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The BBC are running a story about UK games developers missing out on public sector funding that’s available for aiding firms undertaking digital media production – according to the report, firms are often ignoring pots of cash which are available for the taking. The example cited is that of the East Midlands, which has £6m on offer – and the implication of the quotes are that firms are walking away from free money.

I’d humbly beg to differ. While there are pots of assistance cash on offer, getting access to these tends to involve labyrinthyne bureaucracy of Kafka-esque proportions. Usually that’s because the gatekeepers are the local Business Links, publicly-funded organisations that are to business support what the Boston Strangler was to lone women (to misquote Jack Valenti).

At best, the funding is available after providing a forest-worth of increasingly complex paperwork asking for everything from a 5-year business plan to the inside leg measurements of the shareholder’s spouses. At worst, the money comes with strings tying it to accepting paid-for ‘advice’ from the minor army of dubious characters that staff the average Business Link.

They come in two flavours: semi-retired ex-managing directors who have spent the last forty years running their small machine tools business into the ground, and are now Business Link ‘advisors’ because they play golf with the chairman of the Regional Development fund; or twenty-something freshly-minted graduates eager to bring every last buzzword that they learnt on during their third-class Business Studies degree to bear on the situation. Regardless of the quality of the advice, every encounter between a firm and an advisor counts as a success for Business Link, because they’re measured by the number of encounters rather than the eventual outcome.

And in an increasing number of situations, the funding isn’t actually cash which could actually be invested in the business – it’s vouchers that can only be redeemed through a network of advisory consultancies, who have paid ‘accreditation fees’ to arms-length associates of Business Links in order to be placed in the register of the favoured few.

While it’s not actually corrupt, it’s certainly a dubious way of getting support to the firms that need it. And it’s hardly suprising that funding remains unclaimed – for many organisations it’s simply not worth the hassle of applying.

As an approach to problem situations, systems thinking can be extremely powerful. Put simplistically, it considers situations in terms of inputs, transformations and outputs – so you could consider a company as being a system that transforms raw materials into profit through a process of manufacturing and selling.

The power of the technique is part of the problem – it’s often difficult to get a handle on a starting point, and the inherent messiness of the kind of situations that the technique lends itself to complicates things even further.

Soft systems methodology is one of the most commonly used techniques, and has been around since the mid-70s when it was first development by Peter Checkland at Lancaster University. It’s used a lot in the UK public sector, not least because it works well in the type of unstructured situations that are common in this area.

If you’re interested in getting to grips with the process, then unfortunately “difficult” doesn’t even begin to describe Checkland’s writing – while the methodology is sound, his explanations often come across as more philosophical than practical. Other books on the subject also take a highly-academic approach, which while interesting if you’re after that sort of thing, isn’t the rapid “get me up and running” approach that’s needed in most business situations.

Although it’s a good 15 years old, David Patching’s Practical Soft Systems Analysis is still one of the best introductions to the technique. It’s resolutely practical, focussing on the ‘how’ as much as the ‘why’, and resists the temptation to wander off on some of the more meditative cul-de-sacs that Peter Checkland visits. There’s a good practically-oriented treatment of the background to the soft systems methodology, detailed coverage of the process itself, and several examples of practical applications.

Overall, it’s written in a fairly accessible and down-to-earth style. It’s probably not a manual as such – I’m not convinced this is the only book you’ll need in order to become a practitioner of the technique – but it’s a good introduction to the methodology that’s a great deal more readable than the Checkland titles. Unfortunately it’s rather expensive as a new title, but Amazon generally have a number of second-hand titles for rather more affordable prices.

Here’s a ’so simple, why didn’t I think of it’ way of improving the clarity of mindmaps:

A frequently cited weakness of software mind maps is the lack of explicit relationship between pieces of information in the map. By contrast, Concept Maps use linking words on the relationship between two items to form a proposition.

Full post over at Beyond Crayons.

If you’re looking to shave a few percentage points off the cost of a project, then opting for a virtual approach can be attractive. Rather than spending oodles of the budget on flights, hotels and expenses, why not cut out all the expensive travel and conduct all the interactions across electronic channels?

The problem with this approach is that it comes with a hidden cost – by eliminating the face-to-face contact, you’re just reduced the chances of building trust between the members of your team. And there’s a substantial body of evidence to suggest that trust between members is a key feature of successful teams.

A recent paper from Dr Niki Panteli from Bath University’s School of Management looked at ways of developing trust within virtual teams, and it’s worth a read if you’re in the throes of building this sort of organisation. The three main characteristics that are identified are shared goals, the dynamics of power within the team, and communication. And it’s this last one for which technology can play a major part.

Part of the communication process that’s highlighted is social interaction, and this is one of the elements that’s removed by a virtual environment – there’s no watercooler around which to congregate. One technique that we’ve used quite successfully is to ensure that there’s at least one physical face-to-face meeting between team members during the course of the project, even if the rest of the work is carried out entirely virtually. By being able to visualise someone as a result of meeting them can help break through the impersonal nature of email, video conferening and phone calls.

A second trick is to put together a ‘biography page’ somewhere on the project intranet. Each team member contributes a mugshot and a potted biography, so that you’ve got a little bit of background context about the people that you’re interacting with. And it also helps to include some social detail as well as the standard work-style resume – try including a paragraph on ‘three things noone knows about me’ in the bio.

And if you’ve provided that sort of background detail in the team bios, you can build on this by the way that the project team communicates. Project documentation can be highly impersonal and dry – while they’re important, status reports and risk logs don’t help to project the individual, and it’s relationships with individuals that will be important when crises strike. Using a project blog as a means of communicating between team members can allow an individual’s personal style to come through – it has a more “3D” effect than formally-dry reports.