The Making of a SharePoint Shepherd Photo

Robert Bogue November 21, 2011 No Comments

One of the things I hear from folks from time-to-time is they wonder how we came up with the idea for the cover to The SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide for End Users: 2010. I wanted to explain that – and unwind our latest photo – or Christmas gift of humor to the market. (If you want to get a copy of the full message subscribe to our mailing list and we’ll send you a copy.)

The 2010 Cover

The SharePoint Shepherd's Guide for End Users: 2010 Book Cover

One of the problems that happened when we were creating the 2010 cover was we were trying to find good stock photography featuring sheep. As strange as it is to say, finding good stock photography of sheep is difficult. So we were joking about getting a puppet and using a sheep puppet – like Lamb Chop – to use on the cover. And then we weren’t kidding. It was a way to convey our sense of fun with the SharePoint market. I found a sheep puppet I liked – and named it Lamb Shank – since it was going to have my larger arm in it.

Through the concept development process we decided that it wasn’t the sheep’s guide to SharePoint – it was the Shepherd’s guide. As a result we need to convey the shepherd – but how? Well, enter the Shepherd’s Crook. Of course, Wal-Mart doesn’t sell Shepherd’s Crooks (at least not the Wal-Mart stores near me). That meant a search on the Internet – and I’ll warn you not to do a search for this on your own without the Safe Search filter on. With it in hand we went off to do a photo shoot. You’ll be happy to know it’s my hand in Lamb Shank on the cover of the book with my son supporting the crook.

As we were finalizing the book we decided that Lamb Shank (and the book) were blue ribbon – first class. So we tried to figure out how to convey that. We couldn’t exactly pin a ribbon on such a small lamb. And thus is the story of how the cover was born.

The Holiday Greeting

One of my pet peeves was that people started to advertise for Christmas before Thanksgiving. I have already got my inbox full of “Black Friday” and “Cyber Week” deals. The initial concept was that Santa was still on the beach on vacation and that when the advertising started he had to come back. We wanted it to be intentionally fun, corny, and a bit crazy. That’s why we decided to add the blow up palm trees and the blow up pink flamingo. It was sort of my homage to all things corny and overdone. The shot was actually done in my studio. We shot it in front of a white screen and added the image later. The reason for white is because the green screen causes a green halo on the objects being traced when doing photos.

That sort of morphed a bit into Santa being the SharePoint Shepherd. (i.e. it’s me in the Santa suit.) It was really a last minute thing to have Santa capturing the pink flamingo with the shepherd’s crook. The shot was originally planned as Santa with some money – signifying both what we spend on Christmas and the remaining budget that an organization may have in its training budget. However, the crook won out becauase it was funner.

Create Your Own Story

As we’ve got a series of DVDs coming out and of course more marketing campaigns coming out, I’d love to hear what you’re thinking of fun and interesting things that we can do with a sheep puppet, a shepherd’s crook, and a video studio. Coming up with these visual stories is one of the funnest parts of my world.

Book Review-Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web

Robert Bogue October 31, 2011 2 Comments

There’s one statement that is definite truth, there’s no mystery in how Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web approaches IA. It’s all about the web – and why shouldn’t be. If we’re accessing information today we’re likely doing it via the web. Whether it’s an internet web site that sells Shepherd’s crooks or a corporate intranet, we’re spending more and more of our time consuming information in a browser.

The book is a good, straight forward guide to developing an information architecture. From reminding us that you have to do good thinking first and then write it down, the book gently reminds us that Information Architecture isn’t about one thing – it’s about blending multiple things together to get them to come out right. I’ve seen situations where people just start writing down stuff – skipping the good thinking – and places where the thinking was great but they neglected to write it down. You need both for success.

I was flying out to SharePoint Connections in Las Vegas while writing this and I was quietly watching how people made it through the airport. There were folks following the flow, and folks who were trying to process each decision. It resonated with the wayfinding topics in the book and how it’s essential to help folks know where they are at all times. This is signs in an airport and typically breadcrumbs in a web site. If you’re starting to study IA I recommend you keep your eyes open for people getting lost in the places you go everyday – libraries, airports, churches, etc., it’s really intriguing from the perspective of ensuring that you show context all the time.

