Tag Archives: collaboration

Keeping an Engaged Team – 15:5

10 Monday Jul 2017

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When working with a team that is made up of individuals often working on diverse activities, as often happens with an architecture practise keeping everyone feeling engaged, informed and connected can be challenging.

Several years ago I was introduced to the idea of a 15:5. The concept is incredibly simple, demands little of the individual but really help address these issues. The idea works like this …

Once a week – ideally mid-afternoon on the last day of the week. Each individual takes no more than 15 minutes to answer 5 questions and then emails it to the rest of the team.  The emails typically will take no more than 5 minutes to read. He questions are along the lines of:

  • What have I done this week,
  • What have I got planned for next week,
  • What are my successes,
  • Where do I need help,
  • How do I feel?

The last question all the simplest can be the trickiest. The goal of this question is to help the team leader and understand the mood of the team and individuals. Having this insight means underlying issues of ill feeling etc can be addressed. But answer this question directly, can result in very anodyne responses. This can be addressed by encouraging people to respond with a bit of humour. This can reveal a lot more indirectly. One of my former colleagues, who was working in very challenging conditions got finding funny ways to express his frustration. For example “Forest Gump said life is like a box of chocolates, fine but I keeping the box when everyone has eaten all this nice chocolates if I’m lucky”.

Where do I need help, can be a directed request for some assistance, or could be I’ve been asked to do something that isn’t my area of knowledge. This kind of sharing can mean another member of he team, who maybe be able to help can respond or the team lead can look to facilitate some support.

Typically reading these emails only takes a few minutes. A lot of people when I’ve introduced this idea have pushed back and said – those minutes add up when there are a lot of us. This maybe true, but you don’t have to read them all at once, and pausing for a couple of minutes here and there whilst you drink your coffee, waiting for a meeting to start is dead time well used.

The secret to making this work is everyone does it regardless of seniority every week (unless you’re on holiday). To illustrate the idea, here is an fictional example:

What have I done this week,

  • An RFI that was passed to us for input at the last minute for infrastructure consulting
  • Got to the bottom of customer’s process for requesting network changes
  • Submitted network change requests

What have I got planned for next week,

  • Get incoming devs into Active Directory and into the correct groups
  • Get load balancer policy updated for app x
  • Project handover and holiday

What are my successes,

  • Finally got to the bottom of customer process and accountabilities
  • RFI returned

Where do I need help,

  • Given the urgency of customer project that some with some pull keeps pressure on infrastructure
  • Input from Joe to configure load balancing in F5 appliance

How do I feel?

  • Shattered, RFI being last minute and people playing politics around it BUT some time out with the family next week.

Adopting Collaboration Tools in the Workplace

14 Sunday Sep 2014

Posted by in General, Technology

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I was recently reading an article from MIT Sloan about the use of collaboration tools in the enterprise. The article made the point that collaboration tools are being introduced into the workplace, but not being effectively leveraged and people continuing to use email. I think there is a correlation here to some of the statistics for mobile and web applications.

So let me start with some facts, and some thoughts before I bring it back to the point about office collaboration.

We know from research from organisations such as PEW (general view of use, older generation view) that there is a correlation between age and use of mobile devices, and mobile apps. This I believe reflects on technology in general. As collaboration technology goes, it is a fairly young set of ideas. Although many will associate collaboration with social – there is a difference when social is more simply just sharing information. Collaboration is not just sharing but collectively working on assets such as documents.

Add to this a view of the demographics of any enterprise leadership (although IT is something of an exception) and you will see that leadership is an older generation (illustrated by this FT article). So, understandably less likely to lead an organisation into technology adoption.

Add to this the constant noise and increased pressure on information security, remembering that the most harmful security compromises originate internally. So with this sort of consideration you’re likely to see downward pressure to keep things tightly controlled. Such tight reigns seriously impact collaboration from my experience.

The last key thread, is the fastest way to encourage adoption of something is for the executive and senior leadership visibly adopt something. Organisational role comes with an inferred command (a well established piece of psychology) best illustrated by a story where a chief exec wanted to motivate staff, so spent time wondering around talking with his staff, and in doing so made observations and suggestions to people thinking he was helping. But as his role inferred a level of command, he sound discovered that those suggestions and ideas had been read as instructions and his staff where rapidly implementing such suggestions.

So here you have a recipe, where executives potentially don’t get the power of collaborative technology, potentially nervous of the security implications and least of all not using position to leverage it. You can see why the technologies aren’t being effectively exploited.

What is worse, is that you will see hotspots of collaboration which will be established by those who get the ideas and will inspire their colleagues. This is the true risk of collaboration as it is unlikely to controlled or properly secured with no contingency or remedial actions in the event of a security breach as those situations aren’t being dealt with by