Last year’s FranklinkCovey survey of the top 10 New Year’s resolutions is little changed from the previous year, with most of us still circling around the same things. Specially, the top 5 last year was:

1. Become more physically fit
2. Improve financial condition
3. Improve health
4. Lose weight
5. Read more

So, what’s the plan? We’ve got an app for that… Milestone Planner is free for a single plan, which is all you need for tracking your personal goals (although if you want to treat yourself to the Professional Edition that would make our day, and it won’t break the bank!).

Create a ‘workstream‘ for each of your goals (or New Year’s resolutions), then set milestones in each stream that track your progress towards that goal. Breaking it down into specific steps, with a deadline for each step (which is what a milestone really is) is a great way to chunk your goal down into manageable bit. Later, you can come back to the plan and on the dashboard, milestone or ‘do‘ pages, break things down even further by adding actions (specific tasks) against each milestone. If you don’t check in our your plan for a while, and a milestone is due, we’ll send you a gentle nudge. If your plans change, just click and drag the milestone to a new date.

If you are familiar with GTD, you are essentially asking yourself “What’s the next action?” towards achieving each milestone. You’ll end up with what seems like lots of milestones and actions, but you’ll have spread them over time to make them achievable. The review feature graphs your progress, and you can export your plan, or share it with other people if you want.

I might be biased, but I think it’s great for tracking goals and making sure you follow up on those new year’s resolutions.

You might also want to read Simon Jordan’s post on making a plan. Which encourages you to think of the big picture:

• VISION
• MISSION
• OBJECTIVES
• STRATEGY
• PLANS

Where do you want to get to? That’s your vision. How are you going to get there, what’s the journey, why are you taking it? That’s your mission. The objectives are the markers you set, so that you know you are on your way. Please do vote for Milestone Planner, and let us know how you get on!

The question of measurement is an interesting one. My original engineering background lead me to believe that anything can be measured, and that certainly seems to be the view that prevails across much of the computer programming world. My move into marketing quickly taught me that actually you couldn’t measure many of the things you needed to measure, and even when you could, the measurement was often so far after the fact as to be (at least commercially) useless.

Test Me On This

More recently, adventures in designing and carrying out psychology experiments has helped me realised that you can actually measure things that don’t exist, and that you can’t measure many things that do exist. Now, this isn’t new news to any theoretical physisists out there, but it is something that many in social media haven’t yet figured out.

Measurement has long been a central tenet of the natural sciences. Come up with a hypothesis, then devise an experiment that involves measuring something that hopefully doesn’t disprove it (or the null hypothesis). Weights, heights, speeds and hundreds of other metrics have been constructed and calculated to enable us to describe and detail things in the physical world. However, this central tendency towards measurement is far from natural, and at times quite unscientific, when it comes to human beings.

We’ve Been Here Before, Haven’t We?

Applying behavioural measurements to human beings has a long history, and while Klout, Peerindex and Kred are wonderfully new and shiny (although increasingly less shiny in the case of Klout), they are the second cousins, once removed, of psychometrics – the scientific art of slapping a number on a human being. It is a science that is so problematic that there are not only shelves of books about it, there are also whole books written just about how problematic it is. Many of the thoughts here are inspired by “Putting Psychology in its place” by G. Richards, but most texts on psychometrics touch on the issues I’m going to raise. As I’ve read a fairly large number of them over the last 10 years or so, many of the sources have merged into an amorphous blob in my head, so I’m not going to pretend that any of what comes next is very original thought.

Just Because You Can Measure It…

…Doesn’t mean that it exists. One word: Reification. It is possible, simply be measuring something, to bring it into being. This isn’t some weird mystery taking place, it is an epistemological phenomenon that unfolds around the world of the natural sciences. If I create a “flumpy” score for humans, devise a scale for measuring “flumpiness”, and a tool for assessing a “flump” score for each of my friends, then I will have a repeatable, ‘scientific’ and objectively valid measurement. That’s even though there is no real-world correlate for ‘flumpiness’ – although my spell checker seems to think it is frumpiness, that is by the by. Now, if I can get people to believe that people with high degrees of flumpiness are more loyal customers, and should be given higher discounts, then my work is complete. The customers get their discounts, they become more loyal, I measure their flumpiness to prove how effective a predictor it as, and I have myself a multimillion dollar industry.

You’ve Got to be Objective?

Measurements, including those in the social media world, have to latch on to externally observable phenomena, from number of followers to the propagation of messages. These are the linga-franca of the natural sciences, and they are the only objective measures that we have. But, and this is a very big, ugly but, behavioural measures such as influence are inherently individual and personal measurements, and thus they they belong to the subjective domain. They are concerned with the inner worlds of individuals. These are worlds that will be the last to be explored by mankind, and according to Socrates, the least explored by man.

If we hardly know what is going off in our own minds, how can we understand what is going off in the minds of others? Think about the last product purchase you made. Why did you make it? No, really, why did you make it? What was the chain of micro decisions and chance happening that lead you to purchase product X rather than product Y? How many things and people influenced your decisions along the way? And that’s just the ones you were consciously aware of. Many more will have crept in subconsciously.

The task facing Psychology once it moves beyond simple phenomena like reaction times has been identifying overt, publicly ‘measurable’, indices of the essentially inaccessible phenomena it seeks to study such as memory, motivation, thinking, imagery, the structure of personality and intelligence.

Thinking Is…

Rearranging our current prejudices? Right now, that’s pretty much what all of the social media influence metrics I have seen are. The assumptions (which is just a nice way of saying the prejudices) of some well-meaning individuals, projected onto available metrics (which may or may not correlate with ‘flumpiness’). If someone constructed an experiment that has predicted someone’s influence, then measured the actual influence on someone’s real world behaviours, then I missed that blog post. Even if they had, then they are at the start of the 100+ year journey that has lead psychology to an on going set of experiments, debates and hypothesis about what are and are not valid psychometric instruments (probably not Myers-Briggs, maybe 16-PF, possibly OCEAN/Big 5).

One Thing I Know

All that said, those that were in the room, or that followed the first link in this post, will remember that I said “yes” I did think that there could be a single measure of influence. The trick is in the domain-specificity of that influence. Could you construct a measure of the likeliness that I might retweet a link on a specific topic, on a specific day and time? Yes, you absolutely could. It also probably wouldn’t be valid in a few years time, or possibly even a few week’s time, as my interests wax and wane. Oh, and of course, it would just be a probability – you have a measure that gives you “quite likely” – it is not “will” or “won’t”. The measure will also have an error range, which will be a very large one if the -/+50% changes in Klout scores are anything to go by.

