Nathan @ e-gineer

Clarify. Simplify. Implement.

2008-02-21T21:22:00.002+11:00

Clarify. Simplify. Implement.

Working through a wide range of projects, our IT team has settled into a consistent project methodology: Clarify, Simplify, Implement.

Clarify: Work with key stakeholders to understand drivers behind the process. Question motives and key assumptions. Turn over all the rocks to see what lies underneath. (In traditional software terms, this is requirements gathering.)

Simplify: Relentlessly question, review and challenge the processes and solution being developed. Drive for consistency. Search for well-known models or applications you can copy. Don't be afraid to change basic assumptions, where simplicity can be enhanced. Always challenge the value of edge cases and try to eradicate them. Work hard to remove every single process, click, page view, icon, etc until you have something so simple that it feels right to everyone involved. (This is the primary value adding activity for IT.)

Implement: After the requirements are clear, and the solution distilled to its simplest form, start implementing. Do not start with a preconceived solution. Continue to loop through clarify and simplify while performing the implementation. (Use your preferred development methodology, provided it supports constant change and rapid prototyping.)

Tough love adds value

Consultants can gather requirements, and programmers can deliver code from anywhere in the world. But, tough love is only available from those you know and trust. This is the advantage and importance that internal IT teams offer.

External service providers make money through complexity and increased scope. It's in their interest to understand your desires, validate them and then do more work to deliver the wish list. IT needs to reject this model, and help prevent the organisation from becoming as complex as it constantly tries to be.

Simplicity is making hard decisions up front so users can save time and effort in every interaction for all time. Assumptions must be challenged. The status quo should not be accepted as always correct. Trade offs must not be avoided.

Tough love and simplification change IT from a human power tool into a true business partner who provides both leadership and support. Tough love is different to just being tough, it includes love. IT should never be a blocker and will occasionally need to be forgiving. IT should be open in communication and have the best interests of the business at heart.

Design reviews: Brutal refinement and pixel-perfect goodness

An essential part of Clarify, Simplify, Implement are design reviews. These form the ongoing basis for a loop of improvement beyond the initial pass of requirements gathering, simplification and implementation.

A design review includes the application/process owner, the key implementation team and a set of trusted peers. They systematically move through and challenge every process, screen, button, decision, layout and definition. Pixel alignment is important. Removing every excess user decision and superfulous design element matters. Entire pieces of the process or application may need to be redesigned or thrown out. Consistency is critical.

Design reviews are hard and tiring, but ultimately hugely rewarding. Project deadlines and a desire to move onto new problems make it hard to continually refactor your solution design and implementation. It's tempting to stop at good enough, when great is just around the corner. Hours spent discussing alternative user interfaces and nitpicking over definitions can seem like wasted or unproductive time, particularly when your not sure if anyone will notice.

Design reviews take good solutions and make them great.

Zero training

Every user is time poor. They have no interest or time for attending training sessions. Training is the first and biggest hurdle to adoption of your new system and process. While complexity exists and training is required, users can always reject or work around the process with a politically acceptable excuse - "It's too hard".

Our aim, through simplification, is to make people's life easier, reduce the burden on their time and remove all the excuses. The reward is adoption, engagement and relief that that finally it's been done the way everyone always thought (individually) it should be.

Staying simple

After launch, when everyone loves the new system because it just seems to easy, is when discipline becomes truly critical. Feature requests, small changes and extensions will flow from users and every single one "should be easy to add". The hard part is deciding which requests are worthy while ensuring that the system remains simple and consistent.

Clear, simple solutions challenge traditional project economics

With a robust process of clarification and simplication, two things happen:

The implementation phase is much easier. (e.g. multi-step, parallel workflow problems become one level approval).
The solution becomes very agile and iterative, since it's only through the project process that new clarifications and simplifications become apparent.

Traditional enterprise software projects start with large, feature rich solutions that cover the complexity of features and organisational behaviour that appear to be "requirements". Clarify, Simplify, Implement refuses to engage in projects until the status quo has been challenged leading to changes or understanding.

For example, we recently set ourselves the IT procurement challenge that "it should be easier to buy something internally than it is externally". On our journey to achieving this, the obvious first step was inclusion of a shopping cart (we were using Amazon as a benchmark). But, when we saw it working we realised that using enterprise context (e.g. cost centres tied to individuals using single sign on) we didn't even need the complexity of a cart. One click ordering is now the default process.

Project economics and style change to become:

Focused on user experience. All projects and features must provide a significant improvement to the user experience or process. If the cost of implementation outweighs that improvement, then keep looking for a simpler approach that is not so expensive to produce.
Just in time development and design. Accept that clarity and simplicity are a journey, no one has the vision to see that far in advance. Be disciplined enough to realise that sometimes small feature additions need large architectural change just to keep the overall application as simple and consistent as possible.
Optimised for lifetime value. The cost of an application must include the cost to end users of training, inconvenience and usage. For example, the cost of implementing single sign on must be compared to the cost of X users performing Y logins over Z years.

Small, simple projects are fast to prototype, easy to justify and responsive to business needs. Combining Clarify, Simplify, Implement with an iterative improvement process like the Continuous Application Release Cycle sets a journey of positive dissatisfaction and continuous improvement that will quickly change your organisation for the better.

Take the time to write short letters

Lack of time, politics and ego drive enterprises towards complexity. Complex solutions reflect our perception of the difficulty of our jobs, they reflect the important differences of every department involved and are an inevitable result of looking for quick wins by not challenging ourselves upfront.

As Mark Twain once wrote "I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead".

Unfortunately, most project teams take this approach, saving on delivery time and hard conversations and effectively hiding lifetime project costs in lost productivity, frustration and training courses.

Clarify, Simplify, Implement challenges this process and demands the writing of short letters. Users will thank you for it.

Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum - Janssen-Cilag Case Study Presentation

2008-02-20T10:52:00.000+11:00

Here are the slides I presented at the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum this week.

Interested readers, may also like to see my detailed posts on the same topic:

Continuous Application Release Cycle

2007-12-14T09:40:00.000+11:00

Introduction

The Continuous Application Release Cycle is a simple process for providing predictable, stable releases in a rapid and sustainable way. It is not a detailed methodology for release planning, development or testing.

Agile methods, open source development and online applications (often in perpetual beta) have established the power of fast iterations and release of minor versions. Release early, release often! I've successfully used the Continuous Application Release Cycle with high velocity applications ranging from publically downloadable software (Sauce Reader) through to internal enterprise web applications.

The Continuous Application Release Cycle

Adopting this cycle brings certainty and momentum to end users while ensuring continuous improvement and low risk release management for developers. Developers move seamlessly from one version to the next, with only a small cross-over for bug fixing during the Beta period.

Release planning is a high level determination of the features and bug fixes that will be incorporated into the release.

Feature development & Bug fixing is the rapid development of wide-spread code changes to implement the planned features.

Design review & Feature freeze is a formal examination of the design and implementation of features for this release. Ensure they are neatly integrated into the application and do not compromise its integrity or simplicity. Build a final design / development plan to finish integration of the features, or delay their release until a future version.

Final development, Help & training and Bug fixing is a finalisation phase, with consolidation and review of the code base. New capabilities may be added to finalise features, but major surgery should be avoided. Help and training materials for new features are constructed in parallel.

Beta launch puts the application through standard test suites and launches to the Beta user group.

Beta testing & Bug fixing has Beta users installing, trying and testing new application features. Appropriate bugs may be fixed with careful control and testing.

Launch puts the application through standard test suites and launches to all users on production.

Production is wide-spread use of this application version. Bugs and feedback are collected for integration into the next version.

