So with all the social-freemium activity I've had a play with this year, which applications stand out from the rest in terms of usefulness?
Clear winner:
Skype - what can I say, free phone, view of who is 'live' on-live, conference calls and a messaging system all at the click of a button!
Runner up:
Trello - great medium for developing ideas, managing projects and developing marketing plans!
Honourable mention:
Twitter (inc Tweetdeck) - thought this was going to be useless - but is very dynamic, feels alive when compared with the very slow response you get from the other networking applications.
Good but must try harder:
LinkedIn - going in the wrong direction - removing links to other media - seems to be reverting to recruitment site mode.
Storify - I like this one personally but not been a great interest for others.
Scoop.it - you need to make sure it doesn't end up as a dumping ground - the stuff you put in the loft thinking it would be of use someday!
Saturday, 29 December 2012
Saturday, 22 December 2012
Christmas programming activity for when you get bored!
Short and sweet one this week - a bit of festive activity courtesy of 'bambofy' ;)
Hopefully everyone is now familiar with Dropbox - which is one of my 2012 favourite freemium apps by-the-way - well it has now been enhanced to the point where you can use it to build your own web site!
Or as the web site says 'absurdly simple web site hosting' check out http://www.site44.com/ - which lets you build a site from your Dropbox folder structure!
Here is my very feeble first attempt at it http://grandwizz.site44.com/ - looking for some instruction from my two trusted advisor's over the holiday.
Another one for all those interested in managing their activity on all this social media stuff - and a mechanism for planning your 2013 online campaign if you are so inclined - check out
www.tenxer.com
all tracked for you - and put onto your own personal dashboard - bit dangerous really!
That's it for now - Merry Christmas - enjoy whatever projects you have running!!
Hopefully everyone is now familiar with Dropbox - which is one of my 2012 favourite freemium apps by-the-way - well it has now been enhanced to the point where you can use it to build your own web site!
Or as the web site says 'absurdly simple web site hosting' check out http://www.site44.com/ - which lets you build a site from your Dropbox folder structure!
Here is my very feeble first attempt at it http://grandwizz.site44.com/ - looking for some instruction from my two trusted advisor's over the holiday.
Another one for all those interested in managing their activity on all this social media stuff - and a mechanism for planning your 2013 online campaign if you are so inclined - check out
www.tenxer.com
- GitHub
- emails
- etc
all tracked for you - and put onto your own personal dashboard - bit dangerous really!
That's it for now - Merry Christmas - enjoy whatever projects you have running!!
Saturday, 15 December 2012
Just when you thought it was safe to come out!
LinkedIn keeps removing functionality!!!
I planned to wax lyrical about richly functional, free, open source applications than can be a powerful tool for business use. However, the past two weeks have illustrated the dangers of relying too much on these 'free' platforms. Should have heeded the messages in a number of the Tweets I have sent out recently.
So what is it all about?
The last couple of posts have been about the journey into 'gamification' and the thinking we have been doing in-house on setting up a company implementation of skill measurement 'badges'. This weeks note was going to say that the easiest implementation for us would be to use the LindedIn platform of 'endorsements'. Creating an in-house set of badges for a tbd set of skills. Company members of LinkedIn would then be able to vote for your company skill. Thus providing a global platform for these ratings without too much involvement from our management. A peer rated set of skills - a much more powerful measure than a list of the courses you have sat through!
Well - this has now all been thrown up in the air. LinkedIn have recently taken a unilateral decision - as far as I can see - to remove a couple of similar features from your profile. One was the link to github (useful if you are into coding) and the other was a link to blogger (ie this site). I'm now very concerned about putting anything remotely critical to our business on the site. Who knows what they will decide to remove next!! In fact, why bother even using the endorsements at all - if nobody bothers they will more than likely be terminated! Yes, yes, yes, social pressures blah, blah, blah.
We need a re-evaluation.
Get your own site up and running as quickly as possible ..... xxxx you have been warned!
I planned to wax lyrical about richly functional, free, open source applications than can be a powerful tool for business use. However, the past two weeks have illustrated the dangers of relying too much on these 'free' platforms. Should have heeded the messages in a number of the Tweets I have sent out recently.
