Asking the Right Questions
Over a leisurely Sunday breakfast on a weekend trip to the coast, I picked up one of those ‘weekend magazines’ from the table of papers while waiting on my order. I find these mags usually have content that’s a little more thought out than a standard newspaper article and are a pretty decent compliment to your breakfast.
One particular article about a Sydney based industrial designer was a particularly good read. There was a couple of paragraphs that really summed up the article and the subject’s (Marc Newson) recipe for success.
"I look at myself as a gun for hire," he says. Most companies I work are large corporations, whether it’s Qantas or Ford or Nike. They all have in-house design capability; it’s not as if they can’t do this stuff with their own resources. But, for one reason or another, they choose to go outside their typical way of thinking because, on some level, they’re not capable of doing things in a different way.
"They’re not only looking for answers to questions they’re having trouble with, they’re also having difficulty expressing the questions. That’s where I come in.
It’s a matter of demystifying the issues and trying to give things a handle to grab on to. I look for simple things – the straightforward parameters of a project – and once I’ve digested that and created the framework within which to work, it’s joining the dots really. I have to make it rational because I’m working with such a broad range of industries – whether it’s designing a boat for Riva or a camera or a mobile phone – that I’ve got to look for logic somewhere.
More often than not it’s a very straightforward and methodical process, so much so I find myself scratching my head, thinking, ‘You know, that wasn’t that hard, was it? I wonder why you couldn’t have done it by yourselves.”
Reference and Image:The Australian – Wish magazine supplement 07.11 From Greg Lindsay’s interview with Marc Newson; story was first published in wsj magazine
Newson identifies the problem domain where companies are often impeded from making their own decisions or doing most of the work themselves, and it’s the following sentence that provides insight to why this happens…..
"They’re not only looking for answers to questions they’re having trouble with, they’re also having difficulty expressing the questions. ",
It appears that the inability, difficulty or frustration of not being able to frame a problem with the right question/s is a driver for an organisation to get outside assistance.
Newson also goes on to mention that he has to make it rational, and that he has to look for logic somewhere, as he is working with a broad range of industries. So what tools or techniques can we employ to provide something against which we can build rationale and help people express the right questions on the journey to solving their problems?
In my next post I’ll outline one such technique, where you can get resources and delve into the world of sense making and issue based information systems.
Australian SharePoint Conference 2011
The Australian SharePoint Conference for 2011 is happening March 7th to 9th of 2011 in Sydney and by the looks of this years agenda there’s something for everyone. I will be speaking in the Business Track on Day One, Session Five the topic of my presentation is:
Managing an Environment of 21 Million People, parallels in the governance of physical and information space.
Information Systems as ecosystems is not a new concept. The very same motivators in the pursuit of effective environmental governance echo those of effective management of information environments:
- Promoting the sustainability of economic development
- Reduce and simplify regulatory burden
- Ensure governing activities represent efficient and effective ways of achieving desired outcomes
- Based on an effective unified arrangement
In my session I will:
- Reflect on Australia’s environmental management approach drawing on ideas for the governance of SharePoint Information environments
- Introduce ‘Business Reference Architecture’, a strategy that casts SharePoint as set of business-focused services achieving stronger business-IT alignment and trust for future engagements.
I’ve also volunteered to contribute to the community challenge program that will run during the conference,
‘Community Challenge’ – Define and Design
In the Community Challenge sessions, conference participants will take a look at the initial planning and high level requirements that WorkVentures has for an intranet, their aims for what they hope it will achieve, what they want to see included. Paul Culmsee will lead us through some audience participation in mapping the information requirements and site architecture for the Intranet part of this project. We will also workshop the processes required for the Annual Leave form and Timesheet Process and demonstrate using Visio to map this out. This will identify the key areas for development of this solution.