The CARC in practice

The length of the cycle varies depending on the type of application, but I've found that monthly releases work well in practice. The development phase lasts about 4 weeks, with 1 week of Beta testing before launch. Each version is in production for about 4 weeks.

The fast development cycle means each release has fewer changes, facilitating a short testing cycle and removing the heavy crunch that typically accompanies software releases. For developers, the key delivery date is the release to Beta testing. With experience, the release to production becomes increasingly routine.

Regular, planned releases keeps developers close to customer needs and allows rapid response to application problems or competitive features. End users enjoy a sense of momentum from the application, and become increasingly engaged as their suggestions, feedback and problems are quickly addressed.

Building Enterprise 2.0 on Culture 1.0

2007-12-04T09:00:00.000+11:00

Introduction

JCintra, our Intranet Wiki, has seen incredible levels of adoption and participation, with a positive impact on the way information flows in our organisation.

Over 18 months, JCintra amassed 23,335 content contributions from 239 (~70%) people. The number of contributions per month continues to increase steadily.

But, JCintra continues to function as an incredibly easy to use Intranet, rather than as a genuine Wiki. In fact, 85% of our 3000 pages only have one contributing author. (Interestingly, this behaviour occurs even at Atlassian, who build Wiki software as their business!)

This article documents our cultural journey so far, and outlines our ideas for driving the next phase of change.

Technical and Cultural Maturity

What does success look like?

Decisions about information sharing in organisations like Janssen-Cilag are complex. Some information should be open, but isn’t. Some information needs to be closed and controlled. Some ideas should be discussed in the open, while other ideas need to be carefully communicated.

Success is defined by what we do, not what we have the opportunity to do. Implementing a Wiki isn’t success, building an organisation that will take collective ownership and collaboratively edit content is. Technology creates opportunity for changes of behaviour and helps shift the conversation away from excuses (it’s too hard) to reasons (it’s too risky).

Frankly, at Janssen-Cilag, we don’t yet know exactly how we should be communicating and collaborating. But, we do know that the steps we’ve taken so far have improved communication, increased our flexibility and given people the power to run with ideas. We want to continue this journey, pushing more power to the edge of the organisation.

The Enterprise Collaboration Maturity Model

All knowledge work is either individual or group based, and it is always performed in an individual, shared or open environment.

The Enterprise Collaboration Maturity Model depicts these work models, and incorporates the cultural journey that enterprises take to reach each stage. Currently, Janssen-Cilag provides an open Wiki (high capability maturity) but primarily uses it as Groupware (medium usage maturity).

To continue our journey, Janssen-Cilag needs to become comfortable with the idea that published content is not finalised. Specifically, we need users to:

Make contributions in an open space that are not policy or announcements.
Edit work or information that is owned collectively.

Successful Enterprise 2.0 style collaboration requires both technical and cultural maturity. While technology opens immediate potential, organisations must grow towards new patterns of usage and collaboration.

The two cultural barriers to collaboration

There are dozens of reasons and millions of excuses as to why people won't share knowledge; but they all fall within two areas:

Sharing knowledge adds more work (“I don’t have time to share”); and
Sharing knowledge increases personal risk (“I don’t want to share”).

These negatives cannot be eradicated, but they can be minimised.

Reducing additional work

Collaboration and knowledge sharing take time. The technical process takes time, but more significantly, wording your thoughts takes time.

Tools for collaboration must do everything possible to reduce the friction of contributing. It needs to be so easy to use, that you can literally laugh at anyone who tells you it is too hard (in a nice, let me show you, kind of way). In practice this means single sign on, one-click editing and instant gratification on saving. Hurdles like slow technology, login screens, workflow approvals or training kill collaboration before you even start.

The time taken to correctly phrase thoughts and distil ideas is unavoidable, but can be minimised by changing our expectation of shared content away from “finished product” towards “work in progress”. Publishing information early and often (rather than infrequently and completely) moves authorship away from essays and succinct conclusions towards sharing of insights and decisions. The ultimate method for sharing without increasing work is to move the work in progress into an open environment (share everything by default).

Policy opportunities exist to move (but not reduce) the work of sharing knowledge. For example, information is shared verbally on the condition that the recipient will publish it for wider consumption. He who asks, documents. A solution like this rewards the giver with time, builds knowledge on-demand and provides learning reinforcement for the recipient.

Reducing the personal risk of sharing knowledge

Collaboration and knowledge sharing increase personal risk by creating a published, traceable flow of inputs (My mistakes are permanently recorded!) and making past information less valuable than new ideas (What if they don’t need me anymore?).

Risk can be offset by increased rewards, such as recognition for contributions or performance objectives based around knowledge sharing. In practice however, these are hard to implement or judge.

In fact, most people are comfortable with publishing or sharing "finished product". At Janssen-Cilag we've seen this through high usage of news announcements and publication of documents. Unfortunately, most knowledge work is a constant work in progress without a clear end-point and thus never reaches the point of being shared.

The solution is to encourage content contributions that are finished enough to be low-risk publishable, but are not so big as to never reach completion. Encourage people to contribute to a flow of insights and decisions that are made as part of larger projects. Adding to the flow of information (I'm adding to the discussion) is far less risky than publishing final knowledge (I own the final decision) or changing existing content (I'm changing the company position).

Own the flow and the stocks will come

News announcements have been the most successful part of JCintra. Open for publishing by anyone in the organisation, they have replaced email for announcements ranging from major organisational change through to baby announcements.

Through this flow of news, JCintra has become the trusted source for the latest information. "Did you see the announcement on JCintra?", is not an uncommon question around the office. As a result, users also expect JCintra to have the latest policies and information. By owning the flow of news, we've created the trusted source for information stocks.

There are three critical information flows, each of which creates its own stock over time:

The flow of news becomes a stock of facts and decisions.
The flow of projects becomes a stock of investigations and outcomes.
The flow of ideas becomes a stock of potential and experts.

A focus on capturing the flow has many advantages:

The system always contains the latest information, building trust and adoption.
The process is easy to enforce and success is readily measured (by monitoring email announcements, the only alternative).
Work and risk is minimised for contributors.
Through search, archived flows become a rich and readily available stock.

Over time, the flow of decisions and insights washes over the organisation, helping each person refine their mental map and build a personal body of knowledge. When new items fit their mental model, they can be increasingly confident and aligned in decision making. When news doesn't fit their mental model, they can seek clarity or raise an area of concern.

Focus on owning the flow of information, then have the patience to watch the stocks gradually compile.

Manifesto for Collaboration Tools

Shamelessly stealing from the Agile Manifesto, I propose the following values for building Enterprise 2.0 collaboration systems:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools.
Ease of use over comprehensive training.
Flexible tools over completeness.
Responding to needs over creating demand.

(That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.)

We are building processes and tools to help with collaboration, but should never forget that the main thing is that people actually work together and talk to one another. We don't need to capture every conversation or every piece of knowledge, we just want to strengthen weak ties.

Training in systems is important, but only after we've done everything possible to design for zero training. In an enterprise, your Mum really is the end user; design for her! Always sacrifice features and power for ease of use. The minute you have to train people you will lose them to the "more work" excuse.

It's tempting to aim for tools that deliver exactly what people need in different scenarios. To always take tools that one step further to capture their exact requirements. In reality, people like to push and abuse tools that are comfortable, flexible and part of their every day work (e.g. email, Excel). Wiki's, blogs and search are great examples of simple tools that can be used for a myriad of purposes without needing a million customisations or extensions.

Finally, deliver solutions that meet an existing need. If you build it, they won't come. But, you can build it around where they already are.

