, Wrike. I was happy to see that the topic generated great interest from the public; however, the dynamic of constant interaction with my audience turned out to be quite different from what you experience during regular product management software presentations. I learned a couple of good lessons from this PCamp session. I tried to mix a fairly rigid slide deck with a lot of freeform discussions, which made the slide deck more of a distraction, rather than guiding product management tools. While analyzing the session later, I came up with a few tips that I’ll make sure to use the next time I present during an unconference-style event. I thought it would be a good idea to share my tips here. • Create a very light deck that’s not a streamline story, but rather provides supporting facts and visuals for some areas of conversation. In this type of deck, most slides should be interchangeable and pulled on demand. • Make a slide with the session’s agenda and show it to the audience first. • Ask the public what questions you should concentrate on. This will help you find out which parts of your presentation interest them the most and which are not worth wasting their time on. After analyzing my presentation, I can say that unconference-style events are fun and can sometimes even produce a greater effect on the audience, since your listeners are taking an active part in your presentation. Yet you need the right preparation to make it a success. I hope you will find my tips useful. Have you ever spoken at unconference-style get-togethers? Please share your own experience in the comments.
, I headed to another event – Silicon Valley Product Camp – for a day of interesting discussions on designing better products. It has become a good tradition for me to attend this get-together, and this year my company, Wrike, was one of the sponsors of the Product Camp. Since at this “unconference” the participants themselves vote for the topics they want to hear, it was a pleasure for me to have my proposal chosen on the event day. As usual, the camps are much more interactive than a typical conference, so it was fun. The audience loved the topic and brought up great questions and ideas. People were especially interested in mobile, game mechanics, conversion optimization and launch, all important topics on their own, so I might develop some follow-up presentations later. By the end of the hour, almost everyone in the room was engaged in the discussion, which, in my opinion, is the best thing about such events as the Product Camp. Do you have a story or tip of your own to share on packaging great innovations in an easy-to-adopt product?
Photo by Clark Little I met Phil Simon, the author of "Why New Systems Fail: An Insider's Guide to Successful IT Projects" about a month ago. He told me that he was working on a new book that will be focused on Enterprise 2.0, cloud computing, SaaS and other next-generation technologies that are much talked about, but are not yet understood by everyone in the corporate environment. I found the idea appealing and thought that it would be valuable for you to get to know Phil’s point of view on these popular topics here at the Project Management 2.0 blog. Later on, I plan to review Andrew McAfee’s “Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization's Toughest Challenges” in this blog, so it will be even more interesting to compare the two viewpoints. Andrew: Tell us a little about your professional background. Your second book, "The Next Wave of Technologies", features lots of detailed descriptions of software system implementations and deals with various aspects of deploying new technologies. Where did you get this knowledge? Phil: I’m a recovering consultant and recently published author. I started working on enterprise applications back in 1995 while in grad school. After a brief career in corporate HR, I started moving into technology- and system-oriented work. In 2000, I became a consultant and started working as an independent in 2002. Over the course of the last 15 years, I have seen many organizations struggle with many types of technologies and applications. For years, I have spoken with colleagues about their technology-related challenges. Also, I learn a great deal from the guests on my podcasts. Finally, I do a great deal of reading on the intersection between people, organizations and different technologies. Andrew: In your book, you say that when using the term “Enterprise 2.0” you mean something slightly different from the classic definition by Andrew McAfee. Could you please give your definition of this term and say why you were unhappy with what Andy McAfee proposes. Phil: Sure. I’ll make it relatively quick. I look at intranets, e-mail and nascent attempts at ERP, CRM, BI, etc. as Enterprise 1.0. Of course, no one calls anything 1.0 at the time, right? I’m pretty sure that no one called it WWI in 1917. Only after the second did the first become WWI. It’s not that I was unhappy with McAfee’s definition. I just thought that it was incomplete. Take BI, for example. Many organizations rolled out some type of BI initiative in the 1990s, and in fact, I was able to work on a few projects of that ilk. Much like ERP and CRM success rates, however, many BI endeavors did not do what senior management initially conceived. So, to exclude things such as open source BI, mobile BI or In-Memory BI seemed incomplete. Many, if not most, organizations still have no BI tool, and early adopters are finding ways to improve their ROI on earlier BI efforts, including using BI Competency Centers (BICCs). I would just say that my definition of Enterprise 2.0 is a little broader than McAfee’s. Andrew: I see your point, and I also wanted to share my point of view on McAfee’s definition. As far as I remember, McAfee’s definition of Enterprise 2.0 focuses primarily on software systems. In my view, it’s also important to account for changes in organizational culture and practices that go hand-in-hand with the adoption of these tools. This is one of the most important aspects to consider when thinking of deploying new software. You’re a consultant, and your job in many cases is helping executives to see what and where they need to change. How would you identify the need for change in an organization? Let’s say there’s an organization where an Enterprise 1.0 system works quite well, and workers feel like they are happy with it. Do they still need to innovate? Phil: The need for change fascinates