SharePoint Document Libraries and Not Showing the New Form

Robert Bogue February 23, 2012 2 Comments

In SharePoint every content type can have three forms that you can define: New, Display, and Edit. These are the forms that are used to enter and view properties. This is great, except that document libraries don’t display the new form. Document libraries are designed to launch the template associated with the content type. If you’ve got your letterhead in a .dot file that’s associated with a content type, that is what SharePoint will launch when you try to create a new item. That’s great when you’re looking to create a new instance of a document – but what if you want the new instance of the document to be programmatically created?

The simple — and should be obvious — answer is to set the document template to the web part that will create your new item. When declaring the document template you’ll need to remember to put a leading slash in the url in the DocumentTemplate node’s TargetName attribute since for some unknown reason it’s required.

Why would I do this? Well, I want to record approvals as XML documents with XML fields over it to allow SharePoint to use property promotion to extract information from the approval into properties that can be in a list view. Putting this together I can handle the details of the approval and just emit the XML I need at the end.

One issue is that this won’t pop over the page like the new item form will over a list – but it’s a good way to get a new form for a document – instead of a template.

P.S. If InfoPath supported password fields I probably wouldn’t have to do this.

Research in the age of electrons

Robert Bogue February 23, 2012 1 Comment

My son’s in the fourth grade. He’s in an accelerated class that has as a part of the curriculum a independent study project where they’re being taught good study skills. They’re being taught the same techniques for keeping references that I was taught. There are index cards for each important quote or fact with the source on the back side so they can produce a bibliography at the end of the project. There are certainly some new teachings. They’re being taught to be skeptical about what appears on the Internet including Wikipedia. (Perhaps they’re being too skeptical.)

However, as I’m doing research and note taking alongside of him, I’m struck by how things are different in the way that I do research and the way he does it. I’ve got a few basic tools that he doesn’t have: eBooks, Note Taking Software, and Search

eBooks

I’ve been using the Kindle software on my PC and Phone for a while. It really got interesting when I got my Acer Iconia A500 Tablet and started being able to read large amounts of text like a book. Like a book isn’t exactly correct, however. The software keeps my bookmarks synchronized across devices so I can start on the tablet, read a bit on my phone while waiting for an appointment, and then sit down at the PC to read and review the content. The ability to highlight text and to take notes seems like an obvious copy of regular book reading – but it’s more than that. The ability to go to http://kindle.amazon.com and download my highlighted text and notes makes the process different – and more powerful.

It’s more powerful because I have the text electronically which I can further manipulate. I can index a very small section of text through a highlight and click on a link to be returned to the quote in context. Something that was very difficult to do on paper.

Note Taking Software

I’ve previously written about my use of Microsoft OneNote. It’s a great tool for note taking. It is, in fact, my primary note taking and organization software. It’s quick to move, format, and organize notes. It’s a perfect marriage from the Kindle web site. I copy the highlights and notes from the Kindle site and then format them slightly. Then I go back through my highlights and highlight them inside of One Note. In essence, I’m creating tiers of information. Some information is important – and other information is REALLY important. A bit of color coded highlighting allows me to further subdivide and categorize the content. For instance, book and article references get coded with a cyan colored highlight so I know where to go if I’m looking for more on a subject.

If I use a reference from the internet, I copy the text from the browser and paste it into OneNote. OneNote is smart enough to record the source URL for me. I don’t have to remember to capture where the content came from.

There’s one fairly major issue with OneNote – and it’s the reason that I also use EverNote. The issue is that OneNote isn’t available for other platforms. OneNote has an iPhone application but its brain dead. And there is no application for Android. So if I want to take notes on other devices I have to have another tool – or approach. For “static” notes – like book highlights I’ll sometimes create a PDF to be used on my other devices but that still doesn’t solve notetaking. That’s where EverNote comes in. It makes it easy to take notes (as they say capture anything). The primary problem – from my way of working – with EverNote is that it doesn’t allow for the flexible organization I want. It instead relies upon search.

