Blog - Robert Bogue [MVP]

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Creating Shared Vision

In my blog post, "The Nine Keys to SharePoint Success" I called out Shared Vision as the first key activity – in part because it's one of the first things in the process and in part because it's so often missed. In this blog post we'll delve into what shared vision is, why it's critical, and some techniques for how to build it.

Defining Shared Vision

We all like to believe we're going to build the same solution but invariably there will be a conversation where your understanding and the understanding of someone else on the team differ. Clearly they're wrong – or are they? One of the most difficult things we do is to reach a shared understanding with humans that have completely different experiences, desires, and ways of thinking than we do.

Our communication is based on notoriously bad language where words don't have the same meaning for two people – and in some cases the words can have opposite meanings depending on their use. Consider the word dust. As a verb it can mean to cover with fine particles – as in dusting a donut with powdered sugar. It can also mean to remove fine particles (dust) from a surface.

A little closer to home I often hear people say that they're using SharePoint for collaboration but when I press them as to what that means I'm often presented with blank stares. When I suggest that one definition is "to conspire with the enemy" I am shown shock – right before the awareness sets in that they don't understand what they mean by collaboration and should get details.

Why Shared Vision?

At some level we've come to expect that we won't understand exactly what someone else is talking about. However, we fail to recognize how much energy is wasted by the lack of alignment. Alignment is what happens when we're pulling in exactly the same direction. Alignment can only be had when we know and agree to the same goal.

Consider the idea of a bon fire that can light up 30 feet – maybe. Now consider a lighthouse beacon that can be seen for 30 nautical miles (~35 miles) – with roughly the same amount of light energy. Taking the light analogy to the extreme, a laser (which is simply focused light) can be seen bouncing back from the moon – slightly more than 35 miles.

There is not a small percentage of better results that are realized through alignment – the differences are spectacular.

Building Shared Vision

Shared Vision may be hard to generate and important to get – but creating a shared vision seems particularly challenging in SharePoint. SharePoint's flexibility is – in this case – its curse. Because you can do so much with SharePoint – and in so many different ways, it's difficult to get everyone to agree on the same objectives – solved in the same way. However, it's not impossible. It can be done if you focus on three things: Personas, Use Cases, and Visual Design.

Personas

If you've not been close to marketing you may not have heard of a persona, it's a description of a class or type of user. Marketing folks use a persona to get a clear understanding of the people they're targeting their efforts to – you can use a set of personas to understand the different types of users that you're supporting. Personas should be created with a name (like Sally Sales, Sam Shipping, etc.), a picture, and a backstory. The photo (some stock photo that you acquire) and the backstory are easy to skip over but they're important to help fill out the character of this person to make them less fictional and more "real" – Yes, create more fiction to make the person seem more real. Creating shared vision is layers. You must clearly understand the needs of the people that you're serving to clearly articulate the goals of the solution. The backstory should include how many kids they have, their pets, and their hobbies. Again, the goal is to create the sense that this is a real person that you're working with – not just some convenient label.

In most cases creating a handful of personas won't be that hard for a group with experience in the organization. The biggest challenge will most frequently be filtering to the important personas and deciding when two or more personas can be merged. Ideally you won't have more than 4 – 6 personas, any more than that and you may have a hard time balancing too many competing personas.

Use Cases

Once you know the "who" of the solution, you'll want to figure out the "what." Use cases are what the users will – and won't be able to do with the system. The most popular cases should be mapped out – and those which the key stakeholders believe are important. If you don't document it as a use case, it's not something guaranteed to be in the final solution.

It's not just the "happy path" use cases that should be considered, it's important to create "negative" use cases where items are supposed to fail due to business rules, technical limitations, or security. Having the negative use cases makes it easier for people to completely conceptualize what they're doing. Research has proven that having folks actively try to identify potential areas of failure improves the probable success rate for a project – so don't be stingy with the time to understand the negative cases.

Visual Design

Visual design is the one area of Shared Vision that most organizations believe they've got down. The organization may create wireframes to discuss the placeholders for content. Typically mockups are created to get the basic look and feel, however, one area that most organizations fall down is in the development of prototypes.

Mockups are good at showing the pages that they depict but all too often organizations only do mockups for a handful of pages – way too few to be able to articulate the way that users will navigate the system – and complete their use cases. By leveraging prototypes it's possible to demonstrate the actual system behavior that will happen for different use cases. By demonstrating the actual use it becomes easier to identify misunderstandings and to coalesce around a single understanding.

