Just a quick note to mention that I’m off travelling again, this time swapping 39 degree Celsius summer weather of Perth for somewhere between –6 to 5 degrees of Canada. I’ll be spending a week in Canada running two classes – one public and one private. The first class is a public SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture class running in Vancouver. MVP Michal Pisarek of SharePointAnalystHQ fame will be there and it should be a terrific two days of learning how to think a little differently to govern SharePoint strategy and deployment. You will learn a bunch of new skills, techniques and perspectives. Best of all, the skills learnt are applicable for many other types of complex projects.

The class flyer is here: http://www.sevensigma.com.au/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2011/02/SPIA.pdf

The registration site is here: http://spiavancouver.eventbrite.com/

In terms of course coverage and content it is worth noting the research performed by the Eventful group (who run the Share conferences). According to them, the hot topic areas for SharePoint are governance, user adoption, change management, information architecture and user empowerment. These sort of topics are the sort where plenty of people tell you what the issues are, but are typically lighter on what to do about them. This class covers why this is, as well as dealing with all of these areas and presents detailed strategies, tools and methods to address them. Furthermore, aside from the 500+ page manual of meaty governance goodness, as a take home, we supply a CD for attendees with a sample performance framework, governance plan, SharePoint ROI calculator and sample mind maps of Information Architecture.

At last count there were 5 places left for the Vancouver class, so if you have been pondering if it is a worthwhile class, check out some of the feedback from the class web site. Also, if you know anybody who might be interested in attending, please pass the course flyer and registration site details to them. We always end up with people who tell us “Ah – if only I knew about the class!!”

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

www.hereticsguidebooks.com

                      

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Those of you who get an RSS feed of this blog might have noticed it was busy over last week. This is because I pushed out 4 blog posts that showed my analysis using IBIS of a detailed linear discussion on LinkedIn. To save people getting lost in the analysis, I thought I’d quickly post a bit of an executive summary from the exercise.

To set context, Issue Mapping is a technique of visually capturing rationale. It is graphically represented using a simple, but powerful, visual structure called IBIS (Issue Based Information System). IBIS allows all elements and rationale of a conversation to be captured in a manner that can be easily reflected upon. Unlike prose, which is linear, the advantage of visually representing argument structure is it helps people to form a better mental model of the nature of a problem or issue. Even better, when captured this way, makes it significantly easier to identify emergent themes or key aspects to an issue.

You can find out all about IBIS and Dialogue Mapping in my new book, at the Cognexus site or the other articles on my blog.

The challenge…

On the Intranet Professionals group on LinkedIn recently, the following question was asked:

What are the main three reasons users cannot find the content they were looking for on intranet?

In all, there were more than 60 responses from various people with some really valuable input. I decided that it might be an interesting experiment to capture this discussion using the IBIS notion to see if it makes it easier for people to understand the depth of the issue/discussion and reach a synthesis of root causes.

I wrote 4 posts, each building on the last, until I had covered the full conversation. For each post, I supplied an analysis of how I created the IBIS map and then exported the maps themselves. You can follow those below:

Part 1 analysis: http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2012/01/15/why-cant-users-find-stuff-on-the-intranet-in-ibis-synthesispart-1/
Part 2 analysis: http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2012/01/15/why-cant-users-find-stuff-on-the-intranet-an-ibis-synthesispart-2/
Part 3 analysis: http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2012/01/16/why-cant-users-find-stuff-on-the-intranet-an-ibis-synthesispart-3/
Part 4 analysis: http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/2012/01/16/why-cant-users-find-stuff-on-the-intranet-an-ibis-synthesispart-4/

Final map: http://www.cleverworkarounds.com/maps/findstuffpart4/Linkedin_Discussion__192168031326631637693.html

For what its worth, the summary of themes from the discussion was that there were 5 main reasons for users not finding what they are looking for on the intranet.

1. Poor information architecture
2. Issues with the content itself
3. People and change aspects
4. Inadequate governance
5. Lack of user-centred design

Within these areas or “meta-themes” there were varied sub issues. These are captured in the table below.

So now you have seen the final output, be sure to visit the maps and analysis and read about the journey on how this table emerged. One thing is for sure, it sure took me a hell of a lot longer to write about it than to actually do it!

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

www.hereticsguidebooks.com

                      

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The Heretics Guide to Best Practices is now available through Amazon, Barnes and Noble and iUniverse.

]

In Paul and Kailash I have found kindred spirits who understand how messed up most organizations are, and how urgent it is that organizations discover what Buddhists call ‘expedient means’—not more ‘best practices’ or better change management for the enterprise, but transparent methods and theories that are simple to learn and apply, and that foster organizational intelligence as a natural expression of individual intelligence. This book is a bold step forward on that path, and it has the wonderful quality, like a walk at dawn through a beautiful park, of presenting profound insights with humor, precision, and clarity.”

—Jeff Conklin, Director, Cognexus Institute

“Hugely enjoyable, deeply reflective, and intensely practical. This book is about weaving human artistry and improvisation, with appropriate methods and technologies, in order to pool collective intelligence and wisdom under pressure.”

—Simon Buckingham Shum, Knowledge Media Institute, The Open University, UK.

“This is a terrific piece of work: important, insightful, and very entertaining. Culmsee and Awati have produced a refreshing take on the problems that plague organisations, the problems that plague attempts to fix organisations, and what can be done to make things better. If you’re trying to deal with wicked problems in your organisation, then drop everything and read this book.”

—Tim Van Gelder, Principal Consultant, Austhink Consulting

“This book has been a brilliantly fun read. Paul and Kailash interweave forty years of management theory using entertaining and engaging personal stories. These guys know their stuff and demonstrate how it can be used via real world examples. As a long time blogger, lecturer and consultant/practitioner I have always been served well by contrarian approaches, and have sought stories and case studies to understand the reasons why my methods have worked. This book has helped me understand why I have been effective in dealing with complex business problems. Moreover, it has encouraged me to delve into the foundations of various management practices and thus further extend my professional skills.”

