It's great fun. Sitting with your cilleagues and opining how the world would be sweetness and light if only the IT crowd knew what they were doing. The cms is slow, and those new feature we hanker for are just not coming, in fact you have no idea when you last got anything useful out of them. And while you mention it, when was the last time those awful people last came to talk to us!
But while your relationship is the pits you are missing out on a potential partner who could help you achieve your goals.
Whoever it was who said that looking in the mirror was a great way to start solving a problem may have been on to something. If you think those things about your IT crowd then what do you think they think of you?
My team has a relationship with the it people that has its ups and downs, but we are always working to improve it.
1. My top advice would be to keep talking. Not jsut once a year, set up a monthly session where you keep track of progress, discuss plans, identify issues - you know the sort of thing.
2. Be open. If you do start talking then you may notice the it people want to talk about different things than you do. Of course you need to separate your accountabilities clearly, but let them get involved.
3. Move up the food chain. Some of you may have had some bad experiences with the IT team in the past, but i have consistently found that the people at the top of the IT organisation aren't actually planning for you to have a poor experience. If you have an opportunity to get more value from it then most CIOs will be champing at the bit to help.
4. You may have to change too. Acknowledge that you may be part of the problem - and get over it.
By sharing ownership and actively involving the IT team in your intranet you are bound to move further, faster than you can without them.
Comment below on the quality of your IT relationship.
Friday, 28 November 2008
Sunday, 16 November 2008
Make your intranet 2-way using ideas
About a year ago someone showed me what Dell were doing at ideastorm.com.
The concept is a great, practical development of web 2.0 - let anyone in your community create an idea and then let anyone else vote and comment on it. Then promise to do something about the ideas that get voted to the top.
Before I tell you how we got on with our implementation I'd like to point out why I think this works so well in the enterprise.
1. Get staff to tell each other how bad (or good) their ideas are
2. Get staff talking about ideas - people want their idea to get voted up (just human nature), this starts people discussing your business issues in the coffee shop
3. High visibility - management have to get involved and do something
4. Post some management ideas anonymously - you'll get real feedback on what people think
5. Promotes an adult-adult relationship with your staff
I implemented something similar inside our company and found some great learning points:
1. Middle and senior managers may be more open to the concept than you'd think
The downsides are obvious - you are suggesting to a manager that we should have an open exchange of ideas that everyone can have an equal vote on. Strangely enough, in my experience most management did not fight this concept. Not necessarily because they loved the idea, but rather we had been running, suggestion boxes and idea schemes for quite a while and it had some serious downsides. In our particular situation it created conflict because managers had to evaluate ideas and if the idea was no good then the process ended up with a manager having to politely tell a member of staff that their precious idea, the one they nurtured for months, was not good enough. How's that for employee engagement. Worse still, managers across the airline dreaded receiving ideas as they had to spend the time evaluating poor ideas. Employees were unhappy because the system rarely worked and when it occasionally paid out (there was a bonus involved) there was a lot of suspicion about the quality of the ideas. We had to do something better.
2. Your people don't realise how much you are doing already
We ran an idea exchange with a trial group of 2,000 staff in the IT department. Over the half the ideas were under way already, and of the rest, nearly all had been evaluated at some point or other. It was a chilling reminder of how hard you have to work to get your people to understand what's going on in any case.
3. Most ideas are not that good
Just because you have thrown down the challenge to everyone in the organisation doesn't necessarily mean that you will suddenly identify hundreds of fantastic ideas. In fact, our experience was that we got 1 or 2 really great ideas. I think, and here's where I'm out of my area of expertise, we raised the average quality of ideas - and since most people (in life in general) only occasionally come out with a sparklingly adroit comment, so it is in the realm of ideas.
4. It's obvious, but you have to implement something
Once everyone knew that we were running the thing (we got over half the staff to use the system within the first 3 weeks) then we faced the challenge that they all wanted to know what happened to their ideas. At least those that did not get voted into the top twenty had dealt with themselves, but we still had some hard work getting those top ideas going.
