Read More Steven's new book is Legal Project Management: Control Costs, Meet Schedules, Manage Risks, and Maintain Sanity, available now from DayPack Books and Amazon.
 About the Images The images at the top of the page are all taken from (or in) my office on Lopez Island, about 70 miles northwest of Seattle, except for the shots of the Space Needle (from a great photo by my daughter) and my eyes.
|
One of my business lines is tied to Google Voice. Today I got a voice message that was automatically transcribed by Google.
I’m impressed.
It wasn’t perfect, but the subject matter was very abstruse. However, it nailed all of the normal-speech parts of the conversation.
Based on experience, my guess is that most voice messages are fairly straightforward. When will you be home? Is Joe coming to the meeting? Please call me back. Hi, this is Joe Blow, and I’m running for Congress.
There are two huge advantages to transcriptions.
- You can read them on your computer or SmartPhone — and people generally read a lot faster than they listen.
- Reading is silent; there is little more annoying than people in a conference room or shared office trying to listen to voicemail.
Transcription isn’t perfect. However, when there is low clarity, you can go back to the voice version… which isn’t always all that clear either.
We’ve come a long way since Garry Trudeau singlehandedly killed off the Apple Newton!
 It started with this one.  There were more in the series, but this is considered the classic.
1. What the heck is up with the title Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire? I’m an author too, and while no one is likely to make a movie from my book, I’d be embarrassed to have to deal with a movie titled Failure: Based on the Book “Legal Project Management” by Steven B. Levy. What’s next? Avatar: Based on the Screenplay “Avatar” by the Actual Winner’s Ex-Husband?
2. I’ve been part of an online discussion with other sometime musicians around the best-score award, which went to Up. The Avatar score was haunting, but Avatar would have been pretty much the same movie even if John “Star Wars” Williams or Elmer “Magnificent Seven” Bernstein had scored it. Up, however, was defined by the wordless four-minute sequence near the start that shows the two characters growing through 70 years of life. It was this sequence where an animated film moved through a magic curtain to become personal and real, and it was the score that made the sequence work.
Not all of John Williams’ or Elmer Bernstein’s music is as bombastic as the two movies I mentioned, by the way. Williams also scored Schindler’s List and Bernstein did A River Runs Through It. for example.
Here’s a clip of that scene from Up on YouTube. Listen to how the simple melody transforms constantly, especially the change a minute and a half into the scene.
I’ve been working with the Microsoft Office 2010 beta for a few months. Like many, I’ve been wondering, what do you do to enhance products that are already chock-full of features?
PowerPoint struck me as a tough one to add value to; I’m a regular speaker who builds very complex graphics-based slides, and PPT 2007 has worked really well. (I’m proud to say that the deck for my presentation in NYC Wednesday contains only a single slide with bullet points, a list of takeaways on the final slide.) Still, they’ve added a number of things that make it a “must” upgrade for me.
Perhaps surprisingly, there are also a few items that enhance it for relatively inexperienced users who just want to make their presentations a bit better.
So here are ten high-value items new to PowerPoint 2010:
- Embedded video. Now, when you put video into your presentation and then move it to another machine, the video moves with it.
- Fine-grained control over complex animations. Most PPT animations are not worth the bits they’re printed on, but if used well they can really clarify a point. Now you can make motion-type animations, such as moving an object along a path, a lot smoother. This is pretty nitpicky stuff… unless you really sweat over your presentations, which I do. I hate stuff that breaks the illusion and calls attention to the presentation itself, and this new feature lets me avoid some “corners” that I never felt comfortable with.
- Save presentation as video. Use your presentation to create an actual playback video. You can even add narrations and timings.
- Create sections of files, akin to headings in a Word doc. Now in a long PPT, you can find the individual parts easily. This feature is especially useful when people collaborate on a presentation. Given that PPT is often used in business for creating reports, businesses will find it a lot easier to pull these together from multiple people. (Is PPT the best way to present this info? That’s a different question. Nevertheless, like bullet points, this is a common usage, and PPT 2010 has improved the experience.)