—Craig Brown, Director, Evaluator

                      

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I was surprised to see the recent SharePoint Fatigue Syndrome post got some traction in the interweb. As it happened, that particular post was kicking around in an unfinished state for months. The thing is, its not the only “home truth” type of post that I have sitting in my “drafts” folder. I also have one on the state of the SharePoint training market. Given that I have a training announcement to make, I thought that I would combine them.

A day in the life…

We recently worked on a SharePoint upgrade project, where the previous developers did an excellent job overall. That is…if you judge them on the SharePoint governance metrics of writing clean and maintainable code, packaging it up properly, not hacking away at system files and actually writing documentation.

Unfortunately, although they did an excellent job through that lens, the actual solution, when judged on whether users found that it made their life easier, it was an epic fail. Users hated it with passion and like many solution that users hate, the system was soon relegated to being a little-used legacy platform where the maintenance costs now outweighed the benefits. The organisation had invested a couple-hundred thousand dollars on this solution and saw very little value for that money. Accordingly, they took their business elsewhere…to us. After a workshop, the client had one of those inverse “aha” moments when they realised that if they had taken a little more time to understand SharePoint, the custom solution would have never been developed in the first place.

This sort of example, to me, highlights where SharePoint governance goes so wrong. The care and diligence the developers exercised was necessary, but clearly not sufficient. No matter what the quality of the code, the unit testing regime and its packaging, at the end of the day a blueberry pie was baked and the client wanted an apple pie. The problem was not in the ingredients or the baking. The problem was that by the time they delivered the pie, it was clear that the wrong recipe was used. In the above case, the developer had omitted a whole raft of critical considerations in creating the solution – none of which were covered in developer training.

Necessary but not sufficient…

When you think about it, the current approach to SharePoint training seems not to be about recipes, but all about ingredients. Trainees get shipped off to “boot camps” for an indoctrination of all of the ingredients in the cupboard (and SharePoint is a bloody big cupboard!). SharePoint features and components are examined in individual detail, usually with an accompanying exercise or lab to demonstrate competency in that particular component. Graduates then return with a huge list of ingredients, but still no skills in how to develop the right recipes.

What exacerbates this problem is that training is siloed across disciplines. As an example: An “IT Pro” bootcamp will go into meticulous detail about performance, scalability and design aspects. Any considerations around development, information architecture and user engagement are seen through the lens of the infrastructure nerd. (Ah – who am I kidding… user engagement in an IT pro bootcamp has never happened. )

Now consider for a second, how we design SharePoint sites. These days, it is common for people to actively discourage designing SharePoint solutions based on organisational departmental boundaries. (By organisational departmental boundaries I mean Marketing, HR, IT etc.) Why is this design approach frowned upon? Proponents claim that it tends to perpetuate  the problem of information silos and doesn’t stand the test of time, given that organisations tend to restructure just when your information architecture masterpiece is ready for prime time. In fact, the research organisation Jackob Neilsen did a study and found that task based structures (characterised by “My…” and “I need to…”) endured better than organisational based structures. Quoting from them:

In our study, task-based structures often endured better than intranets organized departmentally. In our user testing of intranets, we’ve also found that task-based navigation tends to facilitate ease-of-learning. Thus, the benefits for IA durability are just one more argument in favor of adopting a task-based structure for your intranet.

So what I find ironically funny is the second sentence of the Jackob Neilsen quote: “Ease-of-learning.” I wonder what sort of learning they are talking about? Presumably something other than delivering a failed solution with some really nice programming governance behind it! Yet the way SharePoint training is designed and marketed actually compartmentalises SharePoint training into similar silos. The result? Students get a rose coloured view of the SharePoint world, based on their discipline. This is because, as Ackoff brilliantly put it,  “complexity is in the eye of the beholder – the other persons job always looks simple”.

By the way, what I am highlighting is not the fault of the trainers because at the end of the day, they respond to what they think the market wants. Sadly, what the market thinks it wants is often not what it needs.

I feel that the missing link – and most critical aspect of SharePoint training for practitioners – is not about how many ingredients you know, but how you go about creating those recipes. Yet SharePoint training overly focuses on what each ingredient does in isolation – whether a job discipline or a particular component. Whilst I fully accept that knowing the ingredients is a necessity, it is clearly not sufficient. This is an airbrushed version of reality, without due consideration of how ingredients combine in unique scenarios. Accordingly, this training does nothing to teach how to achieve shared understanding between practitioner and the eventual users who have to live with the legacy of what is delivered.

When you think about it, shared understanding is what makes or breaks SharePoint success because it is the pre-requisite to shared commitment to a solution. As demonstrated by the example of great code underpinning a crap solution, lack of shared understanding and commitment will always trump any other good work performed.

What to do about it…

SharePoint is a product that often requires adaptive change on the part of users. Learning the capabilities of the product is one thing – changing entrenched collaborative practice is another altogether. In case you haven’t noticed before, users tend not to be charmed by new, shiny features if they cannot see how it will make their jobs easier. (Nerdy knowledge workers like you and me easily get seduced by shiny things but our world view is seriously skewed compared to those who live on the coal face of organisations). Thus, the skills required to facilitate change and align various roles, require a different type of training course: one that integrates rather than compartmentalises. One that teaches how to synthesise the whole, rather than reductionise into the parts.

For such a course, no virtual machines are needed because there are no labs to demonstrate competence in some SharePoint component that will be out of date by SharePoint vNext. Instead, such a course needs to focus on the concepts, patterns and practices that are typically not seen in the IT practitioners toolkit (and for that matter, not seen in many complex mainstream IT/PM methodologies). The added bonus for such a course is that the skills and learning’s it provides are applicable beyond SharePoint and even beyond IT itself. While a typical SharePoint might give you mileage for the current version, a course like what I describe will give you tools that you can use anywhere, irrespective of the technology and project.

Does such a class exist? (Is that the longest post you have ever read to get to such a rhetorical question? )

Of course it exists – I’ve been running it around the world for a couple of years now. It’s called the SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Class (#SPGovIA) and it was a year in the making and comes with lots of goodies, such as a CD with a sample performance framework, governance plan, SharePoint ROI calculator (spreadsheet) and sample mind maps of Information Architecture. The class was originally designed for Microsoft New Zealand, on behalf of 3Grow for the Elite program that used to certify gold partners for serious SharePoint competence. Since then its been run in the UK, Netherlands, US, Australia and New Zealand. Next month I will run classes in Singapore and Hong Kong.

