Planning the Intranet II

Seems like someone in the company has read the post about the intranet re-design. We received communication that a complete organisational layer will be disappearing! This was actually what I hoped for because I firmly believe in flat layered organisations. From what Ive seen in different companies, is that flatter organisations tend to embrace employee empowerment, are quicker in their decision making and more flexible in fast moving/changing markets (like the IT business we operate in).

I also believe that this will enable me to design the intranet in a much more useful way. The platforms we implemented lately are web based platforms to enable and improve both horizontal and vertical communication. My biggest fear was that with the classic org-chart the company has here these platforms would not be used to the fullest. Especially when I received the first ideas from management, in which they actually wanted to implement the full structure of the organisation in the intranet design.

As it looks now, I’d have to go back to the drawing board, which I’m happy with, because now it looks like we can design a modern intranet, that will actually enable cross-team communication and combine that with a sound knowledge management strategy.

Planning the Intranet I

As we are currently about to start implementing a sharepoint environment, this also implies that we will have to plan the Intranet.

Currently we do not have any. Well, we have the intranet site of our English company headquarters, but that is hardly used, and does not interact with us. Meaning that we cannot add our content, links to our tools, etc. The Sharepoint implementation will give us the possibility of having our own intranet site. This is, I believe, very important. Mainly because being an IT company with a lot of different teams, spread over different floors using only email as a way of “digital communication” is … say… a bit outdated (Heavy understatement). This is especially true if you know that most problems we experience internally are due to communication problems (either lack of, incorrect or simply non-existing).

The intranet could change that. Could, I say, because I believe that if not planned and managed correctly and across the board, an intranet can cause more problems than it was designed to resolve.

Management manages this company in a very typical style, you could really apply the machine metaphor to this one! Top-Down and in very linear streams. It is really hard here to make different dept. managers talk with each other and even more if they have to work together.

Lately there is a lot if buzz about 2.0 technologies, and how they can benefit communication outside work, but also in the office. Examples are company wiki’s, facebook-style people profiles etc.

I am now looking into planning the whole new environment. Not because I’m asked to, but because “I can see the cloud hanging above me, and don’t feel to wait till its raining”… Call it being pro-active (but I will dedicate another post to that;) ).

Personally I would like to make sure the intranet will give us these communication advantages and I believe that is also has to be future proof. My biggest fear is that the intranet ends up to be absorbed by “the Machine”, managed by a few upstairs who only care about their specific parts/departments or tools.

I see that the modern organisation is flat, as flat as possible without interfering with operations. If you look at these new communication technologies, you see that these are enablers for this. Maybe they even push organisations is this direction. The problem is: “how to apply modern tools in a company whose management thinks in an old-fashioned way”

Knowledge Management (KM)

As mentioned in the previous post, we are now looking into setting up a whole new knowledge management strategy for our office.

Currently this is dealt with per team. We have approx 250 people working in 15 account teams, giving IT support. Each of these accounts have their knowledge base and their knowledge management processes (if any). As you understand this is not an ideal situation. It is impossible to benefit from each others’ information, and there are a lot, really a lot of double, even triplicate documents. (after all most of us troubleshoot a printer in a similar way).

For a company that is trying to standardise all over the place, this is one of our worst areas.

According to many KM specialists, the first step in this whole plan should be to make sure we have senior management support. This to be honest is more difficult as it seemed. I was convinced that knowing the above, and actively trying to standardise, they would listen to a plan like this, but soon found out the “the idea is good, but it will be too expensive, or take you too long”. Yes, there will be a cost, and a considerable effort, but the return will be a very valuable asset; Knowledge! The work we do at service desks is for a huge part based on the knowledge we have at hand. An analyst can be great in troubleshooting and phone skills, but without documentation…. After all, none of us knows everything.

We are now at the stage that the senior management team is interested in our plans, but we are still not getting a clear go-ahead. This causes us to have to work on the plan outside office hours…

We already have the main outline of the plan. We have the platform (wss) and bit by bit we start to get support. I’m sure that one of these day’s well get the “official” project request. Then we can start gathering people to set up a small project team, and present our plans to the different teams, to get their feedback.

