For those not familiar with it, PRINCE2  is a UK government endorsed, project management methodology. It stands for PRojects IN Controlled Environments (see what they did there!) and is built around the idea that there is a central point of control (i.e. a project manager! ) for each project . It’s been around since 1996 and has become the de-facto way of managing projects.

However there is a fundamental problem with the type of project management that PRINCE2 encourages….

Centralised control does not work anymore.

If you look back at the history of projects in your organisation I bet you’d see something like…

Ancient History: “Fly the company from A to B”

It used to be that most projects were of the “Fly the company from A to B” type. You knew where you were starting from, you knew where you wanted to get to, you knew how you were going to get there and you could calculate how much fuel (cash) you needed to get there.

In Living Memory: “Fly the company from A to B while upgrading the engine of the plane”

The world outside your organisation was changing faster than before. That meant that there were often changes to the thing you were changing. Cue memories of BIG government IT projects where the computers initially specified were obsolete before the implementation was finished.

Recently: “Fly the company from A to B and upgrade the engine and change the navigation system”

More change, on more fronts. As the number of interacting changes increased the complexity, the chances of making anything happen at all diminished.

Now: “Take off from A, realise B isn’t where you need to be, so work out where C is… while upgrading the engine and changing the navigation system”

Admit it – this pretty much describes what work is like for you right now.

Does this feel like a controlled environment? Look at the trajectory. I’d argue that as the speed of change increases it gets disproportionately harder to maintain centralised control. To maintain central control you need to route all communication about the project through a central point – as the pace of change increases this becomes a bottleneck. If you’re not careful, the need for centralised control actually impedes progress. Thats why traditional methodologies like PRINCE2 are creaking at the seams.

We founded SocialOptic on our belief that the businesses that will thrive in our increasingly changing world are the ones that work differently. The companies that will survive are the ones who organise themselves along the lines of a network, not a command and control hierarchy. We build software that helps those companies.

More and more we see examples of distributed control replacing centralised control. With smart software taking on some of the traditional project managers role of tracking progress and communicating changes and a move away from centralised control where does that leave methodologies like PRINCE2?

In our view, PRINCE2 and similar methodologies will become increasingly irrelevant. That’s not to say all project management skills are redundant – far from it – but smart organisations are distributing Project Management skills across their organisations and smart Project Managers are getting to grips with how to work within a network of people rather than sit in their command and control bunkers.

Hey, who knows, maybe in the future we’ll see job adverts that are asking for certification in PRINUE – PRojects IN Uncontrolled Environments.

There is a tight interception here between business methodology and social technology. People who use social software inside of the firewall, and those responsible for managing the external social media activities of a business, will both hopefully find some useful insights here, as both of those situations expose the problems inherent in hierarchical business structures.

In this CBS News piece, Don Sull outlines the 3 different ways that things get done in complex organisations:

• By hierarchy
• By process
• By commitment

The first shifted out of favour in the 1980′s, although it lingers on! In the 80′s, Six Sigma, TQM and other techniques gave management by process the crown, as it demonstrably out performed management by hierarchy in that era. But just as management by hierarchy creates silos and slows communication across the organisation, management by process creates its own problems.

Management by process originally gained traction in the 1950s in Japan, going on to become a global phenomenon in the 1980s. This view of management sees the organisation as a bundle of processes, and has spawned a sea of different methodologies. They are variations on the same theme, focused on streamlining, removing excess resources and variance, and continuously improving and optimising how the business works. Right there is one of the key problems with management by process: standardisation (and optimisation), which gets in the way of innovation. Mary Benner from Wharton and Michael Tuschman from Harvard found that the higher an organisation’s commitment to standardized processes, the lower the level of innovation in that organisation. In a rapidly changing world, what is most critical to an organisation – optimisation, or innovation? Hopefully that one is obvious. Everyone is having to think outside the box, because their box has moved.