me. At times, it’s completely apparent. At other times, it’s less clear. Let’s look at the first scenario. In “An Executive's Guide to Information Technology: Principles, Business Models, and Terminology,” Robert Plant and Stephen Murrell define a legacy system as one that can no longer meet an organization’s needs. I have seen many people very happy with their homegrown systems or legacy apps because, in their view, it works quite well and they like it. That’s a far cry from saying that it meets the needs of the business. It’s hard to argue that today a clunky 1980s app without adequate reporting, e-mail, etc. meets an organization’s needs. Now, let’s look at a more contemporary system with a decent number of bells and whistles. Is the organization “set”? I’d argue that it’s hard to say. What if a SaaS-based or open source equivalent can meet the same business needs at a lower cost (both out of pocket to the vendor and in terms of employee salaries)? Isn’t the organization beholden to at least investigate what’s out there? So, with respect to innovation, the answer is a qualified yes. Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 technologies allow for so much innovation that I don’t see how you can say, “We’re set.” At the same time, though, innovation for the sake of innovation isn’t a great idea. It all comes down to whether the current apps and technologies can meet an organization’s needs. Andrew: Right. In your book you say that there are important issues that people who choose to adopt Enterprise 2.0 will face. Can you say more about this and why you think that these issues should not scare executives away? Phil: Absolutely. Let’s take two white hot technologies at the moment: social media and cloud computing. Social media makes many organizations uncomfortable because they lose control of the message. As Jay Miletsky points out in the chapter, allowing others to create content related to your brand, organization and products takes many people out of their comfort zone. Miletsky writes that "negative comments, of course, are visible and available for anybody on the network to see -- not exactly the kind of notoriety that most organizations want to be made public." With regard to cloud computing, organizations no longer have their data within the fire wall. Amy Wohl does a great job of explaining some of the security, technical and political issues that organizations face when their data resides elsewhere. Wohl writes that that "early adopters (of cloud computing) will want to make certain that the clouds they choose offer the level of security and governance they require." You’re right. These issues shouldn’t frighten CXOs. Digital music scared the record companies. Open source scares Microsoft. The point is that these vast technological changes are taking place. You can deny that they are happening, or you can understand them and how they can potentially help your organization. In a sentence, that’s what “The Next Wave of Technologies” is all about. Andrew: A considerable part of your book is dedicated to the role of IT in Enterprise 2.0 implementation. Could you please summarize the main roles the IT department should play when a company adopts a new technology? Do you agree that Enterprise 2.0 is a user-driven technology? Phil: Yes, there’s a chapter on IT, and it’s a recurring theme throughout the book. In general, business and IT need to break out of their comfort zones. IT needs to understand more of the business and, quite frankly, many business users should understand more about the role of IT and specific technologies. With respect to IT, the department and its employees are typically in a unique position: they interact with many pockets of the organization and, as such, contain a great deal of institutional knowledge. Applied correctly, IT can use this information to be more of a true partner with the lines of business. It’s hard for me to call Enterprise 2.0 completely user-driven, and I don’t think that it should be. Imagine the chaos resulting from everyone doing everything on their own. I will say this: Look at collaborative tools, such as Yammer. Like many companies, Yammer operates on a freemium model, allowing for mass adoption of the tool within organizations. In other words, IT need not to follow its traditional “top down” procurement and roll out the process for certain technologies. Adoption of a tool such as Yammer can be more organic, more “bottom up.” To that extent, yes, Enterprise 2.0 can be user-driven. Andrew: This is close to the more generic idea of blending top-down and bottom-up approaches to management. I wrote a post on it before with a main thesis revolving around the fact that an organization needs both bottom-up knowledge and top-down guidance to become adaptive and more competitive in the present economy. In my opinion, the main advantage of the Enterprise 2.0 systems is that they make organizations more transparent. I guess this is the core change that Enterprise 2.0 brings to organizational culture. Do you believe that technologies can change the way business is done? In other words, do you think that the change in technologies involves changes in processes and in the way people act at work? Phil: It’s folly to assume that a transformative technology will always leave current business processes untouched. I’ve seen organizations cling to, let’s say, “less than current” methods because that’s how they did things around there. They didn’t know another, better way. As a result, they were unable to successfully utilize their new systems and applications. Take collaborative tools, such as wikis. They have made working on international projects easier by an order of magnitude, as Jason Horowitz points out. "Wikis are an outstanding way to work remotely...allow[ing] individuals to make changes to documents on their schedule while building on the work of colleagues in other locations." Foolish is the organization that doesn’t ask fundamental questions about how Enterprise 2.0 technologies can help improve the current business processes. Andrew: Phil, thank you for sharing your point of view. It was a pleasure to talk. For our readers I’d like to note that, if you liked Phil’s ideas and want to find out more, you are welcome not only to take a look at his upcoming book "The Next Wave of Technologies: Opportunities in Chaos"; but also win a copy of it by leaving a comment on this post! The author of the best comment will get a book with Phil's signature.