Also, we made a SWOT analysis of the current tools we use, which will help a lot identifying the requirements once we reach the lower level of our plan, which is how the database design would look.

At the moment we are putting everything we’ve got in a high level project plan. Mainly to keep ourselves on track and focused on the parts that are important at the moment and not get in to too much detail (which is a common mistake techies make!). As soon as we have it ready, Ill post an update!

Solutions Architect? – II

This is a continuing story. Because I was not sure how to reply to the question asked, I did the least effective… I asked my boss. Not my direct report, but his boss.

This caused quite a small storm in Barcelona. (completely unrelated to the devastating effects of wind force 10 this weekend – Pictures here -) the Service Support Manager in question reacted weird. I’m not sure, but to me it looked like he did not really know what to do with my question.

I can imagine partly that that is so (which would not be a big problem to me, as nobody knows everything), However it seemed to me he felt attacked somehow.

The issue is that we currently do not have a Solution Architect and his point was (I guessed) that we don’t want one neither. He did not say it, but I interpreted his way of explaining as: “Get that idea out of your head!”.
When I asked him the initial question, it was more to see if he could maybe help me planning my career path towards such a position and nothing more (I believe carreer management is an important task for a manager?!?).
When he was finishing his wave of discontent he ended by telling me that “this issue is something I will have to raise with the Director!”, making this story… To be continued….

Am I a (Junior) Solutions Architect?

Currently as I explained in the past, my role is the one of Technical leader. This, in our company is defined as:

“To identify and exploit opportunities for service improvement within the ISC (our office) environment – both internally and within specific customer accounts. To drive and coordinate initiatives designed to achieve superior levels of service in line with Computacenter’s contractual agreements. To take responsibility for the managing of projects to enable teams to meet & surpass productivity and service standards.”

I received a mail today in which a high positioned manager in my company asked me who in our office acts as a solutions architect.Now the role of Solutions Architect is one I had in the back of my head as a possible next step in my Career. I have never been a person that knows since day one what I want  in the future (being a Gemini in IT), but lately I have been looking into several different career paths ranging from consultancy to Solutions Architect.

When I read that mail this morning, It was the first time the name Solutions Architect role caught my attention. I believe it did not before, due to the enormous amount of job titles available in IT (from which I believe most to be made up by HR staff that was not sure how to classify their staff – Also I sometimes get the feeling that people think that longer job titles are for more important roles, kind of like an extension of their …)

I found that Microsoft offers a Certified Architect (MCA) certification path, which would prepare for this role. On their website they give a good idea what the role consists of(from their point of view):

“Communicate mainly with business owners within a company and with the technical staff that delivers the solution. The projects they work on affect the enterprise and they design the solution to take advantage of the existing assets, integrate them into the existing environment, follow the enterprise architecture, and solve the business problems of the business owner or unit. They are primarily responsible for taking a project through envisioning and design, and are more consultative to the project manager during the development and deployment phases, ensuring the project stays true to the architecture, time-lines, and budgets. If problems occur, they are escalated to the solutions architect.”

This is perfectly in line with my Job Description. Now I am aware of the differences between both definitions, but believe them to be very comparable. (Also the rest of my job description, which I cannot publish because of confidentiality) looks very similar.

The next days Ill be looking into this, and mostly on how I can now direct my role to that of a Solutions Architect.

POST – PRINCE2 Training

Well, a bit late, but as promised, a quick review on how the Prince2 training was.

The trainer, part of the company’s higher management level really knew his stuff. He gave us a quick historical overview, and explained the most important phases of the project. He did not go too deep into the diferent phases of the PRINCE2, but explained each in a more global manner. I believe he did this, to enable us to scale the theory to our business units and projects.

As explained elsewhere, I am currently very busy developing small to medium sized Domino applications, most are workflow, data collection or reporting tools. However I am the only one doing this.

I am now thinking that my supervisor could help me organising the huge amount of work. (currently developing 5 Applications and working on 2 Migrations) However it is hard for me, (mainly because I do not want to loose the freedom of movement I enjoy now), to talk to him about this. I would not like him to micro-manage me. This happens a lot with people who manage a small team (he manages 8).