Next steps for Janssen-Cilag

At Janssen-Cilag, our Wiki has settled into a steady pattern of news publication and simple intranet editing. It is well established and respected for these tasks. Our aim is to build on the strengths of JCintra, while expanding into new areas of knowledge capture.

First we will make internal blogging available to all employees. Links to new posts will be interspersed with news on the home page, creating a flow of ideas in the trusted location but not taking valuable attention away from the full content news items. The people directory will also have direct links to recent posts.

Second, we'll add a Twitter/Facebook style status capability to the people directory which has a history and can be updated via SMS. This is a powerful micro-blogging solution for our field personnel and will be integrated with the Office Communicator Note field. Recent status updates will also be incorporated into the home page news feed, but in a very lightweight way. (The Jitter screenshot shows our early experiment in this area, which we have decided not to launch but instead integrate into the people directory.)

Finally, we hope to expand our internal project management offering with something in the style of Basecamp, which can create a feed of project related milestone news for the home page.

Overall, the aim is to build on the strengths of JCintra by adding ideas and project milestones to the flow of information that washes past people on the Intranet home page. With time this will build a powerful stock but, most importantly, it immediately provides ideas and stimulation to drive interactions between individuals.

Conclusion

Successful Enterprise 2.0 style collaboration requires both technical and cultural maturity. Janssen-Cilag has adopted an open Wiki with the potential for collective ownership, but usage remains dominated by individual contributions to a shared space. This is reflected in the high usage of JCintra’s news column for announcements and the regular publishing of team and policy information.

To encourage an organisational shift along the enterprise collaboration maturity model, Enterprise 2.0 leaders should focus on capturing the flow of information. Over time, the flow builds not only a stock of searchable knowledge but also a reputation as the source of fresh ideas and trusted up-to-date content.

Building on the success of our Intranet Wiki, Janssen-Cilag plans to introduce internal blogging and personal status updates to encourage the flow of individual insights and decisions.

Note: Here are some of the articles I read while writing this post. Thanks also go to my team without whom this would all be theory.

Metaphors for interface design

2007-08-28T21:36:00.000+10:00

Over the last few years, user experience has become my primary focus when building processes and systems. But, I never truly understood the importance of interface design until I read this post by Andy Rutledge.

Andy intelligently draws a metaphor where words represent content (what you are saying) and body language represents interface design (how you look as you say it). He also beautifully illustrates that a huge component of all communication is non-verbal, although it is less than the sensationalist 93% that people inaccurately extrapolate from Mehrabian's communication study.

What is your interface design saying?

Our Intranet, the Wiki: Case Study of a Wiki changing an Enterprise

2007-08-18T07:30:00.000+10:00

Introduction

Janssen-Cilag is one of the fastest growing, research based pharmaceutical companies in Australia. It has more than 300 employees, split across Australia and New Zealand with around half based in the field. It is one of 250 Johnson & Johnson operating companies, which total about 121,000 employees across 57 countries.

In 2006, Janssen-Cilag completely replaced our simple, static HTML intranet with a Wiki solution. Over the 16 months since launch, it has dramatically transformed our internal communication and continues to increase in both visits and content contributions each month.

History of Janssen-Cilag's Intranet

Janssen-Cilag's previous intranet, InfoDownUnder, was a static HTML site, originally developed in 2001. Content was maintained using FrontPage, with only a handful of active editors throughout the company. IT was involved only to upload latest versions of content files from the development site onto the production server.

While some areas were lovingly maintained to a high standard, large sections of content were out of date. There was no search capability. Trust in the information was very low. News was distributed via email, not the web. The site featured excessive use of the blink tag, and New! icons highlighting content that was up to 3 years old.

Latent demand for change was strong.

Intranet requirements gathering

The culture at Janssen-Cilag is highly consultative and relationship based. As such, gathering information and buy-in is often achieved through a series of conversations and discussions, building a coalition of support.

Requirements for a new Intranet site were collected through 27 interviews with a variety of people from all levels of the business. Three themes emerged:

We need a trusted source of information
Whatever we do has to be simple
Just do something!

Each conversation varied widely in focus, but the format usually went as follows:

The floodgates open with a dump of information the user considers vital for the Intranet, which lasts about 15 minutes. (What can I get?)
They highlight search as a key requirement.
I would steer the conversation to questions about how content should be maintained. (What can you give?)

Pitching a Wiki to the business

With many years of experience building one of the first large scale completely open collaboration platforms for the web and then building heavyweight enterprise CMS systems for large organisations, I've personally come full-circle to the idea that the best collaboration systems are incredibly simple and open. Wiki's are a powerful starting point for any organisation, but latent demand at Janssen-Cilag created the perfect environment.

As such, I used the requirements gathering session as a chance to pitch the idea of a Wiki as the solution to our Intranet problem. After bringing the conversation to understand our content maintenance requirements, I'd talk through the Wiki approach and how it may work for Janssen-Cilag. My sales pitch went as follows:

We need a system where editing is immediate and very simple.
Getting people to contribute at all is hard, so we need to concentrate on letting people do things rather than worrying about what they shouldn't do.
The risk of letting anyone change anything is low, since we'll keep a complete history of changes so we can quickly undo mistakes and we can hold irresponsible individuals accountable for anything improper. (Reactive moderation rather than Proactive moderation).

In general, the response was incredibly positive. Predictably, the main argument against this system was fear of improper changes to content, particularly for information subject to regulatory control. I would counter this argument in two ways:

There are two ways to control people's behaviour: social forces and technical forces. Currently, we successfully rely on social forces to control a wide range of things like who calls or emails the CEO with their latest crazy idea. Technical forces are powerful, but with each technical feature we increase training and raise the bar against collaboration. Surely, we can see if social forces will be enough for all but the most critical of content?
Anyone can choose to monitor any content that they are concerned about (e.g. automatic email alert with changes). So, they can quickly jump in and correct any mistakes.
For exceptional cases, we may choose to lock down critical content and define clear ownership and responsibility for its maintenance.

At the end, showing people around Wikipedia was an incredibly powerful way to seal the deal, particularly since they have often used it to find information in the past.

There were no major objections to trying a Wiki-style concept.

Implementing a Wiki for your Enterprise Intranet

We purchased, customised and launched a pilot Wiki Intranet within two weeks and with a budget of $11,000 AUD. This included all graphic design and single sign on integration.

After evaluating a wide range of alternatives including MediaWiki, Twiki and FlexWiki; we selected Confluence by Atlassian. Our main concerns were support for a hierarchy of pages, strong attachment capabilities, news features, LDAP integration, high quality search and a decent rich text editor.

Our customisation focused almost completely on usability. People shouldn't know or care that they are using a Wiki. All that matters is that they can easily browse, search and contribute content. (In fact, after 16 months, only a small set of Janssen-Cilag staff would think of our Intranet as a Wiki. To them, it just seems natural that Intranet software would have evolved to something this simple to use.)

Here were our implementation decisions:

Integration with LDAP and use of NTLM for automatic single sign on is essential. We even hacked someone's starting point and open sourced our improved version.
Rich text editing must be available and as Word-like as possible.
Users like hierarchy and structure, the Wiki should not feel disorganised or completely free-form. (Confluence supports this with an exact page hierarchy capability.)
Sacrifice power and flexibility for simplicity. For example, our page design is fixed into a title, alphabetical list of subpages, page content, alphabetical list of attachments. While it would be nice to be able to change this at times, or order the attachments, or change the look and feel; it's far more important that everyone can contribute and clearly understands how things work.
Remove as many unnecessary features as possible. For example, labels are a great idea, but we already have hierarchy and most users don't really know what labels are.

Launch & user training

We started the new site as a pilot, launching as the source of information for a relocation of our head office. (Nothing drives traffic like the seating plan for a new office!) Information around the relocation was fast moving and changing daily for the two weeks between announcement of the move and our actual relocation.