I’m really looking forward to this session as at all the conferences I’ve been to I’ve never seen this sort of initiative run, it should be a great opportunity to throw around some ideas, hear some approaches from the audience and really share in an initiative that will benefit this not for profit organisation. Workventures are a social enterprise who engage with individuals and communities to build the capacity to improve lives through new skills, access to technology, community contribution and fulfilling employment.
Looking forward to seeing a great slice of the SharePoint Community at this conference.
Recently I spoke at the Brisbane Productivity User Group (Thursday, 1st July 2010) on the subject of SharePoint 2010 Related lists. The main aim of the session was to explore the very simple parent child pattern that related lists now offer and what real world opportunities this opens up for applications of SharePoint.
At the previous months BSPUG session, Adrian Colquhoun introduced Agile concepts and SCRUM so to extend on some of these concepts I demonstrated a related list scenario by putting together a simple SCRUM workspace, using features and options available to us within the user interface and without the use of SharePoint designer or code
A couple of people commented that the slides around Agile and SCRUM that I used to set the scene for the Related Lists example were really helpful and would I be able to make them available.
Knowing when you are done – Satisficing
Sometimes one of the most challenging parts to working on tasks can often be a factor of knowing when you are finished, being satisfied that what you have completed is sufficient enough. Without a clear definition of the outcome of what you need to do we end up finishing tasks when resource run out, such as time, money, or energy, not when some optimal or ‘final and correct’ solution emerges. Herb Simon, Nobel laureate in economics, called this ‘satisficing’ — stopping when you have a solution that is ‘good enough’ (Simon 1969)
So ‘how’ can you know when you have completed something?
1. Have a well-defined goal as to what you are trying to achieve with this piece of work
2. has a definite stopping point, i.e. when you know you’ve met that goal, this can be thought of as like writing a series of acceptance criteria which you should try as much as possible to be able to objectively evaluate each as right or wrong.
With these in place whenever you start to wonder where you are heading or you are ‘thinking about how many hours you have left, and if this is enough to achieve what you need to do’ you can go back to what is essentially your plan, the end goal – the desired state and its criteria that you have formulated to remind/test your state of completion enabling you to re-align yourself in pursuit of finishing to the goal. Particularly in creative work we are in a constant cycle of thinking of the problem and solution over and over until we get the best outcome, its easy to get lost in amongst the thinking and problem solving process.
It may be two points there, but sometimes they are really challenging and there’s more than meets the eye to the theory behind this approach, some people are naturals at this, as if they have been brought up with this learning, others particularly those with highly analytical or creative minds need to develop the familiarity with this approach
Recovery.org rebuilt on MOSS
Recovery.gov
Recovery.org was very recently re-developed on SharePoint and is another good example of how different branding approaches, functionality and integration can be applied to SharePoint sites.
Recovery.gov is the U.S. government’s official website providing easy access to data related to Recovery Act spending and allows for the reporting of potential fraud, waste, and abuse.
The impetus for the move to MOSS was:
- Users were not able to follow the recovery funds from beginning to end as the Obama administration had envisioned — and promised.
- Nor could site administrators use the site to handle the approval process needed to collect, sort and display spending data being collected from recipients of the funds.
- As a result, the site became a target and verbal punching bag for watchdogs, open government advocates and lawmakers who were underwhelmed with the content and capability of Recovery.gov.
I don’t see this as any shortcomings with Drupal, as an enterprise technology MOSS is designed to peer into a multitude of databases and surface data to the web, Drupal is fantastic and in many cases Gartner regards it as a leader in social web technologies.
The following article details the reasons behind the movement away from the open source platform Drupal to SharePoint:
Recovery.gov revamped with an unexpected helper - SharePoint
Word from the SharePoint 2010 conference in Vegas as that it took approximately 9 weeks to develop, which is a very good effort. Run through validation it brings up a number of errors, which means it’s having a bit of trouble meeting web standards compliancy, but good effort all round.