, a recognized technology expert, about his book, “The Next Wave of Technologies." However rapid technology development is, Phil does a great job in keeping up with its pace and considering all the latest trends in his works. In his third book, which was published a couple of months ago, Phil took a look at the emerging technologies from the small business perspective. The title speaks for itself: “The New Small: How a New Breed of Small Businesses Is Harnessing the Power of Emerging Technologies.” What are “the new small businesses” and how do they leverage the opportunities brought by new technologies? Phil shared his point of view on these questions when we met to discuss his new book. Read our conversation to learn more. Phil, congratulations on the release of “The New Small”! According to the subheading, the book is focused on “the new breed” of small businesses that successfully leverage the new technologies. What exactly is this “new breed”? This new breed of small businesses is open, experimental and curious. They are constantly pushing the envelope and refuse to manage by routine. You’ll never hear “that’s not the way we do things here.” They’re a dynamic bunch of companies that, as you see in the book, are doing some amazing things. The owners of these companies inspired me a great deal. They weren’t afraid to break away from old tools and techniques that have worked for them and taken them to a certain point. In the first chapter of the book, which is available for free preview at your Web site, you call the present situation “the era of constant technological change.” In your opinion, is there a difference between the way large enterprises and smaller companies respond to it? If so, what are the main challenges that small businesses face? For political, legal and financial reasons, big companies often cannot get away from technologies that no longer work for them. Small companies don’t have that problem. The world is their oyster. Yet that very freedom can easily become chaos. Fortunately, the New Small is able to strike a balance, getting the benefits of amazing new technologies in the process. What about globalization – is it a threat or an opportunity for the New Small? Both. If you think that you’re safe as “the local provider of X” services, unless you’re a plumber, you’re in for a rude awakening. Why do you think the emerging technologies, such as social media or cloud computing, are a perfect match for the needs of small businesses? Can you share a specific example of successfully harnessed new technologies? For one, the advantage of new technologies is that they scale quite easily. No longer does a business need to predict “just how much” technology it will need. Second, success begets success. You can dip your toe in the pool before you jump in. Finally, with the freemium model, you can test-drive technologies before making the jump. There are many case studies that prove all this. For instance, I can think of Skjold-Barthel, the law firm that threw all of its data and apps into the cloud, reducing its IT costs by 75 percent. That’s just one example, but the book is rife with them. I can’t agree more with you regarding the significance of scalability. In my opinion, it is one of the key things that decide whether a solution is efficient for a company or not. Teams grow, and they have more and more data to organize. The system they use should be able to accommodate as much data as needed and still remain productive and comfortable to use, kind of like the social networks that we use daily. What advice would you give to entrepreneurs who have just started or are planning to start their own business? The impact of new technologies isn’t necessarily the same across the board. Different companies still have different needs; one size certainly doesn’t fit all. So don’t be afraid to experiment or fail. Einstein said something along the lines of, “If you want to increase your success rate, fail more often.” This couldn’t be truer today, particularly with respect to small businesses. Also, get away from technologies that no longer meet your needs. Whether it’s ERP, CRM, a content management system (CMS) or whatever, see if there’s something better out there. Then try it out! Do you have any tips for managing projects in the New Small? Yes, and the main one is – go agile. The companies that inspired me do not use Waterfall-based methods. They can’t wait a year to see if something is conceptually sound. Throw something against the wall and see what you like and what you don’t. Also, don’t reinvent the wheel. See what open source and off-the-shelf tools exist. Use existing APIs and modules to extend functionality. Thank you, Phil. It was really nice talking to you. Some good news for my readers – if you have enjoyed this interview just as much as I did and wish to know more about “the new breed” of small businesses, you have a chance to get Phil’s book for free! Share your point of view in the comments to this post. The author of the most interesting comment will win a copy of “The New Small.”
MLab Roundtable was a remarkable event. We discussed the ways to improve existing management practices and I had a chance to tell what inspired me to start working on the online project management software - Wrike. I have been managing businesses for more than 8 years now, and I know how inefficient traditional project management tools, like e-mail or Microsoft Project are. Most businesses now have three major gaps that could be easily filled up with the right tool. 1. There is a gap between the strategic plans and the daily agenda of the employees. In many businesses, strategic plans, quarterly plans, project plans and daily to-do lists of team members are separated. All of these plans should be a part of one master plan. There should be a tool able to easily merge plans into a bigger picture. With the help of this tool, daily to-do lists should emerge into project plans. Projects should lead to achieving strategic goals. So this tool should utilize the principle of emergent structures. Emerging structures allow you to combine top-down and bottom-up planning to bridge the gap in the middle. The whole structure is then transparent and can be traced from a quarterly goal to a daily task of a team member. This is a real-time visibility into a company that lets corporate executives lead their business in the right direction. 2. There is a gap between e-mail and project management software that made project management software inefficient. E-mail is the most widely-used software tool in project management, and at the same time traditional project management tools, like Microsoft Project, ignore this fact. This leaves a gap between the everyday project management tool (e-mail) and project planning software (Microsoft Project, Excel). This results in putting a heavy burden onto managers. They need to gather information from e-mails, merge it into a bigger picture, manually update plans, communicate the updated version to team members and report the progress to the top manager. This seriously decreases productivity on all levels in the organization, including top managers' productivity. It is hard to get a picture of where the business stands if you simply rely on thousands of e-mails spread across hundreds of mailboxes. E-mail buries a lot of valuable information. There should be a tool that will help to turn the e-mail mess into organized projects, increasing productivity and bringing control of business. 3. There is a gap between project management tools and Web 2.0 tools. Web 2.0 collaboration tools, like wikis, are much more powerful than traditional project management software, because they leverage collective intelligence and emerging structures. At the same time they lack some pieces that are crucial in order to use them as effective management tools. There was a huge potential in bringing the best practices of Web 2.0 into project management software and business management software. Instead of being a complex, expensive and stiff tool designed for trained project managers, the new tool should be simple, agile and inexpensive and should be used by the whole company from top managers to employees. It will greatly increase productivity of the whole team and will make managers' jobs easier. So when I started Wrike, the idea was to invent a project management application that would help businesses to deal with all three problems. Several years of extensive research and development resulted in the launch of innovative, online project management software, Wrike. The product has the best e-mail integration among project management tools. First, this integration makes Wrike easy-to-use. Second, it turns e-mail mess into neatly organized project plans helping to increase the productivity and making it easier to control the whole business. Our tool applies the principles of Enterprise 2.0 to democratize project management software. Wrike empowers organizations and makes managers' jobs easier.