Back to my point, having the ability to organize my notes electronically, quickly and easily, is invaluable. I don’t keep doesn’t of different colored pens and highlighters. I don’t have a briefcase full of different folders. I’ve simply got everything I need in one space. All I need is one more tool.

Search

OK, search is a “Duh.” But here’s the thing, I use it differently than you might expect. First, inside the notetaking tools I’ll use it to find quotes that I partially remember. But I also use search outside of the note taking applications on my desktop to peer into my notes – and my non-note research. What is non-note research? Well, that’s things like articles in PDF form that I’ve acquired a copy of. It may also be a presentation I did based on my research where I made a point that isn’t a direct reflection of my note taking. My son sits sorting his note cards trying to find the next bit of information to convey. I type a few words in and get a list of results.

In Summary

I’m doing research on how the explosion of information is overloading humans and making it more and more difficult to really process the information we need to process. I’m reflecting on the state of the human condition when we’re run over each day by over 3,000 ads. While I certainly don’t feel like we’re resolving the problem of managing information. I don’t think that we’re winning the battle against the onslaught of information. However, I do find hope in the fact that we’re building new tools and techniques to improve how we do research. I guess it’s time to figure out how to help my son learn how to use these new tools.

Book Review-The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Robert Bogue February 23, 2012 No Comments

Steven Covey’s book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is a classic. I probably read it 20 years ago when I was first entering the workforce and the book was the latest rage. I can probably count on one hand the number of books I’ve read more than once on one hand – actually I can’t recall any other book that I’ve read more than once. However, when Amazon.com featured the book for $0.99 on Kindle I thought it was time for a reread.

The 7 Habits, for a quick reminder are:

Be Proactive
Begin with the End in Mind
Put First Things First
Think Win-Win
Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood
Synergize
Sharpen the Saw

These correspond to three “levels” – Independence, Interdependence, and Self-Renewal.

The Seven Habits is different than other books in the sense that it focuses on principles rather than techniques. While the connection is never made to Dale Garnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People the difference between the approaches is striking. Where one is teaching you the psychology of how people work – something I deeply enjoy as evidenced by my DVD – the Seven Habits talks about how to develop an inner strength of character. I believe both are needed as I’ve found people who are very character rich who still struggle with how to work with people, how to communicate their concern for others on a daily basis. One of the premises is that principle centered growth leads to more happiness than techniques for connecting with other humans. This is consistent with The Time Paradox and The Happiness Hypothesis. Both of these books speak of the way that character and purpose are more rewarding than the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure.

Much of reading the book was like watching an old home movie of me. Somehow I remember being there but I was seeing things from a new perspective, from a new lens. I was stirred by different words. I caught the difference between principles – natural laws and values – beliefs. I pride myself in having friends with different beliefs. While I personally have a deep faith in God, I have friends who have no such belief. I can have great conversations with them exploring because I know that my perspective on the situation isn’t the only one.

Having been a consultant for most of the last 20 years of my professional career, I consider the information in The Seven Habits foundational for every good consultant. As Covey admits in the book his struggles to always live the seven habits, I too must say that I’m not always on track with the seven habits. I can, however, say that in many cases I know when I get off track with them. It generally means I get a healthy dose of retraining as to why they’re important in the first place.

Even if you’ve read the book before, it’s worth reading again.

Rules of Thumb

Robert Bogue February 18, 2012 No Comments

Over the past few months I’ve seen some well-intentioned, bright folks get pretty sideways because they were using "rules of thumb" without understanding the principles underneath them. To be clear, we all use rules of thumb every day. It’s a part of our human existence. We are bombarded with information and crushed underneath our expectation to do more. The kids need transported to their two events each this weekend. There’s a presentation on Monday that we’re not quite prepared for. We’re looking for any shortcuts and efficiency that we can get just to squeeze a few extra minutes in so that we might be able to check the sports scores or watch or favorite TV program.

Rules of Thumb allow us to simplify the problem, to make it easier. We know if we multiply a number by 10 we just move the decimal point one place to the right – even if that means adding a zero. We know that changing our oil every 3,000 miles is a good rule of thumb. Newer cars will tell us when we need to do this but without the internal monitoring every 3,000 miles is simple to remember. The problem isn’t so much that we use rules of thumb – rather it’s that we fail to recognize when those rules of thumb aren’t going to serve us.