On That Subject

Of course, this new shiny measure wouldn’t be valid for a different topic (I don’t think I’ve retweeted much on knitting recently, although I did tweet something about knitting QR codes!). One of the lunch-time games in the office, which has lead to much hilarity, is seeing what topics we are apparently influential for. Apparently, we have expertise in social media (of course), jam (don’t ask), toothpaste (I said, don’t ask) and … You get the idea. Computer algorithms for assigning opinions to categories are a fine art, and even getting groups of humans to do it reliably is a regular form of intense frustration in psychology studies.

You Might Be Lucky

If a narrow, transient and probabilistic measurement with a wide margin of error is what you are after, then your luck may be in (no pun intended). Given that people sort CVs by the number of pages, or the hand writing on them, then using influence scores to hand out favours and goodies is probably no greater crime against humanity. Just be aware of the dice that you are rolling.

The short answer to the question is that the transitions happen badly today. The keyboard still remains the primary interface for converting off-line conversations into on-line knowledge. Of course, it isn’t really the keyboard, ultimately it’s the human that makes the conversion between the two worlds take place. That brings a good deal of fallibility to the process, but it is also what makes it inherently personal, human and social, and what makes social software so well suited to tackling the issue.

Blogs and Wikis have long been used to capture the essence of meetings and events, to make them more broadly available to the organisation – although I continue to be shocked by how few meetings are minuted, or even have actions recorded (as Penny was). Milestone Planner has made that process a habit for me – typing a line of text and clicking on an avatar is all it takes to record an action. The simple act of creating a digital record of the off-line event has a dramatic impact on the likelihood that it will be followed up and actually happen. When that action is ‘socially’ accountable – by being made visible on-line to others – the likelihood goes up even further (that’s one of the main concepts behind Milestone Planner).

The interface between on-line to off-line data has also been a narrow one. The office printer is still the main way that digital assets get back into the physical world. There is the occasional nod to the meeting room projector, that makes our PowerPoint creations appear as a fleeting flash of light, but the piles of printed paper that seem to gather by any office printer bear testament to the device’s dominant role in creating ‘real’ things from our digital machinations.

The narrow paths between on-line and off-line in the business world seem ridiculous when you look at the technology we actually have at our finger tips: Phones to capture pictures and video, or even audio, conference call systems that can record and transcribe speech, virtual world environments, speech to text software, augmented reality, … the list goes on. Many business folks are already using these tools – mostly the ones that move in social media circles I note! – but they are a tiny minority in a sea of literal monotony.

Mobile devices, be they phones or tablets, have a central role to play in smoothing the transition between the on-line and off-line lives of business data. That is partly due to the amount of technology they pack into one space, but it is one of the things to fall out of the inherently personally nature of the interface between the two worlds: Mobiles are inherently personal, privatised and individual. We keep them with us, much more than laptops, and they have a much better sense of our place and identity, through features such as GPS, and their ability to create and store video and photos that represent our daily experiences.

Unsuprisingly then, mobile devices have lead the charge in enabling better ways of switching between the two worlds. Possibly one of the most clunky ways this is happening is in the use of QR codes, little square of digital magic that can be printed, then viewed by reader software and used to jump to a web page. Though many question their usefulness, 14 million Americans in the month of July used a QR code – that’s a lot of interactions. Where do they fit into the business process? How about putting a QR code on a meeting room door, with a link to the on-line booking system, or adding them to your meeting documents to give attendees a link back to the project plan or documentation? Although they are effectively a progression from bar codes, they don’t have to be boring. The built in error correction allows marketers and designers a lot of creative freedom.

QR Codes are just one way that the divide is being bridged, there are plenty more exciting ones. On one side, virtual reality systems have been building out from the virtual world, on the other, augmented reality systems have been building out from the physical world. The main thrust of a recent Digital Surrey event at CSC’s offices was that the two will become increasingly blurred. Businesses like Layar have be creating digital layers of information over the physical world, so that you can interact with information around physical objects. You might already have seed the Arcade Fire video, that has a great example of using video and HTML 5 to create a personalised video that draws in the physical world. Another example is Blue Mars Lite, a 3D virtual world platform that draws on Google’s street view data. It enables you to gather people into a virtual space, based on a real world environment, and chat and explore that space online.

Social technology, and the developments around it, can blend on and offline, easing business processes and making them both more human, and less fallible. So much valuable business information is still transient and offline – corridor conversations, customer meetings, conference calls. The majority of that information is undiscoverable , unsearchable, and ultimately lost - those who couldn’t be right there, right then, loose the benefit of the interactions, often resulting in repeated conversations and decisions made with inaccurate or out of date knowledge. To paraphrase an old sci-fi programme: We have the technology to fix this, we can rebuild it. The barriers are not the technology any more, they are resistance to change, and a lack of application.

There is a lovely video from Microsoft doing the rounds, which paints a picture of better ways of interacting with devices:

I have to admit to being a bit disappointed to see a QWERTY keyboard in the video, but other than that, it is an exciting vision.  As Steve commented during the event “Providing a friction free way for teams to collaborate significantly increases likelihood that they will do so.” - We are already starting to experiment with the ways touch can be used to create better business applications, and in the next few weeks we’ll be adding QR code support to aspects of what we do here. There is much to be done!

Not everyone is a Social Software enthusiast. In fact, some people are down right hostile to it, for all sorts of reasons. The word ‘social’ has baggage, we have to deal with that. The telephone received many of the same objections…

• “Well-informed people know it is impossible to transmit the voice over wires. Even if it were, it would be of no practical value.” – Boston Post, 1865
• “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” Western Union internal memo, 1876
• “Why would any person want to use this ungainly and impractical device when he can send a messenger to a local telegraph office and have a clear written message sent to any large city in the United States?” report to the President of Western Union written by the committee charged with investigating potential purchase of Bell’s telephone patent for $100,000

Many IT roll outs fail simply because people stopped believing in the project. Not convinced? Try spreading a rumour that your current favourite project isn’t going so well, and watch how quickly support for it gets dropped, and how hard getting it done becomes! Visible buy in from the leadership team is essential in the long run.

Image by kind permission of James Poutler.

The way that we interact with knowledge has, and is, changing dramatically. It is often framed in terms of the “digital natives” – a new generation growing up who are as at home with technology as fish in water. However, it’s really not that straight forward. Personally I’m not comfortable with the term “digital native”, even though I am probably one of the oldest of them around.

My father had the vision to see how important computers would be, and I so I by the time the 1980′s arrived I had a computer at home, was writing code and dialling into on-line communities. So, I might have been one of the first Digital natives. But they are not what we think they are, or even what they think they are! Individual differences between each of us dwarf the differences between the generations. No one of us is average – there is no such thing as the average person, and we miss understand people if we try to squeeze them into a statistical box.