For my US readers, early next year I will be taking the course on the road, specifically Canada and the USA in Feb 2012. This course is not run often, because for me the US is a damn long way to travel and my time is tight these days! So I sincerely hope that if this sort of class sounds interesting to you, then you will consider being part of it. Michal Pisarek has already made an announcement for classes in Vancouver, and more details will be forthcoming for one or two US cities. I only have time for 2 classes in North America, so which city should it be?

For more detail on the class, head on over to www.spgovia.com. While there, click the Media link and watch the first half hour of the class. I look forward to seeing you there.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

                      

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I have a couple of important community service type announcements to make.

How do I know I’m attending a legitimate Seven Sigma Class?

Sometimes the training marketplace can be confusing with various organisations offering various courses. Ask any attendee of the SPGov+IA class and they will attest to the uniqueness of our course. Both myself, and some of my trusted local partners have been contacted by people about other SharePoint courses in the Information Architecture space, wondering if we endorse or are in any way associated with them. This has happened again recently, so it’s probably worth clearing the air here and now.

Ahem

Seven Sigma has a number of relationships with like-minded organisations around the world. In the UK, we have a terrific relationship with Andrew and Ant at 21apps. In New Zealand, we work with Chan at 3Grow and Debbie at EnvisionIT. In the US we work with Erica Toelle at FPWeb, as well as Ruven Gotz and in Brisbane recently we worked with Alpesh Nakar from Just SharePoint.

Aside from myself, Ant Clay of 21apps is the only authorised trainer of our courseware. Essentially if Ant or I are not running the class, then it’s not my class!. Visit the trainer section of www.spgovia.com for our details.

Furthermore outside of Australia, if the course organiser is not Andrew Woodward or Ant Clay (Europe), Erica Toelle or Ruven Gotz (US), Chan or Debbie Ireland (New Zealand), then it is not the SPGov+IA class.

www.spgovia.com is the official site for the SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Master Class. Here you can find out about the class, feedback from past attendees, schedules and registration information. This is the authoritative source for all information related to all classes. Each of the above partners will publish location specific information about classes that they plan to run.

More SPGov+IA classes for 2011 (and Issue Mapping Class is a go…)

I am proud to report that the first ever Issue Mapping Master Class, co-developed with CogNexus and run by Seven Sigma happened in my home town of Perth last month. This has been a long time coming, and the feedback from the first attendees was immensely gratifying.

Definitely one of the best courses I have ever attended…I have already recommended to many people that they should get on the next course if possible. Jon Gorton

This course was brilliant. The technique itself is a valuable tool for any business with multiple applications. Leisha Velterop

So now on top of the SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Class, we can offer a specialist course on the craft of Issue and Dialogue Mapping – something that regular readers of this blog may be familiar with. For all alumni of the SPGov+IA class who put their hand up for a dedicated IBIS class, you now have your wish. The Issue Mapping class will be taken onto the road for the first time too and the plan is to run both classes in each location.

To that end, we have classes locked in for Auckland and Wellington. But Melbourne and  the US East coast are also being earmarked in the latter part of 2011. Here are the planned classes so far.

• September 5-6, 2011: #SPIAAKL SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture (Auckland, New Zealand)
• September 8-9, 2011 #IMAKL Issue Mapping Master Class (Auckland, New Zealand)
• September 12,-13 2011 #SPIAWEL SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture (Wellington, New Zealand)
• October 12,-13 2011 #IMPER Issue Mapping Master Class (Perth, Australia)
• November 10-11 2011 #SPIASIN SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture (Singapore)

We will publish more details of the new class as soon as we can.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

                      

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Ah, Erica Toelle – what a legend! Thanks to Erica and Fpweb, I’m thrilled to confirm that the Seattle SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture class is all systems go. Save the date as its very likely indeed to be the only SPIA class in the USA in 2011.  If it wasn’t enough that Erica will be joining me, but Ruven Gotz will be there too.

Thursday and Friday, May 05-06, 2011. (http://spiaseattle.eventbrite.com/)

The location is the Silvercloud Inn, 14632 SE Eastgate Way Bellevue, WA 98004

In this multimedia extravaganza of a blog post, lets take a closer look at this class and what you can expect. Below is a snippet of a talk I did in New Zealand called “SharePoint Governance  Home Truths”. This clip shows a little diagnostic test that I do on my audience, to see whether they have experienced the visible signs of wicked problems. If you want to know why you should go to SPGov+IA, then take my 2 minute test yourself.

If the two minute test has taken your fancy, then you might want to see what is in store on the course itself. Below is the first half-hour of module 1 (in the form of a conference session), as well as the accompanying slide deck.

Course Information:

Download Course Outline (PDF)

Download Class Flyer (PDF)

Most people understand that deploying SharePoint is much more than getting it installed.  Despite this, current SharePoint governance documentation abounds in service delivery aspects. However, just because your system is rock-solid, stable, well-documented and governed through good process, there is absolutely no guarantee of success.  Similarly, if Information Architecture for SharePoint was as easy as putting together lists, libraries and metadata the right way, then why doesn’t Microsoft publish the obvious best practices?

In fact, the secret to a successful SharePoint project is an area that the governance documentation barely touches.

This Master Class pinpoints the critical success factors for SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture and rectifies this blind spot.  Paul Culmsee’s style takes an ironic and subversive view on how SharePoint Governance really works within organizations while presenting a model and the tools necessary to get it right.

Drawing on inspiration from many diverse sources, disciplines and case studies, Paul Culmsee has distilled the "what" and "how" of governance down to a simple and accessible, yet rigorous and comprehensive set of tools and methods that organizations, large and small, can utilize to achieve the level of commitment required to see SharePoint become a successful part of your enterprise.

Some workshop sessions are hands on, we provide all of the tools and samples needed but please bring your own laptop.

Course Structure:

The course is split into 7 modules, run across two days.

