Creating a Social Construction Project

March 11, 2012 By 1 Comment

In my last-but-one posting, The Social Construction Project, I promised to provide a worked example of how to socialise a construction project extranet to the benefit of those involved.  So, here goes:

I am going to use IBM Connections as my example for customisation, but I am sure you could adapt these ideas for any social business solution.

In the Model 1 diagram above I show that the main areas concerning a construction project can quite easily be implemented in Connections:

  • Change Management is probably one of the most complex but can easily be standardised into the main workflows the project needs based on common definitions agreed by the industry itself.
  • Drawings fits easily into the Files area.  Uploads, downloads and all that good stuff are handled easily by Files.
  • Standard work procedures in place in the project, such as health-and-safety details, contractor inductions, etc would be placed in the Wiki.
  • The Site Diary, a record of what has happened on the site can easily be implemented using a Blog.
  • The two distinct groups I discussed in my earlier post, the design team and the contractors would be managed through communities.  As the main contractor you’d be a member of both communities.  Anyone else, often including the client, would only be a member of one of the communities as well as all the “public” information.

For a much larger project, such as one with multiple sites or very complex requirements like multiple buildings, a bigger model is needed.  Importantly, however, many organisations who would really benefit from a social business project management tool do lots of small jobs.  Implementing Model 1 would quickly become unmanageable for their requirements, so I propose for these situations, Model 2:

Key to deployment of this kind of structure is the ability to template a community so that it appears each time with the same structure, of course!

Finally for an extremely large construction project, like the stadium in London for an upcoming sports event, we might consider using an entire instance of IBM Connections to host the system:

Without turning this into a shameless sales drive for IBM Connections, its worth considering Model 3 for a moment and the implications for the IT infrastructure you would deploy.

The London Olympic Stadium under construction ...

Image via Wikipedia

Running a project like the Olympic Stadium generates enormous amounts of data.  Leaving out the drawings, can you imagine the amount of documentation which would be associated with such a project?  Getting some proper advice from who is going to run a social solution like this is vital to ensure that it operates trouble-free throughout the life of the project.  IBM Connections runs on IBM WebSphere and as such can be scaled horizontally and vertically – in some situations where individual applications (such as Activities) are hosted and clustered on individual servers.  In this way the IBM big-iron approach allows you to be confident your system won’t let you down.  My point here, to quote Steven Covey, is “Start with the end in mind”.  Connections lets you scale up so, think about it!

So what might this look like in IBM Connections?  Well, first off the Community can be set up as follows:

Change Management, the management of changes on the job, is one of the most tricky parts for any computer system to handle.  It’s easy enough to prepare a system which provides workflow, but to put the ability to tweak that workflow into the hands of the end users whilst maintaining oversight and control is more difficult, especially for systems which set out to be glorified web based file systems.  Thankfully, as you’re probably expecting by now, we have an excellent platform in the shape of Connections’ Activities.  I have waxed on about Activities before, but here’s my flowchart with swimlanes to show how it would be set up:

In the screenshot below, I show a particular change request, SI-0019-20, Removal of Retaining Wall, which started life as a Request for Information.  This is automatically linked (using the Social Business Toolkit) to the new Site Instruction which is where the main contractor tells someone on site to do something.

Through the use of Activity Templates Site Instructions, Requests for Information and all the other types of change processes can easily be handled.

One other quick point to make – criticism of online systems for construction often centre around the need to be able to record who received drawings.  In the old paper world a Transmittal Sheet would be used as a kind of manifest for the drawings being sent to the recipient.

This can easily be achieved using Activities again, providing a template for the transmittal and attaching to the activity bookmarks to the drawing files which the recipient is to get.  IBM Connections keeps track of who downloaded the files so you also have a record to prove someone has the information they are supposed to have.

Summary

I hope from this brief tour of building a Social Construction Project you can see that even the most complex requirements can be addressed in a system such as IBM Connections.  The benefits of sharing, networking and discovering I discussed in the Social Construction Project blog entry are real and I hope that this article has given you some inspiration to give it a try.

