I've heard it said by Dave Winer and many many others: if only Dean had reinvested half the money raised into the Internet, then ...

OK, so you're the Dean Campaign Chief Information Officer in August 2003. The money starts to roll in. $20 million over six months, $2-4 million per month.

What would you spend the money on?

1. What does your monthly budget look like?
2. What is your application and infrastructure portfolio?
3. How much will you allocate to maintenance?
4. You're building from scratch, so what problems do you hope to avoid through wise architecture?
5. What are your big milestones?
6. Who are your key vendors?

How do you spend in consonance with the campaign strategy?

1. How will you use the Internet to bring offline voters into the campaign at the same numbers as radio or television broadcasts?
2. What is your online strategy for responding to attack ads and opposition pundits in radio, television and print?
3. Online community takes time to build and is very hard to organize geographically. What will you do to match the state-by-state primary schedule?
4. What can you do with online services to serve the campaign in caucus states?
5. You are preparing for Bush to launch in Spring 2004. What are your countermeasures to reach out to moderate Republicans online while the GOP uses its advanced voter email systems to barrage 200 million validated email addresses?
6. How will you lower the cost-per-vote vs. the GOP?

Working notes from D. Keith Robinson's project of moving most of the hospital's intranet into Moveable Type. Useful observations on deployment, template design, new uses (project coordination). "Don’t let anyone tell you that you need to spend thousands of dollars to do distributed authorship or content management the right way. It’s simply not true." (Staff time excluded, of course.)

Director Ron Howard spoke about project management with Charlie Rose this week.

On executive sponsorship of projects...

If they're going to make a movie, it's a big deal. Every movie is an investment, a commitment. You want a studio that believes.

Finding a project's spirit. Project scope as narrative...

It's my hook on the movie. It's making some sort of connection or defining a thematic value that I think I understand and that I think I can express to an audience. Then I have something to bring it. Otherwise I'm a technician setting up camera angles. I can do that, but I'm not really offering anybody much. But if I can come to understand the story, then I have conversations with the actors that can add up to something that can be meaningful. And I have a way of evaluating each and every moment. Because at the end of the day it's not so much about setting up camera angles, it's really about making a thousand little choices during the course of any one day.

The payback from effective communication of your vision...

Once you discover what the film can be, you can then begin to sort of rally everyone. And it becomes a kind of an organism. And it's moving together. And it's exciting to be at the center of that. Because this consciousness is now making a lot of creative decisions and suddenly it's very exciting because everyone's ideas are working in concert in synch. As a director you wind up saying 'yes' a lot more than you say 'no' because you've been able to create a sort of a sensibility, you know how to fulfill it and everyone starts seeing roughly the same movie. That's what I love, that's what excites me. 

Can you say emergent project management? 

[a klog apart]

Matt Mower skyped me in my early morning hours. Blame errors or recollection on being awake all night.

Speaking from theory, what might be some core business cases for intranet blognets?

Project communication.

Team blogs. Project aggregators and RSS feeds. Individual blogs. Blog your thinking as you scope the project. Blog flash reports. Meeting minutes. Task notes. Use a blog-to-email gateway for stakeholder communications. Socialize new project members faster and more completely. Create better after action reports.

Projects often fail due to poor communication. Blogs aren't a magic pill, but they are a fast and cheap way to produce more and better communication. More, because blogs lower some of the barriers to communication and create personal and peer reinforcement for sharing. Better, because blognets' social nature also improves the quality and context of those communications. The PMBOK describes a basic project communication; you can live it with blognets.

Scale social network from small to medium, medium to large

When your workforce can fit in your neighborhood Starbucks, everyone knows each other. Blognets help you scale that experience. Do you plan for growth? Foster blognets to smooth the way, to preserve values and culture, to reinforce the informal organization that gets things done.

Cross stovepipes

Marketing doesn't talk to engineering? Raise two blognets. Expose them to each other with discovery tools. Not only are you getting blogging's baseline benefits, hidden processes and thinking see daylight, and you can improve the quality of dialog.

Due diligence

Merging with another department or company? Buying one in the next few years? Selling your company? Start your blognets now. Help appraisers value your org's social capital. Reveal the power of your informal networks, your workforce's individual and collective knowledge and capacity.

You're buying one of two apparently identical firms, but one has a healthy blognet. Which has lower risk? Which gives you an added factor to consider, reinforcing management's claims?

Transition and Continuity Management

Your chiefs adopt a new strategy. The new direction calls for changing the workforce over 2-3 years. Layoffs. Mergers. Retraining. Recruiting. Retirement. For the chiefs, blognets shorten new hire learning curves. Help two organizations merge their informal social networks faster and with less struggle. For individuals, blognets strengthen your personal brand (good or bad, but stronger) and improve your marketability within the enterprise.

