Something for the Weekend - Pizza Teams

My uncle was visiting from the states over Christmas (seems like such a long time ago already!) and he mentioned that a friend of his used to work at Amazon where they had whiteboards in the lifts for colleagues to share ideas or suggestions on their way between floors.

I love stories like that as they really act as a symbol of different organisational cultures, same people different rules. So I googled their CEO, Jeff Bezos, and found a great sound bite that summarised his thinking on effective teams:

"If you cannot feed a team on two pizzas it's too large"

Fundamentally he's saying that an effective, high performing, team should be no larger than around 5-10 people and I wondered if they ever really are? I've worked in project teams of upwards of 50 - 60 people but thinking back there's always a nucleus that are the glue holding the project together. A group who've got each others backs, work well together, make decisions and are pulling towards a single outcome. They're normally the people that the outcome matters to most personally (and I mean neck on the line, rather than 'allocated resources' or vested interests) and they are always the people that you can count on to get the job done. The 'pizza team' ARE the project... highest risk if something goes wrong, but most importantly, the highest sense of achievement when it all goes right.

These teams aren't the ones that organisational charts or contractual arrangements define but the ones that form organically. Obviously we don't always need to be part of the 'Pizza Team' for everything we work on but it's useful to recognise that, on the whole, we choose ourselves whether we are or aren't.

Sources and Credits
http://www.gadgetopia.com/post/357
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/85/bezos_2.html

Something for the Weekend - Citizen Collaboration

Happy Birthday to Wikipedia which celebrated it's tenth birthday last Saturday! Accessible to anyone with an internet connection, Wikipedia is probably one the biggest global collaboration projects ever conducted. It also contains an inconceivable amount of common interest and specialist knowledge topics, in total it has 3.5m articles, received 400m hits a month and has been edited 438bn times!

The idea of crowd sourcing fascinates me. I recently read that Ohmy News, a South Korean news agency, uses 55,000 'citizen journalists' along side it's pay-rolled journalists to provide local perspectives on the countries events.

It seems to me that certain industries are very much embracing the idea of social collaboration. And the pattern / format is largely the same, a core group who provide structure and a large network of contributors.

I wonder how much this way of working will come into play in traditional industries over time? Perhaps setting up so groups of employees (or even end customers / public) would help positively shape services that they are offered by commercial organisation.

Great BAs always look to gain insights from colleagues or customers and therefore our roles are likely to be closer to this type of work than many others. The biggest challenges today are no doubt how wide you can cast the net and how much effort needs to be invested. How do we ensure that we can gain a representative sample of opinion? How do you get to the one superb idea? I wonder if online collaboration and perhaps a clear reward structure could facilitate a whole new era of insight, innovation and idea sharing.

Sources and Credits

http://www.wikipedia.org/
http://www.ohmynews.com/
http://www.thestateofwikipedia.com/

Something for the Weekend - Hans Monderman

I've been researching traffic engineer Hans Monderman, there's an article below which gives an overview of his work and concepts. What's particularly interesting is that his concepts initially seem counter intuitive but have been hugely successful inspiring similar projects the world over. Removing safety barriers, curbs, signs, lights, etc doesn't feel like it would make roads safer but it works.

Click Here

I guess the thing that went through my mind was; what happens if we move some of these concepts from traffic systems to computer systems (or even operational processes)? Do we restrict and clutter our systems with pop ups, control limits, etc to the extent that they actually become more confusing? Do we make our systems so fool-proof that users stop thinking (i.e. if I'm not supposed to do this the system won't let me, and if it does the systems wrong and not me)?

It also made me think about whether faster is really faster? We push to make processes as slick as possible and remove the thinking time but do we introduce errors inherently with that approach?

Something for the Weekend - Customer Experience Resolutions

If you haven't already made your New Years resolution (or you've given up already!) this article comes at just the right time. It’s a list of 10 Customer Experience Resolutions published by Bruce Temkin for companies wanting to take their Customer Experience to the next level;

Click Here

There isn't a word of it that I could argue with, as there's always more that can be done. I'm sure if we each adopted just one of these for ourselves it will make a significant difference to our projects over the next 12 months.