Therefore, before he signs up for the training and starts getting great ideas, I’d like to propose a way where I keep the liberty I have now…. Any Ideas? Let me know!!

PRINCE2 Training

Next week Ill be joining a small 1 day training session on PRINCE2 Project Management.

I look forward to this as this is the first project management theory I will listen to since university. Since I followed Hotel Management studies where project management was not one of the most important subjects, and especially not IT projects.

This course will apply the PRINCE2 theory to IT projects. My biggest hope here is that Ill get some kind of solid base, to be able to plan, and execute my projects from.

Currently, with no “official experience” in planning organising and controlling projects, everything I do, I do according an order or methodology I’ve learnt from colleagues or passed (bad)experiences. Since I am doing a more or less similar job for the last months, I have learnt a lot. I am wondering how much that I have learnt I will have to “unlearn” after the course, and how much of the course I can actually apply in practice.

Now, I work in a pretty organised manner. Even though I started this position from scratch, I have managed to:

• Organize/Plan incoming Work Requests (by creating a request management tool)
• Maintain a solid work-log of all the different projects I am involved in and most of all, (Using my tool, instead of photocopied forms they had lying around here :s )
• Keep up with the deadlines I set.

I will now start reading a little PRINCE2 pre-course documentation (Wikipedia) to prepare a bit. This is probably not really needed, but as I am not an -A- student and classroom trainings are not my preferred method, I guess pre-study can do no harm.

After the training, my plan is to implement the theory in the tool I have created. As soon as its finished, probably, by the end of the month, I will post a link.

for now… a screenhot “as-is”:

Multitasking!

I often wonder how come, there are so few people that really have an idea of he concept of delivering a “service”. From the Wikipedia (I know, not always 100% right…) a service is defined as follows:

A service is the non-material equivalent of a good. A service provision is an economic activity that does not result in ownership, and this is what differentiates it from providing physical goods. It is claimed to be a process that creates benefits by facilitating either a change in customers, a change in their physical possessions, or a change in their intangible assets.

By supplying some level of skill, ingenuity,and experience, providers of a service participate in an economy without the restrictions of carrying stock (inventory) or the need to concern themselves with bulky raw materials. On the other hand, their investment in expertise does require marketing and upgrading in the face of competition which has equally few physical restrictions.

I would like to emphasize the last paragraph and Ill explain why.

We work in a team in a company that has the following motto: “Striving to be in the Top 5 global service providers”. Therefore, I have allway’s expected, common sense I’d say, that the quality of the service you provide would make thát little difference that gets you in that top 5.

The sad thing, I believe is that often service quality is balanced against the cost of a service. Logic, after all this is a business, and we are here to make money, right? But even so I believe that it is not necessarily more expensive to deliver a decent quality service.

Our company, and to be more precise our department or site here uses a “service model” which, supposedly gives you all the ingredients that you need to deliver an IT service, taking the workload etc. in account. However, In the 3 years I work here, and see projects come and go but Ive never seen the service model changed, nor Ive seen people doubt the reliability of it.

The reason a lot of clients look for another service provider is… guess what? The quality of the Service provided.

This is where I am worried. If a service-desk is set-up using a model, and projects fail, I would be thinking about the quality of the model.

Also an other possible problem is the fact that there are different types of people working here with different looks on how they should, or are supposed to perform their job. Don’t get me wrong here, I am not trying to tell of anyone, but the fact stays that in a call-center, where salaries are around Kelvin freezing point, motivation and dedication are hard to find. My personal view on this is that I signed a contract, I accepted to do a job for a stipulated amount of money.

The strangest of all, is that the management here is absolutely convinced “we’re doing great”. Yes, we maintain most statistics in “green”, but still lack that level of skill, ingenuity and experience I believe would make us standout.

The problems  I am facing day-to-day, are very tightly linked with the above described problems. Most of the wor I do now, is giving technical support, or Advice to the Business Improvement team. But someone should realise that Cost v.s.  Quality is a balance thing and that reducing the costs too much will eventually show in the level of quality.