Hardly a day goes by that we don’t hear about a new security breach. 2018 saw a total of 1,244 reported data breaches in the U.S., according to a recent report by nonprofit Identity Theft Resource Center and security and privacy services firm CyberScout. While this number was down from 2017’s all-time high of more than 1,600 breaches, the number of compromised records exposing sensitive, personally identifiable information (PII) skyrocketed by 126%. This doesn’t even include the 1.26 billion non-sensitive records that were also exposed. As more data is created and business increasingly plays out in the online digital space, data breaches will only get more severe. Balancing security and flexibility in the cloud In an effort to maintain control and avoid these data disasters, some enterprises are still often reluctant to adopt third-party cloud applications, opting for on-premises solutions instead. As a result, they’re missing out on rapid, innovative cloud solutions to challenges like scalability, software updates, mobile connectivity, etc. In an age of mobile devices, remote workers, always-on customers, and lightning-speed innovation, cloud software is no longer optional if you want to remain competitive — even for the most conservative enterprises and industries. And while fast-paced, adaptable SMBs usually have far less stringent security requirements compared to enterprises, companies of all sizes should be equally concerned with today’s heightened security risks. The good news is that security and flexibility don’t have to be at odds with one another. Once companies accept that maintaining security is a constant and ever-evolving practice, they can take the steps necessary to protect their data, guard against the risks of today, and anticipate the threats of tomorrow. This point of view is why Wrike has always been at the forefront of collaborative work management security. Data protection has continued to be a core priority for us as we continue to grow our enterprise customer base and expand into new markets and industry verticals. Securing the collaborative work management space More than 250,000 organizations have adopted a collaborative work management solution. And while many vendors’ focus has been on solving problems like low productivity, poor collaboration, and broken workflows, addressing security needs that are unique to the enterprise — like considering how data is managed at scale — should also be a primary goal. Wrike refuses to merely meet the industry-standard minimum requirements for security in the enterprise. Security has always been one of our core pillars, and we’ve continuously pushed ourselves to solve more than just collaboration or work management challenges. Bare minimums won’t fly in the enterprise, nor are they good enough for being the digital workplace that companies trust with their invaluable data. We understand the best collaborative work management solutions solve for convenience and transparency in addition to control and security. Our customers want to be transparent and collaborative, while also being protected, whether that is from external or internal threats, accidental or malicious. That’s why we strive to keep this dichotomy in mind when developing new features or products for the Wrike platform, including the features I’m excited to announce today. Introducing Wrike’s new enterprise-grade security features The Wrike security strategy includes a comprehensive approach across five categories: physical, network, system, application, and people. Our latest platform security features include: Wrike Lock is an add-on feature that allows customers to own and manage the keys to their encrypted Wrike data, giving them data access control and audit capabilities even though their data is in the cloud. CASB integration support allows customers to use the CASB offering of their choice to enforce enterprise security policies on their Wrike data, enabling them to easily spot unusual user activity and better protect data stored in the cloud. Customized Access Roles better ensure privacy and content integrity by enabling customers to create roles with unique permission sets in order to satisfy varied access and sharing requirements. Access Reports enable customers to quickly and easily see which users have access to folders, projects, and tasks, as well as any tasks with attachments that external guest users have been invited to review. Selective sharing allows customers to make it so that folders and projects do not follow the default of inheriting sharing settings from parent folders or projects, giving greater access control over specific subfolders and subprojects. The new sharing interface makes it easier and more intuitive for users to modify sharing settings, better enabling and encouraging them to take greater control of access to work in Wrike. The new antivirus feature will scan files for viruses prior to being uploaded to Wrike, which will enhance the security of users’ devices by mitigating the risk of uploading or downloading infected files from Wrike. This feature will be available in 2H 2019. Wrike has also just completed the ISO 27001:2013 certification from BSI (British Standards Institution). The ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certification demonstrates that Wrike has a complete end-to-end security framework and a risk-based approach to managing information security, and illustrates Wrike’s commitment to a mature and robust security strategy. ISO/IEC 27001 is the most highly regarded and only internationally recognized standard for the establishment and certification of an information security management system (ISMS). It provides a set of requirements for an ISMS, establishing a systematic, risk-management-based approach to people, processes, and IT systems in order to protect sensitive company information. Raising the bar In today’s digital world, the moment you believe you’re secure is the moment you open yourself to an attack or breach. This is true regardless of your company’s size. Wrike’s ISO certification, Wrike Lock add-on, and all of our new and upcoming security features demonstrate our commitment to making Wrike the most secure collaborative work management platform on the market. As security threats evolve and the stakes get higher with every breach, Wrike will continue to invest in the security of our services and push the industry standard for collaborative work management. To learn more about Wrike’s Security practices, please visit our security page. And for more information about today’s announcement, read our press release.
