Apart from posting links, I’ve not been writing here much. Partly that has been through lack of attention, in part because I have been posting (occasionally) on my other blog, but there’s also been another factor – I’m busy with lots of interesting things at work, but have not felt able to write about them. Neil McIntosh seems to be having the same problem: Why the secrecy? Lots of folk write lots of stuff about this business, after all.
Having surfaced after summer holidays, a trade show visit and various bits of work, I’ve realised that the new October dates for the MSP course are only three weeks away – so time to get back into the pre-work! With only a couple of loose pages of notes so far, it already looked like I was well on the way to a paper meltdown, so I’ve taken the time to dissect the pre-course exercise book and stick the pages into alternate pages of a wire-bound notebook – thus leaving plenty of white space for my answers and notes about related material.
One of the reasons I’ve been quiet in this blog has been that I have started another blog specifically focused on Managing Successful Programmes. When I set that blog up, I was planning on attending a training course in June on Managing Successful Programmes (MSP), leading (hopefully) to the practitioner certificatation. MSP is the UK Office of Government Commerce (OGC) approach to ensuring the success of major change programmes. I’ve set up the other site as an online learning diary, and a central place for various notes.
I had a good example the other day of the potential of the Stakeholder Power/Impact Matrix. I was discussing with a colleague the framing of another potential programme, and quite informally drew a rough matrix in front of him. I explained the meaning of the two axes and then with him discussed our first impressions of who should appear on the chart, and where they should be placed. We found the exercise illuminating, not least because the small discipline of deciding where each person or group should go triggered us to articulate some deep-seated and potentially difficult issues around certain individuals
Two updates to the site as alternative ways of navigating the information: I’ve been using Ultimate Tag Warrior for some time to tag posts, I’ve now added a tag cloud view I’ve added a view of my del.icio.us bookmarks, using this idea from Brian Lamb and Enej Bajgoric.
I’ve a hunch that the conceptual models discussed in Jeremy Aarons’ new paper, (as I summarised here) could be a useful lever for unpicking the dilemma I found when I wrote that I prefer conversation, but you need process. In that post I was drawing on conversations with (amongst others) Earl, Taka, Jon and Ton about the apparent conflict between the desire we all feel as empowered, “wierarchical” knowledge-workers to have systems that support a collaborative and improvisational working style, compared with the rigid, dehumanised processes that many companies see as a necessary corollary of delivering consistent service.
Jeremy Aarons has blogged the draft of a new paper, Supporting organisational knowledge work: Integrating thinking and doing in task-based support by Jeremy Aarons, Henry Linger & Frada Burstein. They start by referencing Davenport’s classification structure for knowledge-intensive processes, which analyses knowledge work along the two axes of complexity and interdependence: Davenport’s classification structure (From Davenport (2005) via Aarons (2006)) However they then go on to criticise this as an analytic model on the grounds that much complex work often fits into more than one box.
Allan Kelly commented on my post from last year about the possibilities of using pattern languages to describe business strategies, to point out that he has done quite a bit of this already. So far the only paper I’ve had a chance to read is Business Strategy Patterns for The Innovative Company, which is a set of patterns derived from “Corporate Imagination and Expeditionary Marketing” (Hamel and Prahalad, 1991). In this Allan derives:
I think I’ve just caught myself out in a “one rule for me, another for you” attitude over something… A conversation across several blogs made me realise that I was facing both ways on an issue and hadn’t acknowledged it – oh the power of the internet! Earl Mardle posted about Information Architecture as Scaffold based on a conversation with Ton (More on Ton’s position here). The gist of the view expressed by Earl and Ton is that all this “knowledge” that companies are seeking to “manage” is really only accessible through relationships, and once the relationship is established then the information that was part of the initial exchange is no longer relevant: And that, my friends is what information does; it provides the scaffold that bridges the gap between people.