Blogs
Paying for lunch
There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. Too often, the tragedy of the commons results in a free rider problem. The attainment of selective benefits by individuals in the process of contributing to the public good has been argued to help mitigate this problem.
Designing effective meetings
- Keep the meeting and discussion on schedule pursuant to the agenda.
- Ensure appropriate representatives are in attendance.
- Ensure meetings adhere to and follows the guidelines established within the charter and other applicable procedures and guidelines.
- Prepare and distribute agendas and minutes in advance of the meeting
- Review the agenda prior to the meeting and come prepared to discuss topics.
- Provide information on the subject of the meeting in advance to support the process of determining the disposition.
- Review topics and verify that the appropriate representatives will complete their preparations prior to placing it on the agenda
- Separate agenda items into topics for information, discussion, or decisions
- Have an explicit basis for voting identified (what's a quorum?)
- Have action item reviews at the end of the agenda, and periodic summaries on the agenda
- Ensure that work required by other bodies are appropriately coordinated
- Maintain records of meetings (minutes, attachments, etc.)
- Notify individuals of action items assigned by the group.
- Have a plan to call special meetings if emergencies arise which require immediate group action.
Communicating concepts of operations
Concepts are powerful symbols of meaning in communications. They allow us to organize our knowledge and understanding within a context, and provide a framework to structure the objects and their interactions over time. Concepts can thus help us to integrate apparently unrelated observations and phenomena into viable hypothesis and theories about the world. Readers can then use these concepts to communicate and validate current aspects about a system, and assess the potential value of changes which are under consideration.
A Concept of Operations (ConOps) is a documentation approach used to summarize the value proposition of development projects. It is frequently used within aerospace and defense applications, but is equally applicable to enterprise IT projects as well. A graphical concept map often is used to communicate similar information. However, the graphical depictions often must be narrated or walked through with supplemental descriptions in order for the underlying concepts to be consistently understood by different people or over different timeframes. Use case diagrams suffer similar ambiguity. read more »
More rowers, fewer coxswain
When performance issues arise with teams, the underlying belief is often that these issues have resulted from a lack of adequate direction. In response, businesses often add extra layers of oversight and encouragement to reinforce this direction to the workforce, and clarify what is expected. Too often, and especially when done in haste, these additional levels of review and pressure are implemented while there are still overlapping and fuzzy allocations of responsibility. This often results in inconsistent and poorly communicated direction, which can confuse the people who have to actually make progress towards achieving the goal, and erode their efficiency. Unfortunately, since they are the ones already behind schedule, this may hurt, rather than help, their efforts to move in the right direction more quickly and more effectively. read more »