- Include video from YouTube or other online sites. Now you can include YACV (yet another cats video) in your presentation… or even some useful content. You do need a live Internet link to run the video — which makes sense in terms of copyright.
- Place titles and other objects on top of video. Video used to run on top of everything else. Now you can add titles, pointers and arrows, and other objects in the standard bring-forward/send-backward manner. (You can also put the video in a non-rectangular frame.)
- Video controls — brightness, contrast, recoloring — akin to what you can do with pictures.
- Remove background from a picture. It’s not perfect, but it works well enough for most people on many pictures. For years, I’ve been doing this by the very complex method of drawing a closed Bezier curve around the object (that’s the tool that looks like a square with some rounded chunks taken out, called “freeform”); clicking Edit Points to adjust the curves to fit the object better; copy (Ctrl+C) the picture; right click the outline you drew and select Format Shape; select Picture Fill and Fill from Clipboard; trim as needed with the Offset controls. I still have to do that on complex pictures, but I’ve found I can nail about half of them using the new Remove Background feature, a huge timesaver. (Wednesday’s presentation has about 25 pictures from which I’ve cut out the background, from a watch replacing the head on a $500 bill — hourly billing! — to a stamp that says “Done” to a plate with a pretzel. You’ve got to come to the seminar if you want to know how a plate with a pretzel illustrates the concept of managing scope.)
- Better cropping tool, which “ghosts” the cropped part of the image as you work, so you can see what you’re cutting out as well as what you’re leaving in.
- Trim and fade video and audio. No longer do you need a separate editor to cut the end off a video, or fade it in or out.
There are 50 or more new features that add value.
As always, few people other than professional designers will use every feature. However, each user works with a different feature set; that’s why there are so many features in these kinds of programs. The trick is to (a) find the features that make sense for what you’re doing and (b) when you think, “I wish I could do that,” it’s ever more likely that you can do that.
======================
I took part in some ask-the-customer design sessions for Office 2007. Two things struck me that many critics don’t think about, because they don’t play well with the whole bash-Microsoft shtick. (There are lots of legitimate things to get on Microsoft’s case about, but there are many things the company does very well.)
The context is that we had about 15-20 law-firm CIOs and tech leaders in a room; they were asked about what they wanted to see in the next version, then called “Office 12.”
First, there were innumerable conversations like this:
Customer #1: I wish Word would do X in the next version.
Customer #2: It already does it. (Note — it was almost always another customer replying before someone on the Office team could say anything!)
These kinds of conversations sparked the Ribbon. What good are all these powerful features if people don’t know they’re available?
Second, it became clear from those conversations pretty much every feature in Office had fans that considered it essential, detractors who thought it was bloat or unneeded, and others who didn’t know it existed. (Note: Clippy was long gone from Office by this time.) All of those features do have their uses, because people do radically different things with the products. I know people who build reports in PPT, do complex slides, use it as a note-taking tool, even put together videos. All use different features.
When Monty Python sang about it, it was funny. (At least it was funny 40 years ago.) When it takes over your inbox, it’s frustrating. And when someone gets sucked in and loses data, money, or both, it’s a disaster — and a crime that the constabulary can’t seem to get a handle on.
If you think spam has been increasing… well, you’re right. This report in Baseline Magazine notes that 97.5% — 97.5%!! — of email in December and January was spam. [Note: Unfortunately, it's another one of those annoying built-in-Flash-because-the-developer-thinks-it's-cool slide shows.]
The latest trick is manipulating the sent time so that if you keep stuff in your inbox sorted by date, the spam winds up spread throughout the folder; you can’t just pick off the newest stuff on top.
Almost 10% of the spam came from the US. As a US citizen, I find that both embarrassing and infuriating; how is it we can’t catch the folks within our own borders?
====================
The worst part is that about eight years ago Microsoft proposed what still looks like an elegant way to kill spam: make the spammers “pay” for their emails. [The link is to a generally readable page; it then has links to highly technical research papers with more detail.] Microsoft didn’t originate the idea, which has been around since at least 1992, but they actively promoted it for a time.
