Björn's posterous

Björn's posterous

Björn Holmberg  //  Björn is a certified ICT, web 2.0 and social media geek currently working as a project manager within eGovernment at the Municipality of Klippan, Sweden. He holds a M.S in Political Science and a B.S in Teaching and will probably get a degree in informatics in the near future.

 
Nov 5 / 10:33am

Work, Gantt and You

I love Gantt charts. They're probably the single most useful tool I know for providing structure and organising work. Whenever I'm faced with a new project I resort to breaking it down into managable chunks and try to find dependencies, milestones and timeframes. Even if there's just an idea of what needs to be done I find it better to guess at deliverables and estimates rather than to wait or spend large ammounts of time carving out specific details. By looking at the larger perspective first I can quickly see where I might need more resources or where the critical points are. As weird as it might sound it also helps me get work done. I suspect many of you would agree that being stressed out largely comes down to being unable to handle the chaos that comes with having stuff to do. By making a simple structure you get a handle on the chaos and can start breaking things down and prioritize.

800px-ganttchartanatomy

So if this is about breaking things down, why the Gantt chart? For me the answer is twofold: first, it forces me to guestimate and actually get to work as opposed to thinking about work (and they're two very different beasts). Second, I'm a visual person. I tend to think in images and a Gantt chart makes it a lot easier for me to "get it" since it's a visual representation of present and future work.

While there is a lot to learn about the ins and outs of project management, I consider the Gantt chart one of the top tools anyone should know how to use.

 
Oct 28 / 10:15am

Celebrating one yeaf of successfull implementation!

Today marked the one year aniversary of one of the largest projects we've had at the office. Naturally it called for cake and coffee - and what a cake it was! I hope it doesn't reflect the general sentimet toward the project.

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Even though I wasn't involved with the project I have the pleasure of working with most of the people involved and know of their trials and tribulations. Like any other project it had its ups and downs but still delivered what it should when it should, largely because of the extraordinary effort by project managers and members. One thing I think led to such a success was that management was shared between two project leads. From the top of my mind I can see two advantadges with such an approach:
• it lessens the burden of managing such a large project. It's not easy being the one responsible of getting everything to come together. Working together with someone, even when the formal responsibilty is given to one in particular, leads to better decisions since you can share and get input on ideas before actually working with them in the project. Informal discussion is a key to success.
• the project doesn't rest on the performance on one individual. In the best of worlds everyone would share the same enthusiasm towards the project, irrespective of what their role is. Unfortunately this is seldom the case and that role falls on the project lead(s). Working with two project leads lets one keep the enthusiasm flowing if the other should falter. Again, the informal discussion and relationships within a project is key.

There are of course several more, but the ones mentioned above are two areas within which many projects falter. Give the two-project-leads approach a try sometime and see if it works for you.

 
Oct 22 / 11:11am

No, really, we don't use Word...

My office is much like any other office: people looking important and doing important stuff with important tools. One such very important tool is our office suite (we've deployed both Microsoft Word 2003/07 and OpenOffice 3 throughout the whole organization). It's not that our office software contributes to anything better (increases the efficiency or adds value to our work) than any other solution but it's still held to be the single most important tool after a personal workstation. 

Contrary to our other systems the office suite is the one tool where we've never written a technical specification listing what the purpose of the system is and why we need it - and I suspect we never will. Instead it's one of those systems taken for granted and used in the most varied of ways. It's even used as a specific demand in technical specifications in too many procurements too mention.

Openoffice_3_beta_1_start_540x
There's no end to the things you can do with your office suite...