Building on that success, we obtained executive approval to replace the existing Intranet. Over the next two weeks we worked with key content owners (most particularly HR) to show them how to create pages and migrate appropriate information. We made the decision to not automatically migrate any content, mostly because it was so old and trust in the existing intranet information was so low.

Our launch was timed with an informal head office monthly meeting, where around 100 people stand and listen to an update from senior management. We switched the site to live during the meeting, and had 5 minutes to present:

1 min: Highlight the desire for a trusted source of information that was simple to use.
3 mins: Full training that showed how easy it was to view, search, edit & maintain.
1 min: Point out that responsibility for building that trusted source is now in your hands!

That launch presentation remains the only formal training we've ever provided on how to use the system.

Continuing training has been provided through short one-on-one demonstrations (we only show, we never do) and a detailed help section (I'm happy to show you now, but for future reference here is the help page).

Adoption, statistics & business impact

The adoption of JCintra has been remarkable. After only 3 months, 111 people had contributed more than 5,000 changes. After 12 months, we had 18,000 contributions from 184 people within the business.

Most significantly, our contributions per month has continued to grow since launch. People are engaging and collaborating more with time, they are not losing steam as you might expect.

To drive adoption, we've primarily focused on owning the flow of new information. Early on, we established a policy that all announcements must be on JCintra. When necessary, they may be sent via email in addition to posting as news on the Intranet. Today, announcements ranging from major restructures to new babies for employees flow through the news page without clogging up email inboxes.

Owning the flow of news has established JCintra as a trusted source for the latest information. This translates into an expectation that the stocks of information (e.g. policies) will be available and up to date. Own the flow and the stock will come.

Business information that was previously scattered in email (e.g. Business Planning presentations) is now collected into a permanent, secure online space. We have a growing reference and history of information to build on and make available to newcomers. Knowledge management, previously a big concern, has moved off the agenda for the time being.

Content ownership model

For many Intranet owners, the model for content ownership is a key point of focus. With JCintra, our philosophy (successfully so far) has been:

If someone isn't willing to maintain a piece of content, it can't be that important to the business.
We happily show people how to do things with the site, but we don't do it for them.
Occasionally we highlight sections of the site on the home page, which is a great way to drive the defacto owners to clean it up a little.
We encourage people to have high expectations for content on the Intranet. If something is missing, please report it to the appropriate area of the business, or better still, add it for them.
The answer to verbal queries for many departments has become, "it's on JCintra". This reminds people to search first and ask later.
In the end, the quality of content in an area is a reflection on the defacto department owner, not the Intranet itself.

As a result, we've seen some departments embrace the Intranet in a big way, while others don't update content as much as we'd like. As expected, service areas of the business have been strong adopters, which means the main areas of Intranet content have been well maintained.

We've not yet adopted a formal content review process, but believe this will become more important in the next year of the sites life.

Keeping momentum & next steps

The primary barrier to continued success of JCintra remains the same as our initial barrier: encouraging a culture of collaboration and transparency. Some areas of JCintra have been highly successful in this regard, while other sections have never gained clear ownership or momentum.

JCintra works best when it is established as the source of truth for information and becomes the place where the work is done on a day-to-day basis. While ever the Intranet is a place that has to hold a published copy, it will remain as "extra work" and struggle in the competition for people's time.

Conclusion

Implemented with usability and simplicity as the key focus, a Wiki is a fast, cheap and highly effective way to run an Intranet. Users do not perceive our Intranet as a Wiki, with all the anarchistic overtones that brings. Rather, they see the simplicity and flexibility as a natural evolution of Intranet technology.

In a culture full of all the typical trust, transparency, workload and security concerns common to big companies; the simplicity of this system and its content ownership model cut through. Problems of driving collaboration and content updates remain, but they are exposed as the cultural and people problems at their heart since the technical and workload "excuses" have been stripped away.

Note: Our Intranet has evolved significantly from the screenshots above, which were taken from the time of launch to avoid business confidentiality issues in this public forum. The site now includes a wealth of content and tight integration with our data warehouse, CRM and internal operational systems. Read more in Building Enterprise 2.0 on Culture 1.0.

Getting your Blogger blog listed in search results

2007-08-12T07:47:00.000+10:00

3 months after her birth and simultaneous notification to the Google Crawler for indexing, Elimena.com was still not showing up in Google's results (or other search engines for that matter). I was shocked it was taking this long, and had resubmitted multiple times.

In desperation today, I thought it might be related to the Javascript trick I'm using to show the Flash Movie Header as a link that doesn't require activation to use. Looking at the source code, I noticed this fatal tag on every page of the site:

being added automatically by the Blogger template tag:

<$BlogMetaData$>

I was confused, since my e-gineer blog, also powered by Blogger, doesn't add this when using the BlogMetaData template tag.

To fix this check the following Blogger setting:

Login to Blogger.
Go to Settings, then Basic tabs.
Ensure that Add your blog to our listings? is marked as Yes.

If your blog is suspected as spam by Blogger, and they force you to enter a captcha code everytime you post, you can submit your blog for review by Blogger staff which should fix the problem.

If all else fails, simply copy all the code you need that is produced by the <$BlogMetaData$> tag and paste it into your template in place of the tag itself.

Cost allocation model for shared services

2007-08-10T10:15:00.000+10:00

Introduction

Earlier this year we conducted a review of the cost allocation model used to charge our local operating companies for support centre services like helpdesk, IT procurement, server management, etc. This post outlines the model we came up with and draws key principles for any agreement of this type.

The key is to keep everyone focused on costs, not on cost allocations. (Cost allocation just shifts costs around.)

When allocating costs from a shared service, the key aims are:

Provide customers with transparency and control over cost drivers.
Provide flexibility over the way resources can be used, while keeping a single consistent allocation model.
Leave choice over resource allocation and daily control with the service provider.

The costs for a shared service can be divided into 2 components:

Infrastructure
People

Infrastructure costs

Infrastructure costs should be completely separated from overheads and people costs. Examples of infrastructure include data transfer, rack space charges, outsourced server monitoring, etc.

Each infrastructure item has a total cost, which must be divided among the customers according to an allocation model that best represents the cost driver.

Example: Allocation of Infrastructure Costs
Data transfer into the data center for July cost $100. The allocation model for this infrastructure item is bytes transferred by each customer company. Foo Industries generated 75% of the traffic during July, while Bar Incorporated generated the remaining 25%. As such, the data transfer bill for Foo is $75 and Bar is $25.
Racks for housing servers in the data center are depreciated at a rate of $50 per month. Costs are distributed based on the number of servers used by each company. Foo has 10 servers in place, while Bar has 15. As such, Foo's rack charges is $20 for July while Bar pays $30.
Server monitoring is compulsory for data center servers and is charged at $200/server/month. This is billed directly to each company based on their servers in place so Foo pays $2000 and Bar pays $3000.

In the end, we have this equation to give the operating company cost for each infrastructure item:

ItemCostToCustomer = TotalCostOfItem x (CustomerUsage/TotalUsage)

People costs

People in a shared service spend their time on 3 things:

Project work
Ad-hoc tasks, maintenance and incident management
Managing other people

Each person working in a shared service has a specific cost. This will typically include:

Salary & benefits
Building and space costs
Equipment costs

Time spent on project work and ad-hoc tasks can be directly allocated to customers, but time spent on people management is harder to quantify. To solve this problem, we calculate the cost of time spent on people management and allocate it among all reports under the manager.

