Links and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web. (SOURCE:a klog apart)-Where does Phil get this articles? Thanks!Search engines like Google interpret links to a web page as objective, peer-endorsed and machine-readable signs of value. Links have become the currency of the Web. With this economic value they also have power, affecting accessibility and knowledge on the Web. [Roland Tanglao's Weblog]

Looks as though I missed this the first time round. Thank you Roland for catching it this time.

1:32:25 PM •  • comment  

Tufte Envisions Projects..

Is the generic GANTT chart useful?

Edward Tufte explores visualization of the project diagram.

One challenge is the medium. Computer screens don't have the resolution to see both the macro and the micro. 

Printers spread the project over dozens or hundreds of pages. HP DesignJet plotters are in my project toolbox, they work.

In the comment thread, Robert Towry said:

Placing the plan on the wall is a big help and changes the nature of the discussion. Instead of sitting around the table and talking about what each person is doing, people are more inclined to get up, walk to the plan on the wall, point to a task and say "This is what I'm working on, but I cannot finish until Mary finishes, and I can see that Jim is waiting on me, and he has to complete his task by - good grief, by Friday!". The other people gather around and people are actually talking about their tasks, interdependencies, milestone dates. The stuff you want them to be talking about.

This works great for projects where people work in the same building.

What about the distributed team? You can't really see through a monitor and there no tools that compensate enough.

The visualization challenge: Help project members visualize:

• the body of work,
• relationships among many tasks and roles,
• tradeoffs among potential project designs and risks,
• your place, responsibilities, workload

Envisioning projects a la klog?

How can weblogs contribute to project visualization?

Annotation.

1. Associate each project post with one or more tasks, issues, milestones, and deliverables on a given project.
2. Enable a few extra attributes for a post: Red/Yellow/Green Priority (U.S. cultural bias). 
3. Create a view into a team's weblog posts organized by the work breakdown structure, another by priority  

PM is about the conversation more than formal modeling. It is how we come to appreciate project dreams and know project reality. We discover our colleagues' capabilities and limits. We negotiate commitments. We make the thousand mid-course corrections to the project plan. My project communication templates help you script some of those conversations.

But conversation is narrative and auditory. How do we get the best characteristics of project conversation into visual media? Into electronic visual media?

Thanks to experience designer Diego Lafuento for the Tufte pointer.

 [aka design]

[a klog apart]

Interesting pointer to Tufte's perspective. One funny observation from Tufte:

Project management must have a vast literature; presumably business schools teach this all the time. What are the deep principles and how can they show up in the design and organization of a project? That is, have some real analytical thinking behind the chart, not the guesses about project management made by those who write Project-type charting programs. [emphasis added]

It is rare to see project management taught at all in business schools. The more prestigious the school, the less likely you are to find any concrete training/education devoted to project planning and management. For that matter, most of the consulting firms that do it for a living are lax in the way they teach project management.

Yes, there is a vast literature to the topic of project management. Most of it is way too specialized for the needs of most project managers (I did lots of IT project management in the early stages of my career so I am talking from a reasonable base of experience).

The most valuable piece of MS Project, IMHO, is the built-in outliner to help with developing and organizing task lists. Getting the work breakdown structure is the opportunity for greatest impact on the design of most projects. Good outliners and k-logs are powerful tools for designing and managing projects that are only beginning to be understood.

1:25:36 PM •  • comment  

Blogging Alone.

Stephen Dulaney applies Indicators of Social Capital to Web Logs.

1. Levels of giving (blog ecossystem) reflects people's propensity to give to others when they themselves may not directly benefit. The economy of giving links.
2. Participation and engagement (What we do when we blog Meg Hourihan) gauge of people's involvement in a range of groups and associations, both formal and informal. Ray Ozzie adds a nice contribution to "Why we Blog"
3. Reciprocity within the community (everybodyblogit) is the measure to which people can rely on their community to help in times of need. How to Start a Weblog (For Professinal Journalists)
4. Generalized trust that people have in other individuals and groups, and how safe they feel in their daily interactions with others.
5. Trust towards public officials and institutions or the measure of people's confidence in the institutions of society.
6. Social Norms (Lessig) the rules, belief, morals and habits that regulate behaviour.
7. Attitudinal variables (blogtree) important to social capital or individuals' belief about themselves, their place, and their tolerance of others, levels of acceptance, motivations and sense of connectedness.
8. Confidence in the continuation of social and political relationships for the future.

This list is from the work titled Framework for the measurment of Social Capital in New Zealand which was prepared by Anne Spellerberg and assisted by the social capital programme team. page 16 of the (link to pdf found here)

Do these apply to an Intranet klogging cluster?

I'm sure they do, with a few differences.

1. More klogger than blogger. Kloggers are also members of the large, amorphous population of blogspace. As people are socialized first into a local klogspace, this outside affiliation may be lessened.
    
2. Colleagues first. Second, you define your focus of attention by your work more than your passions and curiousity. Your formal affilliations (your chain of command, your team, your stakeholders) and informal ones (your office network, ad hoc teams) fill your days, and your klogs.  
    
3. Work cultures. Social capital within an enterprise is strongly flavored by personality, policy, institutional memory (institutional rumor?), regional culture, and occupational culture.
    
4. Personal fences. Do you keep your social circles apart? Many people take care about mixing work, family, friends, politics, and faith. Do you want your bondage master, your bowling team, and your quality circle to know about each other through you? when people at work see your personal blogs, how does that affect your working relationships? This visibility biases what people write.  
    
5. Intellectual property. Work is more a Free Agent Nation than ever. Portability of knowledge and experience is a career asset. Most employers claim that everything employees write using company IT gear is the employer's property. This creates a conflict of interest.  

[aka community]

[a klog apart]

Good insights.

10:33:47 AM •  • comment