June 29, 2009 by