Which brings us to that third approach: managing by commitment. It’s a perspective that looks at an organisation as a network of overlapping, continually evolving promises that people make to each other to get things done. It’s a mindset familiar to anyone who works with social networking platforms. It’s not about groups or devisions, it’s about continually evolving relationships between individuals. It’s an approach that it lends itself well to situations which cannot be standardised: innovation, emergent strategies, and crisis management. It also works well when you need to coordinate among people who don’t report to you: suppliers, distributors, customers, virtual teams and so on. It’s no co-incidence that those applications are where Milestone Planner has its largest number of users.

Sull points to a study conducted a few years ago that says 40 percent of all employees in the United States added most of their value to their organisations through non-routine activities. And about 70 percent of the growth of employees in the U.S. was among people who did this non-routine, non-hierarchical work. He goes on to say:

A lot of the organisations we’ve traditionally thought of as well-managed companies have put emphasis on making and fulfilling these kinds of commitments. It’s a big deal in General Electric and similarly Goldman Sachs… .[Talking about InBev, the largest brewer in the world:] …They’ve built a culture where people are very clear on what they are being asked to commit to, and their progress on their commitments is very transparent and obvious to people throughout the organisation… …they have posted their key five performance commitments for the year and their progress toward them. The charts are right there on the wall with red, yellow and green tracking stickers for everyone to see. They are very careful about bringing in people who are achievement oriented, not driven by power.

Now, we prefer the progress tracking to be in the cloud of course – not everyone is in the office. Don Sull and Charles Spinosa have researched how individuals make commitments within their teams. According to them the most effective commitments have five characteristics:

• They are public. They’re made publicly and their progress is tracked publicly.
• They’re active. Parties understand what they are agreeing to and what each party is requesting; people don’t just nod, they really have to take responsibility for the commitment.
• They are voluntary. The other party has the option to say something other than “yes”; they can refuse or make counteroffers.
• They are explicit: it has to be clear who is committing. These aren’t committees making promises, they are individuals. And it works best when it is perfectly clear to whom the commitment is made.
• They’re motivating: the rationale is made clear–why it matters to the individuals and the organisation is made clear.

That’s why, in Milestone Planner, we encourage sharing the plan with a broad group of people: The more public the commitment, the more effective it is. We make Actions and Milestones provisional when they are assigned to someone, until the person accepts them, and the comment/reply feature let’s people actively negotiate and renegotiate the commitment. The aim is to help you keep commitments active and voluntary. It’s that process that enables  managing by commitment to work. It is a radically different way of working, and can take a while for people to get their heads around it, but once adopted, it fosters the kind of innovation that hierarchies and process too easily smother. Of course success is not just about the strategy, as Sull says:

Some people think the key to success is nailing the right strategy. But companies in your industry often will have a base strategy very similar to your own. Execution is where the real separation comes between winners and losers. Executing via hierarchies can be too slow in the kind of unstable markets most companies face today. Standardised processes by their very nature don’t lead to the kinds of variation and flexibility you need to execute new types of projects.

Like Sull, we’d say that it’s not a simple case of one model being good, and the rest bad. Hierarchy has a role, as do standardised processes. Most sucessful organisations need a combination of power, processes and commitments. What matters is the kind of work you have to get done, building and tracking the commitments that enable that to happen, while building the supporting processes and structures to enable you to get better at it.

If you’re Toyota, and the bulk of the value you’re adding is in manufacturing a huge number of cars with a low number of defects, then an almost exclusive focus on standardised processes is completely appropriate. The times when you need to be more oriented toward managing by commitments is when you have this kind of emergent work that has to fit within networks rather than within a hierarchy.

It’s the latter kind of work we are seeing in abundance, coupled with a shortage in the ability to manage by commitments. Our aim is to make management by commitments easier, through Milestone Planner. There’s much more we’ll be doing with the commitment graph. This is just the beginning of a conversation.

We’re used to hearing people describing social as revolutionary, but I agree with Andrew that if you are focusing on solving a real business problem you need to have some structure to it.