Meet-ups with fellow project managers keep bringing up thought-provoking discussions and interesting ideas on how to maximize the efficiency of project teams. This time, I want to share some notes from the February dinner meeting of the PMI LA Chapter. After my presentation that focused on the ways of making distributed teams efficient, one of the most interesting questions that I heard from the audience was how to introduce a team to a granular work breakdown. No matter how talented and experienced your remote worker is, it might still be unproductive to assign him a huge, month-long task. There’s always some risk in thinking that he’ll do just fine figuring it out all on his own. This way, you severely limit your visibility into the work progress, and if the course goes wrong, you might discover it too late to clear things up. When you can’t discuss things with some of the team members directly and frequently, having more granular assignments might be a helpful tactic and make life easier for both parties. So how exactly do you make it work? Making a sliding scale work in planning First, you could use a sliding scale in planning. Your weekly plan for this week could focus on 5-10 things, just like your quarterly plan, but the scope of those things will obviously be quite different. You don’t have to build a detailed, upfront plan for 52 weeks on January 1st of the new year. If your only concern is visibility, then a weekly plan that only includes the current week is enough. As a new period of time comes, be it quarter, month, week, or day, you plan it, thus the term “sliding scale.” The closer this time period is to today, the more detailed your plan should be. You should however be aware of scope leap when using a system like this. When possible and reasonable, you should also delegate the planning to the employees who are doing the work. Most people feel more moral responsibility for getting the work done on time when they have promised the dates, not when the dates were imposed on them. This not only makes them more responsible, but also makes them happier. By the way, in our recent research on working habits, we discovered that sense of responsibility is the No. 1 productivity trigger: People feel stressed out when they feel no control over their life and work. By returning that feel of control back to them, you empower them. Did I mention that it also saves you from having to do the initial planning?:) It’s hard to come up with a better win-win. Of course, you should also review the plans and align them with higher-level objectives and other employees. Steps to building a new habit within the team Sure enough, it’s easier said than done, as some employees prefer murky schedules, so that they don’t need to report very often. Here are the steps that helped me introduce sliding scale, bottom-up planning: - Make sure to communicate your vision. Why exactly are smaller tasks a better option than bigger assignments? Make sure your team clearly understands the benefits and doesn’t see it as their leader’s new micromanagement whim.- Seed it by your own example. For instance, if you use a collaboration system with a newsfeed, when your workers see how you complete tasks one after another, this might give them a good deal of motivation. They wouldn’t want to lag behind. - When you want to implement some change, making it happen in one big swipe is often hard. Instead, support from a group of “pioneers” might be really helpful. Some employees are more open to new methods. Also, some might be more productivity-oriented than others. Form the “core team,” build the right productivity habit there, and it’ll be easier to later plug in others through peer pressure. - You can blend it into your team’s other working habits. For example, if you have weekly virtual meetings to discuss the work progress and the plans, how big is the difference between these two ways of phrasing the agenda? “Last week, we got 40% of the project completed” or “Last week, we got 10 tasks completed on the project, namely …” To me, the second version sounds way more concise, but it still plays nicely with the habit of discussing work progress every week. - In his awesome best-seller “Good to Great,” Jim Collins said, "Sustained great results depend upon building a culture full of self-disciplined people who take disciplined action.” If, after some time and persistent efforts, the new habit still doesn’t stick with certain employees, you need to look deeper into the reasons. Are they your best performers who try to set up their own rules, or are they your worst performers who try to hide that behind ambiguous schedules and obscure “percent completed” updates? Do they simply need some extra motivation, or do they drag and slow down the whole team? Motivation and other benefits of granular tasks The advantages of slicing work into smaller parts are supported by psychologists. For instance, Joseph Ferrari, a professor from DePaul University, says that when the scope of work looks overwhelming, you get captured by the feeling of “seeing the forest and forgetting that it’s made of trees.” In the opposite situation, we can get valuable small wins. Quoting another interesting book, “Small wins are something people can experience pretty regularly if the work is chunked down to manageable pieces” (from “The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work” by Teresa M. Amabile and Steven J. Kramer). By the way, “small wins” have become a behavioral term, and they’re often discussed in literature. In “The Power of Habit,” Charles Duhigg concluded that a “huge body of research has shown that small wins have enormous power, an influence disproportionate to the accomplishments of the victories themselves.” What else is there in the habit of granular work organization? In addition to the benefits of clarity, visibility and easier tracking, this approach to distributing workload might also be an efficient way to eliminate procrastination. Another revelation of our survey on work styles was that 21% of workers see procrastination as one of the most dangerous productivity killers. So they’ll most likely thank you if you give them a good weapon to fight this enemy :)
In my last post, I raised the question of how a new type of leader that emerges with the development of collective intelligence looks like and what his/her role is. We concluded that Project 2.0 leader’s role is to motivate his/her team and make the team members more productive, in order to complete the project on time and on budget. He or she needs to be able to guide the collective intelligence of his or her team and leverage it to the benefit of the whole company. Now I hope to enrich my initial idea with thoughts taken from a well-known Level 5 Leadership concept, introduced by Jim Collins in his “Good to Great” book. . Read on and you’ll see why. According to Collins, a Level 5 leader utilizes several simple, but powerful, strategies. Here I’d like to highlight only three of them: Confront the brutal facts: A Level 5 leader must create a culture wherein people have a tremendous opportunity to be heard. Culture of discipline: Level 5 leaders rely on: Disciplined people – you don’t need hierarchy, Disciplined thought – you don’t need bureaucracy, Disciplined action – you don’t need excessive controls. Technology Accelerators: Level 5 leaders avoid technology fads and bandwagons, yet they often become pioneers in using carefully selected technologies that help them to gather momentum. All these concepts are reflected in the idea of Project Management 2.0: Opportunity to be heard The collaborative environment provided and maintained by Project Management 2.0 tools lets everyone on the team share knowledge and relevant information. Thus everyone on the team can be heard and can introduce ideas about the development of the project. Culture of discipline In Project Management 2.0, the collaborative environment is a perfect incubator for the culture of discipline. Project Management 2.0 relies on emergent structures, not on a hierarchy. In Project Management 2.0, people can update their