Manage Your Dependence

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It’s not enough that you are absolutely fantastic.  Success today is largely dependent on how well you manage your ecosystem.

(Corollary: And it is impossible for you to innovate and succeed all alone.)

This seems to be the main theme of ‘The Wide Lens: A New Strategy for Innovation’, an interesting book that I chanced upon through Forbes.

I especially liked the term ‘managing your dependence’.  It succinctly covers all kind of partnerships that an enterprise has to forge and nurture to be successful – employees, customers, vendors, channel partners and others.

Needless to say, this is a subject close to my heart.  After all, at KineticGlue, we are enabling our customers just do this – ‘manage their dependence’.

The book illustrates several examples of great successes – enterprises that have managed their ecosystem well and failures – brands/ products that, despite being radically innovative, failed, because they did a poor job of managing their ecosystem.   It looks like an interesting read!

Knowing doesn’t help!

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I can’t help but I’m forced to talk about this issue of emails Vs collaboration platforms.  As I have said earlier, more often than not, email turns out to be our biggest competitor.

“So, why don’t you consider using a collaboration platform to manage your work?”

“Yeah, I know it will be helpful.  But,  I really don’t get the time.”

“?”

“There’s so much of email to be  checked and replied everyday – get statuses from my team, send status report to my boss, get back to the customer….”

There you go!

It is not that people do not know about the benefits of using an enterprise collaboration platform.  We hardly have to explain the benefits to them.   But the case is like that of we knowing the benefits of regular exercising.   We know the benefits.  But we do not exercise regularly.

So knowledge hardly matters.  Its the experience that matters.

I  know its hard to invest time in trying something new, however good it is, when we are busy with other, seemingly high priority stuff.  It is hard to break a habit that lets you get by.     But once we have made the shift to the better, we don’t go back to the old ways.

People who have had meaningful experiences of KineticGlue have stayed back with us.  They continue to use the platform.  And their experience only gets richer and their benefits continue to multiply over time.

That’s why, a free account in KineticGlue lets a user experience as much of the product as possible – so that he gets a complete picture of how the platform benefits his purposes.   It calls for a little effort at the start, but we assure you, you’ll enjoy the change!

New Feature: Know Your Leaders

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Know your leaders

Who are the most powerful people in your team?  Who influence other team members more?   Who are your team members most likely to agree with?

No, these are not designated people who hold positions of power & leadership.  These are people who grow to become major influencers by actively engaging in conversations and repeatedly demonstrating their expertise.

We introduced the leaderboard feature in our last week release that provides a simple, but an effective way of finding out who these influencers could be.

The leaderboard throws spotlight on those people who are the most active in your teams – people who are simply doing more.   These people are the most engaged in your team conversations and work activities.

The obvious question that arises is this:  Can we simply consider a person talking more as an influencer? What about the quality of his conversations?

Yes, this is true – quality of conversations does matter.  But consider this: in a closed work group, a person cannot simply yap away to glory:  Unlike a typical ‘informal’ group, discussion and conversations in a work-related community (e.g. R&D, Sales & Marketing etc., a specific project group)  is much more specific.  If a person is doing more in such a group, then we can very safely assume that his activities are also more specific, adding more value to the overall conversation.  And when a person is consistently involved in generating such high value activities, we can infer that this person is likely to be an influencer.

Why Atos Banned Emails

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Atos, the French IT giant, was much in news, late last year, when it’s CEO, Thierry Breton made a revolutionary move to ban emails in the company.

The 56-year old chief executive (the age is important as you will find out that it is not just young people who prefer social media), a former French finance minister determined  that only 20 out of every 200 emails received by his employees every day are important. It wastes a good amount of employees’ everyday work hours.

Sounds familiar, isn’t it?

So, Atos’ 80,000 employees in 42 countries will have stopped using emails eighteen months from now. They will instead use social media tools and in-person communication.

Our customers might not have taken such radical steps as Atos, but they use KineticGlue more for the same reason – to cut unduly long, inefficient email conversations.