Example: Allocation of people costs
Alice is the manager of the shared service and spends 100% of her time managing people. She does no direct project work and does not complete any ad-hoc tasks. Her cost, including salary, building and equipment costs, is $100.
Alice has 5 direct reports, each of whom have 4 reports, giving a total of 25 staff in her team. Alice's cost is divided evenly among all 25 reports, adding $4 to the cost of each person.
Alice has no time to allocate among customer companies (she's done no "real work" afterall). But, her cost is effectively distributed by the work completed for customers since it is allocated to staff who do "real work".
Bob reports to Alice. His cost, including salary, building and equipment was $80. With the management allocation from Alice, his cost is now $84.
Bob spends 50% of his time on people management, 25% on projects and 25% resolving ad-hoc issues. Per the model, 50% of Bob's total cost of $84 is evenly distributed among his 4 reports ($42/4 = $10.50 each). The 25% project work ($21) and 25% ad-hoc work completed by Bill are billed to the customers directly.
Chris reports to Bob and spends all his time on ad-hoc tasks. His cost, including salary, building and equipment was $60. With the management allocation from Alice and Bob, his cost is now $60 + $4 + $10.50 = $74.50.
Of the ad-hoc tasks performed by Chris, 50% were done for Foo Industries and 50% were done for Bar Incorporated. As such, Chris's cost to Foo Industries is $37.25 and to Bar Incorporated is $37.25.

In summary, the allocation of people costs follows these principles:

All people costs are allocated and paid on an individual person basis. So, a company that uses 25% of Derek's time will pay 25% of Derek's cost.This is not the same as using 25% of total time spent by the shared service team and paying 25% of their total cost. For example, if we use resolved calls as the metric to determine ad-hoc time spent and include both L1 (average 300 calls) and L2 (average 50 calls) engineers in the cost calculation there is no potential reward for moving calls from L2 resolution to L1 resolution.
Time spent on people management (an rough estimate for each manager) is added to the cost of the people being managed. So, you are only charged for actual work being done but we recognise that part of the cost of using those resources is the management team in place.
Time spent on project work is directly allocated and billed to the customer requesting the project. It's important to appropriately separate these tasks from ad-hoc time. This ensures that we can see the real cost of project activities and keeps ad-hoc tasks reasonably consistent in complexity (thus evenly cost distributed).
Time spent on ad-hoc tasks is assumed to be the remainder after calculating time spent on people management and time spent on projects.

It's only a model

As always, this model is an approximation of reality. It will never be perfect, nor should we aim for it to be perfect. It's important to remain pragmatic and remember that a lot of the small inconsistencies and errors will correct themselves. (Two slightly wrongs can make a right in this context.)

You'll need to think about how to handle events like extended sick leave or annual leave.

The key is to remember to keep all cost drivers transparent and controllable. Try not to let generic buckets like "overheads" or "maintenance" creep into the model.

Conclusion

After 6 months use on a team of 25 people divided among 5 operating companies over 2 countries, we've found this to be a simple, flexible model that has given us unprecedented insight and high level of control over cost drivers.

We're now dealing with the hard (and important) problem of seeking real process improvement and cost control rather than looking for temporary advantage by playing with cost allocations to get temporary local advantage.

Promotion helps turn flows into authorative stocks

2007-07-12T07:19:00.000+10:00

Before the Web, the availability of information was tied to the ubiquity of the promotion medium. Today, all information is equally accessible¹, but promotion can accelerate its distribution.

Before the Web, information was strictly divided into stocks (books) and flows (newspapers & magazines). Today, through the power of search flows are immediately converted into stock resources.²

Before the Web, promotion could only be used to maximise exposure through flows. Today, promotion is used to speed up information flow. Speeding up dissemination of your ideas allows you to set the agenda, frame the context and establish yourself as an authority. In effect, speed helps establish your flow as the stock resource.³

When executed correctly, promotion today provides far more potential for long term value than previous mediums ever enabled. Establish the context and conversation and you will become established as the authorative stock.

Footnotes:

All information lives on a web page, and can be seen by simple distribution of a link. In that way, my lowly blog post is equal to CNN's biggest story of the year.
Background on stocks and flows.
Search engines are complex beasts and continually evolving, but this is roughly true of how they work.

Creating a flash movie header or banner for your site

2007-05-21T18:49:00.000+10:00

Rather than use a typical image header for Elimena's site, I wanted to try something different and use a flash movie instead. Here are complete instructions on how to create your own...

All the ActionScript code required is in a single block at the bottom of this post, but don't be too hasty as it won't make much sense without the options and other info I've described.

Import the video into Flash (FLV) format

First you need a suitable movie that can be looped in some reasonable way (i.e. the first and last frames of the movie have a reasonably similar appearance). I simply bought a short video from iStockPhoto. I selected the large web size, which provides good movie quality at a width of 640px (just wide enough for an effective site header).

Using Macromedia Flash Professional 8 (just download a trial version to get started), I created and new Flash document and imported the iStockPhoto movie (File > Import). In the advanced import settings you can crop the imported movie to 640x200px and trim the timeline down to something that loops smoothly and keeps the size reasonable. This process creates a Flash Video file (FLV) that can effectively stream as a simple static HTTP served file.

After importing the movie, we must set the background Flash document to the exact same dimensions and position. First, select the main Flash document (click in the drawing area, but outside any objects including the FLVplayback object) and then click the Size button in the Properties tab setting the dimensions of the Flash document to match the movie (e.g. 640x200px). Second, click on the FLVplayback object in the drawing area, then edit the X, Y position of the FLVplayback object to 0, 0 (perfectly aligning it with the document).

At this point we have a simple flash file that will play the movie end-to-end once.

Prepare the Flash container for ActionScript code

Before doing any coding, we need to prepare the FLVplayback object. (These will make sense below.) Click the FLVplayback object inserted above and then:

Change the Instance Name in the Properties tab to be video.
Set a cue point (Parameters tab > cuePoints) called EndFadeIn 1 sec into the movie.
Set a cue point called StartFadeOut 1 sec before the end of the movie.

Making your video loop

For continuous video, we need to both setup the FLVplayback object to loop and create a small fade effect to hide the jump from the last frame to the first frame. Unfortunately, and unbelieveably, there are no "make my movie loop" or "fade" checkboxes in Flash. Believe me, I looked for a long time in disbelief.

The ActionScript code below simply listens for the complete event on the FLVPlayback object and triggers the object to play again. This will cause it to loop around and around.

Using fade for a seamless loop transition

Unless you have a movie designed for seamless looped play, you'll most likely need to join the start and end together with a short fade sequence. This keeps the continuity of play, but hides the frame jump between the end and start of the movie.

Scarred by the lack of loop checkbox, but still optimistic I only spent half as long looking for the fade in and fade out video effects. Again, no such thing. To add fades to your movie, you need to add some ActionScript. Constant use of the onEnterFrame event leads to high CPU consumption (on my old laptop anyway, not so much on the brand spanking new desktop), so I brushed off my coding skills and put together something that achieves the effect with a very low CPU load.

The ActionScript code below catches the cue point events, using StartFadeOut to register an onFrameEvent handler that performs the gradual fade out and fade in of the movie loop. The EndFadeIn event deregisters that handler, reducing the CPU usage required to play the majority of the video clip. (I think this is a fairly neat & important trick that I didn't find used elsewhere.)

Linking the banner to your home page

All good site headers should link back to the home page. Still optimistic, I looked for the add hyperlink capability in Flash (which also doesn't exist). I then tried wrapping the Flash object in an anchor tag (also doesn't work).