Pushing Things Too Far

One rule of thumb that builders use is to square an angle using the Pythagorean Theorem. It is the formula A² + B² = C² that we learned in school. Builders use it to square off corners. Well, more precisely they measure three feet in one direction, four in the other, and then manipulate the angle until the diagonal is 5 feet. This is a rule of thumb – a shortcut. It works because 3 squared is nine and four squared is 16 and the square root of these two values (25) is 5. It’s quick and simple, that is until you try to use this to square off walls – or the edge of a deck that are 20′ x 40′. In my case the builder did this and created my deck which varies by 6" from one end to the other because it doesn’t line up with my house.

It’s not that the rule of thumb is wrong, it’s just that it was used at a scale that it wasn’t designed for. Small errors in measurement are amplified over distance. Moving from 4 feet to 40 makes a ½ error 6 inches on the other end. If you’re thinking that your servers will be good enough because you’ve always just been OK by purchasing stock servers with standard hard drives and putting it together, you’re using a rule of thumb. That is that what’s in the general market will probably meet your needs. Detailed understanding would look at rotational speeds, RAID configuration, controller cache, and dozens of other factors, but you don’t have time for that.

Your personal rule of thumb probably isn’t the same, but what about more expensive = better? Have you ever bought an expensive product just to find out that it broke, or didn’t work the way that you want it to? This happens to me all the time. While I’ve gotten better about evaluating items, trying to make sure that I’m not assuming that more expensive is better – I still use the rule of thumb sometimes.

Changing Factors

I remember a story about the day that suspension bridge making changed. It was November 7^th, 1940 when the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, "Galloping Gertie", collapsed under 40 mph winds. Before that point, aerodynamics weren’t considered in bridge making. Engineers had been building bridges for hundreds of years but the introduction of new stronger and lighter materials had changed a non-influential factor, aerodynamics, into a critical one. I realize that engineering as a discipline rarely uses rules of thumb, instead relying on detailed mathematical models. The point here is that even when the details are known there are times when the factors under which the models are built change and that change makes the model ineffective – or perhaps more precisely incomplete. If detailed engineering equations can be influenced by unforeseen factors so too can our rules of thumb.

I see all the time where organizations use solutions. They say "but I followed the best practices." There should be a disclaimer on "best" practices like "your mileage may vary." Why do we need a disclaimer? We need a disclaimer because a practice is only "best" given a set of circumstances. What’s the "best" car for me? Maybe it is a sedan or a SUV or a truck or a minivan? Until you know what I do in my driving there’s really no way to define what best is. I buy a minivan and suddenly decide to start hunting as a hobby and I need to start hauling the meat home.

The One Best Practice

There’s only one best practice, one universal rule of thumb. That is that you have to keep evaluating whether the rule of thumb that you’re using is still serving you – or is it at risk of causing a catastrophic event. It’s a good idea to reevaluate your rules of thumb every once in a while … and maybe call in some help to determine if your conditions and your rules of thumb are in sync.

Article: Top 5 Tools for Information Architecture

Robert Bogue February 15, 2012 1 Comment

Information architecture is a relatively new field.

Despite the creation of libraries in the 500 BC era, we’ve spent relatively little time focused on information architecture. Forty years ago, computers weren’t even remotely popular.

Twenty years ago, we didn’t have a global network which connected those computers so that they could share information.

Fifteen years ago, we got our first search engines to change information architecture from browsability (finding by navigation) to findability (finding by navigation or search.)

SharePoint brings its own transformation to the information architecture landscape. The following five tools make it easier to implement an information architecture in SharePoint and help us think about metadata differently.

http://www.sharepointpromag.com/blog/sharepoint-pro-by-admins-devs–industry-observers-23/sharepoint/top-5-tools-information-architecture-sharepoint-142271 [Article removed]

The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations

Book Review-The Heart of Change

Robert Bogue February 5, 2012 No Comments

You would think that with the great value I saw in John Kotter’s Leading Change book I would have jumped to read The Heart of Change – but I didn’t. Part of that may be the fact that I’ve had a pretty deep reading list for a while. Part of it may have been that I felt like I had extracted the most valuable piece from Kotter’s work – the process. No matter what the reason, more time spent with the change model was well worth it.