The implementation approach that Andrew advocated is a good one. He approached it as a grass roots implementation, focused on getting middle management buy-in first. Soon there were success stories demonstrating how socially enabled collaboration was shaving (very) valuable time from  Oil & Gas exploration & drilling projects. At that point, “Exec level” buy in became a no-brainer.

We see the same pattern with companies adopting SocialOptic’s collaboration technologies. Milestone Planner is a tool which helps collaborative organisations manage the complex, ever changing network of commitments between individuals. Our most successful customers typically follow a similar pattern to Andrew’s. A small group start using Milestone Planner, which then spreads through the business. It’s a cost effective way to try it out and build some hard evidence around how clearer management of commitments and deadlines drives better business execution. More about that very soon.

 David Stillwell, Science Director, Cambridge Personality Research
 Azeem Azhar, Founder & CEO, Peer Index
 Martin Talks, President, Digital, Draft FCB.
 Nathalie Nahai, Digital Strategy | Web Psychology, The Web Psychologist

It was a highly interactive session, becoming a trending topic on Twitter and ending up as one of the most talked about events of the week, with Nathalie Nahai winning speaker of the week award. Gabrielle Laine-Peters has curated an excellent storify of the event which gives an overview of what was covered, and the video of the session is now on YouTube:

David talked about the impact of personality type on our on-line behaviours,  Nathalie introduced neuroesthetics, Azeem shared insights from PeerIndex and Martin was our caveman-in-residence. With cognitive, experimental, applied and evolutionary psychology covered, I threw in some social psychology: Should we consider groups as a unit of influence, rather that individuals? We often think about influence as an end point, but we’re constantly influencing and being influenced. It is a networked effect, at least in what we see in the work we do here – a business is built of influences working together and against each other, shaping opinions, making things happen, blocking things. Messages flow across the network, spreading, branching and interrupting.

It was very interesting that the lean methodology came up during the session. Want to test a new product? Create a Minimum Viable Product, test it and adapt it. Even the experts find it very hard to predict behaviours. Sometimes a good old-fashioned experiment is the fastest way to find out what will work. Decision making is a complex process, involving emotional factors that lead to “evidence” gathering to  justify the decision rationally. The over riding evidence is that we aren’t as rational as we think we are (although not totally unpredictable)!

Nathalie has posted her slides and has a book coming out soon, and Martin has posted a podcast of interviews. And, if you missed it or want more, keep your eyes peeled – Chinwag has a longer half-day event in May – more details soon.

There are threads within ‘lean’, ‘Social Business’ and many other areas, that risk hurling the baby out with the bath water in their attempts to eliminate structure. Not all structures are bad, and the pursuit of completely unstructured systems is a structural limit in its own right (hence the title of the essay :- the tyranny of structurelessness). In many ways, embracing structure can be liberating, and that is very much the kind of structural change required in modern businesses.

…it is free to develop those forms of organization best suited to its healthy functioning. This does not mean that we should go to the other extreme and blindly imitate the traditional forms of organization. But neither should we blindly reject them all.

I want to draw from a list of points from the end of the essay. They suggest some principles to keep in mind, which have proven essential to democratic structuring. They are useful points for structuring work, and managing a business:

1. Delegation of specific authority to specific individuals for specific tasks.
2. Requiring all those to whom authority has been delegated to be responsible to those who selected them.
3. Distribution of authority among as many people as is reasonably possible.
4. Rotation of tasks among individuals.
5. Allocation of tasks along rational criteria.
6. Diffusion of information to everyone as frequently as possible.
7. Equal access to resources needed by the group.

Let me rephrase those into three, simpler points, which make a good frame work for business collaboration:

• Delegate with authority and accountability

• If you have asked someone to do something, they are responsible for doing it, they are responsible to you, and they have the authority (and autonomy) to do it. We run a very clean delegation model in Milestone Planner. When you create an action for someone, within one of your milestones, they own that action, and that action is being done for you. They can then break that action down in anyway that they want, and sub-delegate it. This is something that will become even stronger in our upcoming releases. Clean accountability is essential for effective working.

