One of the reoccurring discussions at work is how to manage a non-profit. The goal of creating more social good is laudable, but how does it translate into what each of us does during the day? In discussing The Goal we've taken a manufacturing plant's process (sale, production, delivery) and applied it to our work. We'e substituted a grant for a sales opportunity, the process of fulfilling the grant—running a conference, for instance— as the assembly line process and delivery of the final report to the funder the delivery of goods manufactured and sold.
Obvious as this may seem now, it took outlining the process to make clear that final funder reports are not annoying administrivia, but necessary components of any grant-funded work, and that project workplans need to be considered from an organizational level. Our internal incentives have not always lined up with this picture, so we tended to think in terms of projects (is the website up, the paper written) and their completion, rather than the grants backing the projects. So it was a relief to learn from a friend that he too ran into similar difficulties at his nonprofit. Colleagues lacked an organizational view; some newer staff did not know how to the grant-making process worked, and many missed media opportunities for selling their work to the public at large.So, obviously doing social good must be translated into less abstract concepts so we can answer the question, how does what I do benefit the organization's ability to do good? (Not quite as straightforward as how do I improve the bottom line).
I went through BWI recently. The TSA screener stopped me and got this confused look on her face. Apparently my intinerary listing “Bil” was a problem. Talk about idiots.
begins Bill Kearney's brush with potential trouble over using a common nickname.
I can only vouch that this is not improbable, having overheard two women discuss their surprise upon learning “Bill” was a nickname for “William.” (A friend of mine chimed in sotto voce, “Haven’t they heard of William Jefferson Clinton, you know Bill Clinton?”)
But, this points to a potential problem: employing security measures that depend on screeners' knowledge about the world they inhabit. And if the screener jobs are relatively low-paying, some screeners are likely to be less knowledgeable. Combine that with the peculiar nature of names and naming and nicknames in a nation of immigrants, and you will have confusion at the gate. Throw in a few foreign tourists just to add to the confusion. (If Bill is troublesome, what else would also reasonably trip up the screener?) How did the transportation department not foresee problems given international travel, duplicate names, unfamiliar names and low-wage employees?
Although the electronic equivalent of gallons of ink have been spilled to demonstrate SCO's case against IBM or Linux has no basis, that has never been SCO's point. Its case is all about money. Or as As Frank Hayes opines:
None of the threats make legal sense. If they did, SCO would be able to get an injunction to shut down Linux users. In practice, SCO hasn't even been able to get an injunction against IBM and won't get a court hearing on its request to do that until 2005.
... If it sounds like a shell game, well, that's the way Canopy likes to move its companies around. But in effect, Canopy used SCO's stock price, boosted by SCO's Linux threats, to rake in a couple of million dollars in cash behind the scenes.
And apparently it worked. Which means we can expect that as long as Canopy can find ways of cashing in on SCO's threats against Linux users, those threats will keep coming—no matter how little sense they make.
The story really isn't about Linux or copyright infringements. It's about acquiring cash.
Traveling is a pleasure, but packing can be a chore. But it's a chore that pays for itself many times over, I say, remembering that I left my sneakers behind when travelling to Moscow. The lesson learned on that trip iwas hiking boots are no substitute for sneakers for playing a pickup game of soccer. And at that time, buying a pair on the spot was not easy or affordable. On the plus side, I could easily carry my luggage. And in that vein I offer you the entertaining advice on how to pack for several months in Europe, a paean to REI.
Phil Windley points out a nice bit by Jonathan Peterson describing why blogs are strong contenders for project managment:
Now lets look at a blogged IT organization:
- Each developer and/or development team would keep a project blog with RSS.
- The PM would subscribe to all those blogs and would publish a roll-up blog with links to details of various issues.
- The program manager would subscribe to the RSS feeds for every project or team that impacts his project portfolio and would publish his own blog.
- The Powerpoint deck would now have live links to blog entries at the program office level.