parts of the project plans by themselves. Thus, superfluous reports and documentation are eliminated. That means less bureaucracy. Project Management 2.0 supports free-form collaboration; at the same time, it lets managers keep control of what is happening on the project and who is busy with what. Still, the control is not excessive, and it does not damage the collective work. Gathering momentum Project Management 2.0 can be executed only with the help of special tools -- Web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information-sharing, emergence and integration capabilities for the team. These technologies include linking, tagging, building project views and tasks hierarchies. Project Management 2.0 tools are empowered by collective intelligence and emergent structures. Thanks to these two powerful practices, Project Management 2.0 tools can make companies more agile, projects more controllable and people more productive. As a conclusion, I’d like to say that Level 5 leadership and Project Management 2.0 are two great concepts that can be followed simultaneously. Project Management 2.0 amplifies with Level 5 in many ways, some of which I tried to explore in this post. In both concepts, the team and its collective effort and efficiency are the focus, not the leader. A Level 5 leader, as well as Project 2.0 leader, aims at success and creates superb results, while inspiring and motivating his/her team. A Project 2.0 leader’s role, just like a Level 5 leader’s role, is to empower his/her people and guide them toward achieving a common goal, be it successful project completion or greatness of the whole company.
. Today the discipline of management is pressed by numerous factors, like globalization and shortening strategic lifecycles. Management is developing and embracing the benefits of openness, emergence, adaptability, and many other principles countering those of the management status quo (e.g., hierarchies, command control, bureaucracy) that companies have institutionalized over the past century. Organizations like Management Innovation Lab help to create “tomorrow’s best practices” today. I’ll be happy to add my 2 cents.
Last month, I had the pleasure of announcing exciting news related to the next phase in our company’s journey — one that would see a strong partnership between Wrike and unified digital workspace leader, Citrix. Today, I am pleased to share that Citrix has completed its acquisition of Wrike, and we are now shaping the future of work, together. Wrike joins the Citrix family under a common mission to remove the complexity of today’s hybrid and distributed work environments so employees and organizations can perform at their best. By bringing together the power of Citrix’s unified workspace infrastructure and our collaborative work management platform, organizations can enable employees to focus on the work that matters and accelerate business results. For an Orderly, Rapid Digital Transformation Our partnership with Citrix comes at a critical time for companies worldwide, as business leaders continue to grapple with the challenges presented by the recent pandemic. The pace of the Digital Transformation was accelerated last year, with a McKinsey Global Survey reporting that companies moved up the digitization of their customer and supply-chain interactions and of their internal operations by three to four years and the share of digital or digitally enabled products in their portfolios by seven years. Additionally, executives said their companies moved 40X more quickly than they thought possible before the pandemic regarding remote working. What would have taken more than a year to implement took an average of 11 days to find workable solutions. The fast pace of change in 2020 presents a new challenge in 2021, though. Now, employees are dealing with complex, distributed work environments and a heterogeneous array of applications, communication channels, and devices. Rather than enabling teams to work as one, these technologies get in the way of efficient and meaningful work. And organizations are dealing with the next big question - stay remote, return to office, or transition to a hybrid environment? According to PwC’s US Remote Work Survey, less than one in five executives say they want to return to the office as it was pre-pandemic. That means another change is on the horizon, and we’re anticipating it. Together, with Citrix, we recognized the time has come for a simplified, secure digital workplace that will enable organizations to transition to “anywhere working” by keeping employees engaged and productive, no matter where they are. To accomplish this, organizations need to move beyond the basic infrastructure they put in place last year just to survive and roll out more comprehensive solutions that will give them the competitive edge and help them thrive. We’re guiding organizations through this new transition by joining forces with Citrix to bring together two powerful, complementary solutions that will power the workplace of the future, where employees are productive, creative, and collaborative regardless of location. The next step is to work closely with the CIO office to make sure IT has what they need to architect their future workplace. Rising Above the “New Normal” The events of last year put CIOs in the hot seat, as organizations depended on IT to enable the transition to remote work environments, all while continuing operations and staying afloat. There may have been bumps in the road, but many organizations completed a decade’s worth of work in a matter of months thanks to IT. This year, IT is on the hot seat again, as business leaders now look to the CIO to continue to develop the strategies and select the solutions needed to support a remote workforce and enable a secure, unified, on-brand online customer experience. As CIOs build out their 2021 strategy and architect the solutions to adapt to the next normal, Wrike will be a critical part of the workplace stack, enabling a smooth and non-disruptive move to the hybrid or long-lasting distributed workplace. And how do we do this? We’re fully customizable - Wrike is the only intelligent, versatile, and collaborative work management platform for the enterprise that can be fully customized for any department, team, or workflow. We offer automated, intelligent workflows - With Wrike, you can standardize your workflows to ensure cross-functional collaboration while adapting to your unique needs to maximize performance. We’re one platform where everyone can truly work as one - With the shift to digital, the old way of managing work, manually across dozens of tools, keeps your employees from focusing on work that really matters. We’re scalable - A wall-to-wall work management tool is not a nice-to-have anymore, it's mission critical. Wrike logs more than 10 million tasks and 1.5 million projects monthly and offers the reliability and power to support an enterprise-wide digital transformation. To find out how IT can leverage Wrike and Citrix Workspace to meet business demands faster, visit: https://www.citrix.com/blogs/2021/03/01/citrix-workspace-and-wrike-empower-it-for-a-better-employee-experience/ Welcome to the Citrix Family As we join the Citrix family, so do our customers. I mentioned in a recent blog post that this partnership presents many benefits to Wrike customers, and I would like to make it clear that all of our customers will continue to receive the same level of attention and support they’ve come to expect. This acquisition means that we will be able to quickly scale our product and accelerate our roadmap so customers get more from their investment, and the partnership with Citrix allows us to work more closely with IT departments. In doing so, we can enable cross-functional workflows, connecting with the systems across the organization and becoming the single digital workspace for all employees. We look forward to keeping you updated on progress as we, alongside Citrix, continue to build the workplace of the future where employees are productive, creative, and collaborative, no matter their location.