We are, however, a generation who do wonder more about “what we think that they think” than any generation before us. We are highly socially conscious, though the mass media and through social media. We are the “we” generation. Knowledge is now socially centred and digitally curated, with a new generation of highly networked tools.

The We Generation

Research doesn’t support the commonly held idea of digital natives. The fact is there are probably as many young people baffled by Facebook as there are grandmas and granddads, and indeed mums and dads, who are gurus. To say that IT literacy is the preserve of one generation and not another flies in the face of all the statistics we have. The social web is spread across age and agenda. It is everyone’s web, or at least almost everyone who wants. The ‘me’ generation is giving way to the ‘we’ generation, a generation that is intensely aware of what their peers are doing, even thinking.

Harder Better Faster Strong

However we are not our parents’ generation. Each successful wave of technology has hit harder and faster than the last. Video recorders were adopted faster than TVs. Mobile phones even faster still, and as for the Internet, well… Each wave reaches majority penetration in a fraction of the time of the last. We adopted and embed the technology into our lives with ever increasing speed.

Digitally Immersed

The next generation are the first generation to have never experienced information scarcity. We live ‘under the graph’ of phones, computers and the Internet. There are things that now encompass all that we do. A new generation is just starting to experience information over abundance, the very people that have never experienced information scarcity. Information hasn’t just escaped from the libraries, it has breeding in the streets, living rooms and offices of the entire western world, and is overflowing down the digital drains at the sides of the information super highway. We’re drowning in it! The next generation will bring new demands into the work place. They have new expectations about technology and the ability to access information. Information Techonlogy is not longer a business tool, it is instrumental to our personal lifestyles.

Like fish in the sea, we are barely consciously aware of how we live off of the digital water that is constantly flowing around us. Try this experiment: Go without your mobile phone, and without the Internet, for a week. Feeling nervous? When you are a fish, surviving in air isn’t so easy! We are so surrounded by technology, just as a fish is not conscious of the water, we aren’t conscious of the digital air around us. Until it is taken away of course.

Simple things like meeting up with friends or a business meeting, which would previously have been planned in detail, are now planned on the fly. We have become co-dependent with the tools of the digital information age, we feed them, and they inform and steer our every move – from where to meet our friends, to which books or films to buy or see.

A New Kind of Execution

The ‘new way’ of ‘doing things’ is also reshaping the work place.”Barely planned behaviour” has become our modus operandi. Rich and available communication channels have switched our ‘planned behaviours’ into new emergent one:. We phone when we get there to sort the finer details of where to meet, or fire up a map on arrival to get directions. The addition of location awareness to our digital devices is pushing things even further. With new services like Foursquare, we swarm to where our friends are. Decisions evolve through an emergent social consensus, rather than one individual’s logic. SMS powered teenagers text their way to a new kind social behaviour, planning without a plan. Increasingly a night out and a day in the office are planned in the same way. An interactive network of micro-decisions, rather than a lock-step turning point. It is collaborative – building a consensus and moving on is fast incredibly fast, compared to traditional business. We are no longer dealing with information at rest, we are dealing with information on the move. An yet many businesses are still run as if knowledge is locked up in filing cabinets, and decisions are taken once a quarter.

While there are both good and bad sides to this emergent planning, it is a fact of business today. We do have to respond in real-time to real-time changes to remain competitive in a dynamic, 24×7, global economy. We are just at the start of a transition in the way that we interact with knowledge. Location aware applications are but the first of a new generation of context aware technology. Traditional, static applications, will need to become real-time and social.

Before the event, we surveyed some of the participants using our on-line survey tool. Here are some highlights of what we found, taken directly from the survey report:

length of time on twitter

Whilst the majority of people there had been using twitter for over 3 years – almost as long as it has been around, there was also a significant spread of newer users, including some who were very, very new to Twitter. The range of experience lead to a very broad range of discussions, from the basics of how to use Twitter, to in-depth discussions about how it has changed as it has grown.

Hoping to meet someone in real life

Emphasising the way in which connections on Twitter have a habit of moving into the ‘real world’, three quarter’s of the attendees said that they hoped that tweetcamp would allow them to say ‘Hi’ to someone in real life that they already knew through twitter, and there seemed to be plenty of opportunity to do that during the course of the day, with a large open area and sessions in 8 or 9 breakout rooms. There were conversations everywhere.

What do you want to talk about?

People came with a massive range of things to talk about, as evidenced by this word cloud from the answers to one of the survey questions.

The thing I took away from this Tweetcamp, much like the first one in 2009, is how much services like Twitter are changing the way we work and live. The immediacy, the fact that everyone can now have their own platform to shout from, the speed at which news travels, and just how connected we all are, all add up to a rapidly changing world that the attendees at Tweetcamp were keen to discuss and debate. Today’s web is both real-time, and personal.

A burn down chart is a graphical representation of work left to do versus time. The outstanding work (or backlog) is often on the vertical axis, with time along the horizontal.

John Rusk describes how they work in his post – Agile Charts - which is over 6 years old, but still up to date today. Now, not everyone likes burn down graphs - they do have some very definite limitations. In Milestone Planner, Milestones have a status beyond just completed or open, and as we are tracking an entire project, so we have to deal with things like changes in scope (adding and removing milestones), and down the line, we also want to show the earned-value in the project (see “Earned-value and Burn Charts” by Alistair Cockburn).

Burn-up charts are the mirror image of burn-down charts, and are much better suited for charting the progress of an entire project. As the name implies, they are line an upside down version of a burn-down graph. Being the other way up let’s them display different types of status, and any changes in scope show up as changes on the top line. If you are interested, you can get more of an idea about how they compare by reading David Anderson’s “Managing with Cumulative Flow Diagrams“, or see how burn-up charts can be used to show bottlenecks in  Juurgen Appelo’s take. 

A picture is worth a thousand words, so here is an example of a burn-up graph from Milestone Planner (we call it a progress graph – didn’t wan’t to get the health and safety folk all hot under the collar with talk of fires):

But the image is only part of the picture, as it were (not doing so well with metaphors today). From left to right, we can see how the project suddenly grows in scope (number of milestones) half way through, and we can see a steady difference between work completed, in blue, and the target completion, shown as ‘missed’ in light blue. But because we track the full history of the plan, we can also show how these estimates have changed over the course of the project. Watch this video from Jim to see what we mean:

Slightly mind bending stuff, but we hope, after a little explanation, that it makes sense. As ever, the best way is to dive in and try it for yourself. You’ll need to run your project for a few weeks to really see how the progress graph works. We hope that it gives you a better view of how your project is going, and helps you stay on track!