Module 1: SharePoint Governance f-Laws 1-17:

Module 1 is all about setting context in the form of clearing some misconceptions about the often muddy topic of SharePoint governance. This module sheds some light onto these less visible SharePoint governance factors in the form of Governance f-Laws, which will also help to provide the context for the rest of this course

• Why users don’t know what they want
• The danger of platitudes
• Why IT doesn’t get it
• The adaptive challenge – how to govern SharePoint for the hidden organisation
• The true forces of organisational chaos
• Wicked problems and how to spot them
• The myth of best practices and how to determine when a “practice” is really best

Module 2: The Shared Understanding Toolkit – part 1:

Module 2 pinpoints the SharePoint governance blind spot and introduces the Seven Sigma Shared Understanding Toolkit to counter it. The toolkit is a suite of tools, patterns and practices that can be used to improve SharePoint outcomes. This module builds upon the f-laws of module 1 and specifically examines the “what” and “why” questions of SharePoint Governance. Areas covered include how to identify particular types of problems, how to align the diverse goals of stakeholders, leverage problem structuring methods and constructing a solid business case.

Module 3: The Shared Understanding Toolkit – part 2:

Module 3 continues the Seven Sigma Shared Understanding Toolkit, and focuses on the foundation of “what” and “why” by examining the “who” and “how”. Areas covered include aligning stakeholder expectations, priorities and focus areas and building this alignment into a governance structure and written governance plan that actually make sense and that people will read. We round off by examining user engagement/stakeholder communication and training strategy.

Module 4: Information Architecture trends, lessons learned and key SharePoint challenges

Module 4 examines the hidden costs of poor information management practices, as well as some of the trends that are impacting on Information Architecture and the strategic direction of Microsoft as it develops the SharePoint road map. We will also examine the results from what other organisations have attempted and their lessons learned. We then distil those lessons learned into some the fundamental tenants of modern information architecture and finish off by examining the key SharePoint challenges from a technical, strategic and organisational viewpoint.

Module 5: Information organisation and facets of collaboration

Module 5 dives deeper into the core Information Architecture topics of information structure and organisation. We explore the various facets of enterprise collaboration and identify common Information Architecture mistakes and the strategies to avoid making them.

Module 6: Information Seeking, Search and metadata

Module 6 examines the factors that affect how users seek information and how they manifest in terms of patterns of use. Building upon the facets of collaboration of module 5, we examine several strategies to improving SharePoint search and navigation. We then turn our attention to taxonomy and metadata, and what SharePoint 2010 has to offer in terms of managed metadata

Module 7: Shared understanding and visual representation – documenting your Information Architecture

Module 7 returns to the theme of governance in the sense of communicating your information architecture through visual or written form. To achieve shared understanding among participants, we need to document our designs in various forms for various audiences.

Putting it all together: From vision to execution

Attendees will be taking home a manual ~480 pages, containing the Seven Sigma Shared Understanding Toolkit CD with a sample performance framework, governance plan, SharePoint ROI calculator (Spreadsheet), sample mind maps of Information Architecture. These tools are the result of years of continual development and refinement "out in the field" by Paul Culmsee and have only been recently released to the public through this Master Class.

More Information:

• Praise for SharePoint Governance and IA Masterclass

Refund Policy:

No refunds will be issued for attendee cancellations once payment is recieved.  Class cancellation by the organizer will result in a refund less transaction fees.

http://spiaseattle.eventbrite.com/

                      

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Practical, relevant and seriously funny: These attributes are seldom seen together in a training session.

However, Paul Culmsee has practical, real world experience having worked on complex (wicked) projects which provides him with the background and understanding of what works and why.

Discover the immutable f-laws of SharePoint projects. Cry and laugh when you identify the reality of you own organizational platitudes, but breathe a sigh of relief when you see that there is a way out and that SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture can be achieved with everyone sharing the same understanding of where you are now and where you are trying to get to.

Paul also supports you new found realization of what needs to be done by providing you with the guidance, tools and methods that you can take from the classroom and apply to your complex (wicked) problem projects to make them work.

Basically it is all about people (gaining shared understanding), process (knowing how to get from here to there) and then the technology (SharePoint).

My team now uses the concept of shared understanding and the tools that the Governance and Information Architecture Class has provided to get customers “on page” before we design and code in SharePoint land.

Paul McTaggart

ECM Business Manager

Gen-i a division of Telecom New Zealand

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

                      

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I recently participated in the Australian and New Zealand community SharePoint conferences and had a blast. First up, I was given the opportunity to keynote the Australian conference on day 2, where I spoke about SharePoint Governance home truths. It received very positive feedback and I was told by a lot of people that it really made them rethink their governance approach. In fact, in the New Zealand session, as I was going through some of the common mistakes people make, I could see people cringing as they knew they were guilty as charged. One attendee buried her head in her hands when I started talking about the “buffet of platitudes” (what is the “buffet of platitudes” you ask? Come to my class to find out!

The community challenge in Australia was a real highlight. This was a new addition to the conference where a group of conference attendees delivered a SharePoint solution for a not for profit organisation. WorkVentures was the organisation selected and the challenge progressed over three sessions, facilitated by SharePoint community leaders. Session one (Define and Design), was a business session which aimed to work through the high level requirements that WorkVentures had for an intranet, their aims for what they hope it would achieve and what they wanted included.  

This post was written on the assumption that you are familiar with some of Seven Sigma’s methods. If not, then we suggest you stop and read a couple of foundational posts first – especially if these maps do not mean much to you.

The Importance of Goal Alignment…

Nick Hadlee was supposed to chair this define and design session, but was unable to get to the Australian conference due to the earthquake events in Christchurch. As a result, I ended up inheriting this role, so I roped in Andrew Jolly to help me on this, because we have a lot in common and work in a similar way. User surveys had been conducted with WorkVentures staff and management, which gave some insights into potential focus areas for SharePoint. Even so, I had no way of knowing whether those potential focus areas made strategic sense. To resolve this issue, we examined WorkVentures 2009 Annual Report to understand their core purpose and strategic focus areas and various business units. After all, it is all well and good to develop some SharePoint functionality, but if you can’t see how that component helps achieve strategic objectives, how do you know it is the right thing to do?