Recently I came across an article about how hard it can be to introduce new enterprise business intelligence technologies to a company. This article reflects an important corporate phenomenon: “mandating and forcing users to adopt a standard practice or technology will often create resistance and political backlash.” The author underlines that transforming and changing the way people do business is never easy, and she advises the heads of IT departments on the best ways to implement the changes.Why is it so hard to make users adopt the new software introduced by IT departments? One of the reasons is that sometimes the choice of software is made levels above the actual users. In these cases software is adopted without taking users’ opinion into consideration. Often users have no budgets and little decision power, and that is why all software vendors’ marketing efforts are targeted at top management and heads of IT departments, who make the final choice of software. Many experts agree that this fact is convenient for the IT departments, because they get as much control as possible over users’ operations. Top management sometimes may not know the specific character of their employees’ work. That’s why the managers’ choice for software may become an additional barrier for effective collaboration, instead of being a helpful solution. As a result, people can be forced to adapt to the imposed tool that does not answer their requirements and can be hard to master. They may have to spend weeks or even months on training. Still, after all the training efforts, the IT-introduced solution might turn out to be ineffective for successful team work. Information can often be hard to find, as it is kept in disconnected files. Sometimes lack of built-in collaboration vehicles in an IT imposed solution can slow down the whole business. Change in enterprise management software adoption All these factors are making the top-management of many companies change their views on the IT department’s role in the adoption of a new business solution. Now there is a strong tendency of transformation in enterprise software adoption due to growing user sophistication. Social networks, blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 technologies people use at home help them find similar tools for more effective work in the office. People find new ways to work together and collaborate without any help from IT departments. These ways are Enterprise 2.0 technologies, and they turn out to be more efficient. Why? An Enterprise 2.0 online collaboration platform can make team-work frictionless, as it is more flexible. Second-generation software is designed with user needs in mind. Team members can customize their collaborative space and make it specific to their own needs. The new-generation software is easy to use. Simplicity has become a key driver of technology adoption, especially in the last 10 years, as advanced technologies have developed simpler user interfaces. For example, blogging can be called a revolution of simplicity. To blog, all you need to do is write a title and, some content, and then click publish. It is that simple to share your ideas with the rest of the team and get their feedback in the comments. Collaboration software can do even more for business productivity. It may be the key for streamlining the work process and may help companies avoid unnecessary paper work and phone calls. Everything is kept in one place – a collaborative space that can be accessed by all the team members. Many companies today realize these benefits and take advantage of them by letting their employees choose the software, which will correspond to the end-users’ needs. As an example we can take SightLines Consulting – a consulting company where employees had lots of complaints on complexity of their CRM software. The application was chosen by the top-management. The tool was stable, but end-users kept saying that the application is inflexible and hard to use. The sales people - the end-users of the software – tend to spend most of their working time out of the office, on the road. The major inconvenience was that the application was impossible to access any other way than through their internal network. However, “sales people are motivated to produce” says SightLines Consulting president Thomas Foydel. This means, that they are motivated to find ways and tools to be more productive. The end-users turned to Enterprise 2.0 technologies. When they found a solution that adds actual value to their everyday job, they adopted it. The result was doubling the speed of sales team work and improved customer satisfaction. The whole business became more successful. The top executives at SightLines Consulting are now sure that they made the right decision by letting the sales team choose their tools. Enterprise 2.0 software brings new ways of collaboration and is adopted according to different standards. It’s easy to use, effective and flexible. This software is brought to the enterprise the bottom-up way, and very often is suggested by end-users themselves. It’s no surprise that the second-generation software adoption and usage are more thorough than those of traditional software. Peter Coffee, a recognized software-as-a-service advocate, said that the software that end-users had before might have been stable, mature and predictable, but “it was not transforming people's ideas of how they do business”. I would add that it was not giving them enough space for implementation of their ideas. IT-departments should not ignore this fact. Changing IT-staff altitude towards the new-generation technologies will benefit the whole organization. IT departments need to learn to evaluate the new opportunities. In particular, IT needs additional competency in evaluating and administering service agreements. Enterprise 2.0 is not just software. It represents another way of managing IT. This means that IT departments should now shift their focus toward managing Enterprise 2.0 vendor relationships, as operational responsibility over the actual hardware and software moves to vendors. Some CIOs have already begun to move in this direction. For example, Alastair Behenna, CIO of Harvey Nash, says that their IT staff is looking into emerging technologies and trying to stay in the loop. “We have a lab where our team—from the help desk to the Web folks—is encouraged to spend as much as 10 percent of its time figuring out if there is commercial benefit to something [new] and doing a proof of concept if so,” - Behenna confirms. Of cause transformation of the software adoption process will be different in various companies. Some enterprises will still preserve the old ways of choosing software without taking the end-users’ opinion into consideration. Others have already realized the benefits of letting their employees take the lead in selecting their tools and making teams more productive. Examples of companies like Shell, Harvey Nash and many others, prove that allowing end-users choose the software according to their needs can make the whole business performance better.
