Community managers have a tough job. They deal with lots of different stakeholders trying to find that elusive “middle ground”. They incessantly cheer on community activities and push adoption of collaboration best practices; but when it comes to validating their position through tangible and quantifiable metrics it can sometimes seem daunting. Is the best measure user participation? How about community size? Each of these seem like great things, and they are, but typically organizations don’t have a lot of tolerance for soft measures that don’t directly impact the “bottom-line”.

Recently I have been working to identify ways in which organizational performance gains can be tied to community activities. Since my current position involves helping large organizations increase performance from their development teams, I started first by looking at something that may seem far removed from community, knowledge reuse.

Why reuse?  The reason I chose to build my case around reuse is that the potential for productivity gains is huge. Let’s do some simple math to illustrate the point. Let’s say a development organization has 1000 developers employed. The industry average indicates that a single developer will write somewhere in the neighborhood of 3200 lines of code per year. That’s 3.2 million lines of code! At an industry cost per line of code of $27 (taken from Applied Software Measurement by Caper Jones) that’s approximately $86 million in software development costs per year!! Wow! If we can replace just a fraction of that development effort with reusable components and establish a process for interweaving reusable assets into all software projects we can save an organization millions of dollars per year.

In this post let’s first look at the process of reuse and in later posts I’ll follow up with some specific suggestions for creating an effective reuse program.

Reuse Process

Reuse has five specific phases with hurdles between each phase that impedes progress to the next stage. Overcoming these obstacles will be key to the long-term success of your reuse efforts.

Publication

During this phase knowledge is converted into something that is explicit and consumable by others. This phase represents the transfer of one person’s understanding, education, and wisdom into a tangible good. The publication format can be nearly anything – a blog, wiki, software artifact, anything that is consumable by another person.

Publication events are of very low value unless they can clear the first hurdle for reuse, Findability. Findability describes how readily available information is to other users in an enterprise. Enterprise strategies to increase findability include document repositories, index and search, push notifications, and categorization and taxonomy. Increasing the findability of assets requires a solid understanding of knowledge asset usage and user behavior.

Discovery

The Discovery phase begins when another user in the organization tries to find an answer to a problem relevant to them. During this phase the output of the publication event is found and analyzed for relevance against a new problem. This can be done via search, browsing, or by someone sharing a document via email. This is a particularly important phase because without discovery the publication event will go unused and is of very low value to the overall organization.

Understanding

During this phase information has been found but may not be fully understood by the consumer. This phase is a critical component of the Reuse Process because it promotes and encourages questioning and full understanding of the material.

Collaboration tools are essential during this phase of the process. The requisite for any collaboration tool is that a question and answer can take place to facilitate understanding between parties. To better disseminate information and to make it more accessible to others in the future, public exchanges should be used when possible. Communication channels like phone, IM, and email are great mechanisms that enable questioning and understanding but also limit the consumption of this “give and take” process to a very few parties. This sometimes is sought after behavior but in many cases the Reuse Process would be more effective if the discussions where held in public forums that are fully searchable and have meta-data such as comments and reviews that can be associated with the artifact.

Extension

The next phase of the Reuse Process is the Extension phase. In this phase we are applying the knowledge, wisdom, and education that was distilled in the original artifact into scenarios that we own and are a part of. In this way knowledge has been transferred to us from someone else and used in, perhaps, totally new ways. The context of the original information may only tangentially apply to these new scenarios, if at all. The idea being that because of someone’s published work we have been able to grow our personal knowledge base and now have the ability to extend a concept into a new area.

A great example of the extension of knowledge into new areas was the seminal work by Christopher Alexander “A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction”. In this book Alexander makes the case for developing construction practices based on the fundamental notion that harmonious patterns have existed in architecture for centuries and that these patterns should be reused if they add value and harmony. This work was later applied to computer science by several researchers, most notably Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides and a new field in computer science was formed with the same basic tenets applied to computer science as Alexander had originally written about. This example clearly demonstrates the Extension principal (although on the extreme perhaps) that allows knowledge designed for one audience and context to be discovered, discussed, and transformed into another entirely different area of study.

Integration

The last phase is the Integration or Reintegration phase where changes that impact the original artifact are integrated back to improve the original. Integrations can take on several different forms from comments and ratings on a document to bug fixes or functionality enhancements for a software artifact.