Comment below if have you ever tried something like this in your company.
The concept is a great, practical development of web 2.0 - let anyone in your community create an idea and then let anyone else vote and comment on it. Then promise to do something about the ideas that get voted to the top.
Before I tell you how we got on with our implementation I'd like to point out why I think this works so well in the enterprise.
1. Get staff to tell each other how bad (or good) their ideas are
2. Get staff talking about ideas - people want their idea to get voted up (just human nature), this starts people discussing your business issues in the coffee shop
3. High visibility - management have to get involved and do something
4. Post some management ideas anonymously - you'll get real feedback on what people think
5. Promotes an adult-adult relationship with your staff
I implemented something similar inside our company and found some great learning points:
1. Middle and senior managers may be more open to the concept than you'd think
The downsides are obvious - you are suggesting to a manager that we should have an open exchange of ideas that everyone can have an equal vote on. Strangely enough, in my experience most management did not fight this concept. Not necessarily because they loved the idea, but rather we had been running, suggestion boxes and idea schemes for quite a while and it had some serious downsides. In our particular situation it created conflict because managers had to evaluate ideas and if the idea was no good then the process ended up with a manager having to politely tell a member of staff that their precious idea, the one they nurtured for months, was not good enough. How's that for employee engagement. Worse still, managers across the airline dreaded receiving ideas as they had to spend the time evaluating poor ideas. Employees were unhappy because the system rarely worked and when it occasionally paid out (there was a bonus involved) there was a lot of suspicion about the quality of the ideas. We had to do something better.
2. Your people don't realise how much you are doing already
We ran an idea exchange with a trial group of 2,000 staff in the IT department. Over the half the ideas were under way already, and of the rest, nearly all had been evaluated at some point or other. It was a chilling reminder of how hard you have to work to get your people to understand what's going on in any case.
3. Most ideas are not that good
Just because you have thrown down the challenge to everyone in the organisation doesn't necessarily mean that you will suddenly identify hundreds of fantastic ideas. In fact, our experience was that we got 1 or 2 really great ideas. I think, and here's where I'm out of my area of expertise, we raised the average quality of ideas - and since most people (in life in general) only occasionally come out with a sparklingly adroit comment, so it is in the realm of ideas.
4. It's obvious, but you have to implement something
Once everyone knew that we were running the thing (we got over half the staff to use the system within the first 3 weeks) then we faced the challenge that they all wanted to know what happened to their ideas. At least those that did not get voted into the top twenty had dealt with themselves, but we still had some hard work getting those top ideas going.
Comment below if have you ever tried something like this in your company.
Sunday, 9 November 2008
Is it worth asking people what they want on your intranet?
How's that for a controversial question? But I really mean it.
When you go to the doctors does he ask you what drugs you want? Do you tell the tv repair shop just how to fix your tv? I thought not. So why is there no end of people telling us how we should be designing our intranets.
I read a great book on holiday, Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, and one of the chapters is all about flaws in the experimental method. What has this got to do with intranets?
All of us are trying to use evidence to improve and optimise our intranets and using flawed evidence leads to bad decisions. For me, the classic example of this is asking people how they would like the intranet to be rather than what they need it to do. Even if you ask them what they want it to do you may find they don't tell you the truth.
A great example of this bias in surveys was when British Airways was designing its new 'Raid the Larder' concept in Club World. The team involved did the right thing and got together some focus groups of regular customers and asked them to name the type of food they would like to have available to snack on during a flight. The respondents were pretty clear - mineral water, apples, maybe a light salad. In due course the larder was stocked with these kinds of things. However, when real customers used the larder they tended to leave the fruit and salad and head straight for the chocolate and cakes.
What does this tell you about how to go about surveying your users.
Just like in the Club World example, it is well documented that people are generally very poor at understanding the way they behave (check out the book for numerous further examples) so you need to treat surveys and demands from users very carefully. The other most biased person you have to watch out for is YOU. Gerry McGovern does a great presentation about people who look like their pets - and that is all about removing your own bias to develop an intranet for your users not you.
