I ran across a great document put together by Terrence Gargiulo for Makingstories.net. Mr. Gargiulo discusses what he feels are the top ten strategies for managing mobile workers. His full document is a very good read because he also discusses things such as risks and issues to consider when managing mobile workers.  You can access his full document here.

I’m sharing this here because so many times as project managers we are overseeing the work of a very geographically dispersed team. In the past three years I’ve only managed one project with a team that I could see on a daily basis. Dozens of others involved remote workers all around the country.

Here are Mr. Gargiulo’s Top 10 Strategies for Managers of Mobile Workers as described in his document.

Top 10 Strategies for Managers of Mobile Workers

1.    Focus on building relationships

You are now in the business of managing relationships. Once a quarter audit your time. How much time are you spending engaged in activities meant to foster stronger relationships with your mobile employees? Rate each relationship on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is weak and 10 is very strong. Craft a strategy for continuing to develop your strong ones and triage the weak ones. Ask yourself why they are weak and what you can learn from them. Avoid finger pointing and hold up the mirror to reflect on your own opportunities for improvement. Extreme cases of under-performance do not warrant time or effort. These however are few and far between.

2.    Streamline communications

Consolidate and prioritize communications. Use email and IM (instant message), texting, blogging, threaded discussions, etc. for relationship-driven communications (i.e., staying in touch and being personal). Communications of an important nature should be cohesive and never delivered in fragmentary pieces that have to be cobbled together by the receiver. Mutually assess the communication preferences of yourself and your team members to develop a communication plan. Avoid assumptions and revisit your plan on a regularly basis especially when the nature of the work is about to change.

3.    Incorporate less didatic forms of communications

Determining the right amount of detail and when to provide detail is an ongoing responsibility of a manager with a mobile worker. As a general rule, less is more. This leaves bandwidth for the times when lengthy, explicit instructions and information are essential for the work at hand. Try working with more story-based forms of communications. Sharing tidbits from the field and office in the form of stories, anecdotes, case studies (use cases), jokes, innocent productive gossip, and even metaphors will relay context, encode key pieces of information, and give mobile workers a sense of inclusion.

4.    Spend more time listening

Obvious, but counterintuitive. When you are out of easy reach and you are tasked with managing the performance of others it’s easy to get sucked into the trap of needing to transmit lots of information. In most cases the opposite is what is most productive. Make listening a priority. This is the hardest and most tiring aspect of managing others. It is also the single most important thing you can do accelerate the development of strong relationships. Listening is not enough. Keep an open mind. Be present and try to enter the perspective of the speaker. This will help you ask effective questions and identify what direction to go with your own needs and agenda. You’ll be surprised at what emerges.

5.    Let mobile workers define communication and reporting practices they want to follow

Structure is critical. Adopt rules of engagement that place people at the center of their own decisions. Managers provide the boundaries and constraints but let employees define the working and communication styles, tools, and processes that will help them perform at the best. Set expectations on two fronts. First, treat these employees’ defined practices as privileges that can and will be modified if key performance metrics are not hit. Second, let employees know there will be times when a projects or work require less flexible, employee-driven communication and reporting practices.

6.    Manage deliverables, not activities

Lots of project-oriented work is well suited to mobile workers. Even roles that are more task driven can be effectively managed if they are broken into deliverables. For mobile workers this may mean collapsing some of the activities of a business process or workflow that had manual checkpoints and controls associated with them into deliverables. Automation where possible can be used or batching activities into larger groups can transform task oriented jobs into deliverables. Realize that there can be many facets of people’s jobs that need to be adjusted to accommodate a mobile work style.

7.    Engage in more frequent and informal performance management activities

When you manage mobile workers, relationships are at the heart of your job. Performance management does not need to be a loathsome, “administrivia” obligation. Designing some unstructured, informal ongoing dialogs with mobile employees about their performance goals and personal development plans is a great way to strengthen communications, and shows an active interest in employees and relationships. This might look and feel very different from one employee to the next. This is another tangible way managers can adapt their style to match the needs and preferences of employees. It works best when the performance management conversation flows in both directions.

8.    Give complete trust until given a concrete behavioral reason to do otherwise

According to a recent survey conduct by HR.com and ic4p, listening and trust are the two most important factors to virtual and remote teams. Without trust, relationships are bankrupt. Abuses of trust can always be found but these occur in spite of whatever systems we put in place. Mobile workers thrive when managers give them complete trust. In some respects managers of mobile workers have no other choice. Use trust to create strong relationships. When some concrete behavior and not just someone else’s word of mouth shows that trust has been violated, then take it away, but not until then.