The annual report proved to be a goldmine. It stated that WorkVentures had embarked on an enterprise improvement strategy prior to SharePoint and the community challenge being on the radar. This enterprise improvement plan, incorporating quality management, IT, HR and business strategy development, provided us the context to focus SharePoint as an enabler that fitted within the plan.

Andrew wasn’t due to fly into Sydney until the evening before the conference. So the day before the conference, Debbie Ireland and I visited WorkVentures on-site, meeting with the CEO, CFO and Marketing Director. The purpose of this visit was to ensure a shared understanding among us all of the alignment of the SharePoint community challenge outputs to the WorkVentures vision, purpose and strategic focus areas. From this conversation, which I mapped, some really interesting stories enabled them to pinpoint one of the key success factors for any SharePoint implementation at WorkVentures – “Bridging Silos”.

Ultimately, we identified four key areas of strategic focus for SharePoint that aligned to WorkVentures strategic goals. Below is a screenshot of the end-to-end alignment in map format . This map was used during the “define and design” conference session to help focus attendees on the purpose of SharePoint for this organisation, as well as noting the key areas that we would have to do well, to consider SharePoint a success.

Stories that led to the goal

Lawrence Luk – the CFO of WorkVentures told Debbie and I several captivating stories that surfaced the bridging silos area of focus. One interesting facet of WorkVentures was that staff from the whole organisation came together once per year – at the Christmas party. This is because each WorkVentures “division” or “business unit” is in effect a separate mini-company, with different goals, customers, vertical markets and regulatory requirements. Thus the problem of silos isn’t a negative one in the sense where dysfunctional “culture” is blamed as such. More that it was the simple fact that each business unit didn’t have a lot in common with other business units. The silo effect was a by-product and it was not driven by negative behaviours.

A great example of this was one particular business unit, Connect IT. It solicits organisations to donate old PC’s, which provides opportunities for skills development for disadvantaged people by teaching them how to refurbish these PC’s. These refurbished PC’s are then sold at low cost. A KPI for this program is the number of organisations donating old PC’s to WorkVentures to sustain ConnectIT. Lawrence had the experience where WorkVentures financial auditors, who had been doing the books for two years prior, asked him why they hadn’t been approached to donate PC’s as they had some. Lawrence realised that he almost missed a great opportunity to help the ConnectIT division achieve one of their key KPI’s. Furthermore, the auditor should never have had to ask themselves. Instead all WorkVentures staff should have this core KPI instilled and internalised so that they could proactively seek out these opportunities to help the other business units.

Another couple of interesting contextual facets illustrated that there were other forms of silo that went beyond a purely divisional basis:

• Most backoffice staff had never been to the Campbelltown office, where all of the “coal face” work took place with the community.
• English was a second language to many staff.
• Not all staff had their own PC’s.

These stories catalysed the conversation to many other examples of missed opportunities, where one business unit has the means to make a massive difference to the results of another. On reflection, it was realised that the nature of WorkVentures business units, being so independent of each-other, inevitably had a silo effect. There was a lack of awareness organisation-wide of the core KPI’s of each unit, hence bridging (not breaking) these silos became a key theme. If SharePoint was to have a long lasting, successful legacy, then it had to play a part in addressing this issue.

The define and design session live…

From there, with invaluable help from Andrew Jolly, we planned and then executed the requirements session with a conference audience of around one hundred people. We split the session up into several areas and the map below shows how we structured it.

After Microsoft did their intro, Debbie explained the context of the community challenge via a short PowerPoint presentation. I then took the chair and explained the vision and areas of focus map (the image above) and stressed to the audience that they were going to be participating in this session as well. I also stressed that no matter what solutions or ideas they came up with, they had to justify them against the four key focus areas, which I went through.

Then we got down to business where I dialogue mapped, with Andrew and I co-facilitating. We decided to focus people’s attention to the core goal of bridging silos as a topic area itself, and ask the audience how SharePoint could indeed bridge silos. We utilised three of the examples that Lawrence gave us  and then leveraged the wisdom of the (large) crowd to solicit ideas. Below is the dialogue map that shows the richness of this discussion (click to enlarge). You will see in this map that for each story told to us by Lawrence, we asked the question “How could we mitigate this with SharePoint?”. The purpose of asking the question this way helped the audience to focus on SharePoint as an enabler to a greater end – and not to be a tool looking for a problem to solve.

Given that we only had around 45 minutes to work with, Andrew and I could only spend around 15 minutes on the bridging silos area. But the map above shows that a lot of very valuable rationale from the audience was captured. The real benefit though was focusing the audience onto the broader goals and how SharePoint could enable them. This was critical to do, because now we had to switch focus from the lofty world of goal alignment to focusing on how SharePoint building blocks could be used to achieve specific ends.

We examined how SharePoint could augment the existing newsletter based method for dissemination of information within WorkVentures. We showed the audience what sample WorkVentures newsletter looked like and reviewed some of the key contextual aspects to newsletters within WorkVentures in terms of their creation, management, reach and format.  We reminded the audience about the importance of bridging silos and then called for ideas from the audience as to how SharePoint could improve the dissemination of news. What was particularly great about this session was that audience members began to relate SharePoint ideas against the key focus areas and identify some of the governance aspects that would be required to make it work.

For example, if you look at the map below (click to enlarge), one of the ideas for the newsletter was a fairly technical one: leveraging “word automation services to extract list or story items and create a PDF”. On first glance one might think “wow that’s fairly heavy” (and not to mention quite nerdy), but the justification for this idea was that it would still account for those WorkVentures users who do not have a PC and therefore access to the portal. Another idea was “Have backoffice staff create the content” on the basis that in doing so, they would get a better feel for coal-face issues that they typically do not see normally. When you think about it, this idea is not SharePoint at all, but more of a strategy for how SharePoint should be adopted and accountabilities for doing so (i.e. a governance approach!)

The key point here is that In both of these examples, audience members were clearly relating their ideas back to the previously established goals, which in turn were aligned to the WorkVentures vision, purpose and key strategic focus areas. Not bad for a couple hours work eh?

With the little time that we had left, we also looked at site navigation and structure, where the audience resolved that WorkVentures would be best served by a hybrid navigation model that was functionally driven primarily (i.e. task based navigation), but then divided into divisional areas. (As opposed to a purely organisational structure driven navigation model).