There were some interesting – if not contradictory – statements about the placement of navigation. How people expect things to be – and how much they’re willing to adapt. Note that I don’t see contradictory statements as a problem – it just means there’s a space between the two statements. There’s also a very useful conversation about: global, local, utility, and associative navigation that’s a good break down of the topic. Mostly it applies to Ecommerce and public web sites but it can be applied to Intranets as well. The key question, “The user succeeded, now what?” is often missed in our desire to breakdown tests and use cases into descrete units.

The book supposes that users come to your site to: find something, do something ,or kill time. (I can’t help but think – how can one kill time without injuring eternity.) Generally speaking, I think this is true. The trick is far to few Intranet projects of which I’ve been apart can articulate what the user wants to find – or what they want to do. It’s a place where I don’t believe there’s much clarity across the board.

The final thing about the book that I felt was helpful was the way that it covered social technologies. I generally read “Social is great, use it for everything.” Or “Social is a fad, ignore it.” Speaking as someone who’s been trying to understand this space for a while, I can say that the balanced view where there are conversations of moving tags into keywords and the problems of social including the one that most folks want to ignore – cold start. Cold start is when the system has nothing in it so users don’t know what to do – there is no normal yet. So it’s hard to get started. It’s also been called inertia (getting the first person to act) and critical mass (getting the system up and running to the point where it sustains itself.)

If you’re ready for a book that will sneak in a useful view of the Information Architecture landscape while discussing the particulars of how IA works, you may want to pickup Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web.

The Top Three Pieces of Technology I want – but can’t find

Robert Bogue October 29, 2011 3 Comments

For the most part I’ve got all of the gadgets that I want. However, occasionally I find a need for stuff that I just can’t find. I’ve sent emails to friends, I’ve looked on web sites, and haven’t found what I want. So I figured I’d place a public blog post out to see who agrees with me that these would be things they would buy too. Maybe we can get some manufacturers to make it for us.

Network Projector Converter Box

When I rebuilt my office I had to make a decision about whether I was going to use a projector – or a flat screen television on the wall. For me the decision was made by doing the math for brightness. I’ve got 28 feet of windows in my office so getting the room dark wasn’t going to work so the projector wasn’t the best solution. At the same time I ran all sorts of wires in my office and I’ve got network to the center of my room – and I can run HDMI or VGA in the conduit… but ultimately I decided that logistically having a video cable in the center of the room wasn’t practical. So what I want is the ability to connect to the TV over the network just like I can with a high-end network projector. It’s been built into Windows since Windows Vista – and it’s REALLY cool. Take a look at the FAQ – http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Network-projectors-frequently-asked-questions . The way it works is a sort of reverse desktop connection.

In environments with them installed you can walk in and wirelessly connect to the projector and start projecting. It’s simple, easy, portable, etc. That’s what I want so others can come in and do presentations to me. However, I can’t find a box that will connect a non-network projector or TV to the network as a projector. I want to find a box that has Ethernet on one side and HDMI on the other side – and uses the projector protocol built into Windows. There are devices that will put a projector on the network but all of them (that I can find) rely on a hardware piece, software or both. This just isn’t convenient. The really scary thing is the device is pictured on the Microsoft site — http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee480296(v=WinEmbedded.60) — but as far as I can tell the device doesn’t exist.

I’ve asked several of my friends to help me try to find a box – and none of us have been successul. Most of the folks I know want one. If you’ve got a wireless network (and who doesn’t) and a large screen HD TV with an HDMI input, how cool would it be to connect your laptop up to your TV for working on presentations, large spreadsheets, etc?

Portable Bluetooth Keyboard

OK, I know there are some portable bluetooth keyboards. However, I don’t want to connect the keyboard to an iPad, and I’d like to be able to use it like a standard laptop keyboard. The scenario for me is my Lenovo X200 Tablet. When the screen is in slate mode I don’t have access to the keyboard. So I basically have to decide between inking and typing. However, I really want to do both at times. This is particularly true when I’m taking notes. There are times when inking an arrow or a shape is the right answer – but I also need to be typing.

