meet little big man

Meet Miwok - our latest foster. Miwok is 7 yrs old and was found abandoned in San Jose. He has once been someone's spoiled little prince - but by the time Hopalong Animal Rescue picked him up; he was filthy, dehydrated, lost 1/3 of his body weight and very stinky.
Miwok needed to be neutered and receive all of his vaccinations. He was microchipped, given a med exam, advantage and deworming meds.
When I picked him up that night - he was still groggy from the surgery, but he has recovered fairly well, is eating better, and is very happy to be indoors.
Like all pugs - he is stubborn and clingy and we are working on some basic commands like sit and don't jump all over me darnit. : )
Miwok will be part of the Maddie's Fund Adoptathon event taking place next weekend - where hopfully he will meet his new forever family.

< 3 Makers Faire

I am not sure I can synthesize down the makers faire into a paragraph, it was a mishmosh of DIY geeky solar baby bots, huge neon lit control driven eight legged transportation devices, classes, swaps and whimsical crafts galore. There was a team of people that were dedicated to helping people build perfect r2d2 replicas. There was a create your own version of Pixar. I can not recommend it more highly.

http://www.makerfaire.com/

This year - I am actually going to make it to makers faire. I have seen makers faire on Spark, Craftster, Threadbanger and Burda.
I was able to convince a good friend to make the trip down to San Mateo fairgrounds, and will report back with all of the fun geekery seen and acquired.

Four things I learned from my HR Metrics mentor.

Decode all metrics presented to you. Ask - what assumptions must be made for the number to be true? Why did the analyst choose to phrase the metric in that way? What are they trying to prove and what are they trying to hide?

When you use numbers to demonstrate a point or explain a trend, be aware of how the metrics are used to tell a story, make certain it is the story you want to tell. Leaders will manage what they can measure - be sure the metric is concretely tied to the change you wish to see.

The key to believable metrics is clearly defined qualifiers and parameters. A savvy leader is going to ask the above questions. Present simple definitions for how you reached your numbers.

Rarely - the person who researches and produces the metrics is the same person who presents them to leadership. When you finish your metrics, place yourself in a leader's shoes and try to think of the 3-5 additional follow up questions. Place these answers in your speaker's notes or presentation. The director or manager presenting the metrics will feel more comfortable and will project more confidence. Leaders will have a greater level of faith in the metrics if they feel they can not "poke holes" in your arguments.

Next Steps become Big Steps

Project Plan

After our successful demo, my manager and I sat down in our conference room with white board markers to draw out next steps. We began by talking about our expectations for the project and began very shortly to see the expectations of us from the sponsors had changed during the demo.

We went from proposing a solution to owning a program. The feedback given to us by the National Learning Leaders showed they were so happy with our idea that we should "run with it." "It" being the whole process and program of 4D Follow Though - the development driven interactions with leadership training participants over a 10 week period - that would be taking place in 11 different regions, 50 individual classes containing 1,000 participants a year.
Wow.

Daunted but daring - we began to draw out what that would look like: what would need to be put into place in the form of policies, processes, training and resources.
First - we started by stepping through the known process. Where were the delta points? What would we need to change as we moved the process in-house with a new tool. Next, we began to lay out who would need to be doing these things. What roles would need to change? What new skill sets would they need to have?
We looked also at how we would handle change management. This new tool would require additional effort from the participants. We would be facing all of the misgivings of the old system - plus a fear of the new tool.

I created a project plan to begin capturing the next steps. The project plan will be presented back to our project sponsors, who hopefully will bless our vision for the future.

Business requirements - or - how I became an expert on three systems in three days

Business Requirements

Well, not exactly an expert, but I certainly did learn a great deal very quickly.

As my manager gathered information on the system we would be replacing I was watching over her shoulder to get some advanced information on what systems we might be able to tap into.
KP has enough systems, you very rarely need to invent a new one. Chances are, someone, somewhere has bought or built a tool that would fit your need. We knew that we wanted to use an existing system, as we had no budget for licenses, setup or customization. We turned first to two HR systems - our LMS and our performance management system. We wanted to take advantage of the natural connections between training, development, coaching and performance management.
As the business requirements began to lay out, I began testing and examining our two HR systems for possible fits. I poked my head into offices of system experts, cornered system sponsors in the office hallways asking hypothetical questions. Like most folks who begin business requirements work, I thought I knew the solution to our issue. Naturally, I thought the LMS would be our best fit. I identified the "Learning Plan" functionality as the module that had the closest match. I scoped out the work, tested some scenarios in our sandbox environment, and even considered the evil of customizations of forcing the system to behave the way we needed it to.
The biggest issue lay in the fundamental mismatch in functionality. The LMS and performance management system were built for the partnership between the manager and the employee. We needed a system with two additional roles - Instructor and Coach.
What we needed was more of a community of interest - an open relationship between participants, managers, coaches and instructors. We needed web 2.0.

I had used the jive/clearspace KP-branded application "KP Ideabook" for some document sharing and to get a few answers on discussion boards. The idea was broached to try "KP Ideabook" against the business requirements, just after we had discussed web 2.0 applications and what they were capable of. After two days of intensive learning, testing and building a demo system, I was able to mark Ideabook against our other candidate systems. The results look very favorable and our small project team thought we had a hit. I mocked up a quick power point demo to present our findings and our recommendation to the project sponsors - the National Learning Leaders.
I was on PTO the day of the presentation, but received an email from my director upon my return:

"I wanted to let you know the presentation today was great. In fact, it was the only work from all the teams that we clearly have a go ahead to move forward on as outlined.

The deck was great and the slides of Ideabook screenshots were a real help.

Thanks to both of you for your excellent work. It is appreciated."

Awesome.

Charter 2.0

Charter

Because our leadership doesn't feel we have enough on our plates (what with the never-ending, ever-delayed project, and those 40 hour support jobs we had prior to the additional project work) they have decided they need a flashy cost saving project.

Several years ago - KP implemented a teaching methodology culled from The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning: How to Turn Training and Development Into Business Results

The 6D's - as they are called - can be explained in the handy image


The trickiest D's are the 4th and 5th D - follow through and support. With our leadership training, particularly Facilitative Leadership we instituted a 10 week goal setting/achievement process. The process has the training participant setting goals at the end of the class and working in partnership with his/her manager, coach and instructor to track and document the progress and success of these goals. The success measurements can be boiled down to training ROI - the holy grail of development metrics.

KP bought this tool from a pricey vendor that claimed to automate and mine data from the process, creating nifty dashboards. Fort Hill was a niche company specializing in 6D methodology. The ResultsEngine was a hosted service with a low level of "hands on" support and maintenance of the program. The tool was complex, time-intensive to maintain, and the cost per user was not scalable. Moreover, the ResultsEngine, which we branded "Friday 5's" did not measure the right metrics (only the easy to capture transactional metrics, but Leadership didn't mind, they wanted "numbers".)

Eager to save "low hanging fruit" dollars, "Friday 5's" was slated for replacement. My boss and myself were given the task to propose a no-cost system/low-cost resource solution. And we were given 2 weeks to do it.

Quickly, we sprung into action. My manager began polling existing users about the Friday 5's tool: what they liked and disliked, what was critical to keep and what could slide with out too much issue. I took the growing list and created a business requirements document.

What I found, proposed and what happened to our project along the way will be in later posts. This revised charter reflects some of the surprises and solutions, so I hope I do not spoil the surprise.