It’s been a long time since I wrote my last post. The end of the last year and beginning of this one were very busy and exciting. I was participating in several industry conferences, meeting new people, getting new ideas from them and picking up some interesting topics. One of them is leadership in project management. The development of collective intelligence and collaborative Web 2.0 solutions gives this topic a whole new angle. I thought of writing a couple of posts, reflecting on my perception of leadership in the age of collective intelligence. So here’s the first one. Every now and then I come across articles on the power of the collective brain. Analysts, bloggers, business consultants, and professors in business schools keep talking about the value of empowering your team and unleashing collective intelligence. A growing number of people are discovering through their own experience that wholes are indeed far more than the sum of their parts. If individuals are coming together with a shared intention in a conducive environment, then the result of their collective work will far transcend the work of the individuals involved. I support Andrew McAfee’s view that leveraging this collective brain can help an organization to deal with many financial challenges. McAfee suggests that the answers to a company's challenges reside in the minds of the employees dispersed across the organization. Each particular individual may not have the best answer, but technology can be used to pull together the bits and pieces of employees' knowledge to find the right solutions. In one of its reports, Forrester indicated that Web 2.0 is being broadly and rapidly brought into enterprises to enhance performance in different spheres. In this respect, project management is perhaps the most popular field for adopting a new technology. Indeed, various Project Management 2.0 technologies do a great job in giving team members more opportunities to communicate, share files, update each other on the latest project news, and work together in real time despite time differences and vast distances. Project Management 2.0 tools become a system that lets members contribute and modify content in a ‘freeform’ manner—with a minimum of imposed structure in the form of workflows, decision right allocations, interdependencies and data formats. The best tools in this field contain mechanisms to let the structure emerge over time. Such mechanisms include linking, tagging, building views and hierarchies. Using a project management system as an emergent social information environment, the team becomes more powerful. However, there are many concerns on the project managers’ side that this freeform team collaboration can turn into chaos. Does the growth of the collective power of a team decrease the power of a project manager? To find an answer to this question, we need to take a look at the team itself. With the next-generation technologies, people have more freedom of collaboration and access to more information. Yet, having more information, more new ideas and more choices can puzzle people. So people start looking for somebody to guide their actions and decisions. They are looking for project leaders. In the contemporary reality of growing collective power, teams need leaders more than ever. So collective intelligence and adoption of Project Management 2.0 tools and practices do not eliminate the need for project leaders. However, it looks like project leaders of the collaborative age cannot follow the old-fashioned command-and-control pattern anymore. Many experts agree that, project leadership is undergoing a radical redefinition. For example, Edward Marshall, president of The Marshall Group, Inc., writes: “We are at a turning point in organizational and leadership history. The 20th century command-and-control approach, which worked quite well in the manufacturing age, no longer works in the 21st century information age, which is global, high-tech and incredibly competitive. It’s time to catch up to current realities.” I couldn’t agree more. Project Management 2.0 transforms traditional perception of leadership. Well, what does the new Project 2.0 leader look like? Seth Godin addresses this question in his latest book “Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us.” “Tribes”, according to Seth, are groups of people with a shared interest and a way to communicate. Web 2.0 technologies facilitate the formation of such tribes. However, to be really effective, tribes need leaders. Leadership, as Seth puts it, “is about creating change you believe in.” What I like about this rather laconic definition is that it highlights the two important things. Leaders should: 1. “create change”, i.e. improve the existing state of things 2. “believe in” this change, i.e. they should join accountability with passion. And what’s the leader’s main role? According to Seth, it’s to “increase the effectiveness of the tribe and its members” by: • transforming the shared interest into a passionate goal and desire for change, • providing tools to allow members to tighten their communications, and • leveraging the tribe to allow it to grow and gain new members Seth speaks about tribes that are formed on the web, not in the corporate environment. Still I think that this leadership concept can be applied to Project Management 2.0. Indeed, the Project 2.0 leader’s role is to motivate his team and make the team members more productive, in order to complete the project on time and on budget. He can do it by: • setting a goal that his team will be aspiring to and make this goal clear to every team member • providing the tools that will make the team’s collaboration most efficient, and • leveraging his team’s collective brain and capabilities Let me underline that this type of leadership is more about empowering a team by helping it to collaborate than about telling people what they should do. Also, the emphasis is more about the effectiveness of the people on the team level in achieving the goal. While the leader is the one who has accountability and personal commitment, it’s really the team that is the focus. In many ways, this echoes the concepts of “Level 5 Leadership” as described in the book, "Good to Great" by Jim Collins. In addition, the point about setting a goal is very much aligned with Collins’ BHAG concept. In my next post, I’ll explore this concept in more detail and will try to present it from Project Management 2.0 point of view.