• Distribute responsibility widely and rationally

• Keeping decision making centralised makes for slow responses, which slow exponentially as the organisation grows. Distribute decision making as far out as you can, and negotiate based on the impact of the decision, rather than the criteria for the decision. Task completion date is the most obvious external impact, but there are others. Distributing management makes for more informed, more rapid decision making.
• Centralised project management does not work in today’s fast moving world. Jim’s next post will discuss why. Distribute to get velocity, agility and efficiency.

• Provide broad access to information and resources

• Traditional IT systems were built to lock away information. This gate keeper mentality is generally costly, dangerous and increasingly outmoded. Let everyone see the whole plan, unless there is a very specific reason that is not practicable, and let everyone have access to the resources they need, and negotiate reasonably for them. The increased context provided by broader information sharing leads to a clearer sense of purpose. The increased transparency also reduces the chances of poor or ill-advised decision making.

To be able to adapt to change, we need to adapt our organisations to change. While that means new models of organisation, it doesn’t invalidate traditional good business sense!

We’re All Connected

People talk a lot about “social graphs” these days, at least we do here in the SocialOptic offices! Who is connected to who. We also talk about the “commitment graph” – how do all of the different commitments in the organisation link together, and how do you keep them together, with the constant juggling that happens in today’s world. That’s what we are here to help with, even when it’s complicated.

In the words of Paul Simon “one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor,” we often “back off” our commitments on to others, just as others are depending on us. You’re producing a report for the boss, and I’m creating a graph for your report. You’ll need my graph before you can submit your report. In planning terms, that’s a dependency, and it’s something that Milestone Planner has always handled.

I Know You’re Depending on Me

We have made juggling commitments even more powerful, and hopefully simpler too. Let’s go back to that report we were working on together. Create a milestone for the report, then set the date. Next, create an action in the milestone for me. You’ll notice that the action picks up the date of the milestone. What is new is that you can see that the action is currently ‘not planned’, but that it is expected by the date you set. When I next come in to Milestone Planner, I’ll see the new action on my dashboard. It starts as ‘provisional’, so the first thing I do is ‘accept’ it. Now, I can leave the date as it is, or I can plan when I will do it.

Simply Done

That’s it. Now you can go back to the action any time and see when I’m planning to have the report to you. You can even add a comment to the action if you want, by clicking on the speech bubble.

Life in a modern business is tough and it’s getting tougher. It’s something that came up again and again during the sessions at Social Media Week London.

I suspect that if I asked you to grab a piece of paper and sketch a graph of the amount of change in your organisation over time it would look something like this.

The amount of change is going up. To make things even more interesting, the rate at which the change is going up is increasing too. Double whammy – your graph has an upward curve. Of course you know this already – the amount of change you saw last year was significantly more than the year before, and next year you expect to see even more.

If your graph doesn’t look like this then you’re lucky. Maybe you work in an industry where things are calmer? If so, you can stop reading now, this post isn’t for you.

Now think about how your business learns. How quickly can it change direction? How quickly can it reshuffle people and teams? How rapidly can it find and build new skillsets? What is your organisation’s capacity for learning from and reacting to change?

Once again let’s sketch a graph. Does yours look like this?

As time goes by it gets harder to improve. As you reach economies of scale it gets much more difficult to incrementally improve your processes, you’ve grabbed all the ‘low hanging fruit’ and you’re now into what a former boss of mine used to call the ‘hard yards’.

Anyone think there’s a problem with the shape of these two different graphs? Of course there is – the change curve is getting steeper at the same time as the capacity to learn is flattening out.

In fact what happens if you superimpose the two? You get something like this.

So – and here’s the big question… Which side of the “interesting” line do you think you are on right now? If you’re not already on the scary right-hand side of it, you will be soon – social technology is pushing us there by increasing the speed of communication and driving the rate of change.