More than any other of the books that I read lately, I found myself taking notes about The Heart of Change. I was writing in the virtual margins on my Acer Iconia A500 Tablet with the Kindle software. I kept reading and writing notes and parallels.

I wrote in one spot the classic (if not potentially insensitive) question: How do you eat an elephant? The answer is simple and surprising. One bite at a time. In another place I wrote “You can’t boil the ocean.” These clichés may be overused but they represent a fundamental awareness that Kotter and his co-author Dan Cohen grok.

Distilling the key message of the book into just this would be an over simplification, but core to the book is the idea that first people SEE the need to change, then they FEEL the need to change, and then, with luck, they CHANGE. This SEE-FEEL-CHANGE model is important. If I put this into the language of The Happiness Hypothesis and Switch it’s about the elephant, the rider, and the path. The rider must become aware of the change that’s needed (urgently), but it’s the elephant, the emotional powerhouse of the arrangement, that must FEEL the need to change. With a bit of luck in shaping the path (removing barriers) change can occur.

It seems that the natural resistance to change – which is less about resistance and more about confusion – can be overcome by feelings. The elephant will start to move when he senses that standing still isn’t working.

Another interesting thought that swept across me while reading The Heart of Change was the idea of a fish ladder. If you don’t know what these are, they are specifically designed parts of a waterway that are designed to allow fish to traverse dams, locks, and other manmade structures that have disrupted their normal migration. What’s remarkable about these fish ladders is that they aren’t so much a set of distinct areas but rather a connected system. As the water flows across them they make each individual step – which are distinct in structure – seem like a part of a system. So there’s a bit of overlap – or connectedness – between the steps. The Heart of Change speaks to this exact thing – that the steps aren’t so distinct as they are a natural system where the lines blur and the next step starts before the previous one ends.

Sidebar: the whole idea of a fish on a ladder is funny if you think about it. How do the fish hold on to the rungs?

I was also struck by a story about how pictures were removed from the lobby of one organization – not because changing the décor is the solution to changing a company – rather – I was struck by how sometimes simple, stupid, unseen things are the sacred cows of the organization. They’re the thing, process, or procedure with the unwritten “do not touch” rule. My note on the story was “find the sacred cows and slay them – with theatrical style.” Why would I write such a thing? It’s simple. There are far too many sacred cows, it’s time to thin the herd. Make sure the sacred cows that remain are meaningful.

Image from Flicker – USFWS Pacific

A quote from the book is “You can’t plan what you don’t understand.” The context is that it’s difficult to plan for radical changes because you don’t understand what a radical change will look like. However, it occurred to me that this extends beyond. The great project managers I’ve worked with always seek to understand. They want to know how things work – even if they don’t understand the details, a foundational understanding makes them better at planning the project. It also occurred to me that far too often organizations try to move forward through a transformation without an understanding of what the other side looks like.

Even after all the books I’ve read on change, on thinking, or motivating, I still found new ways of connecting to this content. If you’re trying to figure out how to do change, pick up The Heart of change

Article: 5 Steps to Making SharePoint Information Architecture Work for You

Robert Bogue February 3, 2012 No Comments

Information architecture shouldn’t be a big scary thing: it’s simply about creating the same elegance you see in the Golden Gate Bridge or the Eiffel Tower, only instead of being built with steel, it is built with information.

What is Information Architecture?

Information architecture is the process of creating a structure and tools for information such that it can be stored, retrieved, and managed efficiently and effectively. In other words, information architecture is about making information work for you.

Information architecture is different than physical architecture as there aren’t physical materials to arrange. However, the struggle towards effective and simple elegance, which is at the heart of all architecture, has its place in information architecture as well.