For me, observation of real users is one of the top ways to get great feedback. Be prepared for the deflated feeling when they gloss over your great taxonomy, miss your signposting and can't see that text in BOLD RED that you were sure they couldn't miss.
For me, there is one other thing - have a vision of your business outcomes and goals and stick to it. By using your measures as a control and constantly adapting to achieve your goals your intranet can only get better.
When you go to the doctors does he ask you what drugs you want? Do you tell the tv repair shop just how to fix your tv? I thought not. So why is there no end of people telling us how we should be designing our intranets.
I read a great book on holiday, Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, and one of the chapters is all about flaws in the experimental method. What has this got to do with intranets?
All of us are trying to use evidence to improve and optimise our intranets and using flawed evidence leads to bad decisions. For me, the classic example of this is asking people how they would like the intranet to be rather than what they need it to do. Even if you ask them what they want it to do you may find they don't tell you the truth.
A great example of this bias in surveys was when British Airways was designing its new 'Raid the Larder' concept in Club World. The team involved did the right thing and got together some focus groups of regular customers and asked them to name the type of food they would like to have available to snack on during a flight. The respondents were pretty clear - mineral water, apples, maybe a light salad. In due course the larder was stocked with these kinds of things. However, when real customers used the larder they tended to leave the fruit and salad and head straight for the chocolate and cakes.
What does this tell you about how to go about surveying your users.
Just like in the Club World example, it is well documented that people are generally very poor at understanding the way they behave (check out the book for numerous further examples) so you need to treat surveys and demands from users very carefully. The other most biased person you have to watch out for is YOU. Gerry McGovern does a great presentation about people who look like their pets - and that is all about removing your own bias to develop an intranet for your users not you.
For me, observation of real users is one of the top ways to get great feedback. Be prepared for the deflated feeling when they gloss over your great taxonomy, miss your signposting and can't see that text in BOLD RED that you were sure they couldn't miss.
For me, there is one other thing - have a vision of your business outcomes and goals and stick to it. By using your measures as a control and constantly adapting to achieve your goals your intranet can only get better.
Sunday, 2 November 2008
How big is your homepage? - in this case small is better
I've been on holiday this week to somewhere with not much bandwidth and it struck me how annoying unnecessarily heavy pages are.
In response to the poor availability of bandwidth at many worldwide locations my company's intranet has a page weight limit of 30kb in place. Of course some of the pages go over, and the homepage definitely does, but most don't.
In these days of broadband everywhere (and I would suggest that all of your employees have broadband at home to access your intranet) this does seem like a rather old fashioned idea. Trouble is the really advanced users are using your intranet on a mobile device or connection. If your experience is anything like mine even 3G (when you can get it) pretty much creeps along. This means that lightweight pages are going to work best for everyone.
Even better, when you start constraining the 'creative' souls around you with a bandwidth limit (and definitely no banners and flash) you suddenly start working out what is really important and useful on that page.
Great to hear any opinions on this one. In particular, leave a comment saying how big your homepage is if you can. Can someone also leave a post telling us all a quick way to know how big your page is?
In response to the poor availability of bandwidth at many worldwide locations my company's intranet has a page weight limit of 30kb in place. Of course some of the pages go over, and the homepage definitely does, but most don't.
In these days of broadband everywhere (and I would suggest that all of your employees have broadband at home to access your intranet) this does seem like a rather old fashioned idea. Trouble is the really advanced users are using your intranet on a mobile device or connection. If your experience is anything like mine even 3G (when you can get it) pretty much creeps along. This means that lightweight pages are going to work best for everyone.
Even better, when you start constraining the 'creative' souls around you with a bandwidth limit (and definitely no banners and flash) you suddenly start working out what is really important and useful on that page.
Great to hear any opinions on this one. In particular, leave a comment saying how big your homepage is if you can. Can someone also leave a post telling us all a quick way to know how big your page is?
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