Planning the Intranet III

For about 5 years I have been working with IBM software. Mostly using Lotus Domino and Notes, designing applications. However I also looked at other technologies, like Websphere and DB2.

I have recently switched (well, I’m still switching) to comparable products from Microsoft. Mainly becasue the company I work for made the decision to stop using IBM for their internal mail and databases.

I do however believe that IBM, known as Big Blue, a big and slow organisation, was ahead of Microsoft concerning intranet software and ease of development back in the day’s they launched Websphere. I have been looking at an article on their website, that states that in 2006, their Intranet was listed in the Nielsen Norman Group Report: Intranet Design Annual 2006: Year’s Ten Best Intranets.

I never heard of that report before, and headed straight over for a look: http://www.nngroup.com/reports/intranet/design/. The report is for sale. 224$ and its yours. For me that is too expensive, and Im sure that my boss (who is likely to leave soon), would have a good laugh if I walk over to ask him for the money!

(reports from previous years still cost about 200$, which I still find very steep!)

However, it gave me a good impression what points to look at for our Intranet:

Some of the key areas for which best practices are presented in the report are:

• Company and industry news
• Integrating internal and external information sources
• Editorial control of the intranet homepage
• Keeping the intranet up-to-date
• CEO blogging
• Employee and department weblogs
• Onboarding of new employees
• Consistent navigation
• Multilingual intranets; supporting international employees
• Multimedia and video on intranets
• Data visualization
• Web 2.0 features on intranets
• Community
• Polls
• Collaboration tools and discussion boards
• Internal wikis
• Employee self service
• Search
• Governance
• Development process for intranet redesigns
• Web analytics for intranets
• Staffing of intranet teams; where they report in the organization
• Updating and maintaining standards and guidelines for intranet design
• Intranet branding
• Promoting new intranet features
• Staff directory and employee profile pages
• Corporate calendars
• Personalization
• Customization
• Alerts
• Working with external design agencies

These points are things (call them features) they look at when evaluating intranet sites. I believe this to be a very complete list, and I’m sure that in a company our size (just looking at our office in Spain, we are about 300 people) can and will have to remove some of the points. Either because of difficulty of implementation (read: cost), Irrelevance or plain Overkill.

It looks like we have a Feature Checklist, with which we can start planning!

Intranet budgets and staffing

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.

European Championship´s on

Not yet, but in a months time, well have the European football/soccer Championship. Great, I really love it!! In this part of Spain though, the people do not tend to watch a lot. The Catalans don´t feel Spanish and don’t get in the mood as the rest of Europe. The Dutch go crazy, everything turns in to orange, the national color.

Now, the really interesting part is that in the office, I’m asked to set up a system, so most employees can watch the games. The rules are: Nothing Illegal and No (Bandwidth) problems on the network.

2 Years ago, with the World Cup, we built a streaming media server, with the help of the windows media encoder, and had a workstation per desk that connected and played the stream. Our office then was smaller, and therefore we had less interference with in and outgoing traffic.

Now my first Idea was to have the lab set-up with a streaming media server, and a digital DVB Receiver. Then patch about 5 desks per floor (3 floors) to the lab network. I will still have to see if that is possible, but please, if you have any Ideas…..?

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.

Off-Site Visit!

One of the good things of my job, is that we (sometimes) actually get the chance to visit customer-sites. For me beeing a techy this is a very usefull experience. I realise that most of us, never had the chance of a face to face talk with the customer, let alone, visit the company!!

The visit, this time took me to Germany, where we have a big client. Our company is interested in taking on some of the IT Services they provide locally, and offer them from Barcelona. This off course is a lot cheaper, and we should, eventually be able to provide a better.

My job is to inventorise the work done onsite and see if we can take on the services they provide remotely. Looking at the activities, tools, training needed etc. The biggest problem I am facing now, after returning, is that we in Barcelona hire L1 call-taking agents based on their language skills, instead of looking at their computer skills. This has created a lot of problems in service delivery in the past but since it hard to find people at all with the currect wages the company offers….. so we are looking at implementing sevices that range from user creation/deletion, folder management etc.

The solution will probably be some training and have a team script a lot of the manual actions to be performed…..

More news about this will follow!