So what is it all about?
The last couple of posts have been about the journey into 'gamification' and the thinking we have been doing in-house on setting up a company implementation of skill measurement 'badges'. This weeks note was going to say that the easiest implementation for us would be to use the LindedIn platform of 'endorsements'. Creating an in-house set of badges for a tbd set of skills. Company members of LinkedIn would then be able to vote for your company skill. Thus providing a global platform for these ratings without too much involvement from our management. A peer rated set of skills - a much more powerful measure than a list of the courses you have sat through!
Well - this has now all been thrown up in the air. LinkedIn have recently taken a unilateral decision - as far as I can see - to remove a couple of similar features from your profile. One was the link to github (useful if you are into coding) and the other was a link to blogger (ie this site). I'm now very concerned about putting anything remotely critical to our business on the site. Who knows what they will decide to remove next!! In fact, why bother even using the endorsements at all - if nobody bothers they will more than likely be terminated! Yes, yes, yes, social pressures blah, blah, blah.
We need a re-evaluation.
Get your own site up and running as quickly as possible ..... xxxx you have been warned!
Saturday, 8 December 2012
Gamification cont.
So - following on from the previous post what have been the thoughts on what to actually allocate badges for? Seemed like an easy one at first but became a bit mind bending pretty quickly.
Do you allocate badges for tangible activities/achievements - such as these the team came up with off the top of their head;
or link them to actual company certificates - such as;
The advantage of doing this is ease of coordination and management by the business. These activities are already tracked and monitored as part of internal staff development.
However, then the question is, what is the point of the badge? They then are simply measuring achievements in a simple tick-box manner. Is that wrong - a question still to be debated?
OR - should badges be allocated based more around skill or capability measures as judged by a community, peer groups, clients, competitor networks etc? This would have the advantage that it is more of a true representation of capabilities, rather than ticking the box for a given training course. You may not have your PhD in Particle Physics (or railway signalling) but you can be acknowledges for your participation and contribution to the field (Honorary Doctorate style) by other leaders in the filed. This to me seems a much better use of badge allocation. The second question - still to be debated.
As an example of how this would work LinkedIn has recently introduced 'endorsements' - where your network of contacts can 'endorse' the skills you say you have as part of your LinkeIn profile. Its fascinating seeing this grow - its only been put in place recently and is still in the phase where people are finding out how it works and what it all means.
Anyway, the fun continues.....
Do you allocate badges for tangible activities/achievements - such as these the team came up with off the top of their head;
- Training quizzes passed (1st, 5th, every 10 thereafter)
- Completion of a training series
- Billable hours worked (1st, 40th, 100th, 500th, every 500 thereafter)
- Employee grade
- H&S TIPs completed (1st, 5th, every 10 thereafter)
- Completion of Project Management training
- Revenue oversight for PMs ($100K, $500K, every $500K thereafter? no idea on this one)
- Company Profile completed (Mysite)
- Professional Licensure
or link them to actual company certificates - such as;
- Advanced Manaement Programme Certificate
- European Networking Programme Certificate
- IOSH Certificate
- PM Certificate
- Risk Mngt Certificate
- Webinar Presenter
- Quest Achiever
- SuperQuest Achiever
The advantage of doing this is ease of coordination and management by the business. These activities are already tracked and monitored as part of internal staff development.
However, then the question is, what is the point of the badge? They then are simply measuring achievements in a simple tick-box manner. Is that wrong - a question still to be debated?
OR - should badges be allocated based more around skill or capability measures as judged by a community, peer groups, clients, competitor networks etc? This would have the advantage that it is more of a true representation of capabilities, rather than ticking the box for a given training course. You may not have your PhD in Particle Physics (or railway signalling) but you can be acknowledges for your participation and contribution to the field (Honorary Doctorate style) by other leaders in the filed. This to me seems a much better use of badge allocation. The second question - still to be debated.
As an example of how this would work LinkedIn has recently introduced 'endorsements' - where your network of contacts can 'endorse' the skills you say you have as part of your LinkeIn profile. Its fascinating seeing this grow - its only been put in place recently and is still in the phase where people are finding out how it works and what it all means.