When speaking of architecture, we should mention the architect, the person who is responsible. In Greek, the word architect means the chief builder. However, a building architect doesn’t actually build the building. Carpenters and skilled tradesmen do that. An architect, then, is the person who creates the plans, strategies, and direction for the building.

Going back to our case of information, the primary tool the architect uses is “creating meaningful breakdowns”. That is, the architect creates the ability to find information by categorizing it. The following five steps are a straightforward approach to generating your information architecture.

Book Review-Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking

Robert Bogue January 28, 2012 1 Comment

When a friend of mine told me about this book I was sort of concerned. I thought that somehow learning more about Social Engineering was sort of like reading a book on how to make a bomb. Sure I know some people need to know how to make a bomb, but does everyone need access to this kind of information? However, as I was reading it I realized that the information in the book wasn’t “new” per-se. It was the same sorts of things that consultants do every day – perhaps without the lock picking part.

If you’ve read my reviews you know that I love psychology. I love the observation of human behaviors and the thinking about what makes people tick. So much of what I ran into including neuro linguistic programming (NLP) was already information I had been exposed to. However, there were other places where I was reexposed to things that I had not remembered. Dr. Ekman’s work on FACS (Facial Action Coding System) was something I was exposed to before but hadn’t really spent much time thinking about.

While I don’t think that reading this book will make you a good social engineer, I do think that if you’re interested in psychology, particularly how people are manipulated you’ll find this book very informative. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that everyone who’s a full time consultant should read it – not because I think that consultants should use these techniques to get their next consulting engagement – but rather because the sheer number of people a typical consultant interacts with will ultimately cause them to run across someone who is trying to use the techniques on them.

Perhaps the best part – from my point of view – was that the book was easy to read and interesting. Having made a relatively sharp right turn into some heavy academic books this was the book that I kept coming back to for “filler time.” It was the one I wanted to read when I had a few minutes. So whether you’re looking for a job as a tester who will test an organization’s vulnerability to social engineering tactics, or you just want to learn more about the tactics that Social Engineers use, this book is a good read.

Nine Keys to SharePoint Success

Robert Bogue January 23, 2012 1 Comment

[If you want more about this topic, check out my DVD.]

Several years ago – it seems almost like in another lifetime, I wrote two articles: “Seven Keys to SharePoint Success” and “Seven Signs your SharePoint Project is in Trouble”. These were written for SharePoint Advisor magazine, later renamed to Advisor’s Guide to SharePoint. The articles are no longer publicly available but I’ve got the original articles which I recently reread. The articles were written in the spring of 2006 – before even SharePoint 2007 was released. They were a slight tilt on the risk matrix, I created for types of SharePoint projects and their risks. By that I mean that the problems that were exposed in the matrix were the same sort of things being tested for in the articles. So some six later, I wanted to revisit the keys to success and warning signs in a blog post but reframing them all as keys to success.

In an attempt to refine and reorganize the keys to success and the warnings, I’ve introduced some categorization into the items. Before they were simply a quazi random list of things, this time around I want to group them into areas since they do share some similar characteristics. I also combined a few things, eliminated a few that didn’t really fit any more due to the way the product has changed, and try to get them into an order that flowed logically a bit better. The result are three categories: Activities missed, Culture change, and Simple things.

Activities Missed

Everyone is busy. Sometimes we simply forget to do the things we know we should do. We’re all looking to take short cuts – to cut corners, however, sometimes corners are cut and they do more harm than good. John Kotter, a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School and author, cautioned that skipping earlier steps in his eight step change model would mean problems later on. (Check out my review on Kotter’s book Leading Change.) The same problem exists if you skip (or skimp) on these activities in SharePoint. Let’s take a look at four often overlooked activities.

Shared Vision

Sure. Everyone believes that they want generally the same thing. Everyone wants a way to share documents and track tasks. That is what led to SharePoint as a solution in the first place. However, is there a single shared vision of what SharePoint success looks like? In most cases the answer is no. The arguments abound. Like the story of the blind men and the elephant where each felt a different part of the elephant and had a different perception of the elephant. In most organizations if you try to nail down a single vision of how SharePoint will be used it will feel like herding cats. However, just because something is difficult doesn’t mean that it’s not the right thing to do. Ensuring a single vision at the start helps to reduce the thrashing that will happen later in the project.

