Archive for the ‘collaboration’ Category

Cloud Walking: 5 Ways To Make The Cloud Work For You

Thursday, May 27th, 2010
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The Cloud Could Be Your Key To Team Collaboration

The Cloud Could Be Your Key To Team Collaboration

I’m guessing that the last thing in the world that you really need to be reading about right now is more “cloud” talk. The world of IT is experiencing a form of “cloud fever” in which every company seems to be talking about how they are going to use cloud computing to become more successful. Well, talk is cheap and in the end it’s starting to look like nobody really has a clue as to how to go about actually doing this. How about if we lay down some practical steps that you can take to use the cloud to make your IT team more successful?

Step 1: Appoint A Cloud Champion

You’re going to need to have someone step up and become a clear cloud booster in your organization. There’s no problem with this being you – if you’ve got enough pull. If you don’t then you need someone farther up the food chain to come forward and tell everyone that this is what we’re going to do.

Step 2: Make Using The Cloud To Collaborate Mandatory

Come on, you know how us IT folks are – once we get used to doing something one way, we hate to change. Add on top of that collaboration tools who’s primary purpose is to get us to share our hard learned information, well you can guess just how popular that idea is going to be.

You are going to have to change how your team gets compensated – using your cloud-based tools has got to become a required part of everyone’s job. New polices like “you have to make three updates to our wiki each week” are the way to start things rolling.

Step 3: Focus And Share

Saying that you’re going to start using cloud based tools to collaborate better without having a driving goal is the wrong way to go about doing this. Instead, pick one set of information that your IT team needs to do a better job of sharing and start by focusing on how that information is created. This is going to make it much easier for you to measure your success.

Step 4: In With The New, In With The Old

Just because your team starts to use some nice new shiny cloud based collaboration tools doesn’t mean that you get to throw all of your old tools away. I’m going to bet that like most of the corporate world your team uses Outlook for email and it’s going to be important that at the bare minimum that you find a way for your new tools to work with Outlook.

Step 5: Training, Training, Training

The best collaboration tool in the world isn’t worth the code that it’s written in if nobody can figure out how to use it. Unless you’re using an app that was written by the user interface engineers at Apple, you’re going to have to take the time (and expense) to make sure that everyone who is going to be using it knows how to get the most out of it.

What All Of This Means For You

Managing a team of individual IT workers who operate in unconnected silos is just about the hardest way to get anything done. As an IT Leader your task is to find ways to get everyone to share information and to work together.

Cloud based collaboration tools provide an excellent way for you to get your team to work together and share information. These tools are even more valuable if your team is distributed across multiple locations.

There are no “silver bullets” in IT. Cloud based collaboration tools are very useful, but unless your name is Harry Potter they aren’t going to magically fix all of your team’s issues. However, they are a step in the right direction and they may be the most important step for you to take…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World IT Management Knowledge

Question For You: Do you think that security issues would prevent you from using cloud based collaboration tools?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When you go hunting for your next IT mangement job (and it may be sooner than later), will your resume be up to the job? Come to think of it, when was the last time you dusted off and updated your resume?

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But I Don’t WANT To Work With You!

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

IT teams need to learn how to collaborate

In the April edition of the Communications of the ACM, Peter Dennine and Peter Yaholkovsky discuss an interesting topic: just how do you get a group of people to stop thinking about “me” and start thinking about “we”? They are talking in broad generalities; however, it did get me thinking about how this can be accomplished in IT departments & teams.

Messes are defined as large, complex, problems that appear at first glance to be unsolvable. Really big messes have a special name: “wicked problems“. Peter & Peter point out that the only way to solve problems like this is through the use of collaboration. Collaboration is defined as a working together synergistically. Here in the 21st century, this should be easy to do, right? We’ve got blogs that talk about important things, wikis, IM, and cell phones. How hard could this be?

Well, it turns out to be quite hard. Most of the collaboration tools that we have turn out to be pretty poor at enabling collaboration. Things got even more complicated when researchers did some testing and found out that you and I don’t really like to collaborate. When we are working on a wicked problem in a group setting, we first like to use authoritarianism, then competition, then finally collaboration. Researcher Nancy Roberts says it best when she said “People fail into collaboration.” So why do we do this? Two guesses: first, we seem to think that we can win in every negotiation by standing our ground. Secondly, we have a hero culture – we look for a hero to arise and solve the problem. If they solve it, they’ll get the credit so why make the effort because you’re not going to get any credit.

In IT we seem to encounter more than our fair share of “wicked problems”. What can we do to encourage collaboration within IT teams when our very nature resists it? If we adopt a three stage process for dealing with wicked problems, we can solve them together: design, collaborate, and follow-through. The design stage simply requires us to identify all of the affected parties and what questions that they need to answer. Hosting a meeting where a moderator leads the team through a series of follow-through steps can cause collaboration to occur. Basically, you want to state the problem, have everyone discuss it, have folks start to throw out ideas, and then when people start to refine the ideas offered by others, that’s when you’ll see the real collaboration start to happen.

The authors finish up by asking one last intriguing question: how far up can you scale this approach to solving wicked problems? They’ve shown that it can work in groups of 50-200 people. The open question is if it can be scaled up beyond that. From an IT perspective, it doesn’t matter because that size works well with departments or specific project teams.

In the end, collaboration happens when a team or department comes together to create a solution to a wicked problem that takes care of everyone’s concerns at the same time. It sure sounds like we should be trying to make this happen just a little bit more often!

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Fix It & Forget It? Nope, Doesn’t Work For IT

Monday, June 16th, 2008

management tools to fix IT departments
If, like me, you actually enjoy reading the 100+ business books that get published every year then you are probably well aware of what I like to call “the silver bullet syndrome”. In any given business book, the author generally describes a problem, documents the approaches that had been tried to solve the problem, and then finally gets around to describing the solution that finally saved the day. You can pick your favorite management strategy: TQM, Black Belt, Just In Time, etc. and there are multiple books that basically tell the same story.

That’s why when I was leafing through the Theory & Practice section of the Wall Street Journal, my attention was caught by an article by Phred Dvorak titled “Experts Have a Message for Managers: Shake It Up”. The gist of the article was that management practices that solve a particular problem at a given point in time can eventually turn on a company. This has some significant impacts on IT teams.

The article goes on to say that if you keep doing the same things over and over, even if they made you a great department at one point in time, then they will eventually lead to problems. The reasons for this dire eventuality is because you can develop tunnel vision, start to resist new ideas, stop experimenting, start to build silos, and stop being able to adapt to new changes. Dang — I though that if I could only find & read the right book, then all of my problems would be solved.

It turns out that the experts recommend that in order for an IT department to succeed in the long term, you need to set up processes & procedures that naturally cause tension and collaboration at the same time. Having both of these conditions present at the same time will help keep the department open and able to change. You have to be careful to mange both of these — too much of either will result in a workplace that nobody wants to be a part of.

Ok you say, so how can this be done in my IT department? You have many choices: reorganizing the department is a quick and dirty way to shake things up quickly. How about telling everyone that their job descriptions are only temporary. There is the IT classic: give different managers different goals (reduce costs, produce twice as many products). Separating tasks and making mangers dependent on each other in order to complete projects will also introduce new challenges.

At the end of the day I guess we are all just a little bit like zoo animals. We can get very used to what works when it is working well. We say that friction is bad, but it turns out that we all need just a little bit of conflict in our lives in order to keep us engaged in what we are doing.

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