Anyway, the fun continues.....
Saturday, 1 December 2012
An emergent property!
Over the past few weeks - through my various meanderings on Twitter and LinkedIn - something that I have been seeking has emerged!
A topic that I came across on a Tweet by one of my GURU's (that's Grandwizz Useful Research Unit) was taken and re-entered into one of the company 'thought leadership' groups on LinkedIn. Nothing Earth shattering in that process, however, it has been fascinating seeing how this topic has sparked interest among a 'self-organising' group of people. No need to send emails around the various operating units around the globe to canvas for support - usually resulting in getting someone nominated who is not fully engaged - the Diamond Dogs have formed.
Comprising, me plus;
The topic we are thinking through is around the use of 'gamification' to help support and grow staff development - which sounds pretty boring when you say it like that. Essentially the use of game and token incentives - like collecting game point to show your 'power' to others. Or possibly hotel points in my case given the number of scheme's I seem to be enrolled in! Given that this was completely new to me a couple of weeks ago I am now seeing these sorts of things everywhere, LinkedIn 'profile % complete', 'endorsements', Twitter followers' etc..
The challenge has resulted from Tom's use of FourSquare (I'd not used that either - just to let you know how far behind the drag curve I am on these things) where 'badges' can be gained for visiting certain places. Badge collection resulting in gamification of travel. I'm still struggling with FS if truth be told but I can understand the concept of incentives for visiting places - still feels a bit boy scout-ish to me though. The concept of using badges for training and development purposes is well established - few sites listed below for those interested - and widely used in the education field. Our challenge was could we not apply these concepts to our internal activities? Seems like a very reasonable task - how to use non-monetary public recognition awards within the business to help raise staff engagement.
Some of the key requirements - given the topics of previous posts I had to put a few of these down ;)
Badge collection site links
A few links if you want to explore further:
http://gamifyforthewin.com/2012/10/big-news-the-book-is-out/
http://duolingo.com/
http://www.freetech4teachers.com/
A topic that I came across on a Tweet by one of my GURU's (that's Grandwizz Useful Research Unit) was taken and re-entered into one of the company 'thought leadership' groups on LinkedIn. Nothing Earth shattering in that process, however, it has been fascinating seeing how this topic has sparked interest among a 'self-organising' group of people. No need to send emails around the various operating units around the globe to canvas for support - usually resulting in getting someone nominated who is not fully engaged - the Diamond Dogs have formed.
Comprising, me plus;
- Ben
- Cam
- Eric
- Ian
- Marcelo
- Paul
- Tom - who set the challenge!
Many thanks to all - you know who you are - for the input so far by-the-way.
The challenge has resulted from Tom's use of FourSquare (I'd not used that either - just to let you know how far behind the drag curve I am on these things) where 'badges' can be gained for visiting certain places. Badge collection resulting in gamification of travel. I'm still struggling with FS if truth be told but I can understand the concept of incentives for visiting places - still feels a bit boy scout-ish to me though. The concept of using badges for training and development purposes is well established - few sites listed below for those interested - and widely used in the education field. Our challenge was could we not apply these concepts to our internal activities? Seems like a very reasonable task - how to use non-monetary public recognition awards within the business to help raise staff engagement.
Some of the key requirements - given the topics of previous posts I had to put a few of these down ;)
- must be easy for staff to 'sign-up' to the scheme
- must be accessible to all staff - no inner-circles
- must be recognised across the business
- must be easy to implement
- must be publicly viewable
- must be linked to tangible benefits (e.g. enhanced peer recognition)
- must be cheap (if not free)!
Badge collection site links
A few links if you want to explore further:
http://gamifyforthewin.com/2012/10/big-news-the-book-is-out/
http://duolingo.com/
http://www.freetech4teachers.com/
http://www.openbadges.org/en-US/ which provides some basic open-source tools to accomplish intrinsic badge reward set-ups.
Saturday, 24 November 2012
Management of requirements management!
Quote this week from Bambofy - "you deal with the boring end of software development".
