Sunday, May 23, 2010
< 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.
Saturday, May 22, 2010
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
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.
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.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, May 17, 2010
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.
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.
Friday, May 14, 2010
Project Documentation
I will soon be adding more information in this post on my project.
Charter
Business Requirements
Project Plan
First Draft Screenshots
Charter
Business Requirements
Project Plan
First Draft Screenshots
Thursday, May 6, 2010
momma's got a brand new bag
So - I am switching projects - which means I need to create a new charter. The catalog work for the LMS is still going forward - full speed ahead in fact, but I will be presenting my work on the Jive/Clearspace social media tool.
I am now in various states of implementation in 3 projects using "KP Ideabook" - a community of interest group for the administrators of the application I support, coordinating a 6 week UAT (user acceptance testing) group of about 40 people and a six disciplines of training follow-through tool for ongoing use through out the company. The last implementation will be replacing an expensive vendor tool (fort hill results engine). I will be re-writing my charter on the six disciplines tool - as it is leader sponsored and is going through the whole charter to implementation process in the next few weeks.
Wish me luck - charter to follow shortly.
I am now in various states of implementation in 3 projects using "KP Ideabook" - a community of interest group for the administrators of the application I support, coordinating a 6 week UAT (user acceptance testing) group of about 40 people and a six disciplines of training follow-through tool for ongoing use through out the company. The last implementation will be replacing an expensive vendor tool (fort hill results engine). I will be re-writing my charter on the six disciplines tool - as it is leader sponsored and is going through the whole charter to implementation process in the next few weeks.
Wish me luck - charter to follow shortly.
Tuesday, May 4, 2010
crazy, crazy, crazy
I have been crazy busy at work - integrating our internally branded "KP Ideabook" into several new projects - racking up places I can put the web 2.0 social media into play. KP Ideabook is based on Jive/Clearspace http://www.jivesoftware.com/products/employee-community product. Jive is SaaS model social business tool that is either hosted inside our firewall (the leased option) or perhaps only the gateway is inside the firewall - which uses SSO - Single Sign On. I am not sure.
I am integrating the tool as a "Community of Interest" for the administrators of my system, with interior subgroups for special teams - like Report Users and User Acceptance Testers. I will use these spaces as a part of our overall deployment/communication effort. "KP Ideabook" has discussion boards, blogging, document management(including collaborative documents) and mini project plan modules. I am in a rush to get the space ready for our first push this coming Thursday, when I will demo the tool for our large user community. Our go-live date is drawing near again (Sept 1st) and it looks like this time it is for real. As one of only two people set to deploy not only a system but training on that system to 3,000 users - this will be a godsend.
As well - there is a leader sponsored project to replace a costly vendor tool with a no cost solution. Web 2.0 to the rescue. I am going to use "KP Ideabook" for this project as well - although I will set the functionality and user interface to look and behave very differently from my User Community of Interest.
This thing is going to be put in place right away - and had I not taken this class - I would have never understood the possibility of this tool. Thanks Jun!
I am integrating the tool as a "Community of Interest" for the administrators of my system, with interior subgroups for special teams - like Report Users and User Acceptance Testers. I will use these spaces as a part of our overall deployment/communication effort. "KP Ideabook" has discussion boards, blogging, document management(including collaborative documents) and mini project plan modules. I am in a rush to get the space ready for our first push this coming Thursday, when I will demo the tool for our large user community. Our go-live date is drawing near again (Sept 1st) and it looks like this time it is for real. As one of only two people set to deploy not only a system but training on that system to 3,000 users - this will be a godsend.
As well - there is a leader sponsored project to replace a costly vendor tool with a no cost solution. Web 2.0 to the rescue. I am going to use "KP Ideabook" for this project as well - although I will set the functionality and user interface to look and behave very differently from my User Community of Interest.
This thing is going to be put in place right away - and had I not taken this class - I would have never understood the possibility of this tool. Thanks Jun!
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