9.    Use adaptive management styles tailored to individual workers

Every employee is different. Mobile workers make it easier for managers to take a more personalized approach in how they work and interact with members of their team. It takes more work and effort on a manager’s part but the results can be phenomenal. Understanding what enables each employee to perform at his or her best is the most important responsibility of a manager.

10. Leverage technology

Technology drives and supports managing mobile workers. Using technology well is not as simple as it appears. Standard models of communication and transaction should not always be mapped in a simple one-to-one way. Communication and collaboration technologies offer new and exciting models. These need to be purposely exploited in order for organizations to realize the full extent of benefits these wonderful new capabilities and features offer.

Beyond email, IM and phone, Web conferencing plays a key role in virtual team enablement. Take an inventory of “stuff” you need to collaborate on with your virtual team. If the list includes Word docs, spreadsheets, software applications, or anything else on your desktop, Web conferencing will be critical for collaborating in real time. You’re projects will lag if you can’t be on the same page with mobile workers.

Related posts:

1. Equipping Your Mobile Project Staff – Part 1
2. Technology as a Change Agent
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The big question. Why use Social Media?

If your companies answer is “because everyone else does it”, chances are they haven’t really thought this through. So what’s the first step? Go back to the drawing board and get an understanding of what it has to offer, its pro’s and cons.

There are a number of reasons why you want to embark on this journey and listed below are just a few of them.

1. Reach out to existing customers
2. Tap into new customers
3. Promote your brand
4. Recruit new talent
5. Be “Cool”

While I’m sure there are a number of other reasons you can add l’d like to focus on just these for a now.  Building brand loyalty and awareness can be done rather well using a well thought out social media strategy.

Reaching out to existing customers : The voice of your customer is probably the most important thing you have and creating a solution that allows them to constantly give you feedback is probably a smart thing to invest in.

Tap into new customers: A social platform loaded with content and interactivity is a great way to attract new customers to your product and services as well as give them an idea of what other customers think about it.

Promote your brand : Social Media gives you a long lasting and interesting channel to promote your brand.

Recruit new Talent : Social media platforms are a great way to attract talent to your organization as it allows them to get a better understanding of your company and the way you do business .

Be “Cool” : Let’s face it, with social media being leveraged successfully by a number of organizations there is pressure to adopt it and not be left  behind.

Choose your medium : This would probably be one of the most important decisions you’ll make. The fact that you have an endless list of tools at your disposal really doesn’t help. ( This is where putting together a strategy helps )

The most popular of these are of course:

1. Blogs
2. Micro blogging tools ( twitter )
3. Collaboration tools  (wiki’s )
4. Multimedia ( You tube, Flickr )
5. Podcasts

What makes this worth investing in?

1. Reach : The volumes of people you can reach if you use this medium are mind boggling, you even pull in people that might not be part of your key demographic.
2. Usability : Using social media tools has become second nature to most of your customers out there ( if they’ve been on the web for a while ).
3. Cost effective : As mentioned before the return on something like this far exceeds that of traditional media channels.
4. Permanence : Traditional media cannot be altered, a social media platform is a living, constantly evolving platform that allows you to connect with customers constantly.
5. Recency :  One of the biggest advantages is of course sending messages and information almost instantly to user already tapped into the system.
6. Analytics : Modern Social Media Platforms allow you to generate the kind of analytics you can only dream of in traditional media.

Advantages

The biggest advantage over standard mediums of communication is the ability to connect with your consumers and users and get feedback. Its a bidirectional flow of information that will get scary at times if you don’t understand it or be proactive in dealing with issues that will most certainly crop up.

It’s cheap!! ( well cheaper, than alternative means of communication )

There is a sense of transparency with social media, essentially because people are free to say what they want without the fear of being  gagged. Your consumers will open up to you more and you’ll get a whole lot more honest feedback. Just be very careful you do not violate this trust by being too controlling, this goes against the very nature or social media tools.

Tackling issues before they snowball, Catching something when its still a minor irritant for one consumer is worth its weight in gold before it spiral out of control on the world wide web.

These are just some of the thoughts I had around this topic, feel free to add you own or disagree.