We’ve found that much of the trick of successful project management is helping people to make clear commitments, which are visible to the entire team, and then doing everything you can to help them achieve that.

One of the simplest ways to make commitments and progress visible is schedule regular time to review these with the team.

Assuming that you’ll be meeting weekly, there are three questions you need to address at that weekly review…

• What did we plan to do this week?
• What actually happened this week?
• What re-planning is required to take account of this weeks events?

So to prepare for the weekly meeting, list each of the key milestones and actions that the team agreed to deliver in the last seven days, and get updates from each of the team members on the status of each of these (you can do this in the meeting, but its a much better use of time to begin the meeting with all of the facts already documented). Use the time in the meeting to address the “why’s” of any issues, then move onto re-planning where you need to and setting out the key milestones and action for the next seven days.

Of course. if you are using milestone planner with your team then we’ve already done all of the meeting preparation for you. If you make sure you and your team update actions and milestones as they happen, then you’ll find an up-to-date weekly report under the ‘review’ tab for your plan. It contains all of the facts you’ll need to run a really effective weekly team get together…. if you want to send the info out in advance then theres an option to automatically generate a pdf document which you can send out to your team.

So if you want to help your team get more done and be super organised get those weekly sessions in the diary today.

Switching Plans is now easier. You’ll see an ‘Active Plans’ Tab at the top of the page. Clicking on this will pull down a list of all of your active plans which you can then choose from.

We’ve added a ‘Review Page’ which contains two useful reports which look back at the history of your project over the last week.

New Report Page

The Status report is designed to be helpful input to team meetings. It will show you all of the milestones which are overdue; all of the milestones that were supposed to be completed in the last seven days and all of the milestones your team has committed to completing over the next seven days. You can download it as a pdf to send around to your team and form the agenda for your weekly team progress updates.

The Activity report does what it says on the tin. It shows you all of the activity that has happened on your project over the last week, which actions have been assigned, started or completed and which milestones have changed.

Improved Search

Our professional users will notice we’ve moved the search box to the top right hand corner of the screen, but as well as this we have improved it. It now shows plans, workstreams, milestones, and actions as you type, making it super-easy to find the thing you are looking for.

In addition we’ve made lots of small tweaks to the look and feel – see if you can spot them. As always we’re really happy to hear your feedback on the changes – just click the feedback button at the bottom of the screen

There are a few different ways to add a Milestone Planner calendar, but here is one example… Sign in to your Google Calendar. On the left hand side you’ll see that you can add other calendars. Click add, then click add by URL (yes, it is a little bit tucked away in there!).

Next, sign in to Milestone Planner and head to the projects / plans page. You will see a feed icon and a calendar icon by each project. Click on the calendar icon and copy the url that comes up (or depending on your browser, right click and select ‘copy this link’). Pop back over to Google Calendar and paste than link in and confirm adding the new calendar. That’s it, you’re done. Now, whenever the plan is updated (and a milestone moves), the milestone will change automatically in your calendar.

By the way, you can also subscribe to the RSS feed of project updates in Google Reader as well. The updates feed gives a step by step account of changes to the plan, as they happen.

Happy planning!

Milestones, sorted

Firstly, the milestones page now has a lot more functionality: you can sort milestones by date (as you always could), by status (blue, green, etc…), by owner, by workstream, or by the date that they were last updated. And, of course, you can still filter by the owner and milestone status. Its pretty nippy, and very, very mobile web browser friendly. You can now slice and dice your project in all sorts of ways – sometimes a different perspective helps you see the way to move things along.

Now you see it, now you don’t

Sometimes you love to have the activity stream, and other times you don’t need it. The activity stream gives you another way to navigate around your project plan, and also allows you to see the history of each item, but sometimes you don’t need that. Now you have a choice of having it hidden or showing, by using the little tag at the top to hide it or make it re-appear. When you click to the next page, it will stay hidden or showing. You should find this useful if you are doing your planning on a smaller screen or on a tablet device.

A bit of a tidy

We’ve tidied up the layout of milestones and actions, to make them a bit easier to read, as well as fixing which actions get displayed under a milestone, according to who you are focussed on. We’ve tidied other aspects of the layout to allow it to work on smaller screens in the desktop world too.

Kanban can do

The action kanban is now also much more dynamic and shows the full set of actions, in the Professional Editon. You can view actions by person, and focus the view of actions down to a certain number of days.

Over to you…

We very much hope you enjoy the changes, and welcome your feedback and suggestions as always! Milestone Planner is now in the Google Chrome store, so if you are a Chrome user, please do leave us a review! Don’t forget to explore Milestone Planner’s other features – have you checked out the activity and status reports in the plans view, or tried the RSS and Calendar feeds?

David Thornton from RIM very kindly gave me an overview and demonstration of the device – I like what I heard and saw!

There was a flow and a pace to her work. She was lost in concentration, unaware of the onlookers and clearly enjoying what she was doing. The white paper was rapidly transforming into an intriguing backdrop. Had I arrived a few days later, I probably would have walked right past and not given it a second thought. Being there during the construction gave me the opportunity to appreciate the beauty of the process, the beauty of the work, not just the outcome.

A different perspective, a different outcome.

Using different perspectives to change things obviously isn’t a new idea. Much of my study time at the moment is spent in the depths of Social Psychology. It is an academic field with all the challenges of working between two disciplines (Sociology and Psychology) and bears the scars of long fought battles about the nature and position of ‘the person’. These differences have lead to distinctly different perspectives, and different methods associated with them. The way that we see reality, and the tools that we use to access it, actually change our reality, as they shift our attitudes and our behaviours.

The same applies to work, and the way that we perceive and frame it. Management science comes from a tradition that centered on ‘piece work’ in the manufacturing world. Frederick Winslow Taylor and the other founding fathers focused on how work could be optimised – increasing flow rates and output. Inherent in that thinking were the assumptions that:

• Work is well defined and repeatable
  • The exact specifications of the work are known at the outset.
  • Production can be simplified.
  • There is a mass market.
• People are ‘standard resources’
  • All resources (people) are nominally equal and substitutable.
  • There is simply ‘good’ or ‘bad’ where ‘good’ and ‘bad’ equate to fast and slow.
  • Resources ‘soldier‘ – workers are lazy, not autonomous, and do not self actualise.
• Workers act as individuals, not as groups
  • Individual pay is the primary motivation.
  • Workers must co-ordinated, work must be individualised.

Now, I don’t know about your work and your teams, but mine aren’t like that. However, I do recognise that style of management (although not around these parts!). Just like the window dresser in the picture, knowledge-based businesses, and the workers in them, operate in a world where the exact specifications of the work are often not known at the outset. People are often passionate about their work and do not ‘soldier’ – they find flow, they push boundaries, they want to learn and discover. They also don’t work alone – even when it looks as if they do.