All of the bluetooth keyboards I’ve found fit into three categories: 1) Full Desktop big as a battleship keyboard. 2) Micron sized keyboards designed to be danced on by fleas. 3) iPad keyboards with integrated stand or case.

OK, I found a few that didn’t fit these categories – like G-tech (www.g-techworld.com) that is a cloth based one that rolls up. The minor inconvenience is that it doesn’t have rechargable batteries – the major inconvenience is that it’s not a standard bluetooth HID interface so it requires a device side driver. Arg. That means I can’t use it with my phone, my tablet, etc., unless I start installing stuff. Ick. I’m planning on using it for target practice at some point but haven’t gotten around to it.

There’s also a bluetooth virtual keyboard that draws the keyboard on a flat surface – but there aren’t any updates on this technology in years. It seems like the company has died. (There’s a knock off version that has the same problem as the G-Tech needing drivers.)

So I suppose there’s a way to solve this but nothing that remotely resembles a good solution. I’d love a laptop sized keyboard that has a rechargable battery and connects via bluetooth.

Intelligent Power Management and Storage for Laptops

OK, this is a bit less of a single product as a collection of technologies to help those of us who travel. Battery like is a problem. If you’re using an iPad or a Kindle perhaps you don’t have to think about power management but for those of us that are trying to run a full version of Windows battery life is important. I can get roughly two hours out of my Lenovo W510 and my Lenovo X200. Sure I can get new batteries and extend that – or I can squeeze my power usage down to where I’m reading the screens by candlelight but in general I get 2 hours. I need to get 8 hours out of a device that I’d carry to all my meetings. (Figuring a 12 hour day and 30% of the time the machine would be off.)

The problems, from my perspective, are many. I used to use an External battery pack – a Valence n-Charge VNC-130 –it was heavy but it was good. It delivered good power. Except that my laptop thought it was plugged into a wall and didn’t try to save power. Of course, Valence doesn’t make this product any longer and the competitive products have the same problem – because the laptop doesn’t know its using battery power it’s not economizing. It’s manageable but painful – why can’t we plug into a different power port that tells the laptop that it’s on a battery? Maybe a port that’s directly on the battery?

Similarly, there was no way to tell the laptop not to try to charge the internal battery when the external one was plugged in – so you had to start with the external battery pack.

Another issue when you fly is that most aircraft with power only let you draw 75W of power. If you draw more you’ll get your power port shutdown. Of course, my Lenovo W510 will chew through more than that no problem. Why can’t we have a power adapter which will draw the 75W the airplane will allow to AUGMENT the battery. Sure I’ll still be burning into the battery of the laptop but if I could do that at a much slower rate I might be able to get 10 hours of power+battery instead of 2 hours of battery. Now, I end up burning through the battery shutting the machine off and plugging it in. Charging the battery is less than the 75W of power. But that means hours of not working to get a little more juice in the battery.

If you’ve seen solutions to these problems I’d love to hear them. I’m not buying as many gadgets as I used to, but I’ll buy these technologies in a heartbeat. It’s so strange to me that there are these random gaps in what we have available in our technology landscape and no one has filled them.

Book Review-Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences

Robert Bogue October 28, 2011 2 Comments

I view Information Architecture (IA) as the organization of information around you. I picked up Pervasive Information Architecture: Designing Cross-Channel User Experiences because I wanted to see how others thought about the problem of keeping messages consistent. In what I’m trying to do I was less concerned about eCommerce / brick-and-mortar mixtures of experiences – which the book spends a great deal of time on – rather I was more interested in how our experience on our desktop, on our phone, and on our bookshelf impacted the way we should think about information architecture.

There were lots of little snippets, shifts in perspective, that I loved in the book. Simply considering whether IA is about what’s on the pages or the connections between the pages is an interesting bit. It ties in visual design and what I consider to be true IA. I tend to think of navigation flowing from IA – however, I recognize that the reverse is also true. The ability to leverage different navigational techniques informs and shapes the IA. It was good to see this played out well.