As you can see below, we made a point of always showing the four areas of focus for SharePoint overall, to ensure that decisions made were informed by them.

Conclusion

I have to say that given the timeframe and constraints, I think we did a great job of developing a shared vision for SharePoint, how it fitted into WorkVentures organisational and strategic context, and then focusing a diverse audience into looking at SharePoint building blocks through that lens. The dialogue maps were very rich, with some terrific ideas, and WorkVentures staff were thrilled to see the alignment of SharePoint to their strategic goals.

I use similar methods to this for non IT projects too, and I think that if we had a week to work on WorkVentures, we would have created something really special. Nevertheless, from my point of view, I think that the community challenge is an terrific idea, I enjoyed being a part of it, and I have to offer special thanks to Debbie and Andrew in particular for helping to make this into a really great mini-engagement. Hopefully we can do it all again next year.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

                      

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I just thought I would check-in with some updates on happenings and some upcoming travels. In less then 2 weeks now, I will be in London with Andrew Woodward and Ant Clay of 21apps for the second SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Master Class. There are still places available on this class so if you have been thinking about attending, now is the time to act.

Also in Europe, a class is being run in Utrecht, Netherlands in May by Ant Clay.

I am proud to be chosen to be a keynote speaker at the Australian SharePoint conference in Sydney in March. I am still wondering if I should dialogue map 600 people! I will also be running a two-day class after this conference – the only one in Sydney for this year. The week after I am in NZ at the SharePoint conference there, also running a 2 day class and hopefully the first ever Issue Mapping class in New Zealand.

After a small break (begging forgiveness of clients who have to put up with my “international man of mystery” gallivanting), I’ll be heading to North American shores to run classes over there. Confirmed cities at this stage are Boston and Toronto, but DC and Chicago are in the works and I am hopeful to run one on the west coast, perhaps in San Francisco or Seattle.

If you are a SharePoint consultancy in these areas and would like to partner with us on this, please contact me on twitter @paulculmsee or email me via the address at the about page of this blog.

Below is the current itinerary for Governance and Information Architecture classes. Things are still being solidified, and will obviously change a little between now and then. Keep an eye on twitter @paulculmsee for more detail.

if you live in any of the regions that are either “tentative” or “in the works”, please contact me and register your interest so I can work with local partners on the ground in these locations.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

                      

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• The facets of collaboration Part 1–Meet robot barbie
• The facets of collaboration Part 2–Enter the matrix!
• The facets of collaboration Part 3-The feature jigsaw
• The facets of collaboration Part 4 – BPM vs. HPM
• The facets of collaboration Part 5 – It’s all Gen-Y’s fault – or is it?

Hi all and welcome to part four of my series on unpacking this buzzword phenomenon that is “collaboration”. Like it or not, Collaboration is a word that is very in-vogue right now. I see it being used all over the place, particularly as a by-product of the success of x2.0 tools and technologies. Yet if you do your research, most of the values being espoused actually hark back to the 1950’s and even earlier. (More on that topic in my forthcoming Beyond Best Practices book).

As it happens, Dilbert is quite a useful buzzword KPI. Once a buzzword graces a Scott Adams cartoon, you know that it has officially made it – as shown below:

So back to business! Way back in the first article, I introduced you to Robot Barbie, a metaphor that represents all of those horrid SharePoint sites remind you of a cross-dressing Frankenstein’s monster. I had an early experience with a client who championed a particular vision for a SharePoint project, only to find little buy-in within the organisation for that vision. This, and a bunch of other things, got me interested in the softer areas of SharePoint governance, where no tried and tested best practices really exist. If they did and were so obvious, Microsoft would published them as its in their interest to do so.

This all culminated in when I wrote a SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture training course last year. I read a lot of material where authors attempted to unpack what collaboration actually meant. My rationale for doing so would be to hopefully avoid creating SharePoint solutions that were Robot-Barbie Frankensteins. The model that I came up with is illustrated below:

The basic model is covered in detail in part 2. But to recap here is the basic summary: This model identifies four major facets for collaborative work: Task, Trait, Social and Transactional.

• Task: Because the outcome drives the members’ attention and participation
• Trait: Because the interest drives the members’ attention and participation
• Transactional: Because the process drives the members’ attention and participation
• Social: Because the shared insight drives the members’ attention and participation

In the last post, I used the model to compare and contrast the use of particular SharePoint features, such as wikis, SharePoint lists and the different aspects of document collaboration. With regards to the latter of these three, I l looked at the effectiveness of certain SharePoint building blocks like content types and site columns within the different facets.

In this post and the next, we will use the facets in a different manner. We will take a quick tour through some common philosophical smackdowns that manifest in organisational life. These smackdowns emanate because of the different viewpoints that people with particular job titles and respective bodies of knowledge have.

Any suggestion that a philosophy might be wrong or incomplete often calls into question the self-identify of the practitioner, which causes much angst among adherents. For this reason, I will leave the “agile is great” vs. “agile sucks” debate for another time, because if you search the internet for criticisms of agile you tend see really passionate programmers get all riled up and flame the hell out of you.

Instead, I will start with a relatively easy one…

Business Process Management v.s. Human Process Management

What does painting the Golden Gate Bridge and Business Process Management have in common? With both, you find that by the time you get to the end, you need to go back to the beginning again. I have personally seen organisations fill an office full of people and take literally years to define and then document key processes all in the name of various best practice frameworks or a regulatory requirement. They then find that, once a thick process manual is created, no-one actually follows it unless an auditor is watching or their performance-based remuneration is directly measured by adherence to it. Of course, I’m not the only one to notice this. In fact, the entire discipline of business process management has taken a bit of a battering in recent years.

If we consider a “process” as the means by which we convert inputs of some description into outputs, Business Process Management has long been the discipline that concerns itself with process optimisation. But in a pattern that is seen in all disciplines like Project Management and Business Analysis, someone will inevitably come along, tell you that you have it wrong or are not being “holistic” and invent a new term to account for your wrongness. In the case of BPM, we now have people arguing for various terms: such as Human Interaction Management, Human Centric Business Process Management, Non-Linear Business Process (thanks Sadie!) or Human Process Management. We will use the latter term, but they are essentially talking about the same thing.