I am super stoked that SharePoint 2010 has related lists, I got to try this functionality out just before I left London in September with my previous company Content and Code Ltd, (if you’re in UK and EMEA and you need SharePoint work done, the team there are fantastic, tell them I sent you) I managed to build a SCRUM Backlog site with all the relevant lists looking up each other and displaying their related child items in less than a lunch hour, I can’t wait to see this in action in the real world and to see how this will transform information management within organisations.
There’s a big hole in SharePoint 2007 when it comes to Parent Child lists relationships, I won’t go into why this is and what it all means as there’s lots of articles about it online but I will plonk down a few links that I gathered together that walk through in very good detail how to get Parent Child relationships working in MOSS, hat’s off to the authors for taking the time to put these together.
Mark Rackley’s 3 posts on Endusersharepoint.com – well written and followed up by Mark, nice work mate.
Creating a SharePoint list parent child relationship out of the box
Setting SharePoint form fields using query string variables without using javascript
Passing multiple query string varibles using SharePoint Designer – follow up to the above article
Greg Chan, Program Manager in the SharePoint Designer team put together a very good post and has the big little workaround where the filter doesn’t quite work and you need to add ‘LookupId=’TRUE’ into the mix, tricky to fix, watch out for case sensitivity issues which is where I got caught out a couple of times:
Building a SharePoint Designer mashup
Hope these resources help those out there that won’t be seeing 2010 for a while yet.
Happy relationship building.
In the SCRUM approach to Agile development we use ‘User Stories’ to capture client requirements . A User Story is a simple statement about what a user wants to do with a feature of the system. Stories are written from a user’s perspective avoiding technical jargon or specific design goals and are written in business language that is understandable to all. Simple as it sounds there’s a lot of consideration that goes into user stories , including the exploration and identifcation of constraints.
What is a constraint?
A constraint is something that is usually to be obeyed rather than directly implemented when developing a solution and can relate to a specific user story or be system wide in scope. As a consultant who helps clients formulate their user stories I often find that the term constraint can be perceived as having negative connotations. I’ve found that if a client doesn’t understand the term ‘constraint’ in the context of user stories then they can easily misinterpret constraint’s as an attempt to limit or reign in what is to be delivered. On the contrary constraints are intended to set boundaries within which we are free, empowered and challenged to innovate.
Very early on I take the time to help clients understand what the term constraint is and how rather than negative they can be viewed as driving forces in innovation. I read an article in recent issue of WIRED magazine that I thought communicated the concept of constraints really well. While not specific to SharePoint the article was very helpful in communicating the constraint concept, the article was entitled:
Design Under Constraint: How Limits Boost Creativity, By Scott Dadich , March Issue 2009 and can be found online at WIRED
It’s a great article and well worth a read, I recommend it for a lunchtime read or the daily commute.
The author gives examples of familiar products, feats of engineering and the constraints employed in their design, in definition of constraint he writes:
“Constraint offers an unparallelled opportunity for growth and innovation. Given fewer resources or options, we have to make better decisions. The imposition of limits doesn’t stifle creativity – it enables it.”
SharePoint, User Stories and Constraints
In terms of SharePoint and user stories, constraints are vital to shaping successful solutions, constraints maybe straight forward statements such as ‘Must be XHTML 1.0 Compliant’ to something more fundamental that points to how it should be developed what objects and code can be utilised , for example, ‘Must be a reusable component’
Do take time in defining and validating constraints before everyone heads off in delivery of a solution as disregarding constraints, insufficient consideration or working around the outside of a boundary can be the difference between a truly innovative solution and one that barely gets there.
Anti monitor tan stylesheet for MOSS
One of my earlier posts was entitled ‘If you are not prepared to be wrong then you’ll never come up with anything original.’ In this post I thought i’d revisit this idea and share a little personal project with you that didn’t turn out quite as I intended however depending on how you look at things with a bit of creative interpretation I think I may have come up with something somewhat original.