Bringing Vision into Focus

Reaching a shared vision is difficult – but it's just a process of taking the right steps to drive understanding. The better you execute a set of simple steps the more you'll end up with the same shared vision. If you want to learn more about Shared Vision or the other 8 keys to success check out the DVD.

Categories: Professional | 0 Comments

Wednesday, April 11, 2012

Book Review: The Information Diet-A Case for Conscious Consumption

Most of the time when I read a book that I have problems with – or that I don't like most of it – I simply don't write a review of it. I generally think that there's little value in telling people what not to buy – it's a habit I picked up from my days of writing magazine reviews, however, the book The Information Diet is a bit different – because there's some things that I agree with strongly and a few things that I vehemently disagree with.

I'm going to let you in on a secret that many of my closest friends know. I'm quirky. Yep. I admit it. I do things that make little sense from the surface. One of my quirks is that I almost never turn on a TV at a hotel while I'm traveling. If I'm in the breakfast room I won't go over and turn it off – I'm not rude. However, I don't turn the TV on in my room. This has led to some interesting conversations about how great the TV or the channel selection is where I have to respond with "Um, yea. Sure." The heart of this quirk is the heart of The Information Diet book. That is, you should be choosy about your information diet just like you should be with your physical diet.

The precept is that we're consuming highly processed information that has embedded biases that we won't be able to detect. Advertising sections with editorial content in a magazine is a really good example. Those Amish heaters which are purportedly Amish-made is another good example. The heat source isn't Amish made… of course that makes sense if you spend time tearing apart the idea that they're electrically driven heat sources – but who thinks that much about a space heater? (By the way, the Amish heater is my example, not the authors)

A key message is that you don't have to consume information, any more than you have to consume a slice of pie placed in front of you. However, how many of us have the will power to resist a delicious slice of grandma's apple pie that's placed in front of us? We're leading our elephant down the wrong path – and the rider is simply not strong enough to steer him back in place – for long. (See Switch and The Happiness Hypothesis) So it's true that you don't have to consume information but it's also true that you're wise to influence the information that you put in front of you. Unfortunately, the forces of commercialism are driving news outlets to seek to entertain and affirm us – because those are the things that keep us coming back. It's sort of like the high fructose corn sugar and other sweeteners silently added to our foods to make them more appealing to us.

Before I talk about what bothers me about the book, I need to talk about another really important distinction that's touched on lightly in the book. We tend to wire ourselves in one of two basic operating modes. Mode 1 is constantly connected, constantly distracted, and constantly confused as to what we're doing. (I might be editorializing a bit.) In other words, we're always looking for the next email popup, the next tweet, the next IM. We spend all day chasing one shiny object then the next. There are some jobs where these skills are absolutely essential. If you're monitoring a chemical plant – I want you trying to take in every piece of information. So to be clear this isn't a bad way of operating. It's the way that our ancestors used to operate. They were constantly vigilant about the threat of a lion. However, they dealt with substantially less interruptions.

Mode 2 is completely focused. This is the cone of silence – although I actually find that having a cone of music is instantly more helpful. This is Flow. This is focused concentration leading to the ability to move a single thing forward. Peopleware talked about how it might take 15 minutes for a developer to regain the productivity they had after an interruption. (This is consistent w/ Csikszentmihalyi's research.) Today we're overwhelmed with interruptions. It's not just email or twitter but a desk phone and a mobile phone. Text messages and knocks at the door.

The biggest issue I have with the book is that it advocates a 5 minute working, 1 minute break approach for helping folks deal with distractions. The concept is you have to focus for five minutes and then you can take a break and getup and stretch for a minute. Um. Wait. If it takes 15 minutes to get into flow … you'll never get there. So the approach to the day that is recommended is awful from a productivity standpoint. The author admits that he extended these windows once he got discipline about staying focused. I appreciate the need to program yourself to be focused – to block out distractions – however, in this case I believe the medicine is worse than the disease.

I need a final word of criticism for the book before I encourage you to buy it. The author has some serious biases relative to his political background and spends an inordinate amount of time talking about political situations and information in that context. This was just annoying to me. This is coupled with the real undertone that the author was attempting to lose weight immediately before or during the writing of the book. As a result some of the analogies and ties are a bit too much for me. (Even as I'm trying to lose a few extra pounds myself.)