So how do you do it? You plan it like you would plan any other web site. Start with the users (or personas), collect the use cases (what will they be doing), and then plan the visual design (use wireframes, mockups, and prototypes to ensure that you get to a visual design everyone can agree on.)

Business Connection

You may have a shared vision with everyone finally on the same page. However, there’s an important question that’s often missed, overlooked, or underexplored. That question is what will be business get out of the implementation? If an organization invests in a new piece of manufacturing equipment there’s a specific tangible ROI for the equipment. Someone knows exactly how many parts have to run through that machine before it’s going to start making money for the organization – and how many years it should be able to continue to churn out parts making greater profits for the organization.

SharePoint isn’t exactly like a piece of machinery. It’s not something with a single fixed purpose and the desire to run a high number of identical transactions through. Because it’s not like a piece of machinery and it can be hard to quantify the value to the organization, many organizations simply give up and don’t bother to try to generate an ROI – but this can be devastating to the project.

The long term measure of a successful project isn’t in its completion on time or on budget. The long term measure is whether the project enabled the organization to be more successful, more profitable, or more agile. If you’re going to make sure the business gets value from the project you’re going to have to align with some need the business has – and that means building a connection to business value.

I’m not saying that you have to have a rigorous ROI calculation for your SharePoint project – it’s unlikely that you could generate any ROI with confidence; however, what I am saying is that you should try to generate an ROI. The benefit is in the process not in the outcome. By trying to put together an ROI you’ll deeply investigate areas of potential match between business needs and SharePoint capabilities. You’ll identify specific areas that will have high return – if you can get SharePoint deployed and get users to use it. You can use these points as your metrics for evaluating whether the project was successful or not.

Planning Measurement

Recently, I decided to try to lose a little weight. What was the first thing I did? I bought a scale. Why? Well how could I determine if what I was doing was working or not? My weight loss journey isn’t over – and it won’t be for a long time – but the small successes are there because I have a specific measurement to indicate success (or failure) and I’m using it.

In most organizations there wasn’t a step on the plan to identify the key metrics for project success – or the metrics that were developed were things like up-time or performance. While these are fine IT metrics for service delivery, they don’t say much about how useful it is to the business.

Some organizations have a slightly more enlightened view and have metrics on page views or the number of visits to a site in a period of time like a month or so, but this still misses the importance of connecting the metric with the business outcome.

Truly enlightened businesses are finding metrics like reducing the time to respond to a request for proposal by 1 day within a month or improving customer satisfaction scores by 1 point over the next three months. Those metrics are specific, objectively measurable, and time constrained. Make time for developing the measurements in your project – and make sure they’re tied to the business needs you’re solving.

Evangelization

Most IT based project plans stop when SharePoint is installed – or at most 30 days after launch. This misses the important process of building support for the solution and for use of the platform. From one perspective the project ends with the working SharePoint site, from another perspective the project starts with a working SharePoint site. From there it’s time to get people engaged with the platform and to get them to start to use it to drive business value.

IT departments aren’t used to evangelizing solutions. You don’t have to evangelize the use of email. There’s never been a time when the IT department had to encourage people to fill in their timesheets so they could get paid – although the payroll department may have. It’s a rather foreign thing to think about how you may need to try to encourage people to use a platform that has been deployed.

However, SharePoint is a different kind of solution. It’s a powerful platform on which users and IT can deliver solutions. Think about it this way, the telephone is a great invention but it took years to develop call centers, interactive voice response systems, voice mail, and the other solutions that are built on top of dial-tone to make the humble phone more valuable. Users need to know how SharePoint can be used and how it will help them. If you want to get users engaged you’re going to have to evangelize the benefits of the platform. Extend – or reopen – your SharePoint project plan to include the need for education and evangelism after the solution is available to users.