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Filed Under: How To..., IBM Connections, Social Business, Technical Stuff Tagged With: , , , , ,

Looks like there’s a problem with Lotus Notes and OS X Mountain Lion…

March 6, 2012 By 2 Comments
(Puma concolor) aka: Mountain Lion, Puma

Image via Wikipedia

I kept wondering where the Apple Notes application had vanished when playing with the Developer Preview version of Apple Mac OS X Mountain Lion.

I realised it wasn’t there because I had Lotus Notes installed. Both have an application icon with the name “Notes”.

If Notes is installed and you upgrade, you lose the Apple Notes application. If you install Lotus Notes after Mountain Lion, the install fails.

I am sure someone in IBM knows this….but just in case!

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Filed Under: IBM Lotus Notes Tagged With: ,

The Social Construction Project

March 5, 2012 By 1 Comment

I must confess that when I first heard about CEMEX’s successful use of IBM Connections I was amazed at how an apparently very manual, practical and non-IT-oriented organisation had become a social business:

It got me thinking about how I might apply a social business environment to other industries and I realised that the construction industry is an ideal place to deploy social business.

The Anatomy of a Construction Project

construction work on the Project City Center

Image via Wikipedia

A construction project – building a new home, office block, shopping mall, or whatever, is all about people. In most cases the people work in many different organisations and are appointed either by the client (the organisation who has commissioned the building) or the contractor (the organisation charged with physically building it).

As well as the client and contractor there will likely be the following other companies to a greater or lesser extent:

  • Architect
  • Quantity Surveyor
  • Mechanical Engineer
  • Electrical Engineer
  • Planning Supervisor

The contractor, whose job it is to build the thing will appoint sub-contractors who are specialists in their areas, e.g.

  • Electrician
  • A/C Engineers
  • Structural Steelwork
  • Plumbing
  • Groundworks
  • … and so on

What I want you to understand from this is that there are lots of different companies involved. Each company of course has multiple people involved and hence you immediately have a social network formed where people need to meet, understand their position and hear about what they’re doing.

The construction industry is typically quite conservative when it comes to working practices. This is partly because it is very litigious (often a company’s only route to making a profit on a project is through litigation). Times have changed, however, and nowadays project extranets are virtually mandated on projects of any size.

Information Overload

Construction is all about instructions. Everyone covers themselves with an instruction to do this, or othat, and failure to do so, or to act in time is often the basis of litigation. Therefore in the bad old days, a construction project would produce literally tons of paper. As time moved on this moved to fax and then email. Many hundreds of gigabytes of emails, drawings, documents and other information are produced on a construction project of any size.

Thus the project extranet was born. Instead of bombarding everyone with all this data and giving each company the same headache about receipt and retention of information organisations such as 4Projects, BIW and others have sprung up to provide a customised centralised location for information to be stored and notifications sent.

Although these systems achieve their aim by cutting down the IT hurdle involved in managing a construction project, they don’t offer the benefits an in-house project team deploying a social intranet experience.

Social Construction

So why would a construction project want to be run in a social manner? A project needs the following:

  • A place to store and manage controlled documents like drawings, specifications and reports;
  • A way of updating others on changes to files and other important information;
  • A project directory so that everyone knows each other’s responsibilities;
  • A management and workflow engine to provide a standard approach to managing changes and which provides industry-standard templates to achieve these changes;
  • A way of managing revisions to documents and being able to back-track through previous revisions;
  • Security and auditability of all changes in the system;

Using a Social Business approach to these requirements allows:

  • A great reduction in irrelevant information flooding into users mailboxes (remember that many construction professionals work on several projects at a time and hence can receive several hundred notification emails a day);
  • The necessary management and control structures to deliver industry standard processes which as subject to audit;
  • Cross-system tagging and discovery of information which previously was not possible through traditional systems;
  • The opportunity to simplify the reporting structure and information update paradigm so that although the same rigour of reporting is put in place, it is done so less formally (I will explain in a minute).
  • The basic utility functions of file sharing and information dissemination are covered through Files and Wikis.
  • Knowing who to contact is addressed through Profiles.
  • Fine-grained control of project activities, completion and progressing is delivered using Activities.
  • Standard Operating Procedures, Policies and other standard documentation is covered and controlled using Wikis.
  • Micro-blogging by each participant can be used as a way of updating others on the status of their part of the project, such as “Drawing 193783 – Second Floor Revision A drawing posted to the General Arrangements Folder”.

