Beer Tokens, Celery & Best Practice Conference UK

So I’ll be down in old London town next week for a few days attending the SharePoint European Best Practice Conference, unfortunately I’m not presenting this year, but I will be down listening to some great sessions and interacting, meeting & generally innovating the hell out of my time there!

My aim, as well as to learn as much as I can and meet as many interesting people as possible is to be a:

“Pain in the ass change agent”

On that note we (@AndrewWoody and I) have come up with an awesome offer for those of you attending #BPCUK to get hold of a free beer for just 21seconds (ish) of your time!

Context

We really want to hear about your SharePoint stories, whatever your exposure to SharePoint has been and ideally on one of these topics:

• Your bad SharePoint Celery Experiences
• How you avoided the SharePoint Celery effect
• SharePoint Governance, what’s it mean to you?
• Business requirements “gone wrong”
• Some other SharePoint related 21sec story!

Offer

 

 

 

We want to video you (on my iPhone) talking at the BPCUK event for about 21seconds about something above…

We will compile the video’s and use them shamelessly and relentlessly to market 21apps and to give you your well deserved fame!

They’ll likely be published to YouTube and FaceBook and may end up on www.21apps.com.

There are only going to be 30 limited edition 21apps Beer Tokens available across the 3 days, so get in there ASAP!

I’ll be redeeming them in a “local bar”, early evening, near the conference venue, that does proper beer, place to be decided! (let me know if you have any suggestions)

Contact

So if you know me then just grab me at some point and we’ll record a quick video on the above topics.

If you don’t know me then get hold of me these ways:

Email – Ant [at] 21apps [dot] com

Twitter – @Soulsailor

Schedule a Doodle MeetMe - http://doodle.com/AntClay

One of these routes will definitely work, if not I’ll be mainly in the IW or Community track or drinking too much coffee & beer somewhere…

I look forward to capturing your 21seconds of SharePoint fame & having a beer with you!

21things to do after attending our SharePoint Governance & IA Master Class

Although I presented the course at the last SPIAUK in London last month, it was only 3 months previous that I first sat in the same room listening to Paul Culmsee & Andrew Woodward imparting their knowledge and experience, what a huge learning curve!

From my experience, it can definitely be daunting being so hyped-up from two days of new ways of thinking and innovative techniques to be dumped unceremoniously back into your “real world of work”.

This blog post will hopefully give you some guidance (more like governance – to steer!) as to what to do next to maximise the value of attending the course.

It is I admit a leap of faith, but its worth it and the benefits to yourself and you customers is immense.

My story went a little like this:

The master class was great, being involved in running it I’d seen the content before hand which helped, but straight out of the course and my mind was blown!

There’s lots to take in, whether its the Cynefin Framework, platitudes, f-laws, robot-barbie, Dialogue Mapping, wicked problems, goal alignment, ROI, KPI’s, governance structures, XMind, IBIS, Balsamiq, taxonomy etc

So what did I do to use this great knowledge, tools and techniques and turn-them into differentiators in my day to day work?

The first thing to do is not to panic, pick-up the manual and calmly thumb through all 500-odd pages, as you pass stuff that really resonated on the day make a note of it, I’m sure that although it is all applicable content, there’s going to be a handful of content that really, really grabbed you…

I did this and came up with the following “stuff” that I personally really “got” excited about:

• Cynefin Framework
• Dialogue Mapping
• Using X-Mind as an IA diagramming tool
• Strategic Focus Area Maps

So I looked at how I could weave these things into client engagements and add value…

Cynefin is very useful (with the wicked problem checklist perhaps) for explaining why SharePoint projects are so damned hard and don’t always deliver business value (See my post on “The Celery Effect”)

Dialogue mapping or the retrospective approach (issue mapping) we use a lot to remove the great swathes of prose out of typical documents and articulate meetings with a huge degree of clarity.

We’ve embedded both Strategic Focus Area maps and dialogue maps into our 21shift approach to consulting (SharePoint Organisational Shift Model).

There’s lots more stuff that I’ll be applying in my day to day work from the Master Class as time goes by, some of the more SharePoint specific concepts around Search and SharePoint taxonomies are really useful, I want to go much deeper with the “CFO talk” and ROI concepts and of course the “Facet’s of Collaboration” will be a great way to shape an organisations business outcomes based on the SharePoint platform effectively and avoiding the dreaded Robot-Barbie effect!