So before we see an example Human Process Management (HPM), let’s review Business Process Management and see what the HPM fanboys are whining about.

Business Process Management

BPM is a structured approach to analyse and continually improve and optimise process activities. Process structure and flow are modelled via diagrammatic tools, allowing organizations to abstract business process from technology infrastructure and organisational departmental/jurisdictional boundaries. This abstracted view allows business to holistically examine process and increase their efficiency and respond rapidly to changing circumstances. This in turn creates competitive advantage.

BPM is often used within the broader context of process improvement methodologies such as Six Sigma (which if you have never read about it, will finally prove to you that all that high-school mathematics that you found mind-numbingly boring was actually useful). While BPM on its own provides excellent visibility of process via modelling them, Six Sigma also incorporates additional analytical tools to solve difficult and complex process problems. Thus, BPM and Six Sigma augment each-other, because process improvement efforts can be more focused via BPM modelling. Thomas Gomez, in an article entitled “The Marriage of BPM and Six Sigma", had the following to say:

“Without BPM, Six Sigma may flounder because executives lack the critical data needed to focus their efforts. Instead, the executives bounce all over the place looking for performance weaknesses, or they focus on areas where successful performance improvements provide only marginal results. With BPM, Six Sigma projects can pinpoint problems and address the underlying causes.”

But that is where the fun ends according to the BPM critics. BPM nerds have had to suffer the indignation of hurtful labels like “Sick Sigma” and stories of long term problems with innovation because of such initiatives. They cite examples such as  George Buckley of 3M, who wound back many of his predecessor’s Six Sigma initiatives.

"Invention is by its very nature a disorderly process. You can’t put a Six Sigma process into that area and say, well, I’m getting behind on invention, so I’m going to schedule myself for three good ideas on Wednesday and two on Friday. That’s NOT how creativity works."

Ouch! Its enough to make a BPM feel all flustered and defensive of their craft. Nevertheless the above quote echoes the main points made by BPM critics. That many processes are not structured, predictable or logical and therefore, BPM approaches force a structured paradigm when none necessarily exists (Mind you, many other methodologies do precisely the same). In an appropriately titled article “The H-Bomb of Business Processes: Humans”, Ayal Steiner makes a point that also cuts to the heart of tame vs wicked problems debate too.

“The modern idea of BPM stresses a well-defined business process as the starting point but this is not always the case. Therefore, in a project that involves new practices or a cross-functional learning among participants, BPM has always had a tough time dealing with the humans.”

The notion of the well-defined starting or ending point is one of the characteristics of a tame problem. Wicked problems are often characterised by poorly defined staring and ending points. In fact with a wicked problem, often participants cannot agree on what the problem is in the first place!

Critics like Steiner also argue that many roles within an organisation, tend to deal with more tacit, dynamic situations and as such spend a large amount of their work time performing collaborative human work, when compared to transactional business process work (knowledge workers is the prevailing label for this type of role). While the main area of benefit for BPM’s is its ability to increase the efficiency of a core business process, the sort of thinking required to re-think processes in a systematic manner involves collaboration and systems thinking (in other words, beyond the process in front of us and how it interacts and interrelates more broadly since the whole of the broader system is greater than the sum of its parts). This is a human-driven activity as it is based on humans collaborating and innovating.

Closer to SharePoint home, Sadie Van Buren noted this same distinction in May 2010 which was around the same time I started the development of my IA class.

Human Process Management

So if BPM is incomplete, enter Human Process Management (HPM). HPM is concerned with process that is not easily defined, nor well structured, where it is hard to prescribe the execution of the process based on some model of the business. With human process, it is generally known how to achieve an intended result, but each case is handled separately and requires tacit judgment (for both decisions and flow) as part of the process. There is not enough standardization between instances of the process that allows for a formal, complete and rigorous description of the process end-to-end.

The obvious downside of human processes, say the critics, is that they are far too fluid and dynamic to be made part of an Enterprise BPM system. As a result, these processes tend to be handled through email, which in turn contributes to information overload and poor information worker productivity – precisely why we look to tools like SharePoint in the first place! The implication of HPM is that we need to shift emphasis to tools and practices that help us deal with unstructured or ad-hoc processes (and the information created/used during that process) more so than tools that deal with the well-defined world of BPM.

To be fair to the BPM crowd, these above criticisms will be seen by BPM practitioners as naive, since from their point of view, the less structured side is simply a part of the entire BPM spectrum. They argue that critics do not properly understand the principles and philosophy of BPM in the first place (Agile and PMBOK defenders say essentially the same thing when defending from critics). Supporting this counterargument is a key theme for BPM success that is regularly emphasised. That is, the critical pre-requisite of clarity of purpose and shared understanding of the end in mind. Mohamed Zairi, in a paper called “Business process management: a boundaryless approach to modern competitiveness” stated:

“The achievement of a BPM culture depends very much on the establishment of total alignment to corporate goals and having every employee’s efforts focused on adding value to the end customer.”

Therefore the BPM crowd are arguing for the same human process that HPM base their criticism on. Developing a culture of alignment to corporate goals is very much a human process. Are the HPM fanboy criticisms well founded or is it more a case that some BPM guys forget about strategic goal alignment and optimise process in isolation?

What do the facets say?

Clearly, there is a natural tension between these two polarities of BPM and HPM and this often plays out in organisational life in how we collaborate to deliver organisational outcomes. While there have always been process nazis, the emergence of social collaboration platforms that do not have a great deal of formal structure (think tagging and folksonomies) has led to a great deal of debate and self examination in BPM circles and beyond. Understanding these traits is critically important on the use of SharePoint tools, because SharePoint – and in particular SP2010 offers features for both BPM and HPM aficionados. Putting the two together however might risk Robot Barbie scenarios.

Straight away, it seems that the transactional vs. social axis of the facets of collaboration neatly explain the Business Process Management (BPM)/Human Process Management (HPM) challenge. Both areas are concerned with producing an output or getting something done. Therefore I have drawn BPM and HPM leaning toward the task side of the model. HPM proponents argue that human process is unstructured or semi-structured, dynamic, intertwined and borderless, which fits in well with the task/social trait of process and insight. BPM naturally fits into the lower transactional half where inputs are well defined.

While I would agree with the assertion that many processes are ill-defined and rely on tacit knowledge to be completed, HPM proponents go further though. For example, Ayal Steiner who I quoted earlier, argues that “analysts are now realising that human processes account for 80% of the business processes carried out in most organisations”. That is a big call, in effect, arguing that the majority of workplace interactions occupy the social quadrants above. I disagree. From my experience, most organisational roles have extremely varying degrees of transactional vs. social collaboration and some roles are in fact dominated by transactional collaboration. Perhaps there is some confirmation bias going on here, where knowledge workers who put in collaborative systems tend to think that everyone are knowledge workers too.

Here is an example. Mrs CleverWorkarounds used to be a medical nurse. When I first showed her this model I asked her to describe where nurses would fit in terms of their collaboration. She indicated two areas.

• Firstly, nurses are strongly linked by trait and transaction. This is because they all have a minimum degree of knowledge and skill. As stated in part 2, the key tell-tale sign of a role with transactional collaboration is how easily individuals performing that role can be replaced by someone else with similar experience at short notice. Supporting this, if a nurse is sick or unavailable, a replacement nurse can be called in to perform the same tasks.  Collaboration between nurses according to Mrs Cleverworkarounds is quite transactional as well. Routine and process consistency via tracking the status of patient care is a critical task – patient status is everything. Thus, data driven tools with version history and well defined inputs make this form of collaboration easier. In fact, Mrs CleverWorkarounds taught herself InfoPath and SPD Workflows because she was so convinced that automated forms with consistent audit trails via workflow would make her job easier.
• Yet at the same time, the sort of collaboration between nurses and patients is completely different and highly social in nature. No process is going to govern the interaction between nurse and patient. The type of care and counselling to get someone well is going to vary the type of interaction. A broken leg is one thing, health problems from say – alcoholism is something else entirely. The latter has much deeper symptoms than just the illness as presented. Here the focus is on patient well-being and goes beyond status of meds, when doctors have visited or accurate handover notes from one nursing shift to another.

State machine workflows?

Interestingly, even seemingly well-defined business processes tend to have ad-hoc and dynamic aspects to them. When there is an exception to the standard process, those exceptions tend to be handled in a relatively ad-hoc, case-by-case manner. Microsoft developer Pravin Indurkar cited an example of a seemingly transactional purchase ordering system.

“Often the business processes contain a prescribed path to the end goal but then there are a lot of alternate ways the same goal can be achieved. For example, a purchase order can contain a prescribed path where the PO goes from being created, to approved, to shipped, and then to completed. But then there a multitude of other ways in which the PO can be completed. The PO can get changed, or back ordered or cancelled and then Reopened. All these paths must be accounted for.”

Indurkar studied the purchase order system of a small business and found that apart from the one standard traditional order fulfilment process, there were about 65 different variations on the same process depending on the nature of the order. This is when BPM diagrams start to get scary. If you think that this workflow below is scary, then be more scared. It is page 12 of a 136 page process!

Naturally, trying to hardwire such a large number of alternate paths is very difficult and traditionally, there were two ways in which this was dealt with;

• Either the business process was hard wired to accommodate all the paths as shown in figure 1, which made the implementation of the business process extremely complex, brittle and hard to maintain.
• The alternate paths are simply not dealt with and any situation of the ordinary was dealt outside the domain of the process. This meant that tracking and visibility were lost because people would create manual systems to track such out of the ordinary situations. The facet diagram below illustrates this:

In Indurkar’s article that I quoted with the purchase order example, he argued that the solution to this sort of problem was via state-based or state-machine workflows which SharePoint has supported in a basic fashion, out of the box since SP2007. This kind of workflow, if you are not aware, is when the workflow waits for one or more events to move it into another state. There is no sequence as such, because this new target state can be any of the defined states in the workflow. This makes state workflows reflect the unpredictable nature of process variations.

Thus, it could be argued that BPM is not incomplete as what the HPM fanboys think, but that critics have a less than holistic understanding of the craft?

Conclusion: A Process Analysis Tool…

To be honest, I don’t want to answer the question of which fanboy is right because it is a bit of a zero sum game. When you think about process, many seem to have elements of transactional and social in them (just like job roles). For example, an “Approval” decision diamond in a business process diagram will determine the path a process takes. Apart from stating the fact that this process is a gateway where a decision is made, this says nothing about whether the activity of making that decision is transactional or social. In some processes the decision may be made by a rigorous data driven process (like a point-score based credit check for a loan applicant). In others it may be on gut feel (such as choosing the right applicant for a job position).

So to me, whether you are the most regimented process nazi or the most cowboyish non-conformist hippie, modelling a business process according to its ratio of transactional to social facets is probably very useful indeed to complement a BPM model. It help us understand how much tacit judgement is required in a given process and whether modelling every variation in a sequential workflow is worthwhile. Check out some examples on how this could be done below. In first example on the left, a business process where the majority of the steps are performed by tacit judgement might look like something like how I have drawn, with a task based social dominance. If the process in question indeed looks like this, then attempting to document every minute variation on the paths the process can take might not be worthwhile. Perhaps documenting the broad process (within the constraints of any compliance regime requirements) might be a better idea. In the second example, the process seems to be oriented around a repeatable set of choices (task based transactional dominant). As a result it may be worthwhile formally documenting these variations.

By combining these “process diagnostics” with the actual diagram, we might now offer additional insights into how the organisation really works with a certain process and do crazy stuff like produce something akin to my mockup below:

Hell, throw in a RACI chart and now you start to see process accountabilities as well!

Of course, you could always remove the task/trait axis if it is not needed and simply use a sliding scale. Nevertheless, what this shows is that the facets of collaboration model offers an extra dimension to any process being modelled and would help many to better understand the nature of the process being modelled, as well as strategies for improving that process via SharePoint.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

p.s If you are a real trainspotter/glutton for punishment and want to dive deeper, google “Human Interaction Management” and “Role Activity Diagrams”

                      

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