I think I agree.
This week has taken a bizarre twist in that its been a week of 'requirements management' (RQM) issues. Two area emerged, the first around how to specify them appropriately and the second on reuse of requirements. You have to admit that sounds pretty boring doesn't it!
But when you try to get your head round these things, the situation rapidly gets complicated. A problem emerges around the sheer number of 'requirements' that can be generated if you don't have a strategy for RQM. Let me try and illustrate.
Even for a simple system there is an exponential increase in the number of requirements the more you need to partition things. Lets not do software example as they tend to be a bit obtuse, but use a house build as an example. Hopefully we can all relate to that a bit better. I'm assuming in all this that everyone is signed up to undertaking some form of RQM as part of the design of course! The first decision is how are you going to represent the 'systems' involved as you will need to be able to allocate the requirements throughout the house in some manner. If you don't get this bit correct you have already increased the gradient of the requirements growth curve. In our house example you could take each room as a 'system' or you could take each major element of infrastructure as a 'system' or one of many other variations. Lets take the infrastructure view as this is more akin to what you would do for more complex assets, railways, oil platforms, power plans etc.
So off we go doing our requirements capture exercise - don't worry I'm not going to do the whole thing - even I'm not that sad!
There are at least say 10 major areas to consider, e.g. 1 water, 2 electrical, 3 heating, 4 lighting, 5 civil structure, 6 plumbing, 7 waste treatment, 8 accessibility, 9 safety, 10 useability ....... etc.
Each of these areas breaks down into at least 10 further sub-areas, e.g. for 1 water these could be 1.1 sinks, 1.2 baths, 1.3 toilets, 1.4 hot water, ..... etc.
Even for this relatively simple example we already have 10x10 or 100 sub-areas to allocate requirements to. We could then easily envisage coming up with say 10 main requirements for each of these sub-areas and at least a further 10 sub-requirements for each main requirement. You can see where this is going - we now have 100 (sub-areas)x10(main)x10(sub-main) or 10,000 requirements to allocate and track. On top of this it is likely that we would need to allocate a set of 'attributes' for each requirements so that we could also track certain types of requirements rather than just which area they are allocated to, for example attributes like, environment, performance, safety, quality .....etc. which could again easily add up to 10 minimum. So - you still awake - in total, without even trying, we have got ourselves into a situation where we are reporting and tracking 100,000 items - just for a house!
Serious problem eh - if you are not careful this is also serious job creation!
This number assumes also that you can clearly specify your requirements in the first place - if not you could easily start with (I have seen this) 100 top-level requirements leading to 1,000,000 items to manage - good luck with that one.
That is why it is imperative that you have a rationale for management of your requirements management. And, no, you don't just have to purchase a requirements management software package.
You then have to ask yourself, if you tick all the requirement boxes, is your built system the one you wanted - would you want a builder to manage the build of your house in this way - or would you rather have the build project overseen by a civil engineer?
In the overall scheme of things its still pretty boring - but critical to get right!
Now some of these requirements can surely be reused on the next house - but which ones ;)
I think I agree.
This week has taken a bizarre twist in that its been a week of 'requirements management' (RQM) issues. Two area emerged, the first around how to specify them appropriately and the second on reuse of requirements. You have to admit that sounds pretty boring doesn't it!
But when you try to get your head round these things, the situation rapidly gets complicated. A problem emerges around the sheer number of 'requirements' that can be generated if you don't have a strategy for RQM. Let me try and illustrate.
Even for a simple system there is an exponential increase in the number of requirements the more you need to partition things. Lets not do software example as they tend to be a bit obtuse, but use a house build as an example. Hopefully we can all relate to that a bit better. I'm assuming in all this that everyone is signed up to undertaking some form of RQM as part of the design of course! The first decision is how are you going to represent the 'systems' involved as you will need to be able to allocate the requirements throughout the house in some manner. If you don't get this bit correct you have already increased the gradient of the requirements growth curve. In our house example you could take each room as a 'system' or you could take each major element of infrastructure as a 'system' or one of many other variations. Lets take the infrastructure view as this is more akin to what you would do for more complex assets, railways, oil platforms, power plans etc.