Here’s 21things you should (and shouldn’t) consider doing, to hopefully help you in this transition:

1. Don’t panic!
2. Breathe deeply (there a lot of stuff to take in!), you won’t remember it all and some may not fully make sense in the cold light of day, but persevere!
3. Join the LinkedIn group, its a great resource
4. Twitter is a great way to connect and share experience or ask for help
5. Read the manual! Yes its big, yes it’ll take a while, but its worth reading and definitely something you should be dipping back in again every so often to refresh your mind
6. Don’t try to do everything!
7. Talk the talk – What we went through on the course is probably very different to your old methods of working, start by removing platitudes and talking about outcomes in your day to day conversations
8. Talk to the business, actually try to “be” the business 
9. Stop talking in geek-speak
10. Start with the tools or techniques that really resonated with you, quite a few things we talked about had a low barrier to entry, start with those
11. Try using one or two tools or techniques that you struggled with on the course in private, you may find that outside of the master class environment they may work for you
12. Remember Governance means “to steer”, the course and courseware is the means to the end or a blueprint to follow by the letter
13. Have a go at (use a whiteboard) listing out the common activities in your role and then go through the course manual mapping the techniques to what you do.. The applicability and potential value may surprise you!
14. Blog about your experiences on the course (let us know!)
15. Blog about how you’ve used what you’ve learnt on the master class in real world scenarios (let us know!)
16. Run “brown bag” sessions with your colleagues, having to explain this content is a great way of learning it!
17. Go and buy a roll of MagicWhiteboard!
18. Practising using tools like dialogue mapping is very important. People have mapped the news, songs, family discussions as well as internal meetings as practice.
19. Adapt the tools to how you work and what you need to achieve, remove things, add things and improve things (we’re always interested in hearing about this)
20. Don’t force tools and techniques, especially when your working with a client, if it doesn’t work or the client “doesn’t get it” then stop, use something else and learn from the experience
21. Get 21apps into your organisation to help drive the value and adoption within your organisation and clients!

That’s my experience and some thoughts of how you can start using the tools and techniques acquired at the SharePoint 2010 Governance and IA Master Class.

It isn’t easy, if it was you wouldn’t have needed to go on the Master Class, but the value of shifting your mind-set is HUGE!

And if you feel you do need some extra support, feel free to get in touch with myself at 21apps and we would happily come into your organisation to do a Free 1/2 day workshop and support you in getting buy-in and adoption from your colleagues, stakeholders and customers.

Hope this helps!

Free 2 Hour Workshop on Delivering Public Sector SharePoint Business Value!

For those of you who work for a UK Public Sector organisation and attended UK Gov Camp 2011, or wanted toattend or couldn’t make it or just weren’t allowed out to play that day, we at 21apps are offering all our new Public Sector friends a proper, honest, free offer in these hard times and austerity cuts!

We appreciate that organisational change, driving efficiencies and delivering citizen services can, where it is appropriate, be facilitated, supported or enabled with innovative technology solutions and that SharePoint is for more and more organisations the platform that IT departments are placing their bets on, but this is a significant investment in both time and financial terms and so it makes sense to really focus effort on ensuring you use the platform to deliver value and not just be another “troublesome IT System” or “failed technology project”.

If you have SharePoint already within your organisation or are interested in implementing SharePoint or Office 365 then we would love to have a few hours of your time to have a conversation about how you can deliver business value and not end up with a celery project!

Whether your a CxO, Director, business user or in IT you’re more than welcome to engage us.

We don’t mind whether we chat over the phone, video conference, come to your organisation or just meet-up somewhere..

What’s important is that you have a real interest in SharePoint and/or Office 365 and you really want to make the most of the technology to deliver real organisational value?

What will we talk about?

Well, we will probably tell you a little bit about 21apps, but we’ll want to find out a load about you… Then we’ll discuss what you’re trying to achieve with the technology, what your organisational objectives are etc.. We’ll probably follow, albeit fairly quickly, our 6 stage 21apps SharePoint Organisational Shift Model:

1. Identity
2. Vision
3. Outcomes
4. Solutions
5. Delivery
6. Realisation

But we’re happy to take things in a different direction if there are specific challenges you have and want our opinions, guidance or help on?

So what are you waiting for?

I’m in Public Sector

I’m interested in SharePoint or Office 365

I have a few hours to spare

I want to deliver SharePoint Business Value.

Give us a call, drop us an email, IM us or find us on Twitter…

We’re looking forward to meeting you and helping you realise SharePoint Public Sector Business Value…

A first step or a huge leap? UK Gov Camp 2011 #UKGC11

 

 

 

WOW! What a great day myself and Andrew Woodward had at the UK Gov Camp ‘11 held at Microsoft’s London Victoria office.

