With today being May Day, I decided to share business tools that could help you get to your pay day. I am sharing these tools as a way of providing business owners with suggested tools to help you run your business proficiently. The tools that will be suggested for you will cover a variety of topics and will help you streamline your business processes.

Image: sxc.hu

For those of you who don’t know, May Day is May 1st and actually is the host to many international celebrations. One of which is the International Workers’ Day which pertains to the the establishment of the 8 hour work day. Although many may not know but this holiday got it’s start in the Americas.

To help under more about how it all came about, I wanted to share an excerpt from an article on the Workers’ of the World website,

In the late nineteenth century, the working class was in constant struggle to gain the 8-hour work day. Working conditions were severe and it was quite common to work 10 to 16 hour days in unsafe conditions. Death and injury were commonplace at many work places and inspired such books as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle and Jack London’s The Iron Heel. As early as the 1860’s, working people agitated to shorten the workday without a cut in pay, but it wasn’t until the late 1880’s that organized labor was able to garner enough strength to declare the 8-hour workday. This proclamation was without consent of employers, yet demanded by many of the working class. [Read more]

With all of this in mind and in celebration of International Workers’ Day of May Day, I thought it would be helpful to provide business tools that can help you reach your pay day as an entreprenuer. Tools that could help you shorten your work day but at the same time give your the same amount of creativity and pay day.

Today’s Business Tools Picks:

• Social media management:
  • Flock: browser that integrates social media + email management + internet browsing + RSS feeds all in one
  • FreeTwitterDesigner: allows you to personalize your Twitter background
  • SocialMention: a social media search engine that searches user-generated content such as blogs, comments, bookmarks, events, news, videos, and microblogging services
• Financial management:
  • Mint: to help you analyze your personal and business finances, you should check Mint out because it allows you to compile financial data from different sources into one location so that you can monitor your finances.
• Collaboration management: includes tools that can help you map out your business, manage your teams or manage your processes.
  • MindMeister: is a collaborative online mind mapping tool - you can capture your thoughts and share them instantly with friends and colleagues.
  • PBWiki now PBWorks: Online Collaboration and Project Management that is perfect for small businesses and small teams/groups in larger companies looking for an easy, secure way to collaborate at work.

If you work with a virtual team then collaboration is an important component for your business. Having successful collaborations can either break or make a team’s ability to reach its goals. As a business owner who uses virtual team members, I have found thant collaborating is essential so that communications are always open for my team members.

Image: Newscom.com

The following things important to the collaboration process.

• Initial meeting to explain all the details of the project.
• A way to track the project’s progress. Each member needs to be able to report on their progress
• Make sure accountability is in place for each member.
• Support for the leader’s vision is important too.
• Software or technology created to allow virtual collaboration.
• Determine what development process you will use for the sharing of information and collaboration
• Defined team member responsibilities based on collaboration

Below are some teamwork or collaboration quotes that can be encouraging to your team.

Author Unknown: A word of encouragement during a failure is worth more than an hour of praise after success.

Helen Keller: Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.

Stephen R. Covey: Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers.

Hopefully this information will encourage you as you build your virtual team and incorporate collaboration into it. Make sure you read the second installment entitled “Working as a Team: Reaching Your Goals”.

For months the Innovations Are Under Your Nose post is the most viewed post on my blog. Funny that it only has two comments. Maybe you can help me out by telling me why it’s number one. Is it the picture of the nose? the revelation that most innovations are copied? or could it be that this is just a fluke of blogdom?

What say you?

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Funny how collaboration and communication, in and of themselves, are viewed by some as “strategies”. In my business (technology enabling business processes) you have to have something to collaborate about; i.e., a business process that is benefiting the company. In fact, “collaboration” and “communication” alone are never enough and seen as “me too” by the people we sell to. Everybody’s got collaboration tools- show me some valuable business processes that you can enable.

Even in blogging you must have content that is interesting, valuable if you will, before people will blog with you. Without the valuable content, or reason to interact with a blog, you have nothing. Watch for empty claims of increasing “collaboration” and “communication”! Stick to your guns and make sure you are doing something that is valuable with these tools.