Still, understanding how the information you consume leads you to think differently, and how those thoughts can be a serious issue over time is an important thing. (We've all met the closed minded person.) If you're interested in learning more about how your information forms you – you should read The Information Diet.

Categories: Book Review, Professional | 1 Comment

Monday, April 09, 2012

Announcing the Comedy for Professional Presenters Workshop

I'm bearing down on two weeks from the first ever Comedy for Professional Presenters workshop – and I'm excited because it's been a journey to find the right people, the right place, and the right time to help my fellow presenters learn how to integrate comedy into their work. You can find out more about the workshop at http://comedy4presenters.eventbrite.com but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, let me first start with what I mean by professional presenters.

Professional Presenters

Sure, you can imagine Tony Robbins or former President Bill Clinton when I say professional presenter – but that's a pretty narrow view. I view a professional presenter as anyone who has to present to any group of two or more people for their job. This definition includes sales people, marketing folks, and even those in full time ministry. It's nearly everyone who works in a professional setting. Whether you present every week, once a month, or just once in a while, a professional presenter has to communicate with spoken word.

Fear Not

Even with 20 years of public speaking there is still the odd occasion when I get a little anxious before I get up to speak. Sometimes it's the size of the audience, sometimes the make-up of the audience, but honestly it's mostly about what's going on in my head. No matter what has me sideways, I know that a good laugh will fix it. We've heard that "laughter is the best medicine." That applies to more than just physical ailments.

If you can convince an audience to laugh, you've created a connection that you can use to communicate your real message. Every good speaker, nervous or not, will seek out the laugh to help build that connection. We've heard the over simplified "start with a joke" advice which is a good start – but how do you get comfortable with the group with a single joke? You need to be able to weave it into the conversation so they know you're there with them.

My Journey

As I said, I've been speaking professionally for more than 20 years. In that time I've spoken at dozens if not hundreds of conferences all over the world. So last year when I was trying to figure out how to take my presentation skills to the next level, well finding a place to start was a daunting task. Luckily I stumbled across an Introduction to Standup Comedy class at Morty's Comedy Joint. The instructors, Chris Bowers and Todd McComas were intent on trying to help comedians be better. That's great, except the kind of comedy that works in a club while folks are drinking and relaxing on a Saturday night isn't exactly the same kind of comedy that's appropriate for a professional environment.

During the Introduction to Standup Comedy course I started reading including: The New Comedy Writing Step by Step and Step by Step to Stand-up Comedy which I blogged about. In short, I was trying to learn what I could about taking comedy and applying it to business – extracting the dark, blue content and reforming it into something that could be used professionally.

I followed this course up with an Improvisation course taught by Michael Malone. Improvisation is about knowing how to make a scene better – and how to be comfortable with being there.

Since late last year my comedy journey had been put on hold until I caught back up with Kate Thomas – one of my fellow students in the Introduction to Standup Comedy class.

Formation of the Workshop

I've got a ton of things on my plate right now – that's pretty normal – but it means that I'm not able to really extend myself into creating a workshop on Comedy for Presenters – without help. When I ran into Kate Thomas at Morty's one night, we started talking about the course, and what we each wanted to do with the skills. The result was a decision to build a workshop (and our ultimate goal of creating a DVD.) Kate would be the primary author for the content and I would commit to help during the production of the workshop. Kate, by the way, has taught students in the US, Europe, and Asia. There's no real way to convey the confusion of hearing her say that she taught math to Asian students.

With Kate onboard, Bowers and McComas agreed to join us. That's the instructors for the workshop – an educator with experience the world over, a 20 year veteran of public speaking, a comedian and educator for the state police, and a motivational speaker and comedian. There's going to be a crazy amount of experience at educating, presenting, and at comedy assembled to teach the students how to integrate comedy into their presentations.

Registration

So on April 21^st at Morty's Comedy Joint at 9AM we'll start our six hour journey to share our experiences and to teach folks how to be professional presenters who've integrated comedy. The cost for the workshop is $99 and seats are limited. Go to http://comedy4presenters.eventbrite.com now to get your ticket – before they're sold out.

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Thursday, April 05, 2012

Article: Top 10 Technical Mistakes in SharePoint

I've seen plenty of technical mistakes when implementing SharePoint, particularly in larger environments when the risks of failure are higher. Here's a countdown of my top ten "favorite" SharePoint mistakes:

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