The key to integration is to understand the need and desire of others to contribute and to provide the support and infrastructure that allows community and organizational knowledge to flow back into the original artifact.

Conclusion

As development teams organize more and more around driving value to the end customer via Agile methodologies, I see reuse as an area that could be overlooked easily without a unifying process. Project teams become focused on delivering their user stories and forget the bigger picture of component reuse because a) it was not budgeted for the sprint or b) no teams are working horizontally across the various project teams to discover reuse artifact candidates. But this post has gone on for long enough. I’ll post again soon and ferret out some of these issues.

I just read Joel Spolsky’s blog entitled “A Little Less Conversation” which discusses something I’ve blogged about in the past here and here, communication overload.

After reading that post I began to consider my own personal experience in meetings over the last dozen or so years and decided to add an addendum to the communication node problem that was so eloquently detailed in the Mythical Man Month by Brooks.

The problem with Brooks’ theory of intercommunication is that it doesn’t take into account the “Number of Managers” in any given meeting.  He assumes in his calculation that all nodes in a communication network are equal.  This is a mistake.  All nodes are not equal, as anyone who has sat through a meeting with more than one manager participating can attest to.

Managers have keen insight into every major (and minor) issue at hand and willingly share that information with the team in a seemingly endless discourse that greatly adds to the meeting’s productivity and value.  In fact I’ve been in meetings with multiple managers that have lasted two, maybe three, times longer than the scheduled meeting length due to the significant wisdom that each of the managers was imparting to their counterparts and the team.

This imbalance in communication node weighting should be reflected in a revised formula for group intercommunication (especially meetings).  Brooks’ original formula can be stated as n(n-1)/2=communication pathways. The revised formula adds the significance of management communication to the pathways problem by accurately describing the impact of management on the original formula.  This new formula can be expressed as (n(n-1/2)) ^x (^x indicates raised to the power of x) where x is the number of managers.

As an example I will restate the original example given by Brooks and then show the difference when true communication weighting has been added…

Example: 50 developers give 50 · (50 – 1) / 2 = 1225 channels of communication.

However, given our new formula and assuming the presence of 3 managers (or significant stakeholders) into our team we now see the impact of the additional management on our communication overhead.

Example: 50 developers + 3 Managers give (50 · (50 – 1) / 2)^3  = 1838265625 channels of communication.

There, that’s better.  This new formula clearly shows the benefit of adding additional management resources to any project.

You can thank me later Fred .

Related Reading

• The Mythical 40 Hour Workweek
• Productivity and Multitasking
• What Do Potential Energy and Collaboration Tools Have in Common?
• Lost Productivity

Nearly 35 years ago Fred Brooks wrote his seminal book Mythical Man Month detailing his experiences managing a large team of developers.  He observed that adding resources to a project could actually impede progress due to communication overhead between increasing numbers of project members.  Everyone needed to keep apprised of what everyone elese was doing.  This communication overhead actually slowed progress.

Brooks looked specifically at software development projects, but I believe his conclusion holds true across all projects.  With the proliferation of matrix style organizations and the lack of strategically focused planning, we’ve created a corporate culture that reacts to every crisis by sending lots of email and having lots of meetings in the hope that something positive must happen due to all this communication.  The secret is, it won’t.  Lots of communication only exacerbates the problem.  What we need to do is remember that communication does not solve business problems; strategic planning and productive action solves problems.

The Quest for the Empty INBOX

This is the time of year we think about our jobs and how our actions map to our company’s goals.  It’s objection setting time.  Year after year we define meaningful, seemingly attainable goals only to see them gradually slip away during the course of the year due primarily to one thing, too much unfocused and unproductive communication.  As crazy as that sounds, how many times have you went to work full of enthusiasm for finally knocking out that project only to find that your schedule has been hijacked and now includes 2 or 3 new meetings?  On top of that, your boss has suddenly found his “next hot thing” and sent you a dozen emails that leave you scratching your head as to (a) how they all relate to one another and (b) fit into the corporate strategy.  Adding insult to injury he also wants an action plan on how to handle those twelve seemingly unrelated emails… by EOD.  As you may have guessed, that project you wanted to finish never finds its way onto your desk and the worst part of it all is that finishing that project IS actually ON YOUR GOAL SHEET.  Go figure?