There were also bits where reality was revealed. For instance, I’ve often said that Architect comes from the Greek and a literal translation leads to “Chief Builder” – which is true. However, Architects don’t build buildings. They don’t swing a hammer. They give instructions to others who build the buildings.

The book also works on the topic of whether IA is an art or a science – or as I would contend both. As I mentioned in Apprentice, Journeyman, Master, knowledge can be intellectual (cognative) or tacit. There’s a similar situation with IA. Understanding the rules is relatively simple. Understanding what the important bits are takes experience. (See Sources of Power – How People Make Decisions)

There are some core IA things which are useful as well. Particularly things like how we break things apart. For instance, the applicability of Hick’s Law (which says that people can pick things out of longer lists quicker than two picks of lists that are half the size.) The trick is that this relies on our ability to see and understand the order of a large list. We use the order to rule out entire categories of the list at one time. This explains why understanding the magic number seven is still important. (Hint: We chunk concepts together in our mind to save working space.)

Moving further down the path of organization and chunking the book talks about the use of prototypes – that is a representation of the category/words we’re seeing so that we can conceptualize it. Some items are better prototypes – and thus easier for us to associate to a category than others. For instance, if you’re looking for a rug there’s little question that the furniture category is what you want. If you’re looking for a rug the association is much weaker. Further there’s some interesting conversation about which attribute “wins” when two attributes of an object are in conflict.

Consider a pink truck. Is the truck generally gender male or gender female? As it turns out, pinkness overrides truck-ness. (My son once wanted a pink rubberband revolver much to my dismay. However, it turns out his mother despises pink so much that I’m rationalizing he was just trying to annoy her.)

I’ve also adopted a new name for topics that don’t fit neatly into an IA. The name is platypus. In science the platypus is an interesting mix of things reptillian, avian, and mammalian. So I’ve decided to start calling the things that don’t want to organize themselves into neat categoies as platypus – if for no other reason than you can’t help smiling when you say it. (Try to think of someone saying platypus without smiling at least a little.)

I also got to think about how a vocabulary (and thus IA) are differnet based on the knowledge of the consumers. For instance, the general public may think of planes, where as I think about how they’re propelled… single, twin, multiple engine… normally asperated, fuel injected, turbo charged, or turbine. I think of tricycle gear, tail wheel (tail dragger)… The more you know about something the more detail your vocabulary.

Oh, then there’s the scary. Marcia Bates aparently believes that 80% of our knowledge is absorbed by us just being around. Only 1% of what we know is found when we’re actively looking for it. That explains why experience with an IA has value. Of course it doesn’t bode well for trying to do a new IA.

Pervasive Information Architecture is a good journey for how IA exists – or should exist – in a world where users won’t experience your IA in a single dimension. Pick it up if you’re looking to figure out how to integrate other channels into your IA.

Book Review-Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions

Robert Bogue October 23, 2011 No Comments

It may seem odd but my quest for resources for my upcoming Information Architecture DVD led me to a book on decsions. Hows’ that? Well, Information Architecture is a funny thing. You’ll never know enough about the problem. You’ll always have to make compromises that are at best uneasy. So I wondered how do people make decisions? How could I provide council on which compromises to make, and which to stay away from. My quest lead me to Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions by Gary Klein. I was a bit worried when I started the book and he was talking about Firefighters. That wasn’t exactly the kind of decision I was most interested in. Sure it’s interesting to know how firefighters make decisions, but what does that do with creating aninformation architecture?

As it turns out, a lot, and nothing. It’s a lot because the book talks about an idea called Recognition Primed Decision (RPD). The short of which is this is where a firefighter would recognize an aspect of the situation that was similar to another experience they had – or a story they heard. From that they would instantly know the right answer. When pressed about how the firefighters made decisions they would respond that they didn’t evaluate options, they just did what seemed like the only option.

I bolded aspect above because it’s key that the firefighters knew which bits of the situation were important – and which ones weren’t through their experience. The experience built up an intuition of what was important and what wasn’t important. It helped them know how to look at their world. So in short, experience does matter. I mentioned in my review of Outliers that purposeful practice is important. Or rather I brought up that Malcolm Gladwell asserts that the outliers have had a chance to get a very large amount of practice. That practice creates a sense of expertise that can not be easily or susinctly communicated.

