared some thoughts at MediaCamp London #3, which seem good to offer up here. Coffee in hand, I talked through the things I’ve discovered about the management of knowledge-driven and creative businesses over this past decade. I can’t say that they are complete thoughts, but in the way of a blogger, I’ll share them here for you for agree/disagree/clarify/extend. The slides I used are on slideshare already:

I use the phrase “cat herding” because it is about the best I have to describe managing very bright, creative people. For the avoidance for doubt, the term isn’t meant to be derogatory, it’s simply one I’ve come to use for the skills involved in leading highly-autonomous, bright folk – The kind of people you don’t realise the potential of by providing a to-do list. There were three sections to the talk: Being a great cat herder, being a great herd member and being a great cat. I’ll cover the first in this post.

Being a great cat herder

Whenever I ask people what makes a good manager, and what makes a bad one, a standard set of themes emerge. For the good manager, it is around emotional intelligence – “being understood/understanding”, “supportive/encouraging”, “being fair”. For the bad it is around process: “not explaining things”, “being absent/being overly present – a micromanager” and so on. Good managers are people rather than process oriented. They get the process things done, but they don’t let them dominate. Perhaps they are better referred to as leaders? I’m increasingly convinced that you manage things, but lead people. They are different skills.

Knowledge workers and creatives generally don’t like being told what to do or how to do it. And rightly so. If you hire people for their skills and knowledge, then you aren’t going to go far if you don’t use them. In a knowledge-business, the boss is no longer the smartest person in the room for every (or any?) given question.

Realise the Potential

One of the biggest failings of managers – or perhaps one of the differences between a manager and a leader – rests in realising the potential of their team. If you’ve hired bright people, you don’t need to tell them what to do, you need to explain why you want them to do it, and then provide them with what they need to be successful. The ‘what’ that needs doing may be different than you at first thought, and in today’s real-time business world it might change while it is being done too. The ‘why’ rarely shifts, and if it does, generally the need for the project goes away with it.

Give your team a clear purpose. Explain what is happening, provide the background, and an explanation of not just what is happening, but why it is happening. The key to an outstanding business is unlocking the discretionary effort of its staff, and that means giving people the motivation to go the extra mile and do their best, rather than “what will do”. Enable people to give their all, and throw their full selves into the business. To borrow from Maslow, that means meeting their needs, from the physiological, through providing stability and certainty, to providing a sense belonging in the business and an appreciation of what they bring to it.

Traditional business management looks at people, processes and systems – although mostly processes and systems. Today’s business environment has simultaneously commoditised processes and systems, so that there is no competitive differentiation in them, and become so fast moving as to render most of them useless before they can be implemented.

Differentiation in today’s market place rests in having great people, and building an environment that lets them operate at their highest level. In my early working life, in retail, the businesses were driven by process, but all of the businesses I have worked in over the last few decades have been driven by skills and knowledge. It’s a big shift in the way that a business is built, and in the kind of systems that are required.

Be More Than Slightly Better

The scales that balance Innovation and Execution have also shifted, tipping relentlessly towards innovation. Being competitive means constantly disrupting your business to create better products and services, and more closely meet the needs of those all-important customers. Small incremental improvements in process are no longer enough to keep up with the competition, and differentiation comes from the philosophy of the business as much as from strategy – witness Toyota’s recent retrenchment back to its core philosophy. Philosophy drives strategy, and strategy drives execution, and the latter two are subject to a rapidly changing market place.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Milestone Planner resonates with much of this thinking. It enables emergent planning, balancing clear ownership with shared responsibility for what happens, and the ability to change tactics in real-time. In recent years I have become convinced that social media, or rather social technology, IS the new process, or at least that it is the scaffolding around which the necessary process can be built. Putting people in the middle of everything, and connecting them with the relevant information, propagated via their social graph, is the core of a knowledge-intensive business. Connecting all of this with the mission of the company, and a clear vision of where it is headed, creates an unstoppable force that drives great execution, and that is the responsibility of every good cat herder.

Next, part 2: Being a good member of the herd.

When you next logon you’ll notice that the “Beta” button has gone. For  many services, being in perpetual beta is a fine fashion statement, but  we have a large number of users managing big projects within Milestone Planner, and we’d love more, so it’s officially time to come out of beta.

Being out of beta doesn’t mean we are perfect though – if you do see a hickup, then give us your feedback. There are so many permutations of browsers, operating systems and plugins, there there is always the occasional surprise. You’ll find we get things fixed very quickly if there is an issue, and that we are definitely still adding new functionality.

A number of users have asked us for premium features, so we’re opening that option up more broadly to users of Milestone Planner. The free service will remain as is. Create as many projects as you want and invite as many people as you need to manage the projects . The ”Professional” option adds full SSL support and full Milestone history for  users that have upgraded.

We’ll be adding in more features in the coming months, so  as an incentive to get in early, we have set up an 80% discount code, which gets you a whole year of Milestone Planner Professional for £19.80. Simply head over to the store – click “upgrade to Professional” and enter launch2009 as your discount code. If you are new to Milestone Planner, you’ll want to sign up and give it a try first. If you are upgrading an existing account, just use the same email address you normally login with and you are away.

The offer is only open to the first 200 people [a few left but only a few days left] who register after this post and before the end of december, and if you want to share the code via Twitter or via your blog, then that’s great with us [drop us an email and we'll send you a code].

If you’re a bigger business with lots of users, we have two other offers that might be of interest to you – drop us a line and we’ll tell you about them.