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Manufacturing Business Technology magazine’s article on collaborative innovation leads to an obvious question: how do you protect intellectual property when you involve many companies and associations in finding a link between a company with a problem and a company with a solution? Paul Stiros, CEO of NineSigma, a firm that links problems and solutions together, comments on this issue:

“Stiros says the entire process is conducted in such a way that neither party has to fear having intellectual property compromised. “The proposals submitted by solution providers don’t contain the actual solution,” he says. “They only contain the company’s capabilities for addressing the problem. Our client then holds conversations with the solution provider to determine if they can indeed solve the problem. Then they sign confidentiality agreements, and ultimately enter into a contract to have work performed.” “

Fairly simple approach to what could be a big problem. Capability is addressed before two companies attempt to work together. In the case of linking P&G and an agricultural products manufacturer together, the common experience and capability was making small bags, out of the same material, to hold oily substances without leaking. The agricultural firm had solved the problem already. NineSigma helped P&G find them. Then the companies worked out a deal with adequate intellectual property protection.

How do you collaborate with other companies on innovating products and processes? Was intellectual property protection a stumbling block to forming a relationship? Is NineSigma’s approach workable?

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For those of you who need a little summary of what WE blogged about in January 2008, here is a month-end sum up of projectmanagement411. There are many excellent comments/points of view on these topics- check THEM out and add to the conversation! (The topics are arranged to be sung, with appropriate breathing- first three words very slow and the rest “rapid fire”):

We… wrote…. about….. living standards, innovation, carbon trading, collaboration…..(breath), strategy mapping, tech trends, role of commitment and preparation…..(breath), social security, business leaders, statesmen, project queues…..(breath), language barriers, PMOs, BI drivers, and swamp draining.

Just click on the topic and see what we discussed- be forewarned, many times it’s not what you think.

Of the topics covered, which ones are of greatest interest to you and why? Let me know.

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Collaboration reaps many benefits but there are still many frustrations with the process and with the technology. Manufacturing Business Technology magazine reports on a survey of just over 400 (about 1/2 design engineers and 1/2 production/project managers) about collaboration as it relates to design and manufacturing improvements.

Only 20% were “satisfied” with current collaboration efforts citing two key areas of frustration:

1. Slow responses from those to whom communications are sent.

2. Clarity of communication.

90% regularly collaborate with internal to company people with only 30% going outside to customers and suppliers on a regular basis. This surprised the reviewers but seems to make sense given intellectual property concerns. These types of realities also create caution when sending design files to production because of difficulties protecting files from changes and making sure the right version is out there.

In spite of the frustrations there is general agreement that collaboration is improving and that there are many benefits to doing it- key among them being:

1. Reduced design and manufacturing errors.

2. Increased product quality.

All of this seems to point more to the value of standardizing processes and the technology that enables them. In fact the article reveals that engineering and production/project management tend to use different systems and processes. This is an age old “siloing” issue borne out of the “need” to hoard information until it is useful to reveal it. In other words, it is NOT a technology problem, it is a people problem.

Once again, centralizing projects related to multiple departments under the guidance of a PMO-like organization could clearly benefit companies collaboration efforts. Leaving it to IT alone to sort out the mess is not a solution- a channel from projects to tactics to strategies that involves an executive level board fed by a supportive PMO can attack the two key issues of slow response and lack of clarity in communications.

How do you view collaboration? Is it more of a people problem or a technology problem? Have you solved the collaboration issue with an innovative business model? Share it!

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My post on Overcoming Language Barriers facilitated some very nice sharing of resources. Executives and managers! You need to familiarize yourself with this information; you will benefit through improved understanding of what your IT projects should be doing for you:

1. Excellent discussion on Domain Driven development from Sensei at ActiveEngine’s Cool Stuff post. This is more than a software development discussion- it deals with how to attack problems from a value perspective as you develop “language” between technologists and users. I suggest reading the transcript and paying close attention to Eric Evans’ thoughts- great reading.

2. Great, and thankfully brief, agile software development glossary from Alex Howard via Margaret Rouse at IT Knowledge Exchange. Agile projects have proven their value- get a leg up on this value-driven approach to software development.