There was considerable discussion about the idea in the early part of the decade — but there was a lot of “oh, it’s Microsoft, so I don’t like it” and “this isn’t absolutely perfect, so let’s not do it.” That’s the stuff that kills projects, and we’re paying for it today.
Or as Monty Python notes, on the menu “there’s spam, egg, sausage, and spam; that’s not got much spam in it.” Well, now we’re up to spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, egg, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, and spam. (Yes, that’s the proportion.) As far as I’m concerned, that’s got too much spam in it.
Joel on Software — by ex-Microsoft veteran and Fog Creek CEO Joel Spolsky — has been my favorite tech-world blog by far for the past decade.
In two weeks, he’s going off the air — for good, he says, in both senses of “for good.”
Joel, you’ll be missed.
I can think of no one in the tech world with more common sense than Joel, and perhaps only Scott Berkun was his equal.
If you’re a techie, read Joel’s prescient comments on how Microsoft lost a key developer market — written six years ago. (If you know who Don Box is, don’t read the last few paragraphs while drinking milk.) If you’re not a techie, read the section titled The Two Forces at Microsoft, about a third of the way down the page. Even if you don’t understand a few specific references in there, it’ll give you an enormous insight into why Windows has captured market share over the years, one that few folks outside of Microsoft recognize. (It’s also one that increasingly few folks inside Microsoft recognize, unfortunately, though I think Steven Sinofsky, the head of Windows for the past three years who shipped a high-quality Windows 7 in a timely manner, does get it.)
I completely understand Joel’s reasons for abandoning blogging. It’s a significant endeavor, if you try to do it well. (I may not be in Joel’s league, but I do try try to write well, and it takes a fair amount of time even for someone who is a fluid, fluent author.)
I understand it, but I’ll still miss his insights on the world of technology, and on the larger world in which technology lives.
I was going to write this article, but a few days ago Ron Ashkenas at Harvard Business Press in effect wrote it for me.
He nails four issues around believing that data = truth:
- Are we asking the right questions?
- Does our data tell a story?
- Does our data help us look ahead rather than behind?
- Do we have a good mix of qualitative and quantitative data?
The Three Data Points That Matter
At the heart of any organization, there are really three data points that determine success:
- Profitability (present dollars — or yen, Euros, etc.)
- Intent to repurchase (future dollars)
- Key-employee commitment (the future of the company)
I find it odd that in the various corporate data “dumps” I’ve seen, #2 and #3 are often absent. In fact, I don’t recall the last time I saw repurchase intent included as a key metric; usually, it’s the misleading “customer satisfaction” that serves as a (poor) substitute metric.
Even #1 is poorly represented in many corporate metrics, especially within departments. Sure, the company has to publish a P&L (profit and loss statement) if it’s a publicly traded corporation, but departments within it do not. Yet how can employees at all levels make the right decisions without this information?
Internal departments certainly can build data around #1 and #3, and most have a version of #2 as well. Even if you’re a sole-source internal supplier such as IT, it’s important to understand your long-term support within the businesses you serve. (If you’re afraid to ask, you already know the answer.)
If you don’t have all three of these data points, you’re not a data driven organization. Period.
Now, around each of these, add Ron Ashkenas’s four questions. Answer them sensibly and honestly. Now you’re in business.
Why Qualitative (Non-Numerical) Data Matters
Here’s a hypothetical. You are a manufacturer with great quality control procedures. You hear from a very few customers that they have concerns about the quality of one of your parts. However, there are always complainers, and your own quality checks show no untoward problems.
The data says you’re good, right? Sure, maybe you want to rerun a few quality checks, but when they don’t turn up any new issues, you don’t change a well run business.
Now let’s put a couple of specifics in there. Let’s call the manufacturer Toyota, and the part in question is the accelerator system on something called, say, a Prius.
Still all good?
As it looks today — from an outside perspective, based on what’s been in the news — their quite stringent quality control checks turned up no issues. But of course, if a part were mis-designed and built exactly to that spec, it wouldn’t show any issues in manufacturing. Or what if it does turn out to be the floor mats — user error, right?
Quantitatively, right.