Culture Change

Corporate culture can change. It’s absolutely possible to change the way the organization works. Like cleaning a petri dish and starting over – or introducing a new reagent – you can change your culture, however, that’s hard. Here are some culture change components that you can actually do.

Honest Evaluation

One of the things that’s difficult to do as an individual is to look inside of yourself. Thinking in psychology circles says that objective introspection isn’t possible. Whether it’s possible or not, it’s not something we do well. The biases for evaluating ourselves are well documented. (Check out the Happiness Hypothesis if you want research references.) Looking at the organization that we are in may not be as difficult but it’s certainly not the easiest thing. The problem is that if you don’t do the introspection, if you don’t look at what your organization is good at – and what it’s bad at – one of the bad things is going to jump up and bite you on your SharePoint project.

Back in 2009 I wrote a pair of blog posts: four most common corporate delusions and the fifth and the sixth most common delusions. If you need to kick yourself in the pants and take a look at what your organization does well – and what reality is, go read them. If you’re not up for facing reality that directly, perhaps you could look at the last five projects in your organization (or your IT organization) that were late or over budget. They may not have been a failure, but there’s probably something you can learn about what you should watch out for in a SharePoint project.

Reframe Your Relationship to Your Business

Users are the source of all problems. Clients are the consultant’s only problem. Or are they? The natural reaction to users as a group is that they’re noisy. They don’t read. They don’t understand. They don’t follow directions. While all of these may be true of some of your users it’s probably not true of all of your users. Yet, we –as all humans do — tend to generalize. We tend to build up a negative feeling to users in general because of a few “bad apples.” In some organizations this has built up to the level where there’s a hostile business-IT relationship where the business wants nothing more than to be able to use some other provider for IT services.

Perhaps your view of the business is not as insidious as the above but you’re stuck taking orders from the business. You get detailed “requirements” from the business that are over specified leaving nothing to doubt nothing to innovation and nothing to take advantage of. They’ve buried design into the requirements without understanding. They don’t know what’s easy or hard – or ways to make the hard easy while accomplishing the same goal. A better framing of the relationship is of co-solution creators. This requires IT to spend more time understanding the needs of the business and to elicit creative problem solving. Candidly neither are easy.

The business may be frustrated, having felt like they’ve clearly articulated their needs – without understanding that they’ve articulated their solution not their needs. They probably don’t really know exactly what’s driving the requirements, they don’t know who asked for what or when they were asked for. Walking through the “why” behind the requirements is important because it’s a path where both the business and IT get in the boat and try to find solutions together.

Platitudes

If you read a corporate mission statement and at the end you’re wondering what that meant – you’re not alone. Many corporate, divisional, and project mission statements are filled with meaningless platitudes. Platitudes are flat, dull, or trite remarks, especially one uttered as if it were fresh or profound. (Thanks Dictionary.com) With the occasional rare exception, a mission statement is a collection of platitudes. The problem with a platitude is that on the surface it looks good. However, when you walk behind the buildings you realize they’re just Hollywood sets. They’re a face with nothing behind them.

If you’ve been in large corporations for any amount of time when asked to create a mission statement you’ll automatically gravitate to a string of jargon and platitudes until people quit disagreeing with it. The problem is that the fact that no one disagrees with it is a good indicator it’s a platitude. Some conflict about your mission statement is good. If no one could reasonably disagree with the mission statement – you’ve got more work to do. People can’t reasonably argue with platitudes – but then again platitudes won’t get everyone thinking the same way either. If you need some motivation to break out of the platitudes consider this quote from Alfred P. Sloan, the former CEO of General Motors: “Gentlemen, I take it we are all in complete agreement on the decision here… Then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what this decision is all about.”

Simple Things

There are some really simple things that you can do which will help drive success in the project but they’re often overlooked.

Right Defaults

The German-American psychologist Kurt Lewin said that behavior is a function of both the person and the environment. That is to say that you can’t ignore the environment when you’re trying to drive behavior change. Blink, Switch, Mindset, and The Happiness Hypothesis are all books that talk about how environment can impact a user. Despite the evidence and theory about how environments influence behavior, most organizations don’t take the simple steps necessary to make it easier for users to do the behaviors they want.