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• Ford’s Social Media Experiment
• Kevin Spacey explains Twitter to David Letterman
• Facebook add’s more grey hairs…
• Does your Company Tweet?

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I have now written two articles fully debunking Facebook of having any real project management or business related application. I’ve gone nearly as far with Twitter – only admitting that it’s good for networking and possibly for reaching out for hard-to-find answers when issues on your projects concerning technology or process may arise.

However, I just read the following situation InformationWeek where a Comcast rep was solving subscribers issues by reaching out to them on Twitter. From a pure project management perspective, possibly the best usage would be post-deployment support or possibly lessons learned information, but it’s an interesting read either way….read on…

Frank Eliason, a Comcast Customer-Service Rep, has more than 13,000 followers on Twitter. In the coming weeks, he’s going to help Salesforce.com figure out how to introduce corporate customer-service systems into the world of Twitter.

About a year ago, Eliason and his team of 10 reps, who primarily answered customer e-mails, began to seek out and help customers who were publicly blogging their criticisms and frustrations with Comcast. The team increasingly concentrated on Twitter and its millions of easily searchable microblogs. Eliason’s readiness to help solve Comcast customers’ problems, while calmly ignoring the occasional insults thrown his way, soon made him somewhat of a personality among Twitter regulars. He’s known as @comcastcares.

Then the media came calling, and in recent months, several newspapers, magazines, and television networks have profiled Eliason. His technique is to tentatively approach Twitterers critical of Comcast, rather than offer up advice that wasn’t asked for. “I never thought I’d become famous on three words: Can I help?” Eliason said.

Now Salesforce wants Eliason’s help. It recently announced an add-on for Salesforce CRM that lets companies track and aggregate customer complaints on Twitter. Eliason and his team will be testing the offering, which is scheduled for general availability in the summer. It’s a perfect fit, since Comcast is already a customer of Salesforce CRM’s Internet (a.k.a. “cloud”)-based software services.

CRM for Twitter will include a dashboard for tracking and monitoring topics on Twitter, the replies to those topics, and whether customer issues were resolved, and it will alert customer-service reps to volume spikes on certain topics. The app will be integrated with Salesforce’s Knowledge Base, which reps use to look up answers to customers’ questions and problems.

Pricing will start at $995 a month for five agents and support for 250 customers. This isn’t Salesforce’s first social networking attempt: In January, it announced an app service that companies can set up to have customers come to them on Facebook (the searchable Twitter approach wouldn’t work with Facebook, since users’ “walls,” where they would post comments, operate on an invitation-only basis). Still, using a team of salaried employees to seek out disgruntled customers on the Web may seem counterintuitive to the typical big-business approach to customers service; that is, stock a phone bank with as many low-cost workers as possible that follow scripts in a database.

But Salesforce executives said during a recent InformationWeek briefing that maybe that’s not the best approach. Perhaps, they suggested, companies need to move beyond the call-center mentality and start reaching people at the place they’re increasingly going to complain about things and get help from others: the Internet.

Twitter, of course, is used by just a small fraction of Comcast’s customers, and Eliason’s team is a tiny speck in a pool of 30,000 customer reps at the company. Still, Eliason said his team has helped solved about 21,000 customer issues on Twitter, Facebook, forums, blogs, and other social networking sites since starting the work a year ago, and he envisions a day when perhaps thousands of Comcast reps can use the CRM for Twitter application.

“This allows us to be much more efficient because it’s going to tie into Knowledge Base,” Eliason said. “My team is the guinea pigs.”

There’s also a big-brother quality to a software service that helps companies find what their customers are saying about them and then intervene. Eliason said it’s all in the approach.

“My advice to companies considering this is that you don’t try to interfere with a conversation,” Eliason said. “If someone is commenting about Comcast, we may not give the answer right off the bat. We don’t force ourselves into a conversation. Instead, we throw the ball in their court, with, ‘Can I help?’ ”

Twitter has also proven to be an “early warning system,” Eliason said; customers will tweet about a Comcast problem before calling customer service.

In some situations, Eliason’s team has known about issues before a Comcast call center. Last year, Comcast reps working on the East Coast at 7 a.m. saw a few late-night tweets about a network problem in San Francisco (4 a.m.). The call centers serving San Francisco didn’t start getting calls about the issue until three hours later, when most Comcast customers in the area were waking up and trying to sign on.

