Enterprise of One

Being one who is rather passionate and enthused about the work I do I often wonder if my energies would be better channeled elsewhere. Like staking it out on my own and starting a business. I know it is hard work but it is also a worthy challenge especially if you believe in what you do. I have been talking to others about this and even watching friends of mine from the sidelines: BandXI, B2 International, and Ajileso. Exciting as all this may be, here are some points of reference (articles and podcasts) worth checking out:

• The Five Minute Guide to Becoming a Freelance Software Developer.
• Top Ten Reasons Why Large Companies Fail to Keep Their Best Talent
• 10 Reasons You Should Never Get a Job
• You Are Self-Employed.
• The Enterprise of One.
• North x East - A Comprehensive Guide to Starting your Freelance Career
• 101 Essential Freelancing Resources
• Start & Grow Your Dream Podcasting Business.
• My New Company - Provides information and services to make starting your business easier.
• The MicroISV Show: Nick Bradbury Interview
• Artistic Entrepreneurship & Technology 101 - An interesting podcast that causes you to think about the context in which mythical stories were told and how they can be applied to how you function as an entrepreneur.

Corporate Blogging Experiences

Introduction

I have been on a quest lately to improve communication within the corporate space. I have been primarily focused on using the latest social networking technology - namely, blogging technology powered by WordPress. I thought the following might be worth sharing in case it is of use to others.

Background

Five months ago, I instigated a movement at work by setting up a blog for my team which then blossomed company-wide (well, not really but I’ll explain more in a bit). I did this because I wanted a way in which to capture what I was working on as well as see what others were doing within the team. The idea was each of us is doing interesting things so lets share it. For example, maybe the problems that I am solving apply to something another person is working on and visa versa, maybe I learned a new way of writing code, or maybe I learned a new software trick that made what I do faster. I see blogs as a way to capture these nuggets of info that can be stored for future use as well as be easily searchable. It also serves as a way in which to record breadcrumbs of information allowing someone who is following your trail to easily pick up where you left off. If nothing else, blogs help foster a community. A way to make the job just a little bit more fun and interesting. That is the idea anyway.

To help build a foundation for those new to this type of software, I have given a tech talk, written documentation, created screencast tutorials, and provided many links for reference within the walls of the company. I spent a lot of time and effort making this possible because I believed in what I was doing and I also believed that the company get would become engaged.

In addition to the educational materials mentioned above, I have also been very active amongst all internal sites (which are roughly fifteen in total). In my team alone, I am the most active blogger posting things that I learn and develop on an almost daily basis.

To me the idea and its implementation was helpful and streamlined. However, the experiment did not turn out as I had planned.

Experiences

The problem was no matter how hard I tried to educate the company and its employees, only a handful made use of it. They would much rather stick to e-mail - which is overused in my opinion (see my post on Corporate E-mail Pitfalls for more info). The paradigm shift from e-mail to blogging (or anything that supports syndicated feeds) seemed too complex versus the status quo.

Because I view blogging as a way of life, I had no good answer to their objections. I view blogging as something you should want to try it out. The value is not necessarily realized by watching but by doing. This is HUGE hurdle to overcome because people need to get their jobs done and blogging can be considered wasted time.

My motivation stems from my use of what I write because if no one reads what I write then I will. As time rolls on, I might forget certain details and having a blog is an excellent way to go back in time and dig up something that I’ve done and might need to do again. That alone has saved me many times that the benefit far outweighs the cost. Even better, once you have written about it you can easily send a hyperlink to someone who might be asking you for advice.

Though I wish my passion for blogging had been shared by my company and fellow employees, I can not say that my experiences were purely positive. Out of the fifteen sites within the company today, only two of them are active. The rest have been abandoned. By this I mean that management has requested that all employees write weekly reports once a week that summarize what they have done, what they plan to do in the coming week, and any outstanding issues they might have had during the week. These reports can be useful but most are just badly formated noise. This counts as abandonment with no real involvement.

I remain optimistic, despite my particular obstacles, and hope that over time people will become more involved.