I am sure that if that person in the shop window had been given numbered instructions that said ‘pick up brush’, ‘dip in paint’, ‘draw circle 300mm’, ‘draw another circle  of 57mm next to the circle’, ‘repeat 400 times’ the result wouldn’t have been the lovely backdrop that emerged. When I was working in Asia, and in Africa, I saw art produced that way – cheaply and at volume. Sadly, a huge amount of physical work went in to creating artefacts that had little commercial value. The majority of the products our businesses produce are not mass market, their value rests in their uniqueness. Just as significantly, the process of the work, once mechanised, was far less enjoyable, both for the artist and for the observer. That leads me on to the third assumption… That work is done as individuals in groups, rather than groups containing individuals.

Social Psychology, whichever of its perspectives you choose to follow, asserts and demonstrates that no person is an island (to un paraphrase that song). We are impacted by those that work around us. Most obviously by their work (ie their output), but also by their attitudes and demeanor. I can’t remember meeting someone who had autonomy in their role for many, many years. In a world of matrix management, virtual teams, and cross-disciplinary working, we constantly rely on the input and actions of other people to ‘get the job done’. In the knowledge-based world it is all about the group, not the individual.

Kurt Lewin and others recognised the importance and effect of the interactions between people. The friction between workers and managers is friction in the process of work itself. Even more so in knowledge-based business, where much of what happens is dependent on the discretionary effort of individuals. Those touch points are typically commitments – “you need this from me” or “I need this from you”. Work can be defined as a series of commitments, the final one representing an end goal. In the case of the window dresser, that might have been articulated as the delivery of a captivating window display, that was sympathetic to the ‘brand values’ of the shop.

However, even the most beautiful of work can be made ugly by reducing it to a list of inflexible work items to be done by anyone, with a minimum of discretionary effort and no personal interaction… Rather than minimising interactions, maximise them, and rather than over specifying the way to do something, under specify it, but set expectations about the value and purpose of the results.

Milestone Planner was built as a way for teams to work together in outcome-based, commitment lead environments. Having a place to track commitments (large ones as Milestones and smaller ones as Actions) leaves our minds free to get on with quality work (rather than fretting about who needs what by when). And having work defined in terms of outcomes enables us to use our skill and creativity to get the very best results.

Work can be beautiful. More than that it should be beautiful. It needs to be, in order to get the best from any team. Google makes the work place beautiful, by providing amazing facilities to its employees, other businesses focus on amazing problems that satisfy people’s personal need to make a difference. The challenge for every business leader is to make work more beautiful.

Last week, while I was in Austin, Texas, for South by South West Interactive (probably the world’s largest festival of digital media technology), I finally gave in. Apple, never one to miss a PR opportunity, had established a ‘pop up’ store in the centre of Austin. With 40,000+ geeks in town, and timed to directly co-incide with the iPad 2 launch, it was like shooting fish in a barrel for them. Every single day, from launch, the store (which only sold iPad 2s!) sold out.

By day 2, surrounded by swarms of excited new iPad 2 owners, my will power finally gave out. Well, actually, I decided I really ‘needed’ one for development purposes… Apple made the purchase process almost dream like, with a dedicated Apple employee guiding you through the choice of product, recommending apps to install on it, and helping you choose an oh-not-so-optional cover to go with it. Even posing for photographs. Here I am, 10 minutes later, unboxing the iPad 2:

So, what does this have to do with what we are doing here at SocialOptic? Well, a couple of things. Firstly, we are seeing more and more iPads, and other tablet devices, in use in business, and are being asked to develop applications for them, which we are doing. The mobile version of Milestone Planner already works on the iPad, but we are now investigating how we use its capabilities to enhance the Milestone Planner experience on tablet platforms. The combination of a touch interface and a handheld format make it a very compelling platform for updating plans in real-time during meetings, and the 3G functionality means that you can have access to your plans from anywhere.

Tablet devices help staff work ‘outside of the box,’ breaking down the barriers that make many business applications boring, hard to use and non-intuitive. With tablets, the style of interaction is fast, intuitive and rewarding. That becomes even more powerful when real-time collaboration is involved. Watch this space, as they say. We are loving the magic.

This week we’ve introduced a couple of new things…

For brand-new users we have built some simple ‘getting started’ templates that can be chosen when you sign up. We’re hoping that being able to choose a pre-built project to ‘play’ with will give people a real head-start in building their own plans.

We’ve also made some changes to how how you can interact with workstreams. I’ve explained what we’ve done in this super-short video.

While we’re on the subject of workstreams, I’ll also mention something we introduced a while back – each workstream now shows you how complete it is. As you complete milestones, you’ll notice two things happening… firstly, the little circle to the left of the workstream title starts being filled in… secondly, a blue line is drawn across the top of the workstream to show you how far through you are. The eagle-eyed amongst you will also have spotted that theres a little yellow line that moves along the timeline to show you where the next milestone you are responsible for is.

Hope you find this week’s tweaks useful!

The first approach is where someone locks themselves in a darkened room with some ‘gantt chart software’… they think about the sequence of tasks; they phone people up and say “how long will it take to make a “; they work out all of the intricate dependencies. Some time later they emerge with a massive file of paperwork which contains ‘the plan’.

The second approach is where a team get together in a room and work out what needs to be delivered, roughly when things are required and who is going to get on and do them. Usually there is lots of scribbling on whiteboards – the plan may not be nicely wrapped up in a document, but is more likely a collection of phone-snapped pictures of flipcharts and whiteboards.

So which one is best?

Of course, the answer is… it depends.

Next time you need to make a plan answer these two questions…

* Can I precisely describe the ‘thing’ this project is meant to deliver?
* Have the people I’ll be working with delivered one of these ‘things’ before?

If the answer is a resounding YES to both of these then you can stop reading now – go and find a darkened room and start making gantt charts.

If you’re not so sure you can answer yes to both of these questions, then its time to book a meeting room…

Here are four questions to tackle with your team. Don’t worry about getting them exactly right first time – it may take a few iterations before things become completely clear.

Why is this thing so important that we going to spend lots of time, energy and money on delivering it?

Sometimes grown-up organisations call this ‘The Business Case’ and make you jump through all sorts of hoops to have it ‘approved’. However, the real reason for answering this question is that it starts to shape the approach you are going to take to the project. Are you going to go out of business if you don’t deliver? Will doing this increase the number of customers you have? Will it reduce costs? Will it be fun and exciting? etc

How will we know when the ‘thing’ is finished?