This experience not only enables intuition but it also enables mental simulations. We all use mental simulations to test how the world around us will react to an action or a statement, but the mental models of masters are better. They are more complex. They see more interactions – and they are more accurate. This is one of those things that I’ve noticed in my work. Some people just seem to be able to identify problems when there’s no supporting evidence – they seem to have a sense for what’s wrong. For instance, I wrote a blog post “Public Service Announcement: Many Technical Problems are Caused by Bad Power” – because I saw lots of quirky things happening as power supplies got a little out of spec.

The book is an interesting read if you’re trying to figure out how experts make better decisions than novices – often under extreme conditions. It’s definitely helped me refine how I look at the decision making process – and how I’m going to go about my next decision.

Apprentice, Journeyman, Master

Robert Bogue October 23, 2011 1 Comment

About four years ago I read a book Software Craftsmanship – The New Imperative. I wrote a blog entry/book review on it. One of the core concepts of the book has been coming back to me over the last several weeks as it relates to SharePoint and SharePoint development in particular. A few weeks ago now the Microsoft SharePoint Developer (http://mssharepointdeveloper.com) site went online complete with tons of content to get developers started with SharePoint. However, as much as I sincerely believe that we (Paul Andrew, Andrew Connell, and I) hit the mark with that content, I’m also aware that it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

This blog post has been rattling around for a while now. I’ve been trying to put my finger on just how to express the value of non-explicit knowledge. I’ve looked at the definition for tacit knowledge –A form of knowledge which is wholly or partly inexplicable (Wikipedia.org). I suppose that explains at least in part why I’m having trouble putting my finger on how to approach the topic.

I’ve seen a non-trivial difference in performance of staff when they’re exposed to mentoring and the support of others. I wrote an article "Use Your Star as a Catalyst for Productivity by Amplifying the Halo Effect" The focus of the article was essentially taking advantage of the high skill employees that you have to make the others around them more effective. It spoke of the influence of a "star" without clearly defining how a person got to be a star, how you might go about hiring them, or how to encourage the growth of a star. That’s where this blog post will focus.

In preparation for this blog post I tried to do some research on the topic — to verify that my perceptions and observations were correct and in the course of that research I realized that vocational training is much maligned. Most of the time vocational training is lumped in with adult education — the place where you’ll find GED programs and other programs for non-traditional learning. I realized that in our information economy we’ve developed an affinity for explicit knowledge to the point where we don’t value tacit knowledge nearly enough. Most of us when we think about tacit knowledge may remember the trades department of our high school with wood shop, auto shop, and home economics. Stereotypically these were classes filled with the less bright students. The classic movie "The Breakfast Club" played out our stereotypes on the big screen — including the stereotypical shop student. The interaction between "the nerd" and "the shop student" is an unforgettable scene.

The funny thing is that when I look at nearly every area where someone’s life is involved. Every profession and every endeavor where it truly matters — every one I looked at has a structured process for developing tacit knowledge. Don’t believe me, then let’s start with an example from my life. I’m a licensed private pilot. In other words, I fly planes. How did I learn? 40 hours of real life flight. The first 20 hours I sat with a flight instructor on my right who had a set of controls and could at any moment fix a mistake that I’d make that could quite candidly have cost me my life. Jim mostly coached me in the right way to fly. How to get the feel of the aircraft and how to know how much control was enough — and how much was too much.

I remember one lesson very well. It was straight and level flight. It’s easy enough now but when I was learning I had a tendency to over correct. I’d actually move the yolk to go up or go down. One of the things that Jim was able to teach me — because he had been there and because he had so many other students before me — was that I didn’t need to move the yolk, I simply needed to change the pressure I was applying. OK, I realize that this did indeed change the actual elevator making the plane more stable in its level flight, the trick was to make this change so small as to make it not seem like a change to me at all. I would have never been able to learn this from a book. It required someone seeing the challenge I was having and reacting to it.