We were really excited and pleased to be both attending and being able to sponsor as well! This event and those on a more “local” stage are of immeasurable importance to the future of public sector IT and of citizen services. For us as 21apps it’s important because we are committed to focussing our efforts to work with public sector clients.

This wasn’t my first unconference but it was by far the largest and Dave Briggs and Steph Gray, also special thanks to Lloyd Davies for doing such an awesome  job of getting close to 200 people to introduce themselves, 6 companies to pitch their products, and 50-odd people to suggest session ideas in less than 45 minutes?

As it was an unconference, if you wanted a session you had to pitch it… so we did, and Paul Clarke captured me in full “SharePoint isn’t evil” flow!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/paul_clarke/

REWORK Public Sector Session…
So the first session I went to was led by Jon aka @publicsectorpm with me supporting/co-presenting. Jon did a great job of facilitating and the session was focussed on public sector organisational behaviours and what can be learnt from start-ups such as 37signals. It was a great conversation, we didn’t get through as many points as we had planned, and i’m not sure that we really got to the essence of public sector changing behaviour towards a start-up mentality, but none the less it was extremely interesting

Hungry:
So stupidly or just accidently myself and Andrew were both doing SharePoint Saturday EMEA Live Online, Andrew doing a session about the future of the “SharePoint app store” and I did a session on SharePoint Business Value… so although the sessions went well for both of us, it meant I had no lunch…

Agile in Public Sector Session:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/paul_clarke/

I came in late to this session after getting way-laid with some great corridor-discussions..but I was early enough to manage to get hold of Paul Clarke’s chocolate brownies and to witness some great discussions around the applicability and experiences of "agile” in public sector, Andrew Woodward contributing some great thoughts into the varied and value filled conversations.

SharePoint Business Value Session

My last session of the day (before Beer o’clock) was to run with Andrew Woodward a session on SharePoint.. purpose being to spark-off conversations about how public sector are using SharePoint, whether they are getting value and if not then talking about our views around how you can deliver value.

It was a lively, frank and extremely interesting discussion with a mix of contributors and points of view, the highlights were one particular persons “shite intranet” and our “SharePoint celery”!

The bits in the middle:
Throughout the day there were a host of introductions, conversations & awesome people to listen and learn from; Microsoft were great hosts and the karma, culture and openness left us all in awe.

Definitely the most worthwhile 10 hours or so that I have spent for a long time..

Finally:
If you didn’t get to attend then I recommend you drop everything and go next year and just to prove the point here’s some awesome posts etc

http://ukgc11.posterous.com/

http://prezi.com/9wsd38pi3cgf/delivering-a-better-government-an-invitation-to-experience-ukgovcamp11/

http://www.ukgovcamp.com/

http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=3758314

http://forestandtrees.wordpress.com/2011/01/24/random-reflections-on-ukgc11/

http://ow.ly/3IZtc

http://bit.ly/dJhSeK

21apps Does UKGovCamp 2011

Community activities, both around Local Government and SharePoint  are at the core of 21apps activities and to that end we are extremely proud to be attending AND sponsoring UK GovCamp 2011 (http://www.ukgovcamp.com/).

Look out for the awesome T-Shirts with 21apps emblazoned on them!!

So, why is UK GovCamp so important to us at 21apps?

Well for a start it's our money that the Public Sector is spending and services to us and our families that are getting delivered, so why wouldn't we want to make sure that:

1. The Public Sector really does deliver value
2. We really understand the issues, challenges and opportunities 
3. How Private companies like us can help deliver business value

We also truly believe what the outgoing government CIO John Suffolk told Civil Service Live, that the civil service's track record of delivering transformational change "has not been as good as many of us would like" and: 

"Much of the civil service is built for comfort and carefulness, not speed, efficiency and effectiveness.

The civil service has a once in a generation opportunity to step back and ask:

What do we need to look like?
How do we need to operate?
What culture do we need to drive accountability, efficiency, effectiveness?"

We feel that there has never been a better time to focus on driving business value from your technology deployments especially in areas such as SharePoint and Office 365.

Also other factors should be considered such as Systems Thinking,  Organisational RightShifting and Hybrid Organisations.

There’s a world of opportunity for us all to make a positive difference to the public sector despite the economic and service challenges.

We hope to see you and your colleagues at UK GovCamp 2011, feel free to come and grab us for a chat. 

If you’re not going to be there then feel free to get in touch and we’d love to meet up and continue this conversation.

Lastly, if you want to hear more about my thoughts and the views and experience of us all at 21apps then please subscribe to our new newsletter… http://eepurl.com/b3uEj

First edition is out on the 10th January!

