Michael Howell

Great Business Teams

Sun, 2 Aug 2009 08:13:02 -0500

Great Business Teams by Howard Guttman is an informative book to a set of principles Howard and his team have documented over the years that lead to forming high performing teams. Most of the tenets are based on leadership skills and individual accountability that equate to honest unfiltered feedback to teams and leadership within an organization. Guttman’s quote of “getting comfortable with discomfort” is the basis for making teams great.

He argues that teams performance deteriorates when conflict festers and disagreements are brought out into the open in an unemotional factitious approach (easier said than done).

Thinking about my own experiences I would have to agree that once the emotional uncomfortable nature of a conflict is broken down and you are able to let someone know what your thoughts are, there tends to be better results moving forward.

The alternative is having people talk about others and not to them and we all know how damaging that can be to teams.

I would recommend the book as a guide to help with team interaction. My only criticism is the examples and studies tend to be a little too straight forward and clear cut, where little attention is paid to the politics and company culture. But overall a good read.

Enterprise Social Networking (Collaboration)

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 22:18:35 -0500

Our company recently went through some changes within the marketing group and a new consultant has been putting together a communications strategy for our internal departments. She has proposed we begin using a social networking style of intranet to promote inner-department communication as well as serve as an enterprise knowledge base system.

I really like the approach as it employs the communication strategy of a social network, but at the same time builds a knowledge base system for the enterprise.

Microsoft seems to get this theory as it has moved toward this approach with its wave 14 release due our next year. Wave 14 is Microsoft's next generation Office and Sharepoint technologies merged to provide corporations insight and network knowledge as it grows.

For example, employees can join their teams in documenting status of projects, meeting notes and Q&A discussions within the project wiki. Additionally, employees can keep a blog of their ideas or interests so interested employees can subscribe to RSS feeds. Instant messenger can be integrated along with enterprise search to bring all the employees together.

I think the bottom line is it depends on what type of culture your company has. If it’s open and generally works as a cohesive unit, the social networking software would probably fit right in. if on the other hand your company is more closed and let’s just say inter departmental communication is a challenge (think silos), then it may be some time before you twitter about something going on at work...

Wharton Healthcare Business Conference

Mon, 23 Feb 2009 21:35:42 -0600

I attended the Wharton healthcare conference last week and I have to say I came away with a little spring in my step. The conferences I usually go to are pretty dry and uninspiring, but Wharton’s was different. Don’t get me wrong, the keynote presenters were CEO’s using their same presentations as they use for Wall Street analysts, but what I found more interesting was the breakout sessions around the future of EMR’s and the new administrations plans on spending a tremendous amount of money on Healthcare IT.

One presenter in particular, Ronald Paulus, gave a very insightful presentation on how the Geisinger Health System in Pennsylvania has turned patient care on its ear by treating people (not patients) not only when they’re ill, but after they have recovered so they don’t end up at the hospital again. The best way I can describe it is like having a permanent project manager assigned to you throughout your life and is there to be your conscience and guide for navigating the Geisinger Health System through thick and thin.

In addition to the non-keynote speakers, the attendees I interacted with were very excited about health care IT and its direction given this administrations outlook on health care. I was lucky enough to meet several of the Wharton health care students and was inspired by their energy to tackle health care related issues.

I look forward to the next several months within health care IT and what the Obama administration unveils as it’s plan for spending the $19B it has set aside. My hope is it is put to good use and not wasted on failed software projects that we have come to expect 66% of the time.

Software Licensing Audits

Mon, 9 Feb 2009 20:25:19 -0600

Ah, the software audit. Well take it from first hand knowledge, software audits are a revenue producing entity. As one of the executives to have gone through a few and ended up on the short end of the stick I can tell you its not personal, but strictly business (insert your favorite mob movie scene here). I have a few tips for dealing with them.

• First, of course, get ahead of the situation. Start looking into your software compliance now. There are several reasonable tools on the market that will “crawl” your servers to inventory your software installations. The most difficult aspect is deciphering the types of software you are licensed for versus what is installed. You may have several licenses for a standard version, but the enterprise version is installed everywhere.

• If you are contacted for an audit, don’t shlep it off on a poor production support manager. Take it serious and get your legal department involved. You will be accountable in the end and should drive the audit rather than being a victim.

• Be aware of virtual environments and the hazards that follow. If you moved to a virtual environment and do not know the license impact, read the agreement clearly. Since virtualization software allows servers to move around on separate physical servers, the vendor may require all to be under license even though they only use one resource at a time.

• Do not provide any more information than asked (now I sound like a lawyer). The audit will most likely be conducted by a third party (KPMG), so don’t feel you need to keep a relationship with them. Be direct to the point and keep it short.

• If you think you’re out of compliance, get in compliance as soon as possible. Once you are contacted, you generally have time to get your house in order. Keep in mind some software agreements allow the vendor to audit change management logs, so be aware.

• Finally, keep your executive team in the loop and let them know the risks and the business impacts to getting into compliance. Also let them know that even the best efforts to get into compliance can be submarined by vague licensing language. So prep them to grow a backbone if it comes down to disputing with the vendor.

Marty Cagan and Product Management

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 20:50:42 -0600

We had a product specialist come to our IT offsite this week named Marty Cagan and he had some interesting concepts to discuss about producing software products that people actually like (a novel idea, i know). His basis for creating great products is user testing, minimal functionality, and data driven decisions.

The most valuable portion of Marty’s keynote speech to me was the process of user testing. User testing is taking your ideas and creating a usable mock-up and testing it with customers. The catch is, you can’t prompt them or guide them when using the website or application. A customer or user must be able to figure our what to do within a few seconds without help or prompting from anyone. The idea, is your website should be so obvious that users will be productive the minute they view it.

Marty’s approach to building effective products is chronicled in his book Inspired, how to create products customers love. Its an easy read and will open your eyes to the mistakes we’ve all made when building products.

I’ve worked in many types of companies, but really never appreciated the role of a product manager, partly because I’ve driven most product direction, but also because I’ve been very engineering centric when building products. Well, believe me, after reflecting on some of the software I’ve produced, product management is definitely a critical factor for a software products success.