This one needs some imagination, but its important. By working out – if you like – the ‘test criteria’ for your project you are moving toward defining the outcome (which is a handy thing to know). So it could be… “at the end of the project we’ll count the number of widgets we make per day and that number will be twice as big as it is now” or “we’ll have released a new version of our software to all our customers with no additional calls to our support centre”… and/or “our boss will be so delighted that we’ll all be taken out for a massive celebratory dinner”

What are the smaller ‘things’ that we know we need to finish the bigger ‘thing’ AND Who is going to get/buy/make each of the ‘things’ by when?

OK its a big long question, but this is the one that’s going to make stuff happen. Break the project down into chunks. If you don’t know what all the chunks are right now, then at least you’ll identify some things that you can get on with while you are working out what the rest of the chunks are. For each chunk have an initial stab at who is going to be delivering it and when it’s going to be needed by. Don’t worry too much about getting dates right first time – as your plan starts to take shape you’ll want to shuffle dates around anyway.

Write this up somewhere – a flipchart or whiteboard with post-its that you can move around will work. Even better (and here’s a plug) use Milestone Planner with a projector and start putting each of the chunks on the timeline as Milestones. With everyone looking at the same screen its then easy to assign people to milestones and move things around on the timeline as you work out what needs to happen. (As a bonus, at at the end of the meeting, Milestone Planner can send you a pic of your plan which you can then circulate to everyone so that everyone stays on the same page !!)

What are we going to do when stuff goes wrong?

Anyone who thinks that reality will pan out exactly like the plan is kidding themselves. Use some of your workshop time to ask ‘What if…?’ type questions. Try and get a feel for where the risky areas of the project might be and start to work out what your response might be.

Wrapping Up

Its important to document the answers you got to… and agree what the next steps are.

If you’re lucky and you’ve got to the point where all the answers are clear you might want to ‘write it up’ into some impressive document. If things are still fluid then it might be better just to take lots of photo’s of the flipcharts and whiteboards and send them around to everyone. Of course if you’ve used Milestone Planner you could just invite everyone to the plan and ask them to update their milestones as they work on them!

There’s a simple answer to the problem, of course, and it’s a simple answer with 2 parts:

1) Set Milestones.

You knew I was going to say that, didn’t you? Creating a check list of the items required, then creating milestones for each of them, according to when the items become available, is a simple way to break the process into manageable little chunks. UK  self assessment tax returns are due, online, by midnight on Monday 31 January. The deadline is only later if you received the letter telling you to complete it after 31 October. There are only a few cases where HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) accepts filing other than online, so for most people this is the deadline. If you are due a refund, you’ll probably want to submit it as soon as you can – the old October deadline is a good one! The documents you need for a tax return become gradually available throughout the year.

2) An (orderly) File.

Collect each item, for example your P60 and P11D, or bank interest statements, as they arrive and drop them into a single file. If you are a bit of a paper-free fanatic, you might want to scan them into your computer and save the files into a single folder there. Then, when you come to file on-line, or using your software of choice, you’ll have all of the information to hand in one place.

We’ve created a simple template plan for UK tax filings:

If you have any feedback or suggestions on it, do let us know. If you are a Milestone Planner user, drop us a note via the feedback form, and we’ll send you a link to add a copy of the template to your plans. If you aren’t yet a Milestone Planner user, just create an account via this link and we’ll send you details once your account is created.

The template is free, gratis – we hope it helps people have a less stressful tax return for this year!

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This is a 101 on how to make those promises last. It was prompted by a tweet from the man behind Thinking Digital, Herb Kim, and from reading a piece in The Times of India, of all places.

“A study has found that most people who make New Year’s resolutions fail to keep them within one week of starting.”

Well, we’ve got to do something about that before it’s too late haven’t we?!? John Norcross, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, says that the tradition of New Year’s Resolutions probably began with the ancient Romans, who would “make promises of good conduct to Janus, the two-faced deity who looked both backward and forward” and presided over beginnings and endings. I’ll come back to professor Norcross in a bit, but first, a quick think about those resolutions…

You Resolved to Do What?

New Year’s resolutions come in all sorts of shapes and sizes. Every year, the FranklinCovey group conducts a survey of its customers’ resolutions. This year is the 5th, and although the 1,007 respondents are in the US, the patterns in the top 10 are globally recognisable:

1. Improve financial situation.
2. Lose weight.
3. Develop a healthy habit (e.g. healthy eating, exercise).
4. Change employment.
5. Develop a regular savings plan.
6. Break an unhealthy habit (e.g. smoking, alcohol, overeating).
7. Spend more time with family and friends.
8. Other.
9. Get organized.
10. Develop a new skill or talent.

It has shuffled around a little since last year (when “get organized” was at number 4), but the pattern is the same. The goals are about achieving something, doing something, changing a behaviour, making a habit or breaking a habit. Those are distinctly different types of challenge, with different ways of reaching them.

How Are You Going to Do That?

eHow has a rather nice article on making resolutions stick, which boils down to this:

• Revisit your goals regularly.
• Think about the process as well as the goal itself.
• String goals along a timeline.
• Set yourself a reward.

You knew I couldn’t go too far into this post without mentioning Milestone Planner didn’t you? Having a place to write down your goals and a way of charting progress towards them on a timeline is a basic essential – that’s why you can do that even with a free guest account (but as it’s the New Year you should treat yourself to at least a trial of the professional edition ;) ). This time last year, we wrote a post about building a plan for the year. It’s still one of the most popular ones on the blog.

If your resolution is an outcome, which is not a bad starting point, then think about the process and specific actions that will make it happen. In Milestone Planner, goals live at the end of a workstream, milestones plot the key events on the way to achieving them, and milestones can be broken down into actions.

Why do people abandon resolutions? Often we’re discouraged when results aren’t immediate, or  satisfying. Change requires a sustained effort and commitment, and it is all too easy to procrastinate and put things off until ‘tomorrow’, so MAKE A START NOW! Sorry about the caps lock there, but now really is the best time – login, fire up the timeline, click and add your goals, then add the first action for each of the milestones you create.

Keep on Going

There’s a little bit of controversy on this next bit. I said that I would come back to professor Norcross, and I haven’t mentioned Herb’s tweet yet. The tweet was to a TED talk by Derek Sivers, where he advocates keeping your goals to yourself. I have to completely disagree with him. He cites a study by Gollwitzer in 2009 (this one in fact – pdf) that suggests that making goals public causes people to be less motivated to achieve them.