Qualitatively, dead wrong — and the pun, unfortunately, applies. Listening to the qualitative data — people are dying in runaway Toyotas — would have, I believe, brought everyone running to focus on figuring out what kind of wild-a** possibilities could cause this to happen. And then they could think about how the company might respond even when unable to figure out what, if anything, was going wrong.
It takes math-smarts to process quantitative data. It takes real-world smarts to process qualitative data.
Math’s easy. Real-world stuff is hard. But you’ve got to do the hard stuff, perhaps even more so than the easy stuff.
You can’t be data-driven by looking only at quantitative data. Or easily collected data. Or incorrect data.
Software vendors are invariably after you to upgrade. Should you? If so, when?
Right now, WordPress — the tool I use to run both my blogs and my Lexician.com site itself — nags me at the top of every screen: “WordPress 2.9.2 is available! Please update now.” [Exclamation point in original.] There’s nothing that tells me why I should update, other than their excitement as conveyed by that exclamation point: “We worked for weeks or days or hours on this version! Ya gotta do it! Now!” Except…
- It’s a minor upgrade to fix a small bug that doesn’t affect me.
- The upgrade to the version before my current one had a serious bug that they failed to catch that led to the hijacking, corruption, and loss of the first year of NoCCrit, including about 250 posts and innumerable comments.
This message staring me in the face for a week, coupled with my beta testing of Office 2010 and discussions with a couple of client folks, got me thinking about when to upgrade. There are, I think, three different upgrade approaches vendors use:
The Big-Release Upgrade
Most server and desktop systems from large vendors follow the Big-Release methodology. Every two to four years, these vendors issue a major new release. Microsoft, for example, released Windows 7 last year, and they’re planning to release Office 2010 in a few months (June, according to word on the Web).
Should you upgrade?
Pros:
- These upgrades are generally safe and competently tested, despite the so-called words of wisdom suggesting you wait until the first service pack.
- They have new features that are likely to be useful, though you may not “get” them until you’ve worked with them. After all, what can Microsoft add to Word at this point that (a) isn’t already in there and (b) you might actually need? Surprisingly, there’s still a lot of room for growth, from little touches — moving the highly valuable Document Map to where users might actually find it and renaming it Navigation Pane — to new ideas such as the online/web version that competes directly with one of Google Doc’s strengths.
Cons:
- It costs money. (It’s a different calculus if you’re on an enterprise-wide license.)
- It takes time and effort, people think. It does take a bit of time while your machine grinds away, but you can do it during lunch. As for effort, Microsoft rolls out new versions to 50,000 people a night internally with virtually no glitches or hassles. If your corporate IT department can’t figure this out, suggest they talk to their Microsoft rep and ask how Microsoft does it. I assure you, there’s no magic, just an IT group that’s got this part of their act together.
- It will break some existing apps built atop the current version. If that’s the case — and I know it often is — then your IT team isn’t learning from experience. Stop doing this! Build on published APIs, not hacks. And then test with the beta versions. Even Microsoft occasionally gets this wrong internally, but it’s usually because a developer tried to do something extra-special and pushed into unsupported territory. That said, occasionally big companies change the underlying model in an unanticipated way, such as the file-formats change in Office 2007.
- You believe you know better than the users what they need. ‘Tain’t so.
The Annual Upgrade
Some companies do annual upgrades as an ongoing revenue stream. I use some music-creation software that used to dun me for annual upgrades, at about $300-400 a year in total. It’s an economic model users hate… but it’s a model that keeps the companies in business, instead of selling maintenance contracts or the like.
Software — mostly — isn’t free. If you have a solution you like that is free, great; go for it. WordPress, for me, is such a solution. On the other hand, I couldn’t have written my book Legal Project Management in anything other than Word (I tried Open Office and Google Docs to see if they’d work).
But often you pay in ease of use, or lack of testing, or intrusive (or hidden) advertising, or no support. There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch — TANSTAAFL, as Robert Heinlein put it. It’s a trade-off, one you should make carefully. Sometimes free is the answer; sometimes it isn’t.