And I haven't even evoked tying blogs to your enterprise systems and processes.

[a klog apart]

 

via Roland Tanglao: Michael Angeles presentation on Lucent Technologies' intranet blogging at a Usability Professionals Association meeting. Download presentation slides with notes, PDF. (5 MB) While he doesn't reveal number of intranet bloggers (my obsession) he describes the range of tools, categories of users, and the nature of blogging.

Michael, an experienced blogger in his own right (see IAslash, urlgreyhot) also shows deep understanding of how blogs fit into his enterprise's IT architecture. Creating blogfodder via RSS from corporate databases. Providing tools for search and discovery. Supporting knowledge workers and communities of practice.

If you're coming to my BloggerCon Sunday session on workplace blogging, this should be on your reading list.

Michael Gartenberg and Chris Sells blame the user, not the tool. Room enough for both, I think. There is always the question of doing the wrong thing more efficiently. Or using a tool as a crutch or substitute for presentation prep and delivery skills.

I'm quite fond of some common tips:

1. One idea per slide
2. Replace words with pictures
3. Fewer words are better. One word or phrase is best.  
4. Talk over slide transitions

That said, nothing replaces rehearsal to perfection, clear organization, ruthless editing, and people skills.

The folks at NewsGator share a case study. 

Triple Point Technology has transformed the way they share information within the enterprise. From critical build and release notifications, to internal publishing and collaboration, publishing via RSS has dramatically changed their information landscape.

Michael Sippey summarizes: 

It's not really about weblogs at all, rather it's about how RSS (or whatever you want to call it) can be used to augment typical email- and web-based collaboration systems. Key points:

• Feeds are generated not only by individuals, but also by teams, and by software. They publish the output of their release management system in RSS. They've retrofitted Sharepoint to output RSS streams for watched folders.
• They're driving the posts right into their mail client (Outlook), which is where info workers seem to spend an inordinate amount of time. No need for training on a new piece of software, and power users can customize views to their heart's content.
• The subscription model is much more efficient and user-driven than internal mail archives. A couple of years ago I wrote a piece for theobvious on how I wanted Yahoo Groups for my intranet. The key thing there was (a) discovery and (b) user control over subscription. An OPML directory and user-controlled aggregator solves that problem. No more sysadmin time dealing with "hey, can you put me on this list for the next few weeks while I monitor what's going on with this project?"

If the blog/feed/echo/rss whatever thing takes off inside large organizations, and thousands of people, teams and systems inside companies like IBM or HP or Sun start blogging, there's gotta be a market for the intranet equivalent of blo.gs where users could learn of recently updated feeds they don't subscribe to, find new ones based on existing subscription lists, etc. (Question: is anyone selling software like this today? To slurp up user's OPML files and discover relationships and create an interlinked directory?)

Sippey gets it. So does Triple Point.

John Robb asks:

1. Can blogs can replace portals?
2. If so, what are the relative costs, benefits, ROI?

His answers (and I concur):

1. Yes for everything except "adding a web front end to business apps"
2. Blogs look better:
• Costs: $142 vs. $807 per desktop (Costs 82% less)
• Benefits: $1,658 vs. $1,886 per desktop (Delivers 88% of the value)
• ROI: 1,170% vs. 240% (or 4.9 times the ROI)

Considering that so many projects:

• Aren't funded at all in this economy
• Fail completely (around 25% are cancelled or aborted)
• Fail partially (blowing scope, schedule, or budget)

Setting up a klognet seems like a low risk, high payoff proposition.

President Marty Morrow posted this project manager gig to his blog a few weeks' ago. As outsourcing and offshoring grow, so will Quovix, a project/product management collaborative software company.  

CVS as Blogger. Bill Lazar seeks programmers interested in bootstrapping a new system. Improve project communication by having your codebase blog.

Yes, blog.

You're all busy doing your own thing, coding here, checking stuff in there, testing this, trying that. Common point of reality? The code. Keeper of the reality? Your configuration management system.

Bill's solution: Wrap common events in plain english and post them to a weblog. Syndicate the results if you like. Add your project CVS to your blogroll. Comment on your CVS's posts in your own blog.

Wanted: Programmers and QA folks interested in making a tool that will extend the five most popular code management systems with a blogging interface. Contact Product Manager Bill. Bill is an alum of both Sun and Pyra, has a Rutgers MBA, and is polishing his C# in his spare time.

p.s. Bill pays attention to movies in the works. Very cool. He's interested in syndicating this content while preserving its structure. Any suggestions?