The solution is to create a button in flash and use ActionScript to link to your chosen page:

In the Timeline panel, click the icon to add a new layer. This layer will be used to house the button without affecting our other content.
Make sure the new layer is selected.
On the Insert menu, choose New Symbol...
Use the Button type, name it Button Symbol and click OK. This creates a canvas on which we can make the button template that will be added to the library. (We have to add it to our document later.)
Select the rectangle tool and set the border to none and the colour to have an alpha of 0. You can now draw an invisible rectangle in the middle of this canvas. Don't worry too much about the size & position at this point.
Use the select tool and select your rectangle by clicking on where you know it will be.
In the Properties tab, set the width to 640px, the height to 200px, the X position to -320px and the Y position to -100px.
The Button Symbol is now in your Library, but isn't in the document yet.
To return to the main stage, click Scene 1 in the Timeline panel (should be just to the left of your Button Symbol link).
To add an instance of Button Symbol to the document, drag it across from the Library pane on the right.
Use the Properties tab at the bottom to set the instance name to btn and align it exactly by setting X and Y both to zero.
Make the button link to your chosen URL by adding this code to the ActionScript section:

on(release) { getURL("http://www.e-gineer.com", "_self"); }

Initially I thought this wasn't working either, as the link in the sample I copied was to an outside website which seemed to get blocked for security reasons in IE (silently) and in FireFox (with an error message that finally helped me understand what was happening).

Removing the "click to activate control" (Eolas patent) requirement

The final challenge is working around the Eolas patent. By default, your Flash object requires a single click to activate the control. This is very annoying when you actually want the whole object to act as a simple link.

The workaround to remove the activation click is fairly simple. Just create a Javascript file (e.g. header.js) that programmatically ites out the header HTML for embedding the Flash file. Here is example content of the Javascript file:

// Use external Javascript to load the object so it // doesn't require the user to click to activate it. // See http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/workshop/author/dhtml/overview/activating_activex.asp document.write('<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0" width="640" height="200" id="Your Header Title" align="middle">\ <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain">\ <param name="movie" value="/url/to/YourHeader.swf">\ <param name="quality" value="high">\ <param name="bgcolor" value="black">\ <embed src="//url/to/YourHeader.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="black" width="640" height="200" name="Your Header Title" align="middle" allowscriptaccess="sameDomain" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer"/>\ </object>');

And then use this code to include it where you'd like the Flash header to appear in your page:

<script src="/url/to/header.js"></script>

The ActionScript code

I added all ActionScript code to the Flash document itself (there are many possible locations, this one seemed cleanest to me). Select the Flash document by clicking in the drawing area outside all existing objects, expand the ActionScript task bar and insert this code:

// This is the length of time at the start and end of the movie
// used for the gradual fade.
fadeTime = 1;
// The frames per second of the movie.
fps = 12;
// Calculate the alpha increment to use when fading in or out.
alphaInc = Math.abs(100*fadeTime/fps);

var listenerObject:Object = new Object();

// To make the flash movie loop, upon completion the movie
// is set to start playing again.
listenerObject.complete = function(eventObject:Object):Void {
  video.play();
};
video.addEventListener("complete", listenerObject);

// To achieve the fade effect on each cycle (except when the movie
// first starts playing) we use an onEnterFrame event. Because of
// the high CPU load this causes, we use two cue points to set and
// remove a listener on this event as appropriate. EndFadeIn is
// set 1 sec after the start of the movie and StartFadeOut is set
// 1 sec before the end of the movie (These intervals must be the
// same as the fadeTime setting above.
listenerObject.cuePoint = function(eventObject:Object):Void {
  switch (eventObject.info.name) {
  case "StartFadeOut":
    // We are near the end of the movie, so register the onEnterFrame
    // listener which will control both the fade out and fade in tasks
    // as the movie loops back and until the EndFadeIn cue point is reached.
    video.onEnterFrame = function() {
      if (video.playheadTime<fadeTime) {
        video._alpha += alphaInc;
      }
      else if ( (video.totalTime - video.playheadTime) < fadeTime) {
        video._alpha -= alphaInc;
      }
      else {
        // Shouldn't be needed due to cue points, but just in case.
        video._alpha = 100;
      }
    }
    break;
  case "EndFadeIn":
    // We have faded in completely, so set the alpha to 100 for
    // certainty and remove the onEnterFrame listener for the time
    // being.
    video._alpha = 100;
    video.onEnterFrame = null;
    break;
  }
}
video.addEventListener("cuePoint", listenerObject);

Elimena joins the clan...

2007-05-10T09:57:00.000+10:00

Elimena Margaret Wallace was born in Sydney at 11:48am on the 9th May 2007. Weight 3.51kg (7lb 12oz), height 52.5cm.

The myth of train the trainer

2007-01-31T23:22:00.000+11:00

In the majority of cases, train the trainer is doomed to failure for 3 reasons:

Training the wrong people
Pushing work downwards
Playing Chinese whispers

Online training and video is the only solution that provides on-demand availability, consistency of quality and clarity of message all with a relatively low time investment.

Training the wrong people

By definition, train the trainer does not include training the average user. So, two alternatives remain, train the superuser or train the non-user (e.g. team manager). Unfortunately, both make lousy trainers.

Superusers are very knowledgeable about the system, but overwhelm average users with their skill, jargon and speed. The result is an impression that the system is best left to the experts, one of whom happens to be readily accessible and now assumed available for 24x7 support. (The same problem faced by computer nerds when helping their family setup a PC.)

Non-users don't have the ongoing interaction with the system to keep their skills fresh, or even the basic system knowledge needed to conduct training. The result is shallow training sessions with an impression that the system must be difficult to understand if even the trainer can't use it properly.

Pushing work downwards

Train the trainer is a beautiful trick that allows project owners to tick the box on training while handing over ongoing responsibility and ownership for use of the system. Arriving with hopes of a nice buffet lunch, the new "trainers" leave with a few PowerPoint slides and a major new unexpected component to their job.

Project owners are given time and resources to raise the bar and change behaviour through the implementation. If they can't find time to prioritise training, there is no way that users or managers swamped in their day to day tasks can do so. The result is a gap, which no one owns and everyone will eventually refer to knowingly as "the training issue".

It's proven again, you can't get something for nothing.

Chinese Whispers

Training is important in terms of showing people how to use the system. But, it's vital in terms of convincing people that the system is useful and helpful. Teaching someone a skill is not the same as motivating them to use it.

Unfortunately it's this motivation and drive that is most quickly lost and distorted through the train the trainer chain. Each generation of trainer interprets the usefulness of the system and the important parts of the system differently, adding their own spin.

Exacerbating this loss of knowledge through imperfect copying is the natural inclination in a casual training session to skim through the material, downplay it's importance and just skip the parts we don't understand ourselves with an embarrassed laugh.

Train the trainer is like being in high school and asking your friend to talk to the cute girl across the room. They mean well, but feel silly doing the task, are vague in their message and don't share your commitment to the outcome.

Alternatives to train the trainer

Typical turnover for a business is 20-25%, so new people are starting continuously and every single one requires training in the system. The need for training is relentless and always urgent.

In my experience, on-demand training packages (e.g. online, video) is the only viable solution giving the required flexibility and control over message while keeping resourcing to a minimum. These don't need to be highly professional or polished, but do need to be reasonably easy to update and maintain.

Making train the trainer work

Despite the common problems above, train the trainer can work when:

Trainers are actually trained in how to lead the training (not just taken through the training themselves). Materials should be prepared and core messages clarified for consistent and continuous delivery to new recruits. Make it simple and time efficient to conduct training.
Trainers are chosen who have some interest in providing training. Whether this interest is intrinsic (I love to share knowledge) or extrinsic (increased chance of bonus) it must keep the motivation level high to conduct quality training with the core messages intact.