If you don’t take an annual upgrade, you’ll likely pay considerably more for your next upgrade, almost as if you were purchasing new again. Sometimes you can find opportunities to join the “welcome back to previous customers” program and minimize those costs; keep your eye out for them.
The Quick-Turnaround Upgrade
The WordPress 2.9.2 upgrade falls into this category; so do many SaaS/hosted solutions, where they push upgrades out whether you want them or not. Many are insufficiently tested. If you can, resist them for at least a few weeks to see what problems other guinea pigs are turning up; check the support boards, Google for answers (can you Bing for them?), and exercise caution.
The other end of this scale is the semi-automatic upgrades pushed out by Microsoft, Adobe, and other large companies for your desktop software. In an ideal world, I’d put many of these off too, but we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a world with sufficient bad guys who like taking on high-profile targets not just because it’s somehow cool to beat Microsoft’s engineers but because they are actively trying to rip you off if they can get past your computer security. Thus I think there’s little choice but to take upgrades in a timely fashion for popular software such as Windows, QuickTime, and Flash; it’s a matter of security.
These companies have reputations to protect and so they test the heck out of these rapid upgrades. That doesn’t mean they’re foolproof, but it does lower the risk so that taking the upgrade is safer, all told, than not taking it.
Finally, there are the antivirus companies that suck innumerable cycles from your machine with their daily upgrades. Again, the bad guys are truly out there, and so I think you have to accept these daily updates. My main cavil is that not all of these vendors properly throttle down the amount of bandwidth they use to push the updates, so that it can interfere with your use of the computer.
Other
Like any classification scheme, this one isn’t perfect. Where, for example, would you put the every-other-year major service packs for Windows releases? Still, it’s a good framework to think about how and when you want to upgrade, rather than leaving it to chance.
Andrew Buck over at the Project Hut has a post today on Meeting Behaviors: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.
It’s a good post, but it oversimplifies in a few areas. More specifically, it falls into the trap of “all meetings have the same purpose.”
Ain’t true.
Buck’s comments are dead on for many meetings, but there’s more than one type. Here’s a chart I’ve used in various talks:
Meetings are either to inform or discuss, and the content involves either many or few of the participants; see below. (This is a bit of an oversimplification, of course. It also excludes classes and training, which are meetings of a sort.)
Meetings-to-inform can indeed benefit from Buck’s suggestions. These are the most common type in corporate America… and the most frustrating, because the participants know it can be better even if they’re not sure how to get there.
Dilemma meetings should be “taken outside.” When two or three participants spend time debating an item that doesn’t concern the others in the room, the person with power in the room should cut the conversation off — politely — after a minute or two, suggesting that the participants take it up separately.
What if the person with power is one of the participants?
- Good leaders recognize the situation and move themselves to table the matter after a few minutes.
- Occasionally it’s both urgent and important — and this is the only time the participants will be together in the near future. A good leader should briefly explain and apologize before continuing with the dilemma… but a good leader also builds a good team that probably recognizes the situation.
- Sometimes the administrative assistant can actually step up to note that the leader is getting off on a tangent. This works only if (a) there’s an agenda or (b) there’s a clear purpose; see below.
So-called strategy meetings — a/k/a brainstorming sessions — need not an agenda but a purpose, almost a vision for the meeting. The chair of the meeting should not be the leader; the leader and facilitator roles should be kept separate in these types of meetings. In addition, it may take considerable time to try to formulate a point; what may seem a “windbag” in a status meeting can be highly valuable thinking aloud in a brainstorming session.
Three Mistakes
- All meetings are structurally alike, or should be structurally similar. See above.
- All meetings need a detailed agenda. (The “agenda” for a brainstorming session may technically be called that, but — other than reminding people of the time limit and the purpose — it’s not a meeting agenda.)
- Meetings should end on time.
#3 is a trick answer. Most meetings should end at least five minutes before the scheduled end time. Give people time to get to their next meeting, give some time to clear the conference room and get the folks for the next meeting in place to start on time, and recognize that post-meeting sidebar conversations or colloquies themselves will take a few minutes and should be allowed for.