Working Socially in Construction

Blogging

Blogging might be scoffed at as simply a way for the idle to promote themselves (ahem!). In a construction context, blogging can be a system of record where each organisation reports formally on the work they have done, advises others of issues arising and generally uses it to communicate.

I advocate that blogging would allow the individual organisations to make the formal reports they need, provides the security to prevent later tampering with the reports and also provides the longevity of data storage which is needed to aid referencing in the future.

Micro-Blogging

Instead of endlessly producing memos of updates on the status of work, construction projects can use micro-blogging (similar to Twitter) to publish what’s going on. Those involved can subscribe to the feeds from different players in the system.

File Management

Centrally storing files and providing a mechanism for revision is a given in any viable project extranet. Any social business solution worth its salt provides this functionality. By tagging the files (with the same bank of tags which are used throughout the system) not only can the hierarchy of files and folders which the industry is used to be maintained, but cross-functional meta data can also be provided.

For example, any project would likely structure its files according to the building, the structure, then perhaps the package of work the drawings represent. This would still be the same. However, by using tags to further describe the content of the drawing it becomes possible to locate the information you need in future alongside other explicit knowledge in other areas of the system. For example, on an electrical drawing you might tag the file air conitioning, data outlets, electrical sockets. Later, blog entries, wikis, status updates and other content similarly tagged can then be grouped with what might otherwise seem to be an irrelevant file.

The ability for not only the owner of the file but in fact any user to tag the file means that the tacit knowledge the users of the system have can be applied. Let’s say I open the drawing and find that it also includes information on the lighting. I tag the file with ighting and have contributed to the body of knowledge without affecting the original data.

Process Management

Most project extranets provide inflexible approaches to managing processes. Some construction projects can be complex and require many different pieces of information to be recorded as well as actions to be taken.

Using a social system which has something like IBM Connections’ Activities framework (where rich templates of process can be defined and reused over and over) provides a mechanism to define, refine and run change management, information review and general management processes for the project.

Communities

Where information needs to be gathered into logical groups, communities can be formed. These allow files, wikis, blogs, activities and all sorts of other information to be brought together under one logical group.

This allows the like-minded to gather and discuss, share and contribute in ways which is not currently possible using traditional extranets.

Tuning Out Socially

As I alluded at the start of this article, there is a defined structure to a construction project. The amount of information generated can easily overwhelm anyone. Using communities and activity streams to group and connect with the relevant people involved in the project allows everyone to stay in control of the stuff that is important to their job.

A Social Construction Project provides these social features with the same rigorous controls for auditing and security which are needed to cover everyone’s backs but with the flexibility of encouraging collaboration and sharing.

Next time…

To illustrate some of these concepts, my next blog post will show how I would construct a Social Construction Project using IBM Connections.

Stay tuned or subscribe using the link on the side to be the first to receive a notification of the next article.

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Filed Under: IBM Connections, Social Business Tagged With: , , , , ,

How to use a social intranet to unite a sales team

March 1, 2012 By 4 Comments

Setting up a structure in an intranet can be a tricky business. Many organisations follow the organisation tree and decide to structure sites, folders, etc based on the established hierarchy of the company. Others let it grow organically. In most cases the results of the former approach is that it turns into a data coffin because the only people who think along the lines of the org chart is the HR department. The latter approach, while encouraging adoption, just turns into a mess where no-one can find anything. Instead of being a functioning society of information it turns into little pockets of activity which no-one outside of the people using it a) know even exists b) would know where to go if it did exist.

Building a social intranet is therefore presumably even harder. On the one hand we have to create something which makes sense to allow people to work without being too prescriptive about the overall structure of the parts. Equally, we must realise that while it’s great to have an intranet site where we can all put stuff and find it later, the real value is in discovering stuff we didn’t know which is useful to us. If we focus our efforts in making something which our immediate co-workers think is cool, then we’re back to the pockets of activity scenario again.