While the office suite fills a need and is a good solution for lone and individual work where the recipient needs a paper copy or a unmodifiable document it's terrible as a tool for working with information in larger organizations. After all any office suite is just a tool for working with information, mostly text, in various ways. The problem lies in that we've never discussed what kind of information might be suited for an office suite and what information is best handled by some other tool. At my office we've had some water-cooler discussions about this and came to the conclusion that we should move away from using office as our primary tools for handling information. There are of course several rational reasons for this:
  • an office suite is a terrible tool for handling dynamic content (i e information that changes more or less over time) - and most information we work with is, in fact, dynamic.
  • it's a hassle to work with even when the information is, or will become, static. A very recent example would be when we shuttled a technical specification for a web based solution for our educational institutions back and forth. I don't know how many revisions and originals we had floating around, but needless to say there were more than there should have been.
  • it restricts collaboration and transparency. Collaboration should be a given: collaborative editing in any office suite is still worse than even the simplest wiki-solution (not to mention a hell of a lot more expensive). Transparency is a more interesting subject however. The way I see it, there are two main issues: a) it's hard for the general public to get a hold of the information they seek if it's contained in office documents as it's much harder to export, and b) it's impossible to follow the whole process behind the final, published, information. Why might this be an issue? Considering we're public servants it should be our duty to be as transparent as possible with how we utilize tax-payer money.

101355_winword
The root of all evil?
Haunting history
The reason for this turn of events, as my CIO put it, is that the personal computer popularized the office suite as a means of working with everyday information (writing letters to relatives, for example). Over time employees demanded that employers should give them the same tools for work as they had at home. Not surprising since we all tend to ask for things we are familiar with. As a consequence employers went from offering the classic "dumb" terminal, who specialized in handling information (and in many ways better than even the most recent office suite), to deploying an office suite on every PC throughout the organization.

A brighter future?
A part of what I do is to try and find ways to remove the office suite as a primary information handling tool. One solution we've introduced and started working with is a Wiki (TikiWiki to be exact). Wikis are, as most probably know, excellent collaborative tools for working with information. Even if you've never touched a Wiki and someone would describe the whole process of adding, removing and editing information you, in all probability, would consider the underlying idea to be pretty good. Wikis are great platforms for working with information of all sorts - if you manage to take the mental step out of the office suite cage!
 
Oct 21 / 7:01am

Another day, another meeting

Today was one of those days when I had the pleasure of having a good, rewarding and efficient meeting with my colleagues about our communications project (see unhub.com/kommunikationshandboken if you're interested). I came to thinking about how long we've come as a group when it comes to having meetings. I'd guess I'm not alone in considering many meetings, even good ones, as a waste of time even when the outcome is good. 

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This is often not due to any one attendee but rather an structural issue based on the fact that we never learnt how to have good meetings. Considering that meetings is such a large part of our lives this is a pretty sad state of affairs when you think about it. It does seem like meetings is something we're just supposed to "know about" even though we never receive any formal (or even informal for that matter) training - as if meetings is somehow magically different from any other form of presentation or interaction based on two or more individuals. Poor meeting technique, in my experience, leads to one or more of the following consequences:
  • a feeling of wasting time
  • frustration and an unwillingness to attend on behalf of colleagues,
  • a waste of resources (time is money in very real terms) that could be used better utilized elsewhere
  • conflicts and hostility.
The two last consequences are probably the least talked about even though most would agree that they are two very important factors influencing the outcome of any project or deliverable.

There are however several techniques you can use to avoid the mentioned pitfalls. First and foremost be clear about what the meeting is about: what is going to be discussed? What decisions has to be reached when the meeting is over? What decisions are going to be decided on during the next meeting? A clear structure helps everyone to know what is expected of them. Second, use what is called an "expectation round": everyone attending is given a very brief moment to reflect on what they expect of the meeting before the real discussions and decision-making takes place. This creates a common understating of potential problems and possibilities surrounding the meeting. It's worth to note, however, that a good expectation round takes practice to get right. If you keep at it you'll sooner or later reach a point where everyone attending will be honest enough to share their hopes and fears. Third, finish the meeting with a evaluation: what's everyones experience of the meeting? Did we do what we said we would? How did the meeting feel? What went good, what went bad and what was your part in it?

There are of course several other techniques you can use but the ones mentioned above are a good start. From my experience I can almost guarantee that you'll have better meetings if you keep on practicing!
 
Oct 20 / 1:38pm

First Posterous post!

So I figured that Posterous might actually be the platform that brings me to do some blogging. Like many others I've dabbled with different platforms such as Blogger, Wordpress and the like - but they're still to much of a hassle to set up and get going if all you're looking for is a convenient way to share your point of view. Posterous looks like it will change all that by going back to the basics. So, let's see where this might lead!