Project Insulation

2007-01-22T20:50:00.000+11:00

I spent all of last weekend crawling around in our attic, cleaning out 70 years of dust and laying insulation batts. Total project cost (batts, tools, safety equipment) was $570 for an 82sqm ceiling.

By far the hardest part was removing all the dust from the attic. Our tiled roof does not have any sarking installed, which increased the amount of crap that is able to find its way in. Worst of all, our original ceiling is lath and plaster, resulting in a concrete ridge every few centimetres creating nice little gathering spots for dirt. It's worth noting that this ceiling dust is nasty stuff, full of lead and other contaminants so you may like to consider a professional cleaning service. (I've heard this costs about $1,500AUD and is probably the route I'd take if I ever have to do this again in my life now that I've proven my stupidity.)

First, I tried using our household vacuum cleaner. After only a few square metres the bag was full and the machine would overheat. Cooling it back down in the attic environment was difficult, making this a slow process.

Second, getting more desperate, I tried our outdoor blower / vacuum. Predictably, and not as spectacularly as I expected, it was only able to pickup a small amount of the gunk which it then promptly spewed back into the air through it's course filters.

I then spoke with Kennards about hiring an industrial vacuum ($68/day), which I'm sure would have worked well and is the solution a number of my friends took. (I would have done this earlier, but picking up an industrial vacuum is non-trivial when you don't own a car.) Unfortunately, we have an unusually small manhole that the vacuum would not fit through. I considered removing roof tiles and battens, but this seemed like a high risk strategy particularly with forecasts of rain on the weekend.

So, in the end, I spent a day and a half removing many kilos of dust from the attic using a dustpan and broom on my hands and knees. I refined the process down to brushing along each 2cm x 40cm plaster crevice towards the beam, and then lengthways along the beam. This gathered the most dust and piled it for an easier lengthways brushing over the plaster ridges.

All in all, brushing was reasonably effective, but is definitely not recommended.

Compared to cleaning out all the crap, laying the actual insulation batts is fast and easy. I settled on Bradford Gold R3.5 batts, which were not at strong as the R4.0 I wanted, but were immediately available off the shelf at Bunnings.

Understanding as much as I could about R-values, it appears that the typical recommendation in Sydney is R3.0. The primary problem in our house is loss of heat during winter combined with 12' ceilings, so I wanted as much protection as possible. In Sydney, we have a habit of believing we live in a warmer climate than reality suggests (hence no central heating and constant comments of "I should have brought a jumper"). BTW, don't be confused when the US uses imperial R-values rather than metric R-values. R3.5 (metric) is approximately R20 (imperial).

The one area I still don't understand is the use of vapour barriers with bulk insulation batts. I know that the vapour barrier is important to stop the build up of condensation. I know that it should go on the warm side of the insulation layer. But, I could never work out if I need a vapour barrier in simple pitched roof with batts on the flat ceiling. I couldn't find any instructions for vapour barrier installation in this scenario and in the end, it appears to be something people worry about more in environments with an extreme difference between inside and outside temperatures than they do in a Sydney style location. So, I didn't install a vapour barrier.

There are 4 things you need to know when buying batts: desired R-value, gap between your beams (450mm centres or 600mm centres), total sqm to be covered and how the hell you are going to get all these massive bags back to your house. The beam gap is easily measured in the ceiling and the total sqm can be estimated from ground floor level. I'd definitely suggest buying extra batts, so you can shove them in around the edges and not be stuck in the roof covered in crap wishing you'd had just one more bag delivered.

Delivery of the batts is an obvious choice, particularly when without a car the alternative is to pile them into a taxi or walk them home bag by bag. Unfortunately, on this particular night at this particular Bunnings the task was all a bit much. We got there, but only after they (impressively) called in the store expert from his holidays to help with the computer. $35 for a huge pile of batts delivered next day delivery after 4pm.

Opening a packet of batts is like pulling the cord on an inflatable raft. In one of the few home handyman lessons my father has passed down, I didn't make his error of opening them inside a small bathroom before taking the pack into the ceiling. But, our tiny manhole struck again as I squeezed, pulled and wobbled 10 packs through.

Laying the majority of your batts is dead simple. They fit perfectly between the beams and are fairly easy to throw around. Even with the recommended face mask and overalls I ended up fairly itchy on my arms, so be sure to invest the $20 in this gear. The only slight complication is making sure that you don't cover all the electrical wiring, I just loosened any fasteners and laid it across the top of the batts.

Batts around the edges require some trimming. I bought a retractable knife which worked OK until I woke up to the idea of cutting them with a beam as the "chopping board" at which point it worked brilliantly. Our roof has a fairly high pitch, so even laying in the corners was not too difficult.

Basically, with some preparation (i.e. buy batts & safety gear) and a little determination you should be able to completely clean and insulate your ceiling in a weekend.

One week later I'm finally able to kneel down again. More importantly, over the 40C weekend our house stayed cool during the day (great) and then relatively hot at night (not so great, but proves the effectiveness of the insulation).

Standard response framework for technical problems

2007-01-17T19:05:00.000+11:00

Something goes wrong and people in the business either reported it or found out. Fixing the problem is important, but not as important as keeping everyone informed and reassured that your team is on top of the situation.

Basic level emails always answer four key questions about the problem:

What happened? (e.g. Sales calls have been underreported)
How bad was it? (e.g. Minor, 150 calls lost out of 10,000 thousand - 1.5%)
Why did it happen? (e.g. Calls are awaiting validation of customer details)
What have we done to stop it happening again? (e.g. Validation status added to dashboard)

Good emails also include plenty of information and context to help reduce fear of the unknown. Working intimately with a system everyday it's too easy to forget that even frequent users often don't understand the language, acronyms or situations that you take for granted. Always try to answer the questions above but also take this opportunity to help learn more about their system.

Great emails recognise the fact that, as a service group, problem resolution is one of the limited opportunities we have to make a positive impression on the business. Good communication and fast resolution of problems usually increases customer perception and loyalty.

Within the framework of those questions, there are a number of common situations to address:

Investigating

This email is sent early in the problem resolution process and the main intent is to let people know that your team is aware of the problem and taking steps to resolve it.

The key messages are:

We're aware of a problem in this general area.
We don't have any specifics yet on the extent of the issue.
We're currently investigating the issue and will update you by XXX.

This is your chance to make readers feel your team is communicating clearly and dealing with the problem with appropriate urgency. That is, you're doing most of the worrying for them.

Monitoring

This approach is used in situations when you know what happened, but are unable to work out why.

The key messages are:

Problem A has been identified.
After investigation, it appears to have affected the areas B, but not areas C.
We've fixed all affected areas.
We'll continue to monitor the situation, please let us know if you see any further problems.

Rather than highlighting the fact that your team can't understand why this problem occurred or guarantee that it won't happen again, this email should highlight your understanding of the business issues, ability to fix problems and vigilance in ensuring ongoing good service. That is, you're not bothering them with the technical details.

Fixed

Use this approach when the problem is well understood and has been permanently resolved.

The key messages are:

Problem A has been identified.
After investigation, it appears to have affected the areas B, but not areas C.
We've fixed all affected areas.
We've done XXX to stop this problem from happening again.

This email should highlight the skill of your team in recognising and fixing the problem for minimal impact on the business. That is, the world is a better place because this happened (and was fixed).

3 Things & more from Naomi

2006-09-06T20:18:00.000+10:00

It's hard when all of the talent and the good looks in the family go to one of your siblings. The songs below are all composed and performed by my sister Naomi Wallace, recorded at home using GarageBand.