You may remember the scene from the Karate Kid where Mr. Miyagi (Pat Morita) sees that Daniel (Ralph Macchio) was trying to learn Karate from a book. It’s another one of those movie moments that offers a glimpse at the discrepancy between our idea of the value of classically trained explicit knowledge and the possibilities offered by old school mentoring. Obviously, in the movie the karate skills dramatically improved with the assistance of a master.

Back to the pilot training, the training I went through, including episodes like that one, is something every pilot goes through — including the pilots that fly commercial aircraft who have literally hundreds of lives in their hands each day.

You’ve probably heard about residency for doctors. Doctors have more schooling than just about any other profession and yet they also have years of mentored training through residency. This is where newly degreed doctors are expected to work under the close supervision of licensed doctors before being officially licensed to practice medicine on their own.

Even professions that often forgotten about such as civil engineers — those who make our bridges that we all trust each day — have some experiential requirement before being licensed and allowed to practice on their own. Certainly the catastrophic failure of the bridge in Minneapolis, MN indicates that this method of education isn’t capable of preventing every problem — particularly those due to maintenance, however, it seems that we’ve developed a firm understanding that some sort of experience based program of training is necessary when lives are involved.

When I started my career I used to hate it when jobs would insist on experience. More recently I’ve found humor in job listings asking for impossible amounts of experience with SharePoint. I used to think that the ability to learn, the ability to think, a natural curiosity, and drive or tenacity was worth more than experience. What I didn’t realize is that it isn’t an either or proposition. You need all of these elements. You do need someone with experience but you also need someone with that drive, in order to create solutions. Experience teaches you what doesn’t work and a natural curiosity drives you to reevaluate those experiences.

One of the time honored approaches to learning a craft has been abandoned or at the very least neglected in recent times. We’ve decided that the old approaches are too slow, too dull, oppressive, and as a result have marginalized its value. The time honored approach I’m speaking of is the apprentice, journeyman, master model. In this model you don’t necessarily learn as quick as you might with a book, a university, or an Internet connection, but the way that you learn is completely.

Book Review-Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life

Robert Bogue October 16, 2011 No Comments

I’ve been a fan of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work since first seeing his work. I feel like I spend much of my days in “flow” and the description of it helps me to explain to others something that has been difficult to explain. His book Finding flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life is accessible to anyone and talks about the research about how people enjoy – or don’t enjoy their lives and how that is related to the time they spend in the state called “flow.”

Flow is the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity. It is characterized by a high degree of focus or limited field of attention, loss of self-consciousness – merging action and awareness, and timelessness (loss of time). Flow is intrensically rewarding and sometimes results in a loss of awareness of bodily needs – so forgetting to eat or go to the bathroom. Situations that encourage flow have a clear set of goals, provide immediate feedback, and provide a balance between the challenge of the task and the skills of the person.

One of the topics that the book covers – albeit lightly is the concept of hedonistic (living for the moment) vs value-based (eudaimonic) happiness. The short of this is that hedonistic happiness is fleeting and requires greater and greater effort to receive the same reward. It operates just like an additction. Value-based happiness is more persistent occuring overtime and being able to resist the storms of everyday life. (I’m not finished with another book that covers this in much greater detail. It is Who am I?: The 16 Basic Desires That Motivate Our Actions and Define Our Personalities by .Steven Reiss. If you’re intersted in this distinction I recommend the book.)

In 2007 I wrote a book review of Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness where I made a point to talk about how I experienced a travel delay and how I just went with it. Mihaly Csikszentmihaly goes to great lengths to help the reader understand how you can create situations where you’re more likely to have flow and how your attitude about something can radically change how you feel about it.

There were somethings I found profound in the text:

The Greeks believed the best purpose for “leisure” time was to study. I tend to do that – so it was interesting.
Extroverts are in a very general sense happier than introverts. However, creative people – particularly those who can balance both introverted and extroverted times are happier still.
Being alone – working on my own comes just as naturally to me as being with people. The point is made that being able to be alone is a skill that’s acquired.
I sometimes talk about doing only what I want – but I don’t mean that any more literally than Linus Pauling did when he said it. I mean that I try to create more of the things I like into my world – DVD production is a good example.