Based on his experience with Twitter, Eliason believes that public social networks will prove to be far more important to businesses than they may are expecting. “Engaging with customers is what works, not PR or marketing or customer-relationship ‘management,’ ” he said. “People respect a company when it’s not about the message, it’s about the personal relationship.”

This article was written by Mary Hayes Weier for InformationWeek. It did not appear in their print publication but was available to subscribers online through an alert download at www.informationweek.com/alert/socialnetworks.

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Carnegie Mellon University has rolled out a custom implementation of TeamDynamixHE to help manage IT projects and end user support.

TeamDynamixHE is a Web-based project management system designed specifically for higher education institutions. It offers a single platform for analysis, communications, and management and includes risk analysis and scorecard ranking features for prioritization.

“We sent an RFP to most of the [project and portfolio management] players listed on Gartner’s Magic Quadrant, and then on a whim, I typed in education project management in Google and found TeamDynamixHE,” said Clay Fulton, PPM project lead at Carnegie Mellon, in a prepared statement. “We assembled an evaluation team from across central IT to review the solution providers’ responses, and we narrowed the field down to five. Following webinars from each of the five companies, our team narrowed the providers down to two finalists, including TeamDynamixHE. Ultimately, we selected TeamDynamixHE for its capabilities, user interface, and focus on the higher education market, and because we felt good about working with the company as a partner. Our market is unique, and it takes a company that understands higher education to really appreciate the differences between the corporate world and ours.”

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Tata Technologies’ knowledge management application provides single, easy-to-navigate access point

DENVER, May 1 /PRNewswire/ — i GET IT(R), the global engineering knowledge management application from Tata Technologies, announces its support of Ford Motor Company’s global “Next Generation” release of CAD/CAM/CAE/PIM (C3P-NG) software tools. i GET IT is an engineering knowledge management portal that allows Ford’s Digital Innovation group to deliver all global C3P-NG methods through a single easy-to-navigate access point. Methods content can be configured to support the specific needs of individuals or groups and delivered to each user’s custom learning path. Accessed by over 6,000 people and 100 suppliers globally, Ford utilizes i GET IT to deliver podcasts, process work flows, and a threaded discussion board in addition to internally developed C3P-NG tool usage methodology documentation.

Read the full story here.

Knowledge Delivered in Any Other Form Is…Perhaps Sweeter

At a bimonthly Friday happy hour, a group of employees shares stories of baseball games and baby showers, interspersed with bits of knowledge about their jobs. Amazingly, people still remember these random pieces of learning come Monday morning, despite being mixed up with personal anecdotes.

Tim notes that Donna would be a good future resource on figuring out the new email system. Stephanie invites Aziz to the internal marketing group that brainstorms catchy slogans. To generate further discussion, Trevor posts a wiki summarizing the company’s revised mission statement and the process behind it.

Informal learning, or social learning, has been around for eons, and was the first method of sharing information within and between groups of people. Suffice it to say it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.

“Formal training and workshops account for only 10 percent to 20 percent of what people learn at work,” says Jay Cross, one of the foremost experts on informal learning and systems thinking. On his blog, he compares formal learning to passively taking a bus whereas informal learning is like riding a bike, in that “the rider chooses the destination and the route. The cyclist can take a detour at a moment’s notice to admire the scenery or help a fellow rider.”

Pervading many a workplace in various guises and fast becoming a staple of today’s employee diet, the tools of informal learning are being harnessed both inside and outside the training function, infiltrating all parts of the organization.

Read the full story here.

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Microsoft realized that in creating a content authoring platform they couldn’t afford to leave out the one aspect that has revolutionized the method by which content authoring is being tackled today, namely blogs. So in an effort to harness Blogs and promote their use in a corporate setting Microsoft introduced Blogs in their latest version of Sharepoint.

Being true to Blogs Microsoft hasn’t tampered too much with the basic layout, which means there is a seamless transition to corporate blogging for people who are already familiar with the concept of personal blogs.

They’ve incorporated a complete gamut of features that we’ve come to expect from any Blog.

Some of these are :

• Comments
• Categories
• Blogroll
• Search
• Permalink
• RSS feeds
• Calendar

Using the Sharepoint platform allows for certain additional features to be incorporated into the Blog. You can now publish information on your blog via e-mail’s, this includes sending documents as attachments ( something most blogs don’t support ). API support for word 2007 actually allows you to directly interface with your blog and submit content through a word document on your desktop. Advanced features like Sharepoint permissions can be inherited and used throughout the Blog.