Shift your Organisation with SharePoint & 21apps

Over the last few years it's become increasingly apparent that technology led SharePoint projects are like celery, they burn up lots of energy yet deliver limited or no real value.

In my experience, and that of my colleagues at 21apps, there are some fundamental traits or SharePoint project issues that we frequently come across:

• Solution delivery of projects based upon platitudes rather than shared understanding of business outcomes
• Technology deployment framing and guiding the functional requirements
• Lack of KPI’s and measurability of the project delivery. How do we know we have delivered the solution and met the business objectives
• Business Value versus Business Requirements – the dichotomy of business requirements.

Requirement	Versus	Value
Document library MySite Workflow Search Wiki		Facilitate a non-hierarchical organisation where people collaborate to resolve problems and find the best approach or the information that they need to do their jobs, real time access to knowledge in a useable form

We like to view our approach as an antidote to SharePoint projects that fail to deliver any measurable value. The 21apps fresh approach to the delivery of projects is based upon what the organisation is trying to achieve, in line with the higher level objectives, and not based on individuals wants or cool features that techies want to play with.

Oh and please stop calling it a “SharePoint project”, your end users and customers don’t care about the technology; I've told you this before, but your still doing it aren't you?

We've spent the last few months distilling, reviewing, mulling over, collaborating, reading, thinking, tweeting, and generally pooling knowledge and experience to see if we could put things down on paper. Out of this we have built the foundations of the “21apps SharePoint Organisational Shift Model”; which we believe to be a more compelling approach to solving business problems with SharePoint and Office 365, and delivering more for less.

The model has the following stages:

1. Identity - Where are you with respect to 21apps SharePoint Organisational Shift Model?

2. Vision - What is your organisational vision and strategy? Consolidating a shared understanding of where you are going and what you need to achieve.

3. Outcomes - We facilitate the definition of value, outcomes and requirements you need to deliver for your organisation, business, customers, citizens or stakeholders.

4. Solution - We help you define your organisation and solution architectures, including IA and Governance.

5. Delivery - Through our governance models and leadership we help you deliver the organisational vision and value. Helping you understand the value of continuous delivery of solutions and services, and continuous improvement.

6. Realisation - Measuring the realisation of business outcomes, and looking forward through the re-iteration of the identity and vision stages.

We believe we have a new approach to delivering projects, to be honest the approach would work across any technology platform, but for us SharePoint and Office 365 is our primary focus and that’s where we can see the Model delivering real value.

Behind the Model there are numerous really interesting theory’s and bodies of knowledge, each having a massive amount of rigour and research, all looking to improve the way we work:

• Organisational Rightshifting
• Systems Thinking
• Hybrid Organisations
• Lean / Agile / Kanban

Each of these is pretty cool in isolation, but combined with our SharePoint, development, delivery, strategic experience and knowledge, they offer a compelling approach to delivering SharePoint business value.

What’s next for the 21apps SharePoint Organisational Shift Model?

• A suite of techniques, processes and methodologies to support the entire Model
• Workshops so we can educate our clients, and share our passion and experience to help others deliver SharePoint business value
• More blog posts
• Enhancing 21SCRUM to better support “shared understanding”
• Where appropriate developing new products
• And keep this to yourselves, we're also gonna write a book!

There needs to be a seismic shift in the way things get delivered; it is an exciting time to be in business and to be part of this. We are passionate about what we are doing, our experience shows that this does work and we really can help you deliver more for less.

If anything in this post strikes a chord with you, or you want to find out more please talk to us. We would love to help you deliver SharePoint Business Value with SharePoint and Office 365!

East Anglian Celery – A tale of SUGUKEA

I had the great pleasure of being invited to talk at the 2nd SharePoint User Group UK East Anglia last night.

The event was extremely well run by Peter Baddeley and the guys from ISC Software Solutions Ltd with myself and Mark Macrae speaking and a great mix of attendees.

I think I may have done the least technical SUGUK presentation EVER!

It was a (worryingly for some I think) titled session “Don’t do SharePoint Projects (The celery effect):

At one point I counted 3 SharePoint projects that were looking a little like “celery” and were going to get stopped, re-started & renamed this morning… I do hope noone lost their jobs over my radical advice!

Stop Doing SharePoint Projects

View more presentations from Ant Clay.

Feel free to comment/feedback on the presentation if you attended, or the slide deck on Slideshare if you didn’t:

http://bit.ly/Feedback2Ant

Mark Macrae luckily rocked up from over Nottingham way and restored the balance with a great overview of the tools and power of SharePoint 2010’s Business Intelligence (Insights) capabilities:

As is expected of a SUGUK event, there was great pizza and coffee laid on by our hosts in the break and we all shared a really interesting SharePint or two afterward in the hotel bar.