Putting together a useful social intranet should address job functions rather than the organisation chart. Building a structure where the sales folks across the whole company, not just the sales people in your region can co-operate and share makes much more sense for the following reasons:

  • It will encourage the discovery of information not known to the local team. Each part of the organisation has its own information about stuff. Share it with like-minded individuals and you’re building organisational intelligence.
  • The sales teams will work more cohesively as an overall entity rather than competing racers in a relay race. Instead of handing out a prize to the best performing sales team at the Christmas Party, how about awarding the entire sales team a prize for sales growth? By having a structure where that team comes together fully, better performance is achieved.
  • There’s no single point of failure. Centralising information and intelligence rather than locking it away means that it’s available to all, rather than just that team.

So, given that you’re prepared to have a go at a cross-functional approach rather than an org-tree approach, how do you go about setting it up?

Firstly I’d encourage the creation of a community for the function, e.g. the Sales Community. Make each member of the Sales Team, wherever they are in the country, continent or planet a member. Provide some sort of profiling solution (such as that provided in IBM Connections) where everyone can see everyone else’s details. Include phone numbers, photos, email addresses and get some background information together either through tags or through a short bio. You’d be surprised at the delight a “random act of data kindness” can generate when you discover that you have something in common with someone across the organisation.

Next you need to seed the community. You need to identify sponsors across the functional group who are prepared to be the cheerleaders for the community. Pick people who are

a) enthusiastic about the concept and

b) will be known to the vast majority of people who will take part.

There’s little point in appointing the intern who’s hot on Facebook but not known outside of his immediate colleagues to advocate on the use of the system because he carries little kudos or respect (in a professional sense).

With a good size group – somewhere between 3 and 10 people depending on your organisation – get them together either physically or via an IBM Sametime web conference or similar. Explain to them the benefits to be gained from having a social intranet and set some short term highly-achievable goals for everyone to deliver on. For example, get them to post a blog entry each about what’s going on in their area and pose a question at the end of the entry which encourages comments to be made. Award a prize to the best comment the following week.

This is all about getting the social wheel spinning. Think about a party you’ve attended where the music has been playing but no-one is dancing. Once someone is brave enough to step out there and start making shapes it’s not long until the dancefloor is full. A social intranet is the same. It needs to be seeded and interaction needs to be sought.

Next start changing work practices. Broadcast your area’s news in the community so that the other folks hear about what’s happening. This becomes a very useful intelligence tool as the more information you can post, the more relevant it is likely to be to the other people. Suddenly you’ll discover that people you may never have met have had the same issues you’ve had and you’ll discover how they sorted it. This comes not by asking questions, but relating stories, describing experiences and seeking feedback.

Start making the Community the place where you put files your team are working on. Stop sending emails with file attachments. Instead use the Community as a place where your proposals, quotations, specifications, blueprints and other information gather. Tag these with the customer’s name, the product, whatever makes sense. I encourage you to make these public (within the community) so that any member can see them. This might be a big leap of faith but nothing drives process improvement better. If you discover a neat way that another region is doing a proposal, table, approach, diagram, anything, then it’s your duty to improve your own. Incorporate their ideas as you can be sure they’re getting something out of what you share. The result? A better proposal and possibly more success for everyone.

If you don’t have a dedicated CRM system, consider getting your sales team to blog about the meetings they have had with customers. Tag the entries with the customer’s name, the products, anything that’s relevant. Share the information and connections will be made.

Lastly, in your sales Community, use the Wiki to distill your knowledge. Product information, useful links, anything that helps you do your job will be of enormous value to your colleagues. That interesting presentation that you gave – prepare for it to be cannibalised and reused time after time by your co-workers.

In some organisations of course, such a co-operative sharing approach might be right against the corporate grain. Considering different sales teams as soldiers on the same side fighting the same battle rather than competing armies might seem like a utopian dream. With a little enthusiasm, a bit of perspiration and above all continuing effort over a reasonable period of time you will find that the social intranet quickly becomes indispensible and the approach you’ve taken for one community becomes your blueprint for wider rollout across the organisation.

Filed Under: IBM Connections, Social Business Tagged With: , , ,
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