Gollwitzer’s study actually relates to identity-related behavioural intentions – an academic way of saying goals that relate to how you want to be seen. If you tell people that you want to be a doctor, then obviously you are going to feel a little bit like you have become a doctor, as you have taken a first step. The study is situation, and doesn’t look at the long-term effects of sharing

A long-term study by Richard Wiseman – who is also mentioned in that piece in The Times of India – suggests the opposite :- In his research telling others increased women’s chance of keeping resolutions by 10%. His participants benefited from family and friends encouraging them to stick to their goals, something that the 43things site majors on. In a piece in the tips section, author Lia Steakley Dicker suggests the following six tips:

• Be deliberate – rather than impulsive, goals made up on the spot aren’t often keepers.
• Leave the past behind - something Wiseman suggests too. Don’t be defined by past failures.
• Stay positive – It is easier to do something (new), than to stop doing something!
• Shorten the deadline – many sources suggest breaking the year down. How about 90 days, or a month at a time?
• Define the obstacles – preparing for challenges ahead of time will make them easier to overcome.
• Go public with your plans.

Back to Norcross; He says that those who “made a public commitment instead of a private decision to change” before New Year’s and were “genuinely confident that they could keep their resolution despite a few [inevitable] slips” were much more likely to succeed in the long run (you can hear him speaking about it on NPR in Radio 2008). Which leads me on to an important fact…

You Will Fail

A long-term study by the University of Washington found that only 40 percent of people who stick to their No. 1 resolution did it on the first try. The rest had to try multiple times; 17 percent finally reached their goal after more than 6 attempts.

Failure is just a small step on the journey to success. In the end your persistence will pay off – giving up is one of the biggest causes of failure! Plans are an aim, not an absolute. They can be amended, corrected and adjusted. If things go off track, accept the fact and adjust accordingly.

Changing behaviours – breaking old habits or creating new ones – is a long journey. One of the most well known approaches to change is the “Stages of Change” model, developed by James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente in the late 70′s, as they studied ways to help people quit smoking. The model accepts that relapses are an inevitable part of the process of making a lifelong change.

Relapse is just a phase. You can read the full transtheoretical model on wikipedia – knock yourself out ;). The shortened version: Pick yourself up; Get back to your plan; Keep calm, and carry on.

“Not Just a Better Me, a Better Us”

The biggest goals are achieved when we work together. That’s why Milestone Planner is social software. It’s much more fun when we do things together with other people, they provide the support and resource that’s required to make big changes. Working in a team also means that you get to see how what you are doing fits into a bigger picture – something that all of the researchers mentioned here would probably agree is a good motivator.

Have a Successful Year!

What do you want? When do you want it? What are the steps towards making it happen? Start now!

If you are interested in reading more, I highly recommend Professor Wiseman’s  ”59 Seconds: Think A Little, Change A Lot” (Amazon UK, Amazon US) – and you are signed up to Milestone Planner, and about to build that plan aren’t you?

Jim and myself have been on the road for a couple of weeks, talking with new, existing and future users of Milestone Planner. We’ve learnt lots, and back at the office the coffee bill has gone down!

A lot of the new learning has gone into our latest release wave, now live, with more to come. I feel like we should call it the “shiny jazzy” release, even though it is mostly been about removing distractions, increasing the functionality and speeding the workflow of Milestone Planner – kind of a tall latte – all the coffee without the froth. Can you tell I haven’t had my morning coffee or put my headphones on yet? Anyway, here are the key changes:

Crisper Milestones and Actions

On the dashboard and milestone pages we have resigned the way milestones and actions are displayed. The new design is (hopefully!) much cleaner, clearer and more compact. That means you can see more at once, especially on netbooks and tablets with smaller screens that seem to be becoming more and more popular with road warriors.

The way dates are displayed has been enhanced too. The due date for milestones and actions is now highlighted when they are past due. It’s just a gentle reminder that the commitment needs to be renegotiated and adjusted – just click on the date.

Clearer Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are great little bit of information that let you know where you are. At the top of each action and milestone we have a new “breadcrumb” design. The breadcrumb is designed so you can easily see which project, workstream and milestones each item belongs to – a little trail of context. Clicking on the breadcrumb will focus the activity stream on that it, so you can see what has been happening. On a milestone you can also click on the workstream name to move the milestone into another workstream.

Jazzier People Bar and Sleeper Activity Stream

The pictures in the people bar now have a name on them, to help identify those people who haven’t uploaded a profile picture yet – there’s always one! At least now you’ll have a name to identify them by. To upload a picture, simply click the ‘my account’ button at the bottom of the page, then click on the profile picture.

We have added a ‘view all users’ button on the people bar for milestones and dashboard views, in the professional edition. Clicking the icon will show the milestones and actions for all of the users in the project at once.

The clearer design extends to the Activity Stream, which now allows you to see more clearly who made what changes, and when. There is more space between items, and each change gets its own line.

Activity Reports – Phase I

If you’ve sign up to the tracking features (go to your account settings page), you’ll be able to preview our new activity reports, which show what has changed on a project between now any any given date that you choose.

Faster Dashboard

The dashboard now defaults to listing the first few most relevant items in each stack (this saves a few mouse clicks every day). Milestones and users that have had activity since you last logged in have a star by them, so you can check out changes at a glance.

Auto Extending Project Timeline

The concept of project length (in weeks) is now separated from the length of the timeline view. That’s a very technical way of saying “if you move a milestone beyond the end of the project, we’ll make room for it. Automatically.” The same happens if you click on the scroll right button, past the end of a project.

And more…

The appearance of the menu has been tweaked a little, there are some bandwidth optimisations to help with mobile and slow connections, and a more touch friendly display for ipads, ipods, iphones and touch screen phones.

Keep sending us feedback, inviting folks and requesting new features – talking to people about how they use Milestone Planner has really energised us. Lots more things coming very soon!

Some of the key points

The way that we engage with knowledge has changed. There is not a lot of ‘stuff’ that we don’t know, and as human beings we’re not very good are realising what we don’t know that we don’t know.

A lot of what circulates around business is information (we talk about “information technology”), and information isn’t that useful to a businesses. We have now moved up to structuring that as “knowledge”, but even knowledge isn’t that useful to a business, until we can take it and apply it to our execution, to generalise it beyond its immediate context. I use the word “wisdom” to describe that generalised knowledge and insight, it’s not a fashionable term, but it is what is needed to today’s fast changing, never-repeating environment.

We are drowning in information. We need to structure and curate it, to turn it into knowledge and to build stories around that (the delivery mechanism for wisdom), so that our staff know what to do in new situations, because everything is changing all of the time. We have the tools to do that; we can tag, categorise, blog, microblog, geotag and socially bookmark these things with the social technology tools that we have available to us.