True, This Is Love! (6MB mp3)
Strong (6MB mp3)
Crucial Ingredient (6MB mp3)
Peaceless Sigh (9MB mp3)
Only Direction (5MB mp3)
3 Things (8MB mp3)

3 Things was written as a wedding gift to Bianca and I, so clearly it's my favourite.

Source of authorative video content

2006-04-25T19:22:00.000+10:00

One thing that really pays traffic dividends on the web is being the "authority" on a topic. For example, Wikipedia talks about almost immediately having become the authority on Pope Benedict XVI.

Using media centre for the last few months you quickly become aware that TV is becoming an on-demand medium. We have a huge degree of freedom in recording, watching, time-shifting etc all TV. We'll often just continue what ever we're doing and wait for a program to get about 20 minutes in so we can watch it in almost real time but without any advertisements.

The other impact of this is that shorter programs are no longer a problem. It's too expensive to schedule the watching or manual recording of these for them to have made sense in a broadcast world. But, when attention spans are decreasing and we have access to quick browsing and watching of shows short-format TV makes sense.

The introduction of video for mobile devices (e.g. iPod video) will only accelerate the need and demand for this type of content. I don't want to watch a full emotional hour of TV on my iPod. But, 5 or 10 minute grabs make a lot of sense while travelling.

There is an opportunity for someone to combine authorative source with the on-demand short video format. Cooking shows are great, but imagine working along with it when you are ready to make the meal. Turning to IMDB on a wireless laptop for a quick background on an actress you just saw in a movie is fun, but imagine just pulling up a short bio video right there on your TV.

Who will run the defacto home for short authorative video content?

Will it be commercial or a Spoken Wikipedia style set of video content?

Cleaning up after a golden shower

2006-03-27T22:20:00.000+11:00

Australia's golden shower fetish has finally been sated for another four years, but the mess will last at least a week as we grapple with the one-off changes to daylight savings.

While the support response from vendors like Microsoft has been minimal, eBay gave up completely and simply decided to ignore the change.

I was strongly tempted by the eBay approach, but it seemed a bit hardcore to create my own official time. Instead, I'm taking the half-assed Microsoft approach and apologising in advance for being -1 to +1 hours incorrect with any meeting time this week. (Between work computers, home computers, EPG's and Windows Mobile I've got no idea what time it is. Confusing things further I spent the weekend in Queensland where daylight savings is not observed at all.)

Inconvenient at first, the stupidity of this one-off change was only truly evident as we realised that only the final day of the Commonwealth Games calendar would have been affected. Even if athlete's or spectators had forgotten to change their clock they would have been an hour early!

Safety around the home

2006-02-04T00:14:00.000+11:00

This amazing table saw can detect the difference between cutting wood and cutting your finger. The video demo really is worth a watch.

Years ago, my grandfather was teaching me how to use a chain saw. Unfortunately he didn't know that the chain was very blunt and was using hand signals to try and explain the failings of my amateur chainsaw technique. With him getting so close, I became too scared to move the saw at all. Turns out I didn't need to; he waved the webbing between his thumb and pointer finger right into the chain.

Very fortunately for us, this accident just took a small chunk of skin off (probably because the chain was so blunt).

While I have no plans to ever go near a chainsaw again, I've had many exciting moments with non-powered saws too. On holidays, I'd usually spend a day acting as a human powertool for my grandmother in the garden. In particular, this meant scaling countless huge trees to remove branches obscuring their beautiful view of the coastline.

One day I was about 15m up a pine tree to remove a particularly large branch. Unfortunately the only saw access was from a branch below. Unpeturbed, I tied a rope to the branch so my grandfather could pull it away from the tree (and me) at the critical moment.

Let's just say that slow sawing and overzealous grandfatherly protection from a falling branch resulted in an exciting sling-shot style ride for me when the branch broke free. With the tree whipping back and forth while I held it with one hand, and tried to prevent serious impalement from the saw with the other, I didn't really have time to notice my grandfather diving out of the way of the branch that he had pulled so enthusiastically down onto himself.

Now, just one last story to honour his memory. Taking the boat out one day, we were having trouble getting the trailer to slip down onto the towball. I stood on the trailer front for weight while Grandpa drove the car forward a few centimetres to get the alignment right. The dolly wheel on the trailer ensured that, should the trailer come off the ball, it (& me) didn't have far to go. All went according to plan and the trailer plopped on.

At this point, my grandfather thought he'd just drive forward about 20m up the sloped driveway to get the boat on the grass for a wash down. Again, no big deal as I was used to riding small distances on the trailer rail in between the car and the boat.

Unfortunately, just as he was stopping the car we reached the crest of the hill. The dolly wheel, left in for safety during the tow ball engagement, now touched the ground and lifted the trailer back up off the tow ball.

We should have used the safety chain as well.

The thing about my grandparents block is that its basically a really long, sloping block (say 150m long and a 25m drop). Starting from the top, I'm now riding a free-falling boat and trailer.

That day it was proven that I have both more brains and less courage than my grandmother. As I jumped off the moving boat, she ran along for an extra second attempting to hold and / or steer it down the hill.

The boat rolled straight down the middle of the driveway missing the BBQ on one side and a large tree on the other. Crossing a flat section of the concrete driveway, the metal keel at the bottom of the outboard motor was sheered off completely.

Continuing to accelerate, the boat stayed on the concrete driveway (or runway at this point) now going past the side of their brick house. Two large LPG cylinders providing gas for the kitchen were torn from their chains (set into the brick wall) and sent flying.

Set into the wall of the house was a very small window providing limited light to the basement. Somehow, probably slightly slowed on that side by hitting the gas cylinders, the boat steered just enough to wedge its back corner right into the brick windowsill, stopping dead in its tracks (without even breaking the window).

Meanwhile, the gas cylinders rolled more than 100m down the hill, crushing plants, crossing a road and settling to rest in the neighbours frontyard. Try saying this in a nonchalant manner "Hi there! Don't mind me, I'm just looking for our gas cylinder".

Believe it or not, these stories highlight a few of the great things about my grandfather. His adventurous, can-do attitude created a multitude of exciting projects and outings. By actively involving me in each one, I received great gifts and lessons that no one else could have given. Finally, and weirdly, the problems above were primarily created by his vigilant efforts towards safety and correct technique.

I only hope that one day I'll be teaching such great lessons in life.

The 15lb burger

2006-02-01T22:49:00.000+11:00

Inspired by these guys, and in keeping with a family tradition of "Christmas surprises", I invited my family over on Christmas Eve and attempted to make a 7kg (15lb) burger.

Video: The 15lb burger.wmv (Full 38MB Small 16MB Micro 3.4MB)

Big corporate world

2006-01-18T22:14:00.000+11:00

In December, I accepted a job as an "Information Management Manager" for Janssen-Cilag, a pharmaceutical subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson. Primarily, my time will be spent scoping, designing and running implementation projects for a wide range of information management systems.

After pouring so much energy and time into Synop, and loving every minute of it, the decision of what to do next was very difficult. In the end, my decision came down to two things: emotional energy and inflection points.

Starting a company requires a huge level of commitment, self-belief and emotional energy. So close to the Synop experience, and with a lot less naivety to hide behind, I didn't feel ready to jump back in.

Starting Synop straight out of uni, my career has been dominated by the entrepreneurial experience. But, despite doubts about my ability to handle the frustration, my interest in the corporate world has always been strong. This was the perfect time for a complete change and it was only going to get harder to make the switch later.

So far, I'm loving it.

The making of vlog

2005-12-09T15:07:00.000+11:00

This is a 10 minute video blog and screencast detailing the entire vlog making process from filming to publication. It's a simple tutorial for beginners requiring only a digital video camera, Windows Movie Maker and Blogger.

The resulting video is in line with my 15 second approach.

Video: The making of vlog (27MB) | The making of vlog (small) (11MB)