Read a great post today over at CollaborationIdeas.com, encouraging freelance workers, work-from-homers, and the self-employed to leverage the power of collaboration. Lorie shared several good ideas, including communicating, groupware, maintaining your workspace, and others. One of them was to maintain good notes in writing – to help you, your customers (and your partners) to stay on the same page. This weekend I was reminded of a simple, but really great tool for written collaboration. No, not chat (this time), but Microsoft OneNote. OneNote has been around for a few years, but some folks still haven’t used it. Here are some quick advantages to using OneNote for collaboration:
- Easily create ad-hoc pages and subpages for different topics and sub-topics.
- Ability to easily combine text, graphics and other media in the same page via drag and drop
- In older versions create a private, ad-hoc point-to-point connection with another person. In new versions, create a group and collaborate online.
Long story short – OneNote is a great way to create a media-rich, shared scratch pad of sorts for that messy (and fun) ideation phase of collaboration.
Cheers,
Eric
.. when you’ve scored a major win at work, and are unable to take a victory lap together with your colleagues. They still haven’t quite worked out a good long-distance replacement for grabbing a couple of pints with your team at the pub.
Cheers,
Eric
Cornelius Fichtner, over at the PM Prepcast, has a pretty good interview with a Cisco collaboration expert on virtual team best practices. It’s one of the audio episodes of his PM Prepcast product for people working on sitting for the PMP exam.
Additional commentary and analysis of the best practices in a future IMR article, but it’s definitely worth a listen, especially if you are thinking about getting your PMP. His training and practice material is good stuff, and very cost-effective.
Cheers,
Eric
The folks over at Inc. magazine have finally caught up to 1999 and gave virtual offices a shot. Guess what? The world didn’t end, much to the surprise of some of the management and participants. Actually, often lead to higher productivity.
Here’s the transcript from an interview on NPR’s Marketplace show recently. I’ll return to this and write more soon when I have more time.
Cheers,
Eric
You know – for all the advances in collaboration technology over the years, it’s still a huge challenge to collaborate at a distance. Even worse than physical distance, are distant timezones. And the competition for those scant overlapping time slots. When you are separated by distance, you miss out on watercooler conversations, quick “FYI’s” from colleagues about the someone’s mood or an interesting/important visitor. You miss out on the general vibe, color and mood of the workplace.
When you are separated by timezones, there is fierce competition for those few hours when “your” timezone and “their” timezone overlap. It’s no coincidence that Outlook calendars in global businesses are booked solid daily from 8 am to noon New York time (1pm to 5pm London). So… you need to get through to that important stakeholder in London – but you are booked solid during those time slots? And they are booked solid during those time slots? They’re free at that time in two weeks, but that’s too far out. You need to speak with them sooner. What to do? The inevitable: Your day inches earlier another half hour to catch an open timeslot. Then maybe another hour. Then folks in your time zone start doing the same thing. Then folks across the pond start suggesting earlier and earlier meeting times because they see you’re willing to meet then, and because it’s the only time slot. It’s like an arms race.
Cheers,
Eric
Recall my earlier musings the use of chat for the remote worker… well …. just to show that that’s not the only dead horse I beat, here’s another, non-chat/IM suggestion for when working from home/remote. Get yourself a mimio whiteboard capture tool. No need to buy the $1000 fancy new ones at retail. You can get an old serial-based model on ebay for $50 and they still work just fine. Put yourself a regular ol’ whiteboard in your home office. Attach the mimio and calibrate it. Aim a webcam also at the whiteboard. Lasso the whiteboard session in the mimio software with VNC or LiveMeeting, and then “broadcast” your white-boarding session to your colleagues/customers across the net. Oh – and a speaker phone, which I’m assuming most everyone has these days now anyway.
The mimio gives excellent high-resolution fidelity of your drawing, and captures it digitally. LiveMeeting makes it possible for others to see it in real time. The webcam session, which you’re also broadcasting in parallel, adds an important spatial dimension. You can point to areas on the whiteboard, gesture, etc. and your audience is right there with you. If you go new/retail, for under $1000 you’ve just built a superb, rich combined collaboration and presentation solution. If you’re buying this just for yourself, check out eBay. I’ve seen good, used mimio’s there for under $100.
Cheers,
Eric
We’ve all seen these articles before ….. The perils, pitfalls, pros and cons of working from home or working from the office. The temptations cited by some commentators, such as sleeping in or slacking off in front of the TV, I would say are not <ahem> location-oriented problems. Rather those are personnel-oriented problems. :-)
In all seriousness, the important discussion is on the unique tools required to ensure maximum productivity and optimum customer service whether from the office, home, or otherwise remote from your constituencies. Consistent with the subject of this weblog, persistent group chat (PGC) is a powerful adhesive for remote and far flung teams. PGC enables members to communicate as a team would – in a forum. Vanilla IM (such as consumer apps for the unwashed masses) only lets you do 1:1′s or trivially small groups. Imagine the power of having your entire department, plus internal customers, in 4 cities across 3 time zones all online. Collaborating. With, oh yeah, a free transcript of the session captured automatically and with zero effort (where your EIM/chat client supports logging).
I’ve seen this take a major leap of faith for some people. And it can take adjustment – taking what was previously verbal and tacit and taking the small extra effort to type it up. But group chat is a huge productivity multiplier, and worth the shift.
Cheers,
Eric
Here’s one from the Department of Contrarianism: According to a recent study at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, too much telecommuting by some hurts the morale of those back in the office. This is relevant to IM and unified messaging, as these are among the technologies most often cited as effective enablers of telecommuting. The argument is that there may be some sense of unfair benefit/flexibility to the telecommuters, and that there is an erosion of social interaction and, I guess, fun at work. IMO, you probably shouldn’t be looking for work to provide you with your social outlet, but I’m probably just being a grump.
In all seriousness, however, I would predict that telecommuting will become the norm not the exception over the coming decade. It’ll likely go even further, where flexible time and “fractime” (fractional time) become the norm.
