SharePoint Wiki’s

A reply to a twitter post on wiki’s prompted me to put down some thoughts around the MOSS 2007 Wiki functionality.

We’ve known for a while now that Microsoft’s portal platform was slow in catching up with the rest of the world when it came to online collaboration and social networking. SharePoint 2003 is still being used to this day by a large number of corporations. However, a significant portion of these companies have invested considerable amount of time and effort to build the functionalities that were missing for them to use the portal effectively within their organization.

Realizing the need for a new revised platform Microsoft launched MOSS 2007.  This product has made huge leaps ahead with incorporating social networking features like RSS, Wiki’s and Blogs as part of its basic setup. Sticking to the simplicity that we’ve come to expect from Microsoft products a person with zero technical knowledge can make use of these features. Though there will be a slight learning curve for new comers as corporate users are just learning how to use a wiki and how it can be leveraged to generate information.

Creating a wiki in this platform is a pretty simple process, its like creating a document library , and once you’ve set it up the process of building on it is pretty straightforward. It even incorporates a full set of rich text tools and buttons that we have gotten used to on Word. They’ve even provided a provision to track the history of every wiki page, a basic functionality that we’ve come to expect from any wiki tool, but still.

This upgrade is a blessing for the organizations still running 2003, if you still indend on sticking to the same platform i’d suggest upgrading, and upgrading fast. The next post will get a little more detailed on the Wiki functionality on the platform.

Conference : The Knowledge Transfer Revolution : New Paradigms, New Payoffs

APQC’s 14th annual KM conference and training is scheduled to be held later this year in the U.S. It has always been a conference that draws a large number of people from around the world. This year seems to be no different.

When and Where : May 11-15, 2009 at the Houstonian Hotel, Club & Spa Houston

APQC continues its 14-year tradition of having the best in knowledge management (KM) tell their stories of creative use and measurable impact. As energy costs rise, skill shortages persist, and global operations expand and become more complex, organizations cannot afford to waste time reinventing solutions. Nor can they let new employees search in frustration for the information and advice they need to do their jobs. Innovations in the transfer and use of knowledge and best practices are more urgent than ever and require sometimes difficult change.

APQC’s KM conferences are known for showcasing thought leadership and innovative thinking. This year’s theme focuses on the transfer of knowledge, the new paradigms, and the payoff to be gained by getting it right. This conference also enables senior-level professionals to network with other KM thought leaders and practitioners from across the globe.

Sign up for the event.

Project Manager to the Rescue

Your organization is involved in a project that is in disaster mode.  Whatever happened to get that way may have not been anyone’s fault.  Or it may be the Project Manager’s fault.  At any rate, the PM’s head is the one that rolls and now you’ve been moved into the role of PM on this apparently sinking ship.  What do you do?

This has probably happened to most of us at some time or another – I know it’s happened to me.  It’s certainly has to be a better feeling than being in the ousted PM’s shoes…but not a lot better.

Immediate Action

Obviously, some immediate corrective action has to happen.  But what?  And how do you get up to speed?  A Project Manager should not take any action without first doing the following:

• Know the resources on the delivery team
• Understand the SOW
• Acquire background knowledge on the customer team members and their concerns
• Read all status reports and know the last 4 by heart
• Study the project schedule in detail and ASK QUESTIONS

There are definitely more tasks the PM is going to take – both formal and informal – to get up to speed, but these are 5 basic ones that have to happen. 

Other tasks may depend somewhat on the circumstances under which the previous PM on the project is exiting.  If the previous PM has been terminated, then they’ve been escorted out the door – or worse yet, told by phone – and they will not be a part of any PM-to-PM transition phase or handoff.  Under better circumstances, if they are just being replaced because they didn’t blend well with the customer but are being retained for other project work, then it is likely that there will be a transition period.  It may not involve the customer if they want him/her gone, but at least it can happen with the delivery team. 