KineticGlue enables our customers to share and track group updates in a single place. Members intuitively understand who is to act on a message. Conversations are threaded, so they are not lost.  There is no need to repeat.  And there are no confusions as to know what is the latest stand on a particular topic.   The most recent conversations are automatically pushed to the top, enabling team managers to stay on top of everyday activities.

This is a refreshingly efficient way of working than sending copies & copies of emails!

You can use KineticGlue to make your work-life more efficient. We are glad to let you know how.  If you are interested, do let us know – you can find the ‘Contact us’ form in our homepage.  You can also setup a free network to try it out with your team.

Customer Interview: Future Group

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And here’s the audio clip of Joathan Dotan’s interview for KineticGlue.

Jonathan heads the Digital and Media Strategy at Future Group.   As I had mentioned in my earlier post, Jonathan’s marketing team has been using KineticGlue for more than a year now.

In his interview, Jonathan shares lots of practical advice on using a Social Business Software for regular business.   He has been hugely successful making Future Group shake hands with its customers through social channels.   So it is not surprising to hear him talk about employee social network as an essential, natural extension to what you do in the outside world.

This is a great way of deriving value from a platform like KineticGlue:  Some companies treat an internal social media as a separate channel (such as email).  They start thinking about the kind of newsletters and other communications that they will share through this media.  That sounds like an awful lot of effort.  Totally unnecessary!

Rather, if we look at such a platform as a way of getting work done, then there’s no effort.  You start doing work through the platform, that’s it.  Yes, it involves a slight behavior change, but you do not have fish or invent new content.  And the platform becomes surprisingly, exponentially useful as people start talking about their day-to-day work, more and more through the platform.

Project Management Tip: How to avoid heartburn

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I was talking to my friend who’s a project manager.  He had to travel to be at his client’s office for a few months.  He was talking how it was difficult to get a clear status update from his offshore team during those months:

“All that I wanted to know is whether something is done or not.  And yet, I don’t get it. It’s always ‘Yes, but….. “.

“Then they start telling reasons:  I was waiting for such and such input, but didn’t get it.   They could have told me earlier.”

Project members are averse to giving a clear yes and more so, a clear no.  Because, there’s always a reason why things were not done according to plan and they want managers to hear them out before making a judgment.  And in these details, lies the Devil; or God, depending on how you see it.

The point that I was trying to make is that these details are important.  Not hearing them out, or not hearing them clearly could result in too many wrong assumptions, hasty plans, demotivated team members, frayed managers and dissatisfied customers.

Not surprisingly, my friend was managing his status updates through emails and telephone calls.  I suggested that my friend try KineticGlue or for that matter, any online team collaboration software to track statuses.  People ask questions, status updates only through the platform, and people who are responsible for that item respond.   The last posted reply is the latest status.  There’s nothing in between.   One has to just motivate people to be honest, open and transparent.  Do not penalize people for not doing something, but penalize them if they did not let the status known.

My friend was skeptical at first.  I coaxed him to try the free version of KineticGlue.   He continues to use the free version of KineticGlue, but he’s at it these days.   He says his meal times are more peaceful.  I believe him.

The Future Way of Working

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“If our customers are embracing these changes [social media], our employees need to be right there with them.  So for us,  it was more than a solution.  It was a necessity.”

Thus starts, Jonathan Dotan, President of Media and Digital Strategy at Future Group, as he starts talking about his journey with KineticGlue so far.

In this exciting 5-minute conversation, Jonathan talks about how his marketing team across India uses KineticGlue to interact and collaborate.

He also talks about the benefits, why enterprise collaboration media, apprehensions about using one and more.

This is a great story and I hope to share the audio soon.

Why ‘socialize’ projects?!

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It’s a big puzzle why access to project management tools is a privilege (or a burden?!), given only to project managers and supervisors.  Sure, they are the people who define deadlines, manage resources and keep track of things.

