A 'clever' blog of a 'free' mind
Posts tagged management
Adopting Enterprise 2.0 for managing my project teams based across continents
0978 days
Continuing from my earlier post on using ‘twitter’ for better collaboration within IT project teams and taking it one step further, I have been contemplating on actually adopting an Enterprise 2.0 software stack for real time collaboration, better communication, effective knowledge management & idea generation amongst my team.
The obvious problem at my hands is lack of budget to actually look for and adopt any proprietary software that would solve our purpose, thus a little more intelligence & effort is needed to ensure we have a good set of working processes, software & tool to enable us become an effective project team.
Being into production support and providing critical support to few prime portals of one of world’s leading telecommunications company, the need of time is for the team to have an effective collaborative tool at their hands which would allow them to exchange short messages via web based intranet portal.
So to cater to this requirement, we decided to install Laconi.ca and try that out. Hopefully we will have something to work on by end of this week.
By the way, after my earlier post, few of my team members came back to me disputing my claim of unawareness of ‘twitter’ within them. So it was good to know as well !
Another important bit was to have a knowledge management portal and for that we installed Mediawiki solution on the LAMP server I had on the Intranet. Obviously it worked as a treat so far and hopefully it would continue to serve as a KMS solution for us.
But the problem we are having is about carrying out the backup of the Mediawiki. Obviously one simple way is to back up the database tables & then back up the file system separately. However, I was just wondering if there are any ready tools available that would execute the backups on the Mediawiki installation and give me an installation kit to restore, if eventually we need !
Few things I have installed on the server are Open Office (OpenGoo) to manage the documents online for the team. However, so far never used it for a real project purpose though. I would like to see how I could use it in my project in future though.
I have also had an installation of b2evolution lying on my server which I intended to use for the team blog for spreading the news on updates and progress on various changes / issues, but as of now it looks a long shot for the team to actually start using it. Obviously it would support the RSS / Atom feeds as well. So I would have to hold on for a while.
As a part of my objective of increasing the collaboration within the team, I have created something called Ideas wall and Questions basket that would give the team an opportunity to interact with the management & post ideas for new innovations, opportunities as well as ask questions on the processes around the project. Just for the sake of mentioning, these two are plain wiki pages in a team section for me and that worked well so far.
So far I have not felt a need of having a Social networking intranet portal for the team as the size of the team is not really big and although we have resources spread across various locations in the world, its easy to connect with each other with the existing tools. So may be I can keep that idea in reserve as of now.
As usual, if you have any comments or any ideas for me to take a look, I would welcome them. So please leave a comment on my blog or ‘twit’ me on Twitter.
Using ‘twitter’ for better collaboration within IT project teams ..
6979 days
by Swapnil
in App Support thoughts
Today, during one of my team review meetings, one of my colleagues raised an idea of having a chat server hosted on intranet to allow the team members collaborate with each other for issuing and requesting updates on various incidents, problems and their progresses. A good idea to have one chat server, but few team members were probably not pro to the idea due to the ‘push’ nature of the chat and they did not want to be disturbed with many messages broadcasted to the team if they were not of any interest to them.
Then the obvious solution to this idea was to install ‘twitter’ like microblogging software on one of my intranet server and allow teams to follow rest of the team to ‘pull’ the updates as and when they need it.
To my surprise, when I explained the concept of microblogging to the team and gave an example of ‘twitter’ to the team, none of my team members seem to know ‘twitter’. This was a shock to me, especially when my team was supposed to be pro in Information Technology !!
Nevertheless, explained them the concept of microblogging to the team and asked them to explore ‘twitter’ concepts and find out how it works.
Upon doing the search myself, I found Laconi.ca best suited to our needs of having an online microblogging and collaboration tool for the team.
I would still need to get the team explore this product and get a pilot installation tested on our intranet Linux server but by the looks of the product, it looks to be exactly what I needed for my team to enable better collaboration.
Anyways, few main expectations I am having from this kind of collaboration tool being used in the support project is to enable the disparately located team put up updates on a simple question @What are you doing?@. Obviously my team is located at various locations across India & UK so having a centralized tool would certainly help us in better collaboration.
Another important usage I envisage of this tool is to give updates to customers about any major release updates or change implementation. It is obvious that while the teams are busy doing the installation of a software on the production servers, they would not like customers or any other teams asking the questions on status updates and disturb them. So if we have this kind of tool, it would definitely enable us ‘post’ proactive updates on intranet which could be followed by various customers / teams to find out the updates themselves.
Thus, a job for me tomorrow is to find out someone in my team who could take on the job of doing the R&D and install the Laconi.ca software on my intranet server and take it from there ..
Into ‘people’ management .. or ‘project’ management?
0998 days
by Swapnil
in Career thoughts
Last few weeks have been pretty exciting as well as busy for me as I was interacting with the new team and getting into the know how’s of the team structure and people within the team.
I felt good whilst doing so and certainly looking forward to be amongst them in next few weeks. The resources in the teams are good but felt like need a bit of hand holding and guidance to get them into a ‘Team’, which I will hopefully be able to do in next few weeks.
Had a good ‘briefing’ session with the team yesterday where I explained them my vision for the team and the key focus areas that I would like the team to work on. The discussion went well and was appreciated by the team members so I hope that was the first step in breaking the ice !
Also, whilst I was doing this, got the news of the changes in our top management. Fortunately the manager whom I have been working all the while in the project is our new head and I sincerely hope it turns out to be a good change.
Anyways, coming back to the subject of my post, as I am excited to be back to directly managing people & team, I am unsure how I think I would fare as a ‘pure project manager’. I, in all honesty, just hate the ‘book keeping’ work that is expected out of the project manager, so it would be interesting how I would be able to manage the ‘expectations of a project manager’ from my leaders and delivery through my ‘people’ management techniques.
Off topic, have been reading the article on Leadership vs Management and it gives a very neat distinctions between the two. Certainly worth a read for all you if you are into leading the team and want to build a high performance teams and be a ‘people’ oriented manager !
Dilbert & my appraisal !!
01001 days
by Swapnil
in Random thoughts
Got the result of my performance appraisal yesterday and could not have been a better Dilbert strip on display on the Official Site !
I just wish it could have been true in real life 
Transitioning into new project …
11001 days
by Swapnil
in Career thoughts
Since a long time, I did not get time to put up a blog post but have been twittering all this while on the internet with few updates on the progress on project and personal front ..
I am now moving into a different project within the same group. The role looks challenging and puts me into actual people management and hopefully would give me a chance to apply my own people / project management principles across the board.
Early days (rather weeks !) for me in here and still getting into the project and understanding the know-how’s. Good to know there are already capable people working on the project, but they need a little bit helping hand in streamlining the operations that hopefully I can provide in due course.
Unfortunately this project was perceived as an “untouchable” and “messy” project so looks like I have a big task on my hands to turn the tide ! I am very hopeful I could do it .. but lets wait for actual results over next few months !
Anyways, if you care a little, wish me luck by commenting on this blog post.
However if you are too lazy to leave a comment, just say “Best of luck” in your mind and it would reach me
And whilst you are around, why not check my other posts on career management below,