Corrective Action – Righting the Ship

As the PM, now you’re fairly up to speed and you’re at the helm.  How do you ‘right the ship’?  If issues and risks tracking has not been a priority before it would be a good place to start now.  An overall team meeting to assess where things stand and how things got to this point (sort of a lessons learned at the midway point, I guess) would be a good idea.

I took over a large project that had reached a point where it could go no further until we got past one key issue that was affecting the system processing performance.  The customer wouldn’t pay any more and were threatening to pull the plug on the project and go with a 3^rd party implementer…it was that bad.  I came on board on the project just as we were preparing for an extended pow-wow thing in a central location – both teams in a war room setting for two weeks.  Since we had all-access passes to tech support, the top-level system architects and our own CEO, it was certainly a way to get high-visibility and to get things accomplished.  It worked…and we moved on more successfully – and more cohesive as a team and as a vendor-customer relationship from that point on.

Summary

No one ‘wants’ to be working in disaster mode, but good can come of it.  Taking the right actions to get up to speed and then successfully leading both teams on corrective action toward a successful implementation is both a great feeling and a huge feather in a PM’s career cap.  An adrenaline rush that’s not for the faint of heart.

The Knowledge Management Framework

An excerpt from the paper ” European Guide to good Practice in Knowledge Management – Part 1: Knowledge Management Framework” at CEN.

Why KM?As organizations strive to improve their business performance and capacity for innovation, their attention is increasingly focused on how they manage knowledge. Experience has shown that successful KM implementations in business settings prioritize attention on soft
issues – including human and cultural aspects, personal motivations, change management methodologies, new and improved business processes enabling multidisciplinary knowledge sharing, communication and collaboration – and see technology as an enabler.
Despite this, most efforts so far at addressing the challenge of KM in business environments have typically taken a “technology-push” approach, concentrating major effort on putting in place IT tools that will “solve the knowledge creation, sharing and reuse problem”.

Given this, it has been the objective of this guide to investigate those soft areas related to KM which can be the subject of common approaches, good practice identification or standardization initiatives, and to situate and describe these in the wider organizational context. The overall intention has been to provide meaningful and useful guidelines to companies, and notably SMEs (see below), as to how they might align their organizations culturally and socially to take advantage of the opportunities of knowledge sharing within and beyond their organizational boundaries.

These guidelines therefore take the form of a European Guide to Good Practice in KM which describes how to implement KM successfully within an organization, and lists the benefits awaiting those organizations that are able to do it. Through its soft, culturally focused approach, the guide aims to add value to other more technology-focussed initiatives underway within companies and standardization bodies. The overall result will
be a greater complementary benefit for European companies, large and small. In short we have aimed to identify and develop good practices which can be applied to all types of European businesses, including SMEs, to ensure that these organizations can be assisted as they seek to put in place the cultural, human and environmental ecology necessary to take full advantage of their collective knowledge as they do business in the knowledge economy.

Read the full article Here.

About CEN :

CEN, the European Committee for Standardization, was founded in 1961 by the national standards bodies in the European Economic Community and EFTA countries.

Now CEN is contributing to the objectives of the European Union and European Economic Area with voluntary technical standards which promote free trade, the safety of workers and consumers, interoperability of networks, environmental protection, exploitation of research and development programmes, and public procurement.

CEN is a non-profit making technical organization set up under Belgian law.

Workshop : Developing fundamental project management skills for non-project managers

I came across this workshop that might interest those of you who are just getting into project management. It is being hosted in London though the dates don’t seem to have been finalized as yet.

Attend this one-day masterclass and learn how to:

• Present and communicate your project effectively to stakeholders
• Ensure the project sponsors understand their role in the project
• Manage for project success in a period of financial instability
• Identify the realistic and appropriate resources required
• Communicate the importance of the project to the business with transparency
• Deliver a project on time and within budget
• Develop the skills to run projects time and again

Who should attend?

Any head or manager of a project team who does not have formal project management training, including professionals in:

• Content
• Information
• Intranet
• IT
• Knowledge
• Programme
• Web

Go here for more details.