Peterson concedes blogging tools are not perfect for project management — doesn't track workflow well, hard to find complete thread of a subject, muddled distinction between internal and external communications— but are fixable. In his follow up to this, Peterson points out the most robust purpose of blogging is capturing verbal knowledge before it walks out the door: His strongest case for the corporate value of blogging:
The “war stories” exchanged by greybeards are not just a means of socialization; they are also a mechanism for passing down valuable information to the next generation. A google search across such "tales" would likely be invaluable in an organization like Nynex. So before you pooh-pooh corporate blogging, ask yourself —How much of your corporate culture is verbal and walks out the door at the end of the day?
Which reminds me to go update my project blog
A main goal at work is to gather all the organization's information into one meta database for people to access in a variety of ways. This metadatabase will not necessarily hold data itself, but will be a map to where the data lives. To that end I'm working on learning C sharp and figuring ways to apply rolled out applications, such as Goldmine to needed purposes.
In seeking the One Database, we hope to make peoples' jobs easier and their effforts more effective. But the OD will not replace one aspect of the job: talking to people. Often the best source of information-sharing is the oldest, namely, having a conversation. And I've noticed that in decentralized organizations like mine, conversations are particularly crucial to good work results. They form the connections between different units and tend to identify conflicts, solutions and relative importance of issues.
To foster this, I've been making an effort to leave my warren/office and walk through various parts of the office to talk to colleagues. The results are mixed thus far. But I have identified one person I consistently miss in my perambulations around the office, probably the one I should talk to the most. Since we do not cross paths accidently, I've proposed a meeting to clarify work flow. The meeting seemed like the quickest way to organize work in a useful and smooth fashion.
Which brings me to the issue of figuring out workflow in a think-tank office. It must have some commonality with an assembly line for certain products such as reports and conferences. That is, certain steps must be complete before other ones take place or the final item assembled. For example, the organization applies for a grant to research and write a report. Somebody (somebodies) do the research, perhaps convening a conference or running a demonstration, compile data, develop conclusions, and pull this into a report. The report then must be edited, formatted, published and disseminated. I'll bet we haven't mapped out the generic steps needed to complete the current list of projects from an organizational perspective. A simple flow chart of the steps might illuminate some of our actual strengths, constraints, and potential places for improvement. And by having an organizational view, not a project-level view, we just might see where project incentives do not coincide with organizational incentives.
In Demystifying the Digital Divide Mark Warschauer writes that computer access is not a yes-or-no proposition, but like literacy, access depends on fitting into social systems and processes:
Literacy does not exist in a bipolar divide between those who absolutely can and cannot read. There are levels of literacy for functional, vocational, civic, literary and scholarly purposes. And people become literate not just through physical access to books but through education, communication, work connections, family support and assistance for social networks.
While not disputing the real disparity in access to computer technology, Warschauer argues that planting a computer in a community is not the same as making it useful:
In 1999, the munipal government of New Delhi .... launched an experiment to provide computer acccess to children in one of the city's poorest areas. Government official and representatives of the company set up an outdoor kiosk with several computer stations. The computers, with dial-up Internet access, were inside a locked booth, but the monitors, joysticks and buttons stuck out and were accessible.
.... Over the nine-month duration of the experiment, the youngsters did indeed learn how to manipulate the joystick and buttons. But without educational programs and with the content primarily in English rather than Hindi, they mostly did what you might expect: played games and used paint programs to draw.
By contrast, the government in another region, Madhya Pradesh, furnished a computer per village, networked them. Local entrepreneurs serviced the computers, giving access even to illiterate villagers. The entrepreneurs could charge a modest fee for access and offer computer training. The government also provided content for the network:
This content includes updated prices of popular crops at the district, regional and national markets, so that small farmers can decide whether to harvest their crop and where to sell it, without wasting a day traveling to the district capital for price checks. A complaint service lets villagers report local problems such as malfunctioning hand pumps or teachers failing to show up at schools.