So if you’re trying to figure out how to be more productive, to be able to concentrate more, or how to better enjoy your life, check out Finding Flow.

Book Review-How to Measure Anything: Finding the Intangibles in Business

Robert Bogue October 1, 2011 No Comments

Douglas Hubbard certainly knows how to throw down a dare. His book, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Intangibles in Business certainly is a superlative title. The promise is that you’ll be able to measure absolutely anything with the techniques laid out in the book. I have to say that he’s possibly right. Certainly there should be a certain amount of skepticism in any absolute, however, once you understand what measurement is and what is isn’t this makes a lot more sense.

The book starts with some practical examples of measurements that were both simple and very useful. There’s the computation of the circumference of the earth nearly 200 years before the birth of Christ. Then there’s the child who figured out that it wasn’t necessary to measure *how* effective spiritual healers were, it was only necessary to measure *if* they were effective at all. A simple study was able to provide a ton of useful information – much to the display of some now out of work healers.

However, this isn’t where the book stops. It moves on to talk about techniques of monte carlo simulations, fermi estimates, and techniques that can be used to approximate answers in a range. That’s a key point – measurements don’t have to be precise. They need only be accurate. Most folks falsely believe that measurements must be precise – there must be no error in them. However, what Hubbard illuminates is that every measurement has some level of error built into it. We’re far from the hiesenberg uncertainty princple (which says you can’t monitor sub-atomic particles without effecting them.)

Hubbard also talks about estimating and how we have biases that are hard to break in the way that we estimate. As a consultant for my entire career I can tell you that estimating is perhaps the hardest part of the job. Every situation and project is different in some ways and as a result every estimate is a challenge of understanding the impact of the various factors. Hubbard talks about calibrating estimates so that the estimator knows how to estimate better. If you’re a consultant who has to estimate work this part of the book is worth the price of admission.

One of the things I liked most about the book was that Hubbard didn’t get stuck into the statisics and just start talking about numbers and probabilities. While he would tell you that with a random sampling of just 5 items you have a 93.75% change that the mean value for the larger population is in between the largest and smallest sample values. That’s pretty cool. It means that you can check with a really small set of people to get some useful information about the everyone population – presuming your sample is random.

If you have some time to learn more about measurement, you want to check out How to Measure Anything.

Writing Your Own SharePoint Publishing Approval Workflow

Robert Bogue October 1, 2011 5 Comments

Out of the box SharePoint has a Publishing Approval workflow that’s hooked up to libraries to support approval of published content. It’s possible to modify this workflow to support your own needs – but there may be some times when you want to author a new workflow from scratch. This works fine in SPD, except that once created you can’t associate it so that it is started when someone tries to publish a new major version of the item. Take a look at the following two screen shots:

If you want to enable this option you’ll need to directly edit the workflow’s configuration XML files. To do this go to the All Files option

Then go to _catalogs then wfpub and the name of your workflow. Note that there’s a different location for non-globally published workflows but since you want this to work anywhere in the site collection you’ll want to work with a globally published workflow. Once you have your folder you should see something like:

Right click the .wfconfig.xml file, select open with, and SharePoint Designer (Open as XML)

In the file add AllowStartOnMajorCheckin=”true”

If you created the workflow on a content type you may need to remove the Category and ContentTypeID attributes of the Template node to allow the workflow to be associated with the library. The Start this workflow to approve publishing a major version of an item is only available on the library – this start option isn’t available for a content type.

Announcing the SharePoint Shepherd Presents the Psychology of SharePoint Adoption and Engagement

Robert Bogue September 28, 2011 No Comments

I’ve been working on getting together some videos for some time now. I started working on my video studio in late 2008. I took one run at getting some materials together for Governance together for 2007 but ultimately ran out of time before I could get them done. You see, I’m committed to making video materials the best quality possible. I enjoy video production and I want to leave no question in the mind of the viewer that the video content I create is the best possible content. That has led me to all sorts of crazy lengths to get it right. For instance, I had a custom teleprompter built. I built processes for bringing in PowerPoint slides. I’ve fine tuned the green screen, cameras, and audio. I got to the point where I’m comfortable with the production quality and then it was time to determine what to deliver.

