Category Archives: Grumbles

annoyances… to me, anyway

Grumbles, New Media

BBC on ‘The Press Under Pressure’

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The Portable Consultant caught the BBC’s Peter Day podcasts on The Press Under Pressure, a two part series on newspapers versus new media and journalism in the era of blogs.

Knowing the BBC, the following link is likely to disappear after about 7 days. Why? Because BBC policy is to remove podcasts for (some?) shows after a week. Why? Nobody knows… not the fellow who responded on behalf of the BBC to my question and not the thousands of listeners, many of whom pay for the BBC as a public service.

Anyway if these podcasts interest you, get them now!

Peter Day’s World of Business page

Press Under Pressure, part 1

Press Under Pressure, part 2

Sigh,
-pmh

ps: Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to share these legally downloaded podcasts with those who were unfortunate enough to have missed the publication window. These podcasts will self-destruct in 7 days.

Grumbles

Earth to Nokia…

.. Your ‘home page’ for your N800, N810 Internet tablets – OS2008 – has been down for days (if not longer).

If you meant to take it offline then a redirect would have been polite, no?

-pmh

ECM, Grumbles, New Paradigms

Non-collaboration: the “To Each His Own” approach

What has finally moved the Portable Consultant to post after all this time? Frustration!

So-called “matrix teams” come from different work units, by definition. In my current business environment we come together for a project, apply our subject matter experience, and go on to the next project when done. Each member reports to a different organizational unit, with a ‘dotted line’ to the Project Manager.

Unfortunately, the collaboration systems we use are all too often designed by, and for, those separate work units rather than for the projects.

This results in the following (in no particular order):

  • Separate repositories for the business analyst, the infrastructure architect, the project manager, etc.

  • Where cross-discipline access has been considered it is likely to be hit-and-miss, depending on who asked for access to the repositories of the other groups and when. This results in name-based rather than role-based access.

  • Different naming conventions between repositories.

  • Different taxonomies (folder structures) for each work group.

  • A general lack of consistency in meta-data (where it exists) and searches (which should be based on that meta-data).

The diagnosis of the To Each His Own approach to collaboration is confirmed by the high number of email attachments that are necessary for the matrix team to keep members informed and documentation current.

In my current situation it wouldn’t even be enough if the project manager were to set up a shared repository – there are two PMs: one for ‘the business’ and one for ‘IT’. Even these PMs don’t share the same repository.

The solution for this To Each His Own approach varies from situation to situation. The first step in all instances, however, must be a realization of how fruitless it is to invest in collaboration without some form of inter-group oversight or cooperation to support the matrix team environment.

Have you encountered this where you work? Did anyone try to address the situation? What approach succeeded? …failed?

Yours sincerely on a typical Monday (but posted on a Tuesday),

Cheers,
-pmh