Once again, thank to everyone who helped organise the great event and took the time to attend… See you all soon!

TechEd Offer - Discounted SharePoint IA/Governance Antidote to Geekyness

There is less than two weeks to go before the SharePoint 2010 Governance and Information Architecture Master Class being organised by 21apps, run by Paul Culmsee and supported by our very own Andrew Woodward. Time is ticking away if you want in on the most useful non-geek-filled SharePoint event of 2010.

So for those of you weary travellers on your way to, or in the midst of or recovering from Microsoft TechEd Europe, have a think about what the key challenges are to your company’s or your clients SharePoint implementation is?

I’d bet my #Movember Mo  that all of these master class outcomes will be of major value to you all in solving those challenges this year:

• Understand the SharePoint governance lens beyond an IT service delivery focus
• Develop your ‘wicked problem’ radar and apply appropriate governance practices, tools and techniques accordingly
• Learn how to align SharePoint projects to broad organisational goals, avoid chasing platitudes and ensure that the problem being solved is the right problem.

So now you’ve had your fill of geekyness at TechEd, give your SharePoint business stakeholders some real value by taking advantage of this one week only* TechEd Europe HUGE £245 discount!

Shout it from the rooftops…

I need me some SharePoint IA & Governance Loving!

 

* Get your tickets ordered by close of play Mon 15th Nov

Is Ray Ozzie's gift to Microsoft the Hybrid Organisation vision?

In answer to a post that Andrew Woodward recently wrote on the Hybrid Organisations LinkedIn Group that made the following assertion:

His New Dawn blog post suggests that the last 5 years were about creating the seamless OS that enables the the Hybrid Organisation to exist.

http://ozzie.net/docs/dawn-of-a-new-day/

It will be interesting seeing how the next 5 years shape up. Any predictions?

I wrote the following which I thought was worthwhile sharing with you guys not in the group (feel free to disagree!)

--------------------------------------------------------------

Certainly from a technological perspective, he [Ray Ozzie] has paved the way and lowered some of the barriers to entry for an organisation to put in place the technology platforms [such as Office365] to facilitate a transition to a Hybrid Organisation.

What fascinates me more though is the effect Ray may have had on the culture and organisational growth Microsoft has witnessed over the last 5 years and will have in the coming decade. My prediction is that Microsoft will rapidly "eat its own dog-food" in terms of platforms and services and will transform more of its operations (physical, technological and cultural) to be "Hybrid" in nature.

It makes so much sense for Microsoft at a corporate revenue level but also more importantly IMHO in engaging it's partners and customers and evolving product development.

Taking this further, one small stumbling block I see for the take-up of the Physical aspects of Hybrid Organisations is those organisations who have heavily invested in bricks and mortar already have a serious challenge ahead in getting shod of those investments in a sensible and economically justifiable manner.

A way out of this perhaps is, with more and more start-ups, consultancy's and hybrid organisations "being born" into the UK, would be for these companies to open up their bricks and mortar and allowing co-operation, co-location and co-working to occur. Rented office and collaboration spaces will become a strategic asset as they foster a more appropriate cultural perspective, enhance collaboration, innovation and strong partnerships.

Picture the UK Microsoft's offices at Thames Valley Park. I can't imagine how much empty space, desks and meeting rooms there is to potentially accommodate their substantial and geographically disparate work-force, but how awesome would it be if great swathes of that space was opened up for start-ups and Microsoft partners to meet and collaborate in and around the great talent pool that exists within Microsoft.

What an unprecedented catalyst to UK innovation that would be!

Ray Ozzie's gift to Microsoft is most definitely the foundations for Hybrid Organisations, but how many people and businesses realise the value of his vision...

Dear SharePoint Project Stakeholders

 

All,

Thank-you all for your input into the “SharePoint project” up to now, your time and efforts have been greatly valued.

I do have to unfortunately inform you that the “SharePoint Project” is being suspended today because I have gained new insights into how SharePoint projects should really be run (from engaging with the guys at 21apps), and we need to re-start this project with a focus on business value.

This project will be re-started tomorrow and called the [Insert your own business value project name] “Call Centre Knowledge Retention Project”. I will need to meet with you all to elicit your business value statements rather than just your “requirements” and then we as a project team can deliver some clear and meaningful value to you, that just happens to be based upon the Microsoft SharePoint platform.

Sorry for the change in tack, but the reality is that you are the end customer and its  about delivering business value not about the technology-based requirements.

Regards,

IT Project Sponsor

--------------------------

Referenced from: http://www.twitvid.com/7RSXJ