Reacting seems to be the only goal we need to define on our objective sheet for the year.  Forget getting any real work done. All that seems to matter anymore is getting through our email and meetings and making sure that everyone on the email chain knows we’re “on top of that”.  Maybe we should create an automatic outgoing email that simply replies to every message with “I’m on it”.  We’d be the company hero.  Does it really matter if we get anything done as long as people think we’re working on it?

Herein lies the problem.  Not only has excessive email communication become the norm in business, it’s also how we are defining success in our workdays.  In times gone by we defined our success by how we contributed towards the company’s objectives and whether or not we influenced the bottomline.  Today we define success by whether or not we’ve processed all our incoming email and at least looked like we handled all the day’s “hot” issues.  How many times have you gotten nothing productive done during the day, but felt successful just because your INBOX was empty?  We’ve become a slave to our communications systems and reacting to them rather than intelligently planning and using email and IM as tools for thoughtful articulation of messages.

So is there any hope for reestablishing our productivity and becoming an agent of change rather than an instrument of reactionary behavior?  Here’s my list of things to do to obtain the Mythical 40 Hour Workweek.

Cleanup Your INBOX

In Get Your Productivity Groove On I discussed the problem of context switching between tasks and how it effects your overall performance.  Because the use of email is so prevalent in our society, my guess is you have lots of extraneous emails sitting in your INBOX; email from your relatives, mailing lists, newsletters, etc.  You should eliminate as many non-essential emails as you can and move them to a personal email address.   Less mail in your INBOX means less temptation to check it everytime you see your notification bar indicating “You’ve Got Mail”.  Less email checking means more focus and more focus means more real work.

This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine.  Everyone seems to hit “Reply All” and/or adds lots of people to the CC list because they think someone might be interested.  Well guess what… WE’RE NOT!  I have enough email that’s directly related to me, I don’t need email that MAY interest me.  If you think it’s important or relevant to me… send it TO: ME.  Many people I know have already resorted to filtering all CC’d email and placing them directly into archive folders.  Maybe you should too .

Train Yourself to Get Things Done  

In the book Getting Things Done by David Allen he defined a system for personal productivity that teaches people to evaluate incoming messages, make a decision and act.  It’s a great system, but may not be necessary if we just focus on a few simple steps to get back our lost productivity.

First, review your yearly objectives and establish whether they still make sense.  If you aren’t sure, schedule time with your manager so that you understand from a high level what you should be working on.  This is also a good way to review the company’s objectives and understand how your job makes “a difference”.

Secondly, create simple goals for each day that help you reach your objectives, and schedule time in your calendar to ensure you can work on those goals.  If you don’t, your schedule will undoubtedly be “hijacked” by someone else’s agenda.

“Productivity is never an accident. It is always the result of a commitment to excellence, intelligent planning, and focused effort.”  –Paul J. Meyers

Thirdly, learn to focus again.  We’ve gotten so used to being interrupted throughout the course of the day that we’ve forgotten how to focus on the task at hand.  During your scheduled time to work on your daily goals, don’t check email, in fact turn it off, and don’t answer the phone.  These are the distractions that drain your productivity.  Focus on your work and only your work.  I’ve even heard of people who have taken to working on non-networked PCs just to minimize the chance they will be distracted by (a) email or IM or (b) distract themselves by surfing the web.  I haven’t gone this far yet, but if you find it difficult to stay on task, maybe pulling the networking cable is not such a bad idea.

Learn to Say “NO”

This one may be the hardest to actually do because noone likes to say “no”.  Probably somewhere deep in our subconscious we believe that saying “no” shows weakness.  If we say “no” our boss will think we can’t manage the load.  The contrary is probably closer to the truth.  By carefully analyzing your incoming work against your defined objectives you’ll prove to be a valuable asset in accomplishing the “important” work that implements your company’s strategy.  However, I’m not suggesting you say “no” to all incoming requests – just be careful in your analysis of what you’re being asked to do.  Is it important to the company’s objectives?  Are you the right person to accomplish the task?  Are there other time critical tasks you need to perform in order to meet your objectives?