As a teaser, here’s some of what Sensei and I had to say about the Domain Driven development discussion:

Sensei: you may be aware of a movement within agile called Domain Driven development. The basic idea is that you allow the “problem domain” to drive the efforts of your technology development and implementation…in Domain Driven development the starting point is the business processes and logic; the database and screens become secondary considerations.

However - and this is a big however - the domain must be defined in very clear terms….developers must be able to write, in English, what the problems are using the business units language. It is also critical that it is written clearly so that the intent can never be misunderstood. Some may argue that UML does this, but most customers’ eyes will glaze over when presented with Use Case diagrams. When the problem domain can be described succinctly in common terms, your problem solving sessions will be more effective.

My theme lately with the development teams I work with is to build a working vocabulary; that is, pick one term to describe a process and stick with that term. In these sessions I have had to literally ask “And the word we use to describe this process is …?” ….if you are jumping from problem to problem, or worse, from project to project, you need strong definitions to keep things straight.

Bob: I scanned the Eric Evans interview; easy and good reading for non-technical people to understand that software developers should want to work on VALUABLE system changes; i.e., very interesting in that he justifies domain expertise as enabling focus on valuable-to-the-business processes which can be much more complex than the other areas because they tend to be revenue producing and customer facing. I enjoyed the discussion about new system complexity requiring an “anti-corruption” layer to interface to the legacy system that could take as much resource as the new system. Also asking “why are you buying this” to get at where to focus modeling efforts. The multi-language (technical model, user model, reconciled language) issue sounds just like what happens when two people speaking different languages begin to understand each other- my last experience like this was in Korea. Excellent insight into the minds of software developers!

Do you have these types of discussions with your IT people? Is a software development process driven by the business processes that are of high value to the organization a good strategy? Why or why not?

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Intelligent Enterprise article “The Seven Pillars of BI Success” closed with a success story where agile software development processes came into play. 1-800 Contacts, winner of 2006 TDWI Best Practice Award, first aligned their BI project with a call-center-incentive project. The agile software development approach fostered high value innovative ideas to allow monitoring and improvement of agent performance mainly by giving the agents a way to monitor themselves. A large part of the success was attributed to the agile approach to collaboration with users:

Before picture: “Business would shout, and IT would do a fire drill and throw something out there.”

After picture: “Better communication with users and business leaders empowered to adjust priorities [through new governance model].”

As I said in my last post, BI and PMOs have similar requirements when it comes to the problem they are solving- decentralized, non-integrated projects and information that need to be prioritized and aligned with strategies. Interesting that agile processes facilitate the increased communication required for success in BI and PMOs.

The idea of empowering collaboration with agile approaches showed that IT can deliver something that gives business users value- mainly because they are getting more of what they want.

This strategic selection of the first “BI” project in an area of great interest to the company led to going down the road of leveraging information in other areas like marketing data mining and customer segmentation. IT is enthused by their successes and the users are enthused with IT.

What examples of IT/user collaboration have you experienced? Was it on a Business Intelligence project? Did agile software development collaboration processes come into play?

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My post on the PMO relieving pain prompted a response by ActiveEngine about pain being crucial to gain people’s attention. Pain and uncovering it can be a multi-layered process seemingly without end- i.e., dealing with one problem inevitably leads to having to deal with others which can get discouraging. This is probably because the “swamp is being drained”. Read my response below:

Pain is an interesting phenomenon. One of the analogies used for improvement is “draining the swamp”. When you drain the swamp you start seeing a bunch of ugly rocks. In project management this means getting rid of the projects you don’t need by doing a project inventory and then getting rid of some more by eliminating those that don’t align with strategies. What this does is focuses resources on the remaining projects and the problems they have which now beg to be solved. Same thing when you do a lean manufacturing program and eliminate wasteful processes- the real problems (pain) start to emerge; you are now on the road to solving real problems and root causes, not just symptoms. Back to software development- do you find that excessive documentation can hide problems in the process? I’ve heard that documentation is the “excess inventory” of software development.

Do you have situations where dealing with one problem led to several others? Did you give up on a project because of this? Do you think it was because you were involved in the “draining the swamp” process and simply uncovering more, but better, rocks (problems)? I KNOW you’ve been there! Tell us about it. What you say could make the difference in someone completing or stopping their project.

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