However, the real work is about getting people to action, getting status updates, discovering obstacles early on and leading the team to a timely delivery.   Social collaboration software becomes an ideal choice to do this work for the following reasons:

  • The work is highly people and conversation intensive, making a social collaboration platform becomes a great choice.  Most traditional project management tools stop with the Boolean statuses and never capture the nuances.
  • A social software with project management capabilities provides greater transparency to the project team members – about the project deadlines, responsibilities, current statuses, who’s doing what etc.  There’s no reason why these should be kept a secret.
  • When time is sparse and agile is the key, a social collaboration platform can greatly help cut time and make available time more productive.  Team members do not wait for status meetings to pose their issues and the management gets signals early on.
  • The conversations in a project team may not be just about statuses.  People will be discovering new issues and inventing new solutions, which may be more useful than just for the immediate project needs.
  • In a typical offshore-onshore setup, nothing works as well as a social project platform to get you timely updates.  A simple, well designed collaboration platform can obviate unproductive, long email chains.
  • What’s more, one can selectively include members from customer organizations in the projects.   Highly useful in the requirements gathering and validation phase.

Our customers have liked KineticGlue because of its project management capabilities.  Apart from the above benefits, the ability to store project related documents and get status updates right on the project tasks, always gets an appreciative nod!

 

The Virtual Tree House

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I have been reading these amazing stories from the Red Frog founder Joe Reynolds, about giving unlimited vacation days to employees and building a tree house for them right in their office.  These are great strategies to retain great talent and attract new talent.

Though the thought and technique is new and refreshing, the idea is inherently the old, well-known one:  happy employees are productive employees.  Ensure that your employees are happy.  And Joe’s strategies only indicate that its not always money that keeps employees happy. [By the way, Red Frog is a success story of a company that rocketed from $5000 to $45 million.  So these things do work!]

The unlimited vacation days policy is really interesting.  The underlying idea is to provide enough flexibility to employees so that they are not constrained by a 9 to 5 office schedule, and yet remain productive.  Going by Joe’s blogs, such flexibility only enables employees to be more productive than if they were doing a 9 to 5 job in their office.

If this is the idea, why not consider an Enterprise Collaboration Platform?  A collaboration platform could, perhaps, be the best way to incentivize employees to be more productive.  You show that you trust that they will be responsible enough to accomplish their work and are giving them freedom to use their time as they wish to use it.   This doesn’t mean you lose track of who’s doing what, when.

And as Joe says, people are really responsible and do not misuse such provisions for freedom.  This has been our experience with our customers as well.  So, in all, a social business platform could be the virtual tree house that you build for your employees.  And what’s more, your employees can be seen happily going about their work in this tree house, even when they are not physically present in their offices.

Chat!

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Sometime back, we had a long conversation about the need for an instant messaging feature in KineticGlue.   It is definitely a great way of communicating a quick bite of information.  However, we felt that a Chat feature would defeat the purpose of a collaboration platform.  An enterprise collaboration platform becomes more and more useful as people share more and more in the platform.  The permanency that gets built to information this way is a great boon for organizations: Information is preserved for future use, one could analyze and gain insight into what’s happening etc. – this line of thought is very interesting.  We thought instant messaging would rob away these advantages as people might ‘chat’ a lot and ‘share’ very less.

But many customers (very surprisingly!) have asked for Chat in the past.  And we also realized that Chat is convenient to pass messages that need not be left of permanency or shared with a wider audience.

So we struck a balance:  We built a robust, but simple, Chat engine in KineticGlue.  Users could chat with their contacts when they are online.  Chatting is kept, consciously, one-to-one; anything that is to be shared with more than one, can always be updated as a microblog (is it not?).  We do not allow any file sharing through Chat to avoid any security and permission issues (of course, some one could always do such things via their email).

Essentially, it’s a simple, but a great tool to use when you’re logged in.   So what’s next here?   Audio/ Video conferencing is something that we are thinking about.  Do let us know how we can play with it.