In short, technology is not a solution, but a tool. Technology alone does not make the illiterate read, the poor well-off, and disparities disappear. But inserting technology thoughtfully based on what it can do (computers are good at sharing and storing information), what a technology requires to work properly (a person is best at introducing foreign technologies to other people), and what role it can fulfill (sharing market information quickly and efficiently) can improve lives.
It started off with what Google thinks of me: http://www.googlism.com/. (Try it by typing in your name and who). But then came a friend's suggestion for those of us with burning theological questions: what does Google think of God. First answer up is “God is a light flash movie.” Which is what I deserve for asking a metaphysical question of a computer.
From someone's email signature block: Christmas is weird. What other time of the year do you sit in front of a dead tree and eat candy out of your socks?
Obviously. Now that someone's pointed it out.
I picked up The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt last night, the first on the list for a work-related bookclub. The Goal is the story of a manager who wants to save his manufacturing plant from closure. It's the parable Goldratt uses to show how a complex phenomenon such as business can be explained simply and effectively. His explanation: Businesses are all about the goal of making money. They gain their profits by increasing sales, cutting inventory and earning a return on investment. Profits are checked by the presence of bottlenecks and the Theory of Constraints. It'll be an interesting discussion to figure out how the checklist applies to my work place, a nonprofit think tank. What constitutes sales? Inventory? Investment? Bottlenecks and constraints may be more straightforward.
Back to the beleaguered plant manager. Will he and his staff discover these principles in time to keep the plant open? Or will the toady manager and his reams of reports backstab our hero? Who is the mysterious guru who nudges the manager along to discovery? Will the manager win back his wife? Really, it does read like a romance novel! (And I thought that description was an exaggeration.)
I need to update to 2.63, and I'm shifting the blog to a SQL database (from the Berkeley one. It was on my list of weekend projects, but getting locked out of the house Sunday slowed down a number of efforts.
From Ad Rem:
Music and What It Says about You: According to a recent study, what music you listen to could tell a lot about who you are physically, emotionally, and intellectually.
People who favour Madonna's Material Girl, for example, are likely to be cheerful, outgoing and reliable. [...] If on the other hand, someone prefers the Rolling Stones' Brown Sugar, they are likely to possess more of an inquiring mind, enjoy taking risks, and consider themselves to be pretty intelligent.
I'm not sure what my music collection says about me. I listen to a wide range of music -- from heavy metal to gregorian chants, to opera, to country, to bluegrass, to jazz, to improv, to British rock, to classic, to world, to Indian, to relaxation music...and that's just what is coming to mind right now.
The study itself is not online (The Do Re Mi's of Everyday Life: The Structure and Personality Correlates of Music Preferences by Peter J. Rentfrow and Samuel D. Gosling, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) but a news release is:
A new study from researchers at The University of Texas at Austin that examines how music preference is related to personality found that most musical choices fall into one of four broad categories: Reflective and Complex, Intense and Rebellious, Upbeat and Conventional, or Energetic and Rhythmic. The results of the study appear in the June issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, published by the American Psychological Association.
Researchers Dr. Samuel Gosling and Peter Rentfrow found that musical preference could reliably be sorted into one of these four categories and that these preferences are related to personality, intelligence and values.
Like Ad Rem, I'm not clear what my collection means. Back in the time of vinyl records, I set four items on a music store's checkout counter. To the cashier's consternation, I bought: Let it Be redone by an industrial rock band, The Brandenburg Concerti, a tape of Buddy Holly hits, and a Glenn Miller album. The stack of CDs sitting on my desk offer Appalachian, Brazilian, Spanish, African, jazz, classical piano, blues, and ragtime music.
In my case, the collection probably reflects both formal musical training from a young age and exposure to many types of music. I've learned to listen to new music many times to become familiar with the genre, before deciding whether I like it.