Last time around I started with governance because at the time no one was really talking about governance and there was a ton of information that the market needed to get better at governing (steering) projects. While I still believe that this is an increadible need in the market – not because of the lack of information but rather because of the lack of credible information, I decided that I’d start by talking about adoption and engagement. I expect that I’ll be doing future discs on governance very shortly. The 2007 materials had over 1,200 nodes of information and over 250 slides when I had to set it aside – so once updated there are hours of content about how to get SharePoint governance right.

The need to start with a different topic lead me to the realization that I needed to create a series of videos which are designed to deliver the highest possible content to folks – content that people could trust. It also created the realization that I can’t create all of the material that folks need. I realized that there are topics where I won’t have time to get the DVD’s content together. There are places where I’m just not an expert. So I’ve asked some trusted friends and colleagues to deliver some special topics so that I can get more high-quality content out. I’ve got commitments from Eric Shupps for a Performance session. David Mann’s agreed to do a Workflow session. Matt McDermott has agreed to do one on Search. Todd Baginski will be doing one on Business Connectivity Services. While we don’t have locked timelines on these, I’m excited about the fact that the guys respect what I’m doing enough to be a part of it.

For the first DVD in the series, I decided to start with the adoption problem that too many organizations face. I talk to organizations all the time which face problems getting users to use the platform they’ve delivered and they don’t understand why. I had been speaking about engagement for a long time. Back in August of 2008 my Whitepaper for Microsoft “Increasing Your SharePoint Engagement” was released. Since then I’ve done dozens of presentations on the topic and yet the market hasn’t realized that we’re not shooting for adoption – adoption is the broader effect of some good engagement. That is some solution creation on the platform. Despite these conversations, presentations, and work with clients I wanted to make sure that I was absolutely clear in my conversations and to make sure that I could explain why the things I was suggesting would work and what folks would need to do to ensure that they’d work in their environment so I decided to do some additional research and reading to clarify and support my message. That led to a ton of reading including:

Drive, Daniel Pink (Review, Amazon)
Leading Change, John Kotter (Review, Amazon)
User Adoption Strategies, Michael Sampson (Amazon)
365 Ways to Motivate and Reward Your Employees with Little or No Money, Dianna Podmoroff (Review, Amazon)
42 Rules of Employeee Engagement, Susan Stamm (Review, Amazon)
Building Trust: In Business, Politics, Relationships and Life, Fernando Flores and Robert Solomon (Review, Amazon)
Trust & Betrayal in the Workspace, Dennis and Michelle Reina (Review, Amazon)

To that we have to add the books that I had already read and integrated into my work. I decided to review my notes and make sure I wasn’t missing anything. Here’s that list of books I went back through:

Peopleware, Tom Demarco and Timothy Lister (Review, Amazon)
Outliers, Malcom Gladwell (Review, Amazon)
Blink, Malcom Gladwell (Review, Amazon)
The Tipping Point, Malcom Gladwell (Review, Amazon)
The Time Paradox, Phillip Zimbardo and John Boyd (Review, Amazon)
Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams (Review, Amazon)

The end result of all of this hard work was 2 hours and 21 minutes of what the reviewers have called “information dense” and “content heavy.” The content ships as a single DVD that is playable on a standard DVD player. The target was nominally 3 hours. I think I did pretty good for hitting targets without an audience to interact with. The one criticism that I’ve gotten is that while the content is absolutely the right content, it’s not the “how to” that folks expected since that’s all the Shepherd’s Guide for End Users was. In order to address that concern, I’ll be following up the Psychology of SharePoint Adoption and Engagement DVD with a “How to do SharePoint Adoption and Engagement” DVD in the next few months. I’ll give you a “bag of tricks” to use when implementing the knowledge you’ll gain from the Psychology DVD.

The DVDs will be available from the SharePointShepherd.com web site as well as through Amazon.com. The price for the “Psychology of SharePoint Adoption and Engagement” is $299.99. Until October 31, 2011 I’ll be offering the DVD at a special discounted $249.99 price on the SharePoint Shepherd site.

Public Speaking