Related Posts

Get Your Productivity Groove On

Lost Productivity

Let’s look at a simple fact …

The human mind does not process information in parallel (you may want to go back and read that again).  It just can’t be done.  The Myth of Multitasking by Dave Crenshaw.  In his book he uses a simple example that is very convincing.  Simply take a sheet of paper and draw a line across the page.  Above of the line you will write the alphabet, below it the numbers 1 to 26.  The kicker is that you write one letter and then one number, so you’d write ‘A’ above the line and ‘1′ below the line, then you’d write ‘B’ above the line and ‘2′ below the line, oscillating back and forth until done.  Time this exercise.  Next, time yourself writing just the alphabet and then just the numbers 1 to 26 in serial without switching back and forth.  If you’re like most people you’ll find that it takes about twice as long to do the first exercise as it does the second.  So think about that.  You did the same amount of work in both cases but it took you twice as long.  The only difference was context switching.  Unfortunately, context switching has become the “norm” in today’s offices.

People forget that multitasking isn’t about processing information in parallel, which we just proved was impossible.  Multitasking originally meant juggling or managing multiple tasks during a given period of time, not at the same time.  Somehow the definition was hijacked to mean something more akin to parallel processing.  Now people brag about how many conversations they can carry on at once, but based on what we now know, what they’re really saying is “Look at me, I’m getting less work done”.  Probably something you don’t want your boss to know .

The other thing to remember is that every communication channel has it’s own place and purpose in the world and changing conventions can be unproductive.  Email was born to replace memos and letters.  No one expected you to reply to a memo or letter within minutes of it being issued.  Your memos would gather in your mailbox and you’d pick them up once a day and work through the replies, just like you still pick up your mail once a day from the Post Office.  What’s changed is the use paradigm and expectations.  Now in this world of cell phones and computers that has people linked in everywhere, all the time, we expect immediate responses to our emails. It’s just not realistic.

Similarly, IM changed too.  Originally, it was a social activity done during off-hours.  You would log on to AIM from home when you were actually AVAILABLE and chat with your friends.  Now it’s moved into the workplace, but in doing so kept many of it’s conventions from when it was used at home, such as the default status of “Available”.  The same goes for Twitter.  What used to be an extracurricular activity has suddenly found it’s way onto workplace desktops.  Don’t get me wrong, all these things are useful tools in the right situation, but they need to find a productive place on our desks without being distracting.  NOTE TO SELF:  It’s ironic that I’ll be pimping this via Twitter? .

In 1971 the economist Herbert A. Simon wrote “What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.”  Sage wisdom, but how do you apply it today without seeming like a Technophobe and dropping “off the grid”.   One thing we can do is remember that newer technologies may have evolved under social circumstances and not business ones.  This means the conventions which were adopted may be perfectly okay at home, but detrimental to the “Productive Desktop”.

Here are a few other tips to reclaim some of your productivity…

Remember when we where in school and had to write all those tedious papers.  Our teachers taught us to use outlines to organize our objectives and ideas.  We need to revisit that same strategy now.  Before logging on to your computer in the morning or after lunch, simply write down what your goals for the next few hours are and what tasks need to get done.  The point here is to set mini-goals for yourself and make sure you understand the steps necessary to achieve those goals.

The next thing on my list may surprise some, Internet Relay Chat (or just chat).  Chat has been around since the dawn of the Internet but evolved mostly in technical communities.  Chat has a different usage paradigm than the “ever distracting” IM.  It’s a communal technology which means its goal is to gather users with similar interests together into a real-time forum.  Once together they can ask questions of the entire group and not specific users.  This means users of the group can monitor the room at their own pace and ask or answer questions to a group of participants.  The goal of IRC is not to query specific users but give participants a forum in which many people are participating simultaneously which reduces the burden on a single user.  Open-source projects use chat all the time but it hasn’t been widely adopted in the business community which is a real shame given it’s advantages over IM.

The thing about IM is that it’s a direct connection to your attention especially since most users maintain the default status of ‘Available’ (that’s just asking for trouble).  I’d say my biggest distracter is currently IM when my status is ‘Available’, but what can you do?  During those periods when you know you need to focus, simply set your IM status to “Do Not Disturb”.  People will rarely bother you if your status is something other than “Available”.

Another great tip for regaining productivity is to only check for email, RSS, or Twitter updates every so often.  Set aside some amount of time in the morning and in the afternoon to go through your email and feed updates.  You’ll be amazed at how much more you get done when your email or RSS icon isn’t flashing at you constantly.

There are several ways to try to take back your life and I’ve only covered but a few here.   The key is to be proactive and manage technology and information the way you manage everything else in your life.  Too much of anything (even a good thing) is often bad.