Lessons Learned

• Choose software that is easy to configure, maintain, and use. My choice, as mentioned, is WordPress, but there are others out there that might suite your needs better.
• Make sure some basic blogging guidelines are in place and people are aware of them.
• Appoint a champion early on to lead the effort and do not take this lightly. Not only do you need a champion but one who has the official blessing and approval of management. This needs to be made known company-wide.
• Start education early. Get people engaged and pick leaders from the various teams within the company to help you spread the love (so-to-speak).
• Provide plenty of tutorials and examples. Make it really easy for those who are stubborn or resistant to change to jump in. Anything you can do to lower the learning curve, the better.
• Do not let management mandate what people should or should not do. Any time there is a management mandate then it feels more like work and takes a bit of the fun out of it. This needs to grow organically.
• Actions always prove louder than words. Lead by example. Give people something to aspire to but don’t make it so daunting that they will be easily discouraged.

Parting Thoughts

Check out an article by Path & Vinegar called Egos and Silos and Social Media. Food for thought.

Tags: WordPress, WordPress MU

Corporate E-mail Pitfalls

Where I work, the corporate policy for all communication is through the use of e-mail and e-mail lists. I like to think that tech companies are in the know and willing to embrace new technologies such as wikis, blogs or anything that supports syndicated feeds. The problem is that there is a varying mix of people and wisdom of the masses can sometimes fail.

Here are a few problems I have with e-mail and e-mail subscription lists:

1. Suffer from poorly constructed subject lines. Lets face it, many people do not know or care to take even the slightest bit of effort to construct a subject line that would be easily searchable and convey the general purpose of the message. Some simple tactics would be: Writing sensible email messages and Getting the Subject Line Right.
2. Suffer from randomly formated message bodies. Ever get a message that is part HTML and part text? Maybe you get people who like to use different colored fonts and font sizes. How about header and footer images, or even background images? Yeah, now were talking. It’s a kaleidescope of fonts, colors, and images while you try to find the real content.
3. Generally have bloated signatures. Sure, it might be nice the first time around but if I have to converse with you multiple times it gets monotonous really fast. Lets not forget about people who feel the need to add cheesy graphics as either part of the header or footer of their e-mail message. Then there are always those touched individuals who love to add famous quoted material either in the form of a single line or an entire paragraph to their signatures. Yeah, thanks buddy, but I really don’t care! So think about what your e-mail signature says about you before setting it up.
4. Difficult to follow message threads. Think of the multiple reply and forward messages not to mention the splinter reply and forward messages based off of a related reply or forward message (i.e. “re:re:fw:re:fw:Check this out”). Even that last sentence alone should make your head hurt. Mine does.
5. Do not have the ability to catch up on any historic conversations unless you ask people to forward their mail to you (which isn’t going to happen). Obviously, there is some history that took place but good luck learning about it!
6. Can have e-mail lists (which is like a subscription to content written by many people of which you can also contribute to). E-mail lists alleviate some of the problems of personal e-mail but are cumbersome to gain access to (either via a web interface or a complete dump to your inbox). Many times these lists are not even archived which, again, means no history.
7. Allow the user no choice on what they want to listen to. With personal e-mail it is difficult to turn off the spam once you have given out your e-mail address. Yeah, you can set up filters but wouldn’t it be great if you could just turn it all off with a click of a button or simply unsubscribe? Same goes for e-mail lists. No choice. It’s all or nothing.

My solution has been to push people away from this overused format and use blogging software to help foster communities of interest. Progress has been slow because it is hard to get people to open up and take a bit of time to jot down what they learn to reduce the strain on e-mail (example: Personal vs. Corporate Blogging).

I am curious. Has anyone else had luck changing corporate mentality? What are your successes and failures?