On Likeminds

What I love about Likeminds is the range of different people. Having a conversation with people that you have no business talking to is fantastically valuable. Talking to people from completely different businesses or disciplines helps you see the things that you miss about your own. “Fish are the last to discover water” – hopping out of the goldfish bowl for a little gives you a great new perspective! I have pages of notes to talk through with the team here, and some great ideas for where we go with Milestone Planner next – even projects need stories!

Last week we started to talk about the benefits of visualising your workload. Visual representations, because they are non-linear in nature, and because we can direct our eyes and focus, enable us to take in a huge amount of information quickly. It was interesting listening to Dan Boyd talking about his films this morning, and the challenges of big screen, versus small screen, versus a stage. Seeing, rather than just hearing things, or seeing a linear presentation of data, it much more under control of the control of the viewer. You choose where your eyes go, although the producer is guiding your gaze in many subtle ways.

What catches your eye in the word cloud above? Everyone will pick out something different, but a single visualisation gives a focal point for discussion and exploration that helps us come to a shared understanding. When you walk away from a (great!) conference like Likeminds, or from watching a film (as many did last night), it is ok for everyone to walk away with a different perspective and understanding. When you walk out from a management meeting or a planning session, you want everyone to walk out with the same understanding, even if they have different perspectives. That’s why you should create and share visualisations of your plans (the export feature in Milestone Planner is there for good reason!), and provoke discussions around them. Conversations surface differences, which can then be explored and resolved. That’s how people come to a shared understanding, and the right things get done.

There were some great discussions at this week’s TVSMC meet up about observing and visualising work, particularly in talking with Simon Bostock. The challenge is that “knowledge work” isn’t as visible as “traditional work.” If I am ploughing a field, it is pretty obvious when I am half way through, and it is also obvious to my boss that I’ve ploughed half a field – or not ploughed half, if you are a glass half-empty type! Knowledge work doesn’t play that way. There are some great insights via a post from Jim McGee, although I’d beg to differ on a few points. Specifically, I believe that social technology can help to restore the organisational learning that has been lost in the transition to knowledge working, and that we can actually visualise our workload.

Will You Get  it Done?

Since we added the new dashboard into Milestone Planner, I’ve noticed an interesting change in the way that I work, and view work. There’s a couple of powerful, but not immediately obvious, things about the three stacks: completed, in progress and not-started/upcoming. At the Milestones Level, I can tell if I am in trouble or not. In my dashboard here, it’s pretty obvious I am in trouble!

I’ve completed 5 milestones in the last week (the default range of the dashboard), I have 39 due now, and 33 due soon. So, my historical work rate is 5 milestones per week – If there are more than that upcoming in the next week, then I am clearly in a spot of bother! That’s assuming that the Milestones require the same level of effort of course, and here is where the second set of stacks comes it - actions. At the actions level I am doing pretty well. I’ve burnt my way through 34 actions in the last seven days, I am working on 18 in progress, and I have 48 not started. The ratio between completed and In Progress does suggest I’ve probably got a few too many on the go at once, and the ratio between the number of upcoming Milestones and actions not started suggests I might want to look at those upcoming Milestones and see if some of them need breaking down into actions.

There’s much more to do of course – and I don’t just mean my work! – but it is interesting how useful visualising our workload can be. Balancing what we have coming up, relative to what we have achieved, is a great way of compensating for the overconfidence bias that all of us have. We can offset how we overestimate our ability to predict future events, but looking at our past performance. Just because you believe that you can do it, doesn’t mean that you can. You really don’t want to end up like the guy in this video!

[Backstory on the video here, with kind thanks to tvsmc regular Alec Muffett, and to Jamillah Knowles]

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some Milestone commitments to renegotiate!

Do Things Differently

Milestone Planner is about working more effectively, and has a very different approach (and philosophy) to ’1.0′ productivity software. Outcomes outperform activities. Purpose outperforms process. Deadlines outperform durations. Leadership and co-operation outperform command and control. Networked people outperform constraints and controls. So, what have we done? Here’s a quick video overview from Jim:

Actions over To Do’s

To Do’s are usually items without context, although good to do lists do have context, which helps to help prioritise and make sense of what’s in them. The real purpose of context is to ensure that our actions map to our goals (either personal or business). So, how are Actions in Milestone Planner different from what you might have seen with a To Do list before? Firstly, actions represent a commitment, either to yourself or someone else. Other things are fine, but they belong in a notepad or some form of idea store. Secondly, actions are created in a context –  they exist against a Milestone, inheriting it’s due date, and following it around.

Just like Milestones, Actions have an owner, but they also have a ‘supporter‘. The owner is the person who created the action. The supporter is the person it was assigned to, who is ‘supporting’ making it happen. The two may be one and the same of course. There’s nothing wrong with making and keeping commitments to yourself! Just like milestones, actions can be reassigned and edited in two clicks. If you are on a call or in a meeting, you can capture the meeting actions by clicking add action on a milestone, then simply type each action and kit enter – you don’t need to take your fingers off of the keyboard unless you want to assign them to someone else. It is super fast, enabling you to keep the flow of the meeting, and have a comprehensive action list at the end of it.

Actions have a status of  completed/done, started/in progress or not-started/backlog . This forms a basic personal kanban system, which you will see when you sign into the Milestone Planner dashboard. Kanban is something I’ve been big a fan of for a long time. If you want to know more about personal kanban, start with this presentation from Jim Benson (@ourfounder on Twitter), and check out the personal kanban site:

There have been hundreds of conversations that shaped the latest release of Milestone Planner. A huge thank you to everyone who’s taken time to speak with the SocialOptic team, dropped us emails, sent feedback or tweeted us. One conversation that stuck in my head is this one with Richard Maybury during a tvsmc meet up. I had my Zi-8 to had, so was able to catch it on camera:

Be productive, very productive! Keep the feedback coming, and thank you for inviting your friends and teams, and for keeping us healthy and growing! As we’ve been saying in the office all week: “ACTIONTASTIC!“

Spurred on by discussions and sessions at Over The Air, we have released a number of new features for Milestone Planner Mobile. You can now more easily log on from your mobile, and view Milestones. For phones with Javascript capable browsers and touch screens, you can also update Milestone status and dates, as well as adding notes and updates. You can now even invite people to a plan right from your mobile.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s talk at over the air was also a good reminder to us of the importance of openness for the success of the web, so we have started to formulate plans for an API to Milestone Planner. If you are interested in integrating what you are doing with Milestone Planner, then do please get in touch. And on a similar note, feel free to send us screen shots of Milestone Planner running on your device – it helps us work to create a better experience. We keep an eye on the #milestoneplanner tag on Twitter and Flickr – it’s always nice to see the great comments there. I rather like the look of Milestone Planner on the new Nokia E7 (thank you @ilicco!)