So off we go doing our requirements capture exercise - don't worry I'm not going to do the whole thing - even I'm not that sad!
There are at least say 10 major areas to consider, e.g. 1 water, 2 electrical, 3 heating, 4 lighting, 5 civil structure, 6 plumbing, 7 waste treatment, 8 accessibility, 9 safety, 10 useability ....... etc.
Each of these areas breaks down into at least 10 further sub-areas, e.g. for 1 water these could be 1.1 sinks, 1.2 baths, 1.3 toilets, 1.4 hot water, ..... etc.
Even for this relatively simple example we already have 10x10 or 100 sub-areas to allocate requirements to. We could then easily envisage coming up with say 10 main requirements for each of these sub-areas and at least a further 10 sub-requirements for each main requirement. You can see where this is going - we now have 100 (sub-areas)x10(main)x10(sub-main) or 10,000 requirements to allocate and track. On top of this it is likely that we would need to allocate a set of 'attributes' for each requirements so that we could also track certain types of requirements rather than just which area they are allocated to, for example attributes like, environment, performance, safety, quality .....etc. which could again easily add up to 10 minimum. So - you still awake - in total, without even trying, we have got ourselves into a situation where we are reporting and tracking 100,000 items - just for a house!
Serious problem eh - if you are not careful this is also serious job creation!
This number assumes also that you can clearly specify your requirements in the first place - if not you could easily start with (I have seen this) 100 top-level requirements leading to 1,000,000 items to manage - good luck with that one.
That is why it is imperative that you have a rationale for management of your requirements management. And, no, you don't just have to purchase a requirements management software package.
You then have to ask yourself, if you tick all the requirement boxes, is your built system the one you wanted - would you want a builder to manage the build of your house in this way - or would you rather have the build project overseen by a civil engineer?
In the overall scheme of things its still pretty boring - but critical to get right!
Now some of these requirements can surely be reused on the next house - but which ones ;)
Saturday, 17 November 2012
Analytical taxonomies - appropriate analysis
Having had a pop at approaches to 'Big Data Analytics' based around spreadsheets in the last post the question has to be "so what does appropriate analysis look like?"
In my various internet wanderings this week I came across a couple of articles that for me give a glimpse into what the future should look like.
The first is by Jim Sinur in an entry on applying analytics to processes and not just data, follow the link for more detail;
http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2012/11/13/is-unmanned-process-management-a-pipe-dream/
As well as the process analytics elements outlined above the sheer volume of data to work through will also require new computing techniques. The second article I came across by Rick Merritt in EETimes illustrates the type of computing power that will be available;
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4401143/Startup-demos-new-road-to-computing-at-SC-12
which is by the sounds of it is 40,000 processors working in a parallel configuration using neural net and fuzzy logic techniques to crank out 5.2 tera-operations per second!
So the Big Data Analytics future, for me, contains complexity in both analysis techniques and computational systems. A bit more that a few unconnected spreadsheets.
Looks exciting eh!!
In my various internet wanderings this week I came across a couple of articles that for me give a glimpse into what the future should look like.
The first is by Jim Sinur in an entry on applying analytics to processes and not just data, follow the link for more detail;
http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2012/11/13/is-unmanned-process-management-a-pipe-dream/
In fact, thinking through exactly what you are expecting your 'processes' to deliver rather than simply feeding the process, is key, as is 'unmanned' optimising and management of interactions between them!
The figure below illustrates some of the analytical taxonomy that could be used.
As well as the process analytics elements outlined above the sheer volume of data to work through will also require new computing techniques. The second article I came across by Rick Merritt in EETimes illustrates the type of computing power that will be available;
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4401143/Startup-demos-new-road-to-computing-at-SC-12
which is by the sounds of it is 40,000 processors working in a parallel configuration using neural net and fuzzy logic techniques to crank out 5.2 tera-operations per second!
So the Big Data Analytics future, for me, contains complexity in both analysis techniques and computational systems. A bit more that a few unconnected spreadsheets.
Looks exciting eh!!
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