Forms of Communication

Using blogs as a communication tool is all well and good as long as it is used in the right context. This is why I want to capture a few thoughts about various forms of communication. I put together the following diagram to help explain:

(click to view)

In the diagram above I placed each form of communication in a numbered column. Here are my thoughts on each column:

1. Column 1: This is the fastest and possibly the easiest form of communication. It is also the most annoying form of communication, depending on who you are, as it is the most interruptible. When you use this form of communication you should be asking yourself, “Do I really need to interrupt this person at this specific point in time?”
2. Column 2: E-mail is a slightly slower form of communication than those mentioned in #1 because it takes more time to compose. What you should be asking yourself when you send e-mail is, “Do I really need to force information on this person?”.
3. Column 3: This form of communication is somewhat delayed and also dependent upon people subscribing to this information. It is not meant for mission critical or time sensitive information, like #1 and #2, but is nice because it allows the people the choice of obtaining information.
4. Column 4: Like #3 but even slower as it depends on the person finding about this form of communication, usually by means of #1 through #3, and then finding the time to dedicate to absorbing the information.

I would also like to point out that columns #1 and #2 are time sensitive and mission critical information and should be used that way. Columns #3 and #4 should be used for information that needs to be captured but is not time sensitive. The other key point to remember is that information in columns #1 and #2 is information that your are forcing on another person while columns #3 and #4 allow people the choice of obtaining information.

Personal vs. Corporate Blogging

The acceptance of blogging is slowing but surely starting to catch on where I work. It will be interesting to see if the seed I planted will grow into something that is used company wide. I hope so because I still feel like I’m in a vacuum and don’t have a great way of tapping into the interesting things that everyone is doing. There is always the same caveat: that is in order for any of this to work both development and management have to be engaged and be willing to take the time to blog. I will say that, within the team that I work, the use of WordPress as our blogging platform has been a huge success but brings up a new issue which is where does one draw the line between personal and corporate blogging? The following attempts to explain.

Personal Blogging

What you blog about is up to you. In my case, I tend to keep it semi-professional and password protect content that isn’t appropriate for the general audience. Just browse this site if you need examples. I do, however, believe that most content should be owned by the individual and not the company as long as it is not specific to the company you work for or have worked for. This is important because these are individual experiences and should be associated with you. I also believe that it is good for the company to allow individuals to blog independently of the company because it empowers the individual to continue blogging as well as reach a wider audience. The hope is that as your network of connections grows, so will you and so will the company. Finally, it also reduces the amount of redundancy on the individual as he/she can capture content in one place.

Corporate Blogging

Now, with the above in mind, I will admit that there is still a need for a company to maintain a corporate blog and have its employees contribute to it whether it be per team, per project, etc. This might sound like duplicate work for the individual but it is not. The reason is that there is quite a bit of content that is specific to the company and most definitely cannot be displayed in a public manner. For example, consider the following:

• Schedules - Calendar and time line based information that captures goals, due dates, milestones, etc.
• News and Information - Information that is not time sensitive, unlike e-mail or instant chat, but should be available for those interested.
• Daily/Weekly Work Activities - Information related to work performed on a daily or weekly basis by the team members. This is good for the employee because it is a way to remember what took place and for management to keep tabs on progress. An added benefit might be that fewer meetings take place because everyone is “tuned” in.
• Meeting Notes - Meeting related information such as who attended the meeting, action items, etc. for those instances when a meeting can not be avoided.
• Out of Office Notifications - Information related to when team members are out of the office or on vacation.
• Documentation - Useful materials related to the how the company works, team works, etc.

These are only a few examples between and will vary depending on the situation.

In summary, enjoy what you do and take a little time to write about it. It should be possible to keep work and play separate without undo strain on you, the writer. Lastly, do not forget to be aware of basic blogging guidelines.

Blogging Guidelines

The following are a few examples of corporate blogging guidelines that are worth reading and understanding:

• IBM’s Blogging Guidelines
• Scobleizer’s Corporate Weblog Manifesto
• Business Week’s Six Tips for Corporate Bloggers
• Charlene Li’s Blogging Policy Examples

Most is common sense but some, especially the last one, talks about blogging ethics. I would go one step further and say that these guidelines should apply to the personal aspects of what you blog about. For those situations where you wish to keep things private, use blogging software that can password protect and secure this kind of content. Even private content should have a level of filtering because even though you control what family and friends can see you can not control what they might do with it (not easily anyway).