Via commoncraft.

To all employees:

Beginning August 1st, you will no longer be able to send an e-mail to another employee of our organization. After some study, we have concluded that such e-mails are almost never the most efficient or effective way to obtain, provide or exchange information. In fact, we estimate that as much as 20% of our employees’ time is wasted reading, writing and answering e-mails, beyond the time that it would take to communicate the same information using more appropriate means.

A face-to-face meeting, or, failing that, a telephone conversation, is almost always a more cost-effective way to convey or acquire information than e-mail. Our study suggests that in 95% of cases, a telephone call or impromptu meeting can communicate the needed information without the need for a formal appointment. Being available for such impromptu consultations is an essential part of every employee’s work, and beginning this year our 360 degree performance reviews will include an assessment of/by all the people you work with, regardless of level in the organization, on their/your accessibility, which will factor highly into overall performance appraisal.

Effective August 1, all employee Calendars will be visible to all other employees, and any employee will be able to book time in another employee’s calendar, with the invitee having the option of rescheduling or proposing another means to converse or meet, but not rejecting the appointment outright. We trust all employees to use discretion in the use of others’ time, and to use this Calendar booking option only when attempts to reach the invitee by a visit to their office or by phone have failed. To avoid excessive ‘telephone tag’ our voice-mail system will also, effective August 1, no longer accept messages between employees of our company.

Please note that, in addition to face-to-face appointments, phone calls and Calendar bookings, there are a number of other technologies available for communications:

1. For simple, unambiguous, straightforward requests for information, approval, appointments or instructions, and replies to such requests, you can use the company’s Instant Messaging system. The system should not be used for more complicated matters — if it takes a respondent more than one minute to reply, it is an inappropriate use of this technology.
2. For conversations that cannot occur face-to-face and which require looking at documents together, you can use the company’s Desktop Video & Screen-Sharing system. This tool requires no pre-booking and can allow users to ’share’ the contents of each other’s screen while they converse.
3. For ‘FYI’ type communications, the documents should be posted to the appropriate category of the company’s E-Library, where those interested in the document who have subscribed to it by RSS will automatically receive notification about it. If you think someone should subscribe to a category they are not subscribed to, suggest this through an Instant Message.
4. For surveys, where you are seeking consensus, in those rare cases where a face-to-face brainstorming is not a much more effective means of achieving it, you can use the company’s Instant Survey tool.
5. For group training or sending of instructions to a large number of people, you can use the company’s E-Learning tool for asynchronous training, or, if interactivity is expected, the company’s Desktop Video & Screen-Sharing system for real-time events.

Because e-mail and voice-mail have been used for so many things for so long, it will take some practice to wean ourselves off these sub-optimal technologies, and they will continue to be available for communications with those outside the company. You may be surprised to learn that e-mail has only been the principal medium for business communications for ten years. You will, we believe, find it liberating to be able to go home each day, and come in each day, with nothing in your inbox.

Let us know (drop by or phone us) how we can help you cope with any lingering e-mail addiction. Enjoy the freedom!

Respectfully yours,

The Management

Via How to Save the World.

Via Project Management 2.0

Marketing is often executed in project-based manner. That is why a lot of generic project management principles perfectly apply to marketing and why marketing should also be optimized, similar to project management techniques. Agile approaches to marketing may help to overcome problems experienced by marketing executives. One of these approaches is Scrum, which has originally been developed as an agile software development method for project management. Now Scrum is successfully employed by hundreds of different companies, such as Yahoo.com, Wildcard Systems, H&M, and John Deere, in many different fields, with outstanding results.

Scrum adopts an empirical approach, accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or successfully defined in a predictable and planned manner. The focus of Scrum is on maximizing the team’s ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements. This method is praised for making the team more productive, reducing risks and maximizing the business value of a developed product and minimizing the period of the development time. Scrum is based on defining sprints - time periods (usually 2 to 4 weeks) during which the prioritized work (sprint backlog) should be done. During a sprint, the team gets together for daily meetings where team members discuss what they have already done, what they are going to do till the next meeting and what prevents them of doing something that they planned to do. In other words, Scrum meetings are supposed to keep teams on track and help members get their work done. At the end of each sprint, there is a brief sprint retrospective at which all team members reflect about the past sprint. According to Ken Schwaber, co-creator of the Scrum meeting method (along with Jeff Sutherland), the purpose of a daily Scrum is to keep teams focused “on their objectives and to help them avoid being thrown off track by less important concerns.” Now Scrum is often viewed as an iterative, incremental process for developing any product or managing any work. Indeed, short and regular meetings can be as important for small marketing teams as they are for production teams. Members of a marketing group may be working on a variety of projects, but they’re all working toward the same goal – marketing the company and its products or services. Therefore, every member of a team has to know what the others are working on and what direction the whole team is moving in.

Scrum lets you involve your clients in the marketing process and take advantage of the wisdom of the crowds. Collective intelligence helps to improve the quality of products and services and make them fully satisfy the consumer’s needs. Scrum lets you promote your product not for a client, but together with your client.

A new report from Forrester Research, a company that has been closely following the adoption of web 2.0 and social technologies by businesses, now says that their earlier predications about Web 2.0 in the enterprise may have been too timid. Last year, they said that in 2008 I.T. shops would start to take a leadership role in Web 2.0 adoption by business, but this latest report is now debunking the conventional wisdom that I.T. is as skeptical as once thought.

Read more at Read Write Web…

Simply blocking applications means disgruntled staff and missed opportunities. Businesses need to change tack.

Young people entering the workplace see email as slow and have grown up with P2P applications and Web 2.0 technology - yet most businesses are still living in a Web 1.0 world, with security policies to match.

The web landscape has changed dramatically in the past five years. Users have evolved from passive consumers of information to active contributors of content. Blogs, podcasts and RSS (really simple syndication) are being used within the enterprise. Wikis, tagging and web-enabled social networking can improve collaboration among workers.

Read more at SC Magazine…

Andrew McAfee listed a number of frequent questions people ask about Enterprise 2.0.

“As I’ve talked with many different audiences over the past two years about Enterprise 2.0, I’ve noticed that the same questions keep coming up, and I wanted to capture them. I’ll talk about the best answers to these questions later, and also about which of them seem to be most legitimate - to reflect the real risks a company takes on when it deploys emergent social software platforms (which from now on I’m just going to abbreviate as ESSPs). For now I just wanted to list them, and to make sure that I’m not missing any common ones.”

Take a look at the questions and let us know if you heard the same or different ones around you.

Via Traction Software:

“It’s not that people don’t have search or other tools and techniques to find information. They have too many tools. They have search in their email client, search on the web, the sales force automation software has its own search [and so forth]. The trouble is most organizations don’t have tools to search across everything. In spite of the fact that federated search has been around for some time, most organizations don’t have it because it’s tricky and expensive to implement.

[...]

If all relevant content isn’t indexed, it can’t be found, but when you add more content stores to be indexed, the signal to noise ratio can get worse as coverage increases.

[...]

But the relevance of search results often gets worse as a larger number of stovepiped and minimally cross-linked content stores are indexed. Email stores are often the worst offenders - but contain much of the most valuable working communication.

[...]

In the enterprise, there are very few links to use for relevance ranking, and tons of duplicate files (or minor variations of the same file) attached to email that’s blasted throughout the company and scattered.”