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May 3, 12:47 pm: Changing my work style
I’m an in the office kind of person. I spend time talking to people in hallways, on the phone and going to meetings. I complain about it—you know, the how-can-I-get-anything-done-if-I’m-always-in-a-meeting kind of complaint. I keep lists and send emails and try (and fail) to get a critical mass of people on a project team to be more transparent and use tools like Basecamp.
Now, for various reasons, my work style has changed. There are chunks of time when I absolutely cannot be on a computer or connected to the Internet. I cannot always come into the office in the days I’d like.
And now the lack of transparency in teams is really killing me. I’m not picking up what’s happening through the hallway-meeting-managementbywalkingaround methods. So, I find myself asking people, via email, for their to do lists so I can put them all together and make sure that we’re all pulling for the same critical items.
Anyone have any tips for moving an organization/project out of the meeting room and inbox and onto a shared platform?
tagged: platform, transparency, projectmanagement, change
Peter Campbell
That’s quite a challenge. Online junkie that I am, I believe with a passion that you can not successfully communicate without some percentage of face to face interaction – maybe 10-15% at the very minimum. Email and web pages do not convey priority, no matter how many avatars and emoticons in your arsenal, so you suffer an intense risk of losing support for your projects if you aren’t adding the personal piece to your communication. If I were in your circumstances, my approach would be to formalize what used to be casual in the times when you are in the office – set up regular face-to-faces with key people. I don’t think that there’s an online alternative.
dave the lifekludger
I’ve found that quite a lot can be conveyed by the use of delicious tags and specific tag search querys all turned into rss feeds and plugged into your aggregator. You need some things clearly understood first. You need an understanding that everyone participating is going to give weight to certain tags, like check at pay more attention to for: tags and an understanding of how your colleages work. You need common tags your going to use, the use of for:xxxx tags in delicious as well as an agreed way to communicate with the notes that go with delicious tags. With an rss feed of each others tags you can get a picture of what everyone else is up to by what they’re tagging. I’ve personal examples with individual others but how you’d scale it is an interesting issue. Clear communication and understanding of the way you work and others work is key and thinking about how that governs the way you use the tools. Sorry that sounds pretty vague. Contact me by IM if you want to chat about it sometime.
(ps: is there any way to get a scroll bar on the comment form…it’s terrible to try and edit…unless it’s just firefox)
Katie
We keep public folders in Outlook (for clients, conferences, meetings, marketing actions, etc) that we dump all of our emails into – this way there’s no breakdown in communication if someone is gone or busy. Not a solve-all solution, but man its nice to be able to follow an email thread for a heads upon on any missed meetings, etc. Otherwise we use a ticketing system for our individual projects that is open to everyone – transparency is awesome. Good luck!