Multiple Authors can contribute to the same blog, and since the Blog ( like most of the features on Sharepoint ) is built on Webparts it really allows an amazing level of customization. Mobile View allows users to access blogs on Sharepoint via their mobile phones, a very useful feature as the percentage of people living on their Blackberry’s, Treo’s, iPhone’s and other smart phones seem to be growing at an alarming pace.

Perhaps the biggest advantage of using the Sharepoint Platform to host your Blog is the fact that you can get details like user contact info and such as the application interfaces directly with the organizations exchange server. A feature that most corporate would definitely find very useful.

All said and done I’m still a fan of Wordpress and Microsoft has a long way to go if they want to deliver a blog tool that meets the demands of professional bloggers.

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Weblog software (also called blog software or blogware) is software designed to simplify the creation and maintenance of weblogs. As specialized content management systems, weblog applications support the authoring, editing, and publishing of blog posts and comments, with special functions for image mangagement, web syndication, and moderation of posts and comments. – Wikipedia

This list links back to the various application websites so you can download the software and try it out. The description in brackets also allows you to identify the environment you’d need to run these applications.

• Apache Roller (Java-based)
• b2evolution (PHP/MySQL)
• bBlog (PHP/MySQL)
• PyBlosxom (Python)
• Dotclear (PHP/MySQL)
• Drupal (PHP/MySQL)
• Elgg (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP)
• FlatPress (PHP/Flat Files)
• Geeklog (PHP/MySQL)
• Horizon Blogging Software (PHP/MySQL)
• Livejournal (Perl) (Also available, developer hosted)
• LifeType (PHP/MySQL)
• Mephisto (Ruby on Rails)
• Nucleus CMS (PHP)
• Pivotlog (PHP)
• Serendipity (PHP/MySQL,PostgreSQL,SQLlite)
• SimplePHPBlog (PHP/Flat Files)
• Slash (Perl)
• Subtext (C#/ASP.NET)
• Textpattern (PHP/MySQL)
• Typo (Ruby on Rails)
• WordPress (PHP/MySQL) – My personal favorite and the software that is used to run this blog.

Please feel free to add to this list in the comments section, will ensure that i incorporate your suggestions whenever i can…

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For those of them who haven’t been blogging or don’t know the benefits of it you might get the following questions.

Why Blog?

Blogging has become the cornerstone of information distribution for most people around the world. It allows you to get your ideas and views out to the entire world, and in some cases lay the seed for very interesting debates.

How do i Build a successful Blog?

Well, the fundamentals are simple Content, Content, Content. Unless you have decent content on your Blog you can be sure you’ll fail even before you get started.

Visibility for the Blog

As I mentioned earlier one of the biggest drivers of getting your employees to start blogging is the idea that there exists a platform from which they can promote themselves. Which means for them to be recognized their blog needs to.  The steps mentioned below hold good for any blog and can be replicated within the context of an organization as well.

Leave Comments :

Leaving comments is part of the foundation for starting a blog community. Most bloggers would be happy to respond to your questions, only if you are sincere. Do not use comments as a way of increasing the traffic on your site, that will happen gradually. Meaningful discourse is the target here.

Trackbacks :

A trackback is a mechanism that allows bloggers to keep track of which blogs have commented on their articles and if those articles have influenced other blogs. It’s a great way to start a community and get bloggers to read each others blogs. The plus point about this is that it helps in increasing the traffic flowing to your blog, which lets face it isnt altogether a bad thing.

Tags :

Tags make it easy to navigate a blog and find what you’re looking for. Tags are category names and people can select keywords for their posts. Usually you will see keyword names on the side navigation of a blog. It is also helps the you, the blogger as it helps to organize your blog and eventually your thoughts. Creating a structured layout is very useful to your visitors as it gives them a lot more information to go through, information they might have missed if not for the tags.

The single biggest blunder bloggers can make?? Not updating your content regularly enough. This is a sure way to lose readers on your site as most users ( if they’ve decided your blog is interesting ) expect new content on a “reasonably” regular basis. So keep this in mind, losing readers are a lot easier than gaining new ones.

Now what?

Once you’ve put together your blogging strategy and educated your employees / project team on how best to develop their blog you need to start figuring out how you can start extracting content that is relevant to your business.  I have some thoughts around this and will put them down in another posts soon.

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