I am not programmer by trade but personally I like to get to grips with as many concepts as possible that my developer colleagues work with on a daily basis. A few months back I was exploring the ‘Alternative CSS’ approach to styling portals that have the publishing infrastructure feature enabled.
I decided to dabble with my own Alternative style sheet as a way of gaining an understanding of CSS by working through all of the styles and seeing how far I could go with using a single solitary CSS file only. Perhaps biting off a bit more than I could chew I set out to create a stylesheet file that looked a bit like the recent trend in design tools and various applications where with they are all black backgrounds, those of you who use Tweetdeck or Photoshop elements will understand what I mean.
The great thing with Portals that have the Publishing infrastructure enabled is that they allow you to slip into the site settings of a site and specify an ‘Alternative CSS’ reference that it will call last when the browser is loading the styles for the page. I had a lot of fun using Firebug, IE Developer Toolbars and SharePoint designer to locate the styles and make the tweaks using SharePoint Designer to edit the CSS file I placed directly in a document library.
It was a good learning experience however I never quite polished it off for a couple of reasons. What stopped me going much further was that all the images and icons that MOSS uses don’t look that great on very dark backgrounds. I was aiming to try and do as little as possible with images and keep as much as possible within the constraints of a single CSS file, things got a little busy with other projects and I put everything on hold, I may very well pick it up and give it some more time at some stage.
Rather than look at my exercise as a write off and see it from the perspective of ‘If you are not prepared to be wrong then you’ll never come up with anything original’ , I thought this could be the worlds first ‘Climate change friendly Alternative CSS for MOSS’ however this proved inconclusive as Google themselves stated that black screens don’t really save any energy so instead i’ve come up with an alternative and new and totally original purpose, I hereby announce the worlds first ‘Monitor tan reducing Alternative CSS for MOSS’ download it now and keep your monitor tan in check today!
Download – CSS 71KB
Pre-requisites:
- Your Portal or site will need the publishing infrastructure feature enabled, else you won’t be able to get to the Look and Feel’s master page options:
- You’ll also need the appropriate permissions to get you into site settings (such as site owner)
Configuration:
- Upload the CSS file to a document library on you site
- Navigate to Site Actions > Site settings
- Under the Look and Feel heading click ‘Master page’
- Scroll to the bottom of the screen and you’ll see the Alternative CSS options
- Select Specify a CSS file to be used by this publishing site and all sites that inherit from it and enter the location of your file.
- If you want to make all the subsites inherit the stylesheet check the ‘Specify a CSS file to be used by this publishing site and all sites that inherit from it.’
This method of styling is ‘light touch’ no features required, no files needed on the server and if you get told off you can click the radio button to set the site back to default quick as lightning. Have fun!
Other alternative uses for this alternative stylesheet from my esteemed colleagues:
- Working late at night so its not so glary – Dave (the green shirted full time front end dev, part time bassist)
- April fools day joke, tell everyone you’ve had to turn out the lights on the server for routine maintenance – Martin
Debategraph – a very cleverworkaround
Why don’t we get the best out of people? Sir Ken Robinson argues that it’s because we’ve been educated to become good workers, rather than creative thinkers. People are frightened of being wrong, people are being educated out of their creative capacities. Students with restless minds and bodies — far from being cultivated for their energy and curiosity — are ignored or even stigmatized, with terrible consequences. “We are educating people out of their creativity.” Robinson says
In this TED video creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson challenges the way we’re educating our children. He champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.
Ken style of delivery is fantastic, has the whole theatre in laughs to the point where you’d be caught thinking he was a standup comedian however his message runs deep. Sir Ken believes that we need to rethink our understanding of intelligence as it won’t stand for the future, that Creativity is now just as important as literacy and it should be treated with the same status.
Sir Ken’s lecture is perfect for lunch break viewing, kick back with a sandwich and find out about why creativity, the process of having original ideas that have value, which come about through the interaction of disciplinary ways of seeing things is so important now and for the future.
enjoy.