So what are the implications? How do our organisations adapt to an environment where the world changes so fast it outstrips our capacity to learn how to deal with it?

One of my favourite thinkers on the subject is Eddie Obeng (a Professor at the School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Henley Business School). His book All Change – The Project Leaders Secret Handbook is one of the best practical guides to managing change I’ve ever read. I first heard Eddie talk about this dilemma over 15 years ago – yes, he was drawing the same curves back then – so he’s obviously a man ahead of his time. He calls the right hand side of the line the “New World” and writes and teaches about how businesses can organise themselves to cope with it – you should check him out.

When we started building Milestone Planner, we knew that we wanted to build a tool that would help people and organisations operate in the “New World“. Plans are made, but then change quickly to keep in step with the rapidly changing landscape. People work in ‘virtual teams’ in a fluid organisation. More and more of the companies we work with are looking to find some clarity in this rapidly changing world, where old notions of command and control are being made obsolete, and a new, networked organisation is emerging.

At the heart of Milestone Planner is the idea that organisations in the New World are no longer rigid hierarchies, but networks. There are many great tools out there for planning and project management which worked really well in the old world, but we’re aiming for something different. We believe we have something very special in Milestone Planner and as we continue to develop it for our New World customers, I’m pleased to say we’re finding more ways of helping them manage the change and find some sanity on the right hand side of the graph. Social technology may have caused some of the problem, but it also has some of the answers.

Yes, we’re thinking about new features for Milestone Planner. A timely post on brain pickings caught my attention :-  A Brief History of the To-Do List and the Psychology of Its Success. The whole post is a great little read, but a couple of nuggets stood out to me:

• Firstly, the pivotal role of to do lists in the relationship between habits and goals. Benjamin Franklin’s personal battles, focused around lists and virtues, may be familiar to some of you. It is something that comes up again and again in his writings. There is something inescapable about the need for them.
• Secondly, at good reminder that our brain appears to be wired to nag us about unfinished work. I’m sure you’ve had that experience of a random reminder popping into your brain at the most inopportune moments. It’s call the Zeigarnik effect.

To quote:

“It turns out that the Zeigarnik effect is not, as was assumed for decades, a reminder that continues unabated until the task gets done. The persistence of distracting thoughts is not an indication that the unconscious is working to finish the task. Nor is it the unconscious nagging the conscious mind to finish the task right away. Instead, the unconscious is asking the conscious mind to make a plan.”

It’s a view we’ve held for a long time: If something is bothering your brain, record an action, or a milestone, or even a couple of actions, that detail the next steps. It puts your mind at rest, and then next time you sit down to review your plans or to do list, it’ll be right there.

Much of the post is based around the John Tierney and Roy F. Baumeister book: Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength, and the place of lists:

“The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists”

As Umberto Eco puts it: ” We like lists because we don’t want to die.” – Lists are often seen as draining and disempowering, but they can be motivating, empowering and releasing. Capturing the niggling commitments in our heads, and placing them into a trusted, curated system. Doing so frees your mind from fussing, and let’s you get on with the good stuff you are doing right now. Marking things off of that list lets you see real progress, and when the list is against and milestone or goal, it connects you with your purpose. Yes, lists can be infinite (hence Eco’s comment about their links to mortality) – but capturing them makes then finite. We can tick things off, or remove them.

Milestone Planner started its life as a ‘top down’ planning tool – set goals, then break them into milestones and actions. We are increasingly blending that with the ‘bottom up’ – groups of actions that form into pursuits, that emerge as goals. There are many places where that kind of emergent planning makes good sense. By combining top-down and bottom-up approaches, a highly agile, purposeful type of planning emerges. We’ll be blogging more about that over the next few releases.

In the meantime, when something pops into your head, pop it into your plan. It’s just the Zeigarnik effect nudging you into doing a little planning!

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!

.