It’s not just the UK…

I’m really not sure whether this should come as a suprise to anyone, but it’s not just the UK government that has problems with their projects, according to this story in Wired.

Although there is an interesting quote which goes some way to getting government off the hook (or at least to put their problems into perspective):

…while government technology blunders frequently make headlines, large-scale computer upgrades in the private industry fail almost as often. But these corporate blunders aren’t publicized by congressional committees, federal investigators and inspectors general…

Some pros and cons of online meetings

Some pros and cons of online meetings, from Robin Good of Corante.

Technology is…

Technology is the art of arranging the world so that we don’t have to experience it

Martin Heidegger

Improving conference calls

While conference calls are a great way of bringing together a group of geographically dispersed people, they’re often frustrating experiences, particularly if you’re using a standard desktop phone. One of the problems of using a standard desktop phone on hands-free is the sound quality - they’re usually half-duplex meaning that you can speak, or listen, but not both; and most of the time you’ll sound as if you’re calling from the bottom of a well. All of which makes it very much more difficult to participate.

If you’re a regular user of conference calls, you’ll probably have used Polycom’s ubiquitous ’starfish’ conference phone at some point - and it’s a device that solves most of the problems I mentioned above. It’s great for meeting rooms, but not so practical on a desk - so check out a desk-top handset that includes conferencing facilities.

Although they’re more expensive than regular desktop phones, consider this - how much does your time cost, and how much time do you waste by asking everyone “Can you repeat that please?” Chances are, a decent-quality conference system will have paid for itself inside a month.

Gmail hints

We’ve had some Gmail invites to give away over the last couple of weeks (sorry, all gone for now) - but if you’re new to the service, this might be of interest.

Jim Barr’s Complete Collection Of Gmail Tips is a complete collection of all the tips he’s posted on gmailtips.com It’s worth a visit if you’re new to the service and wanting to get up to speed quickly - alternatively if you’ve been using it for a while, chances are that you’ll learn something new!

Using blogs in a crisis

The middle of a crisis is probably the last time you’re going to think of using blogs as a way of communicating - but there’s an interesting article on Fast Company that might be worth reading and mentally filing about they could be used in the midst of a PR crisis.

The standard approach to responding to a crisis is to hunker down behind closed doors. Blogs can help companies remain accessible.

But rather than waiting for a crisis to hit, a more intelligent approach would be to use of blogs to communicate about day-to-day service issues - after which they would become the natural response to a crisis situation.

A good example of this is the UK-based ISP PlusNet - they have a blog and RSS feed that they use to update customers on what’s going on with their network and service. Not only does it allow them to communicate proactively about what’s going to happen - maintenance downtime, for example - but also allows them a way of keeping customers informed about major problems as and when they arise.

And of course, this isn’t just restricted to the public face of the company. If you’re running a service function within an organisation - and if you’re not serving someone, perhaps you need to question whether you’ve got your priorities straight! - why not use an internal blog to keep your internal customers in the picture? Not only are you easing the information flows within your organisation, over time you’ll also build a much higher profile within the business - particularly important if you want to promote your function as one that adds value rather than costs.

It boils down to a maxim given to me by an older, wiser colleague early on in my project management career - “a good project is one with no surprises”. Keep people informed, and you can get away with much more!

Prince 2 User Group launched

If you use Prince2 as your in-house methodology - or you’re just interested in methodologies generally - you may also be interested in a new user group that has just been launched.

The Prince2 Community Forum (P2UG) has been set up online “to enable Prince2 users to interact with each other, share information and gain a better insight into the implementation of Prince2 in different industry sectors”.

There’s also a directory of service providers, which is free to list in.

The forum can be found at www.p2ug.com

Seeing the whites of their eyes

There’s an interesting post about the importance of visual speech information over at Beyond Bullets, which got me thinking about how important this can be in a project situation.

visual speech information (i.e. seeing the speaker’s face) facilitates the processing of auditory speech

This is something that’s particularly important in the context of webcams and video-conferencing - the fact that there’s a slight lag between the image and the sound makes following the speech just that bit more difficult.

Which is something to bear in mind if video-conferencing is a big part of your communications arsenal in the course of a project - while it’s often the only practical way to communicate with a dispersed team (and is a considerable improvement on audio conferences in my experience) it’s still a crippled medium compared with the alternative of sitting around a table.

One of the things I’ve always tried to do in setting up projects is to make sure that everyone meets everyone else physically at least once during the project lifecycle, and preferably at the start when the relationships are being established. It’s relatively intangible, but the memory of knowing what a person looks like and how they act can bring an added depth to video or audio conferences, and help lessen the chances of misunderstandings as a result of unseen body language.

Equally, if you’re mid-way through a project and there are real communication problems, consider whether it’s worth bringing everyone together physically - particularly if you’re trying to resolve disagreements. It’s all-too-easy to hold a position dogmatically if you’re only communicating by email - so sitting around a table and discussing the situation with the benefit of full body language can sometimes help to break an impasse.

The Pull Model

This is an interesting description of how webfeeds differ from email (and if we had a pound for every time we’ve had this question from clients!) from Ross Mayfield:

The Pull Model of attention management puts the user back in control of what consumes their time. Email notifications at the interval of their choosing, RSS the subscribe to, and more imporantly, unsubscribe from on their own accord. To state it once again, RSS is pull, not push. The model only works when a user can leverage:

• Transparency — when everything is on a need-to-know and C.Y.A. basis, occupational spam proliferates and social discovery suffers. When people work openly you can browse the periphery of your attention when its less scarce.
• Amplification — when other people find something of interest they can edit it or link to it to bring back to top of group mind. In other words, when you miss something in a first scan, there is a greater chance people will bring it to your attention. First order merits of attention are usually personal, covered by email and IM. Second order merits of attention are more difficult to judge at first pass and are best offloaded to a group.
• Search — when you have confidence in your ability to recall the past, you can focus on the critical path of the present.

I think this can be summed up as “email is reactive, webfeeds are proactive”. I’m following around 350 feeds on a daily basis - which probably amounts to over 1,500 items a day. But the workload involved in keeping up with these is a fraction of the time it takes for me to follow half-a-dozen email lists - and the disruption of the lists is magnified by the interruption factor of new mail arriving. By contrast, I’m in complete control of the update frequency of my newsreader.

So far much of the attention on webfeeds has been about using them to follow blogs - but I think this ‘email replacement’ view of the world is actually missing the larger implication, something I’ll go into in more depth on a subsequent post.

The flip side of a promise…

The flip side of a promise is accountability

- Jason Womack