For instance, if the goal is to get users to stop putting their documents on their local hard drives and instead they should put them in their my site, then simply changing the default file save location in Office can have profound impacts. Changing the available site templates from which users can create sites to the company customized versions can help to ensure consistency across the enterprise. Simple changes like hiding the templates that you don’t want users to use can dramatically increase compliance with the policies of the organization.

The first questions to ask when asking the users to do something should be: “How can we make this default behavior?”

Imperfect Solutions

Perfection is expensive – and ultimately unattainable. Perfection of anything that we have is in context. Was your computer perfect when you bought it? Did you configure everything you wanted just exactly right then after three years or so you realized that it was too slow, it didn’t have a fingerprint reader, or no integrated blue tooth. The problem is that we change our definition of perfect to suit the circumstances. In his book Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz speaks of Maximizers and Satisficers. Maximizers have to have the best. They’re crushed when they realize they’ve not made the absolutely best choice. Satisficers on the other hand look for something that meets their standards and stop. If something better comes along the next week they may want it but they’re not depressed about what they have.

We’re all a bit of a maximizer and a bit of a satisficer. The problem is that maximization is very expensive. Expensive monetarily, expensive in time, and expensive in terms of the weight it puts on your psyche. Those people who tend to maximize more tend to be less happy.

However, in IT (and in business sometimes) we’re taught to completely solve the problem. However, this isn’t always the best choice. Sometimes it’s better to pick an 80% solution for 20% of the cost than to pay 100% of the cost to get 100% of the benefit. (Five times more expensive for a 25% gain.)

To keep from working to perfect solutions, shift your mindset to a fixed expense and prioritize goals from high to low. However far you can get with the money you have is how far you get.

Missing Keys

So those are my nine keys to SharePoint success. What are yours?

If you’re interested in a deeper analysis of the keys and how to get them, take a look at the DVD.

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom

Book Review-The Happiness Hypothesis

Robert Bogue January 19, 2012 1 Comment

When I was reading Switch I was introduced to the metaphor of the elephant, the rider, and the path for thinking about how to motivate people (including ourselves) but the book referenced The Happiness Hypothesis as the origin of this model. Despite the good coverage of the model in Switch, I wanted to get more details about how the model was formed and some of the concepts that surrounded it.

The Happiness Hypothesis doesn’t disappoint. It reaches across religions and great thinkers, it quotes psychologists, philosophers, and research. It’s an ultimate tour of peoples thoughts. I deeply respect Jonathan Haidt’s considerable effort to seek balanced views. I remember a blog post by Malcolm Gladwell where he was discussing Freakonomics. In his book Tipping Point, Gladwell points to “broken windows” as a theory for why crime fell. Freakonomics proposes that it’s the reduction in unwanted children because of Roe v. Wade (abortion rights). He mentions that he dismisses other ideas in his writing. I’m not saying this is wrong – in fact, The Happiness Hypothesis acknowledges that this is normal human behavior. The fact that Haidt fought so hard to provide a balanced text is important.

There’s one direct quote that I can’t pass up because it’s so perfect:

“The metaphor I use when I lecture on Freud is to think of the mind as a horse and buggy (a Victorian chariot) in which the driver (the ego) struggles frantically to control a hungry, lustful, and disobedient horse (the id) while the driver’s father (the superego) sits in the back seat lecturing the driver on what he is doing wrong.”

I just love that word picture.

There is some good coverage of Buddhist philosophies about detachment and their evolution as well as their usefulness. Ultimately, walking through the consumption and the externalization of a person’s identity into the things that surround them and how this isn’t good – even though it’s less risky now than in the past because we’re relatively speaking more secure in our possessions than any other time in history. Haidt explorers the positive effects of meditation and highlights the benefits of cognitive therapy.

I particularly liked the closing which ties things together by talking about “vital engagement” – which is flow plus meaning.

If you’re interested in a “once around the block” for the religions and great thinkers of the world as to what makes people happy, you should reach for The Happiness Hypothesis.

Public Speaking