The second article in the tribute to the humble leave form series has just been posted at SharePoint Magazine.

I eagerly await the "cease and desist" letter Matt Groenings legal team 🙂

Enjoy!

Now, readers would know that I really lay on the pop culture references pretty thick. I find it works well and makes ordinary, sometimes mundane, topics much more interesting and easy to explain. I’ve used Brittany Spears, Ikea, Kung Fu, Death metal, Dr Phil and countless others.

But I have never used Star Wars references in my post and probably never will. Why? I would like you to take some time to have a good read of this blog. I am having trouble finding the words to convey how brilliant it is.

http://sithsigma.wordpress.com/

My own company is a play on words on the much hyped/maligned Six Sigma methodologies, but this is so much more clever!

On this blog, both Darth Vader and Darth Sidious offer advice on strategy, project management and general business leadership and management topics. Some absolutely brilliant content there too, all set against the backdrop of what it takes to manage an evil empire. When you think about it, a Death Star is a pretty serious undertaking and to build it on time and on budget takes some pretty impressive management talent. So, despite whether you are an Empire kind of guy, or prefer being rebel scum, you have to concede that Vader and Sidious know how to manage a team. Sure, they made some mistakes (certainly their disaster recovery and risk management strategy were definitely flawed), but most organisations have a misfocussed attitude to security.

Aside from laughing hysterically when reading their material, I am certain that both Sith lords read the same strategy and management books that I do.

Here are some classic quotes..

In this essay on how performance metrics impact employee behaviour, Darth Sidious cites a recent example

…if your compensation system is based on rewarding people for speed, but product or service quality is severely lacking for some reason – even though you’ve mandated quality, it doesn’t make a difference what you mandate if what you’re measuring doesn’t support that goal (or even worse, is opposite to it).

That may seem like an obvious example, but it’s more common than you think. For the Clone Wars we ordered 100M Clones, and we wanted them ready in time to trick Obi Wan, so the Clone factory sacrificed on quality and what we ended up getting was 35% of the Clones being totally useless.

Now *that* is a real-world example that I can relate to!  Here is another gem from Sidious, explaining how the empire maintains a skills inventory to help them understand a team’s strengths and weaknesses.

Say you’re in a team that specializes in using the Force to electrocute captured rebels, or run a Network Engineering team. When it comes to hiring your instinct is to focus on the obvious and primary skill of the team.

Need to fill in an electrocutioner position? Then you’re probably looking for someone who’s learned how to channel the powers of the Force into electricity. Need to fill in a Network engineer position? You probably are looking for a hardcore networking/router/firewall guy.

Probably my favourite article is the Sith version of my "Project Fail" series where Darth Sidious offers advice on strategy, vision and goals. He breaks it down to:

• Vision
• Corporate objectives – eg "Increase delivery time of star destroyers by 10% over the next 12 months"
• Nested Objectives
• Alignment of Projects
• Executive/Sith Lord Sponsorship – "if an executive sponsor, Sith Lord, finds out you spent a large amount of galactic credits and it didn’t pay off, now you’re in deep water with no one to support you. A Sith Lord is liable to feed you to a Panna Monster in such a case"
• ROI

I could go on and on, but I could never do the site justice. The thing I really like about whoever authors this site is that they have managed to find the perfect balance between entertainment value with really insightful and clever messages behind the humour. It is a goal I have been trying to attain in my writing also, but I have to take my hat off to Sith Sigma for nailing it perfectly.

If they would have me I’d write on that site about collaboration under the pseudonym of Jar-Jar Binks 😉

Go take a look now. Tell em Jar-Jar sent you 😉 .

Paul

This post from the eLumenotion blog is clever and really tickled my sense of humour.

He describes a declassified wartime era document called the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual" and the content is pure gold 🙂

"It gives advice on how to deliberately screw things up but can also be read as an anti-pattern of behaviors to avoid yourself and to watch for in those you manage or collaborate with. The evil genius of this guide is that all of the techniques it advises are destructive behaviors that normal people exhibit on a daily basis. So, if you were to do these things in a theater of war you could hurt the enemy while maintaining plausible deniability and avoid a firing squad."

Sections include

• Sabotage Under the Guise of Process
• Sabotage Via Project Management
• Sabotage Your Team Via Poor Work

I soooo wish that I had seen this when I was writing the "SharePoint Project Failure" series as I actually touched on some of these areas.

Do yourself a favour and check the post.