If you are looking for some good books to read I’d suggest Getting Things Done by David Allen and the Myth of Multitasking by Dave Crenshaw.
Related Posts:

What Really Matters?
Lost Productivity
What does Potential Energy and Collaboration Have in Common?
In Defense of Distraction

6uzt3yf2vb

All information artifacts in the enterprise have “potential” for collaboration we just need to understand how to unleash that potential without creating another “Silo”. For all you Science Geeks out there this is very familiar to the concept of potential energy. Potential energy is the energy stored within an object waiting to be unleashed and converted to kinetic energy. Information artifacts in the enterprise possess the same potential for collaboration if the right conditions exist to release it.

Earlier in one of my posts I defined the Knowledge Cycle and its five key phases for creating and sustaining knowledge within an organization.

• Publish – information is distilled into some tangible form (document, report, wiki, email)
• Discover – finding the information from the Publish phase
• Discuss – bringing relevant parties together to better understand the information
• Personalize – adding your unique perspective to the original information
• Extend – applying newly formed knowledge to new and different scenarios

To effectively use the Knowledge Cycle and tap the potential of an organization you need to release the collaboration potential of your information using tools that understand personal and team relevance and allow information to act as the focal point of discussion and decision making. These information artifacts that have potential for collaboration we’ll call Social Objects. Social objects are information sources that encourage interaction between users due to the commonality users share with the object. They are created during the Publish phase of the Knowledge Cycle and tend to be the center around which collaboration takes place. An effective collaboration architecture allows all information sources available to a user to be considered social objects with potential for collaboration. If we use this metaphor to look across an enterprise it becomes apparent that all data sources available to knowledge workers should be considered social objects and as such collaboration should be, not only encouraged but enabled. This means that not only traditional social media like blogs, wikis, or discussion forums encourage collaboration but also that new information sources such as business intelligence reports or other business data should provide tools that bring users together and provide a platform for effective collaboration.

Let’s consider a perfectly valid business scenario that we’ve all seen dozens of times, a regional sales quota is missed in the Sales Department. The existing interactions that take place in an organization to discuss and solve this problem are broken. The current technology for finding, collaborating, and fixing the above problem relies on human interaction at nearly every level. If we walk through the current situation that most managers face it would contain the following steps:

Existing Steps

1. Get a link to a regional sales report via email at the end of the month
2. Browse the report (when you have time)
3. Discover the failing region
4. Use email to schedule an appointment among relevant parties
5. Discuss the issue at the appointed time among the parties
6. Create action items during the meeting
7. And finally repeat as necessary until you are either fired or the problem has been fixed.

In all honestly I simplified it some. It could have been worse if the manager had to go digging around to find out who the district sales manager was or use “Busy Search” to try to find a time that worked for all parties. Then there is the problem of the excessive amount of email that this flurry of activity will create and having to manage all of that!

Now consider the same scenario but this time using a smart collaboration platform. What if a platform existed that would allow us to place a report filter on the enterprise report server that would flag relevant data based on criteria we set? This platform would then discover the regional sales anomaly for us and understand that this particular object required collaboration. The platform would then automatically discover relevant parties and create a collaboration space that was focused around solving this particular issue. Busy Search is taken care of by the platform, the only thing you do is give your consent for the meeting to take place. Invitations are sent automatically. All the parties come together at the appointed time using both audio, video, and an online meeting space to discuss and archive the reasons for the missed quota. As action items arise during the meeting they are created and assigned in the meeting and associated with the initial report and workspace. As the participants begin working on their action items all relevant data is cataloged with the workspace and when the next meeting occurs the participants can easily check all the action items and progress in one place. Doesn’t that sound better?  We went from seven steps to two.

Reduced Steps:

1. Be at the meeting
2. Plan a course of action

This is the simplicity our collaboration platform needs to give us. Users shouldn’t have to worry about all the minutia involved in trying to create, discover, and manage workspaces and teams. We need tools that do the grunt work for us and let us focus on doing our REAL jobs. We need a platform that is flexible enough to allow connections to other systems for integration with communication services (email, calendaring, IM) and also provides the necessary tools that allow us to add collaboration components like comments, attachments, or tags to our Social Objects.

In the next installment we’ll look at some potential tools to make all this happen .