================
Bill Gates used to hold a regular meeting with his leadership team that was really a rolling series of dilemma meetings. Five or six people/groups would in turn present an item and discuss it with Bill, Steve Ballmer, and some other key senior execs. Here it was understood that (a) it’s hard to get all these folks together and even harder to get your idea in front of them; (b) you could learn quite a bit by listening to Bill and Steve critique or discuss someone else’s idea; (c) it would have been distracting for different groups to come in and out at different times, and Bill wanted agenda flexibility so they could have extended dilemma discussions if need be; and (d) people wanted to see if Bill was going to tear into someone… other than them.
Actually, I never saw Bill tear into someone… just into their ideas. Even that was more mythical than commonplace. (One of my all-time favorite Microsoft internal videos — not available on YouTube, unfortunately — was a funny sketch showing a team trying to sell Bill on Version 2 of Microsoft Bob. He didn’t say a word, and you never actually saw him, but it was priceless watching the team’s faces as they realized the presentation perhaps wasn’t going… um… quite as well as they’d hoped.)
================
Here’s a transcription of part of one of my talks discussing the graphic shown above .
I want meetings where everyone comes out at least a little bit smarter. To get there, we need to recognize that not all meetings are the same. On one axis, what’s the purpose? Is it to inform, or to discuss something? On the other axis, how many participants does it involve? Most everyone in the room? Or just two or three of the attendees?
The high-value quadrant is a rich group discussion. Strategy and planning sessions. Brainstorming. Group budgeting or resource allocation. There’s an art to making these meetings effective, and it starts with everyone understanding the purpose.
So let’s look at the next quadrant. Here one person is informing the others in the room. Perhaps a manager sharing news with her reports, or the group comptroller with a budget update. To be of high value, the news must concern most of the attendees. There may be Q&A and discussion, and meetings in this quadrant may sometimes gracefully slide into the upper left – as long as everyone is aware of the shift.
Lower right is low value, but not zero value – as long as these are short. The most common form is an employee sharing information with peers. You don’t want too many of these, but brief sessions are effective at keeping the team on the same page. Consider stand-up meetings for this quadrant – where, literally, everyone is standing. Keeps the meeting short! Stand-up meetings have become quite popular in agile software development. Just don’t do too many of them, or drag them out.
Detailed discussions involving just a few of the participants – that’s bad news. Don’t drag the whole group into colloquies or dilemmas. Keep dilemmas off the agenda. If you realize a discussion or update or report-out is turning into one of these soul-swallowing monsters, deflect it to one-on-one time.
Tom Peters (a/k/a TomPeters!) has a terrific post today about building great first-line managers. I won’t repeat all 20 points here, but I want to call out a few specifically because they are so often overlooked in lists of this sort:
5. New 1LMs should “shadow” senior 1LMs for a significant period of time. (“1LM” is his shorthand for first-line manager.)
12. “Business” training should also be a central part of 1LM training.
13. 1LMs should be treated as the company’s principal “culture carriers” and principal “change agents”—and be treated and trained and “used” accordingly. [emphasis in original]
18. …[T]he quality of the 1LM portfolio should, in turn, be a central element in the evaluation of the department head and division head.
My only issue with this list hearkens back to Peter Drucker: Too many objectives is no objectives. Shorten the list, Tom!
Here’s my short version:
- Spend as much time selecting – and evaluating and culling — managers as you do on any other core aspect of your business. 1LMs make or break your business.
- Use mentoring, shadowing, and coaching to develop managers at all levels.
- Develop great training – and insist that execs put skin in the game by (a) taking the training themselves and (b) speaking regularly to the training classes.
- Make understanding how the business works a major and ongoing component of managerial training. Every manager should be able to explain how both the business and the specific division make money or otherwise contribute to the bottom line.
- The most important skills are “people” skills (leadership) and cross-functional abilities. They’re harder to build or select for than functional skills. (And don’t confuse cross-functional with politics; they’re opposite sides of one coin.)
- Never forget that managers carry your culture.
|
Steve’s Other Posts: Lexblog Steven writes regularly about the legal world here (Lexician.com), on topics such as Legal Project Management, legal operations, and legal technology: |