So musical choice to me is not a stance, but a taste preference. Is this preference value-driven? Probably, although values and taste are not interchangable. Perhaps the study's use of undergraduates influenced the robustness of the results. I'd guess musical taste and values would have a stronger connection for undergraduates than for other age cohorts. Like many adults, I keep some music around for nostalgia and familiarity. The result? It probably is easier to judge my age range than my outlook or values by my music collection.
Here is the computer gift that keeps on giving: systems integration. Or All I Want for Christmas is a Totally Integrated Network Architecture. And by Christmas we should have goodly parts of this in place.
A South Korean mobile phone company will offer subscribers a downloadable sound for their cell phone to annoy mosquitoes within 3 feet; the sound is inaudible to humans, reports the Washington Post. Now that's a service I'd love to have on my phone. Perfect for living in a swampy town full of hungry mosquitoes.
Yesterday's session was how to tell a story, on the premise that people remember information better when presented in a story. Applying this technique, the writer selects the essential characters in a situation, and presents their role, what they do, the conflicts they face and how they resolve (or not) the conflict. The character may be an organization. For example, this (character) organization provides healthcare to a poor clientele; unfortuately, (conflict) a new law bans the organization from recouping costs by charging its clients. But (resolution) covering costs can be achieved by applying this new business plan. And the description of the plan follows.
Once again, though, assembling the pieces of both days into one day-long seminar would have served us better. We were all tired before the second session ended. The instructor had everyone write a brief story about the class as the last task; my colleagues had some delightful stories, and a few are skilled fiction writers.
I attended the first day of a day-and-a-half seminar on writing. The instructor presented a set of solid techniques for writing aimed a business, not leisure audience. He argued that the goal is clear, well-organized writing designed for scanning to yield information quickly and effectively. To that end, he set forth the importance of layout, of using headers, short text, and informative graphics.
Most usefully, he focused on the process to achieve the above goal. First, identify the audience, the purpose and the barriers to this writing and only then begin to write. The audience, purpose and barriers will shape the entire project: Who is the audience? How broad? Is jargon or technical language appropriate? What is the purpose of the writing? Raise money? Persuade? Inform? etc. What are the barriers? An unreceptive audience? An unfamiliar topic for the audience? Then, write what you want to say (TM); brainstorm. Only afterwards should one proceed to write a draft, employing headers, subheaders and shorter sentences and paragraphs to divide information into useful chunks.
In terms of writing structure, he stated that one, the writer should set user expectations and follow through and two, that new information should follow old information. Set out user expectations by listing the x points to be discussed, say, Point A, Point B and Point C. The reader expects you to deliver 3 points, Point A, Point B and Point C, in the subsequent headers and their respective content. Two, introduce new information at the end of the sentence. The writing will flow more smoothly by providing the reader with necessary connections. Thus, “Assets matter to building future financial stability. The most valuable asset for many Americans is their home. ” instead of “Assets matter .... Owning a home is the most valuable asset”
Unfortunately, what I presented above was most of yesterday's presentation, instead of occupying just the morning. He did not delve into how to write concisely and clearly until the end of yesterday's session. And he was too cute in the presentation for my taste. While I enjoy wit and humor, I dislike the the self-congratulatory applause and feel-good nature imposed on many workplace retreats. In short the presentation should have followed many of the insructor's recommendations for good writing.
In my small world of contacts, two people have pointed to Jon Udell's column about using music (and sounds borrowed from nature) to indicate server moods. Peep, the software, aims to put your server log files to music. What a sweet way to monitor machine health! Easy for a systems person to assimilate the baseline network condition, thanks to brains which seek out patterns, and then use the actual logs and dashboards to delve into details should something sound off.
I took a few days off and managed to catch up on sleep, enjoy some nice cookouts, and take on some yardwork, which unfortunately involved trimming back a wild rose bush. My forearms bear the scars of the encounter, athough the slight allergic reaction is fading. If the bush weren't on the walk up to the front door, I certainly would let it rest in peace.
Several things waiting to be posted: