Joy London of excited utterances on motivating lawyers to invest themselves in KM. (via Rick Klau)

KM: a Matter of Life or Death?

So what motivates medical professionals to do their required reading? ... The answer should be simple. It is a matter of life and death.

Our KM group posed an interesting question—is there a comparable "life and death" situation between lawyers and their clients? Personally, I don't think so. Sure, an attorney could screw up a contract clause and cost the client thousands, maybe millions of dollars. But even at worst, the client loses only his shirt -- a life is not lost. ...

I think we need to stop looking at business models, benchmarks, ROI, etc. to justify KM, and start looking closer to home for motivators that will make lawyers feel like our work is personally worth their while.

One problem is that most law firms are small. Benefits of scale can be real in KM. Maybe the trick is to build a consortium.

Would lawyers pay for a Lexis-like legal knowledge base? You get a discount for contributing experiences, commissions for the top 100 posts.

Motives differ among occupations. Of any profession, I can't see lawyers seeking peer approval through sharing. Maybe time off or a credit for billable hours?

[aka klogs]

Bryce Yehl tossed a coin in the fountain:

Radio Wish: Finer configuration of aggregation frequency.

One thing that sucks about falling behind in Radio's news aggregator: new items will continue to flow in while you're still dealing with the old ones. The "sticky" checkboxes in myRadio help to cope with this problem, but that only goes so far (especially when you have a serious backlog).

I'd like to configure Radio so that it automatically runs the news scan less frequently, perhaps once per day. Coupled with that, I want buttons in the browser to scan immediately and temporarily disable automatic scans.

Why make news collection a quiet background activity? Resources, for one: you don't want syndication confused with denial of service.

klogging calls for more frequent updating of select partner/colleague feeds. Sometimes polling every three minutes is the right thing to do.

Brent Simmons is an "ear" guy in a visual design world.

One of the metaphors I’ve always used when working on something—an application, a website, an article—is noise.

When something isn’t right, it makes a noise.

For instance, when I designed this site I worked on it until it was silent. (Your taste may vary, of course.)

Another example: this morning I’ve been dealing with menu item and toolbar item validation in an application I’m working on. When a menu item is enabled but it should be disabled it makes a crackly buzzing sound like a bug killer light.

It’s my belief that these things make a huge difference in user experience—the little things have to be right, or the app is noisy.

Elegant.

 [aka design]

Is the generic GANTT chart useful?

Edward Tufte explores visualization of the project diagram.

One challenge is the medium. Computer screens don't have the resolution to see both the macro and the micro. 

Printers spread the project over dozens or hundreds of pages. HP DesignJet plotters are in my project toolbox, they work.

In the comment thread, Robert Towry said:

Placing the plan on the wall is a big help and changes the nature of the discussion. Instead of sitting around the table and talking about what each person is doing, people are more inclined to get up, walk to the plan on the wall, point to a task and say "This is what I'm working on, but I cannot finish until Mary finishes, and I can see that Jim is waiting on me, and he has to complete his task by - good grief, by Friday!". The other people gather around and people are actually talking about their tasks, interdependencies, milestone dates. The stuff you want them to be talking about.

This works great for projects where people work in the same building.

What about the distributed team? You can't really see through a monitor and there no tools that compensate enough.

The visualization challenge: Help project members visualize:

• the body of work,
• relationships among many tasks and roles,
• tradeoffs among potential project designs and risks,
• your place, responsibilities, workload

Envisioning projects a la klog?

How can weblogs contribute to project visualization?

Annotation.

1. Associate each project post with one or more tasks, issues, milestones, and deliverables on a given project.
2. Enable a few extra attributes for a post: Red/Yellow/Green Priority (U.S. cultural bias). 
3. Create a view into a team's weblog posts organized by the work breakdown structure, another by priority  

PM is about the conversation more than formal modeling. It is how we come to appreciate project dreams and know project reality. We discover our colleagues' capabilities and limits. We negotiate commitments. We make the thousand mid-course corrections to the project plan. My project communication templates help you script some of those conversations.

But conversation is narrative and auditory. How do we get the best characteristics of project conversation into visual media? Into electronic visual media?

Thanks to experience designer Diego Lafuento for the Tufte pointer.

 [aka design]