Mentally tired this weekend and a headache too, so no work stuff. I promise to get back to SharePoint topics soon though…

I just read something amazing that really surprised me. Opeth (the progressive metal band that is target of a few of my SharePoint metaphors) has managed to debut at #7 on the Australian music charts with their latest album Watershed. It has garnered some pretty rave reviews and for a band who’s roots originate in some pretty brutal death-metal style stuff. It is a testament to the unique band they have become and their appeal outside your typical headbanger audience.

So I thought in between various other pieces of work I would post a review of their album. If I mention the word "SharePoint", does that make it a legit CleverWorkarounds post? 🙂

Continue reading “Opeth – Watershed review”

I just posted a new article to the EndUserSharePoint.com as a guest author. There will be a few of us doing this over the next few weeks, and it will be interesting to see how it pans out. The article is a more end-user focused version of the topic areas that I am interested in – the human side of collaboration. I’ll re-post it here too in a couple of days, but for now, you can read my article here.

The article is called "Thinking SharePoint (and listen to your mother)"

In the ongoing quest to find the perfect metaphor, it features Metallica, the Backstreet Boys, two stoned software engineers and Ikea.

later

Paul

I think with some confidence that I am the only person in the world who has ever attempted to educate about SharePoint while using heavy metal (and my favourite band of the genre, Opeth) as a metaphor. Specifically, I used metal genres to explain the difference between collaborative document management and records management in relation to SharePoint.

Therefore, I feel that this blog is 5% Opeth and 95% SharePoint. 🙂

So I was well pleased to learn that Opeth is coming to town on September 2 and eagerly bought my tickets. But alas! Tech.Ed in Australia starts on September 2!

AAARRGH! What completely sucky timing!

I was really looking forward to Tech.Ed, specifically to catch up with some friends and finally meet some of the superstars of the SharePoint world in person. (I owe lots of beers to lots of people!)

So this is a real moral dilemma! Metal vs Microsoft?

tough choice! What would you choose? 🙂

(cough)

Can the person who left a message on my plugoo chat window in relation to their thesis on SharePoint project failure please contact me again? You were gone by the time I saw the message and I’d very much like to learn more of your take on it all.

For the other two thousand or so people, sorry to bother you 🙂

Paul

In 1998 I met Dr Brian May and got my Queen memorabilia autographed. At the time I thought that was pretty cool and I was the envy of all my Queen fan friends. But today I met an even bigger celebrity :-P, the one and only Joel Oleson who popped up on my plugoo window for a chat. If it wasn’t for the fact I was on the other side of the planet I’d have asked for his autograph too 🙂

He has made a new post, referring to my incomplete series on wicked SharePoint projects which was a real honour coming from someone of his caliber. For you cricket lovers, that’s like Andrew Symonds complimenting you on your batting skills 🙂

Anyway, it’s clear in the tone of his post, that Joel is enjoying the extra freedom he now has in being one of us now :-). I really liked the whole tone of his writing and as always, the indispensable content. Judging by the amount of traffic that is now hitting my site, he still has a fair amount of devoted followers!

Thanks mate, beers on me when you get to Perth!

Paul

My mother went to a psychic yesterday and apparently, sometime this year, I get an job offer from an overseas mining company that is so staggeringly good, the family and I pack up and head overseas for around two years.

The only thing is, the psychic didn’t tell my mother which company it is and where exactly we are going. Damn – I am picky when it comes to temporary adopted countries – there had better be a squash court or there will be hell to pay!.

Anyhow, since I have my existing evil plans for world domination, if said mining company can kindly contact me with their incredible offer as soon as possible, that would be much appreciated 🙂

Thanks for your time,

Paul

How the hell can wicked problems be fun? I’d better explain, hadn’t I…

I’ve been struggling with a blog post for a few days. I’ve wanted to blog about SharePoint’s propensity to become a  dreaded “wicked problem”. I will get to that post eventually, but for now I thought that I would share with you something that made me smile while researching it.

First up, a really quick (wikipedia) definition of a “wicked problem”, particularly Jeff Conklin’s definition. According to Jeff’s research, wicked problems have four characteristics:

• The problem is not understood until after formulation of a solution.
• Stakeholders have radically different world views and different frames for understanding the problem.
• Constraints and resources to solve the problem change over time.
• The problem is never solved.

SharePoint projects can easily become wicked problems, and I promise that I will post more details on the varied reasons. But while researching into the nature of wicked problems and strategies for mitigating the risk of them, I came across some literature that suggests that one of the key strategies is to counter them is … wait for it …

…collaboration!

So in short, to stop SharePoint projects from turning into wicked projects, we have to collaborate!

Collaborate, eh? Then we’d better undertake a project to implement a collaboration system so we can collaborate better. Oh wait – we *are* implementing a collaboration system. It’s this new cool tool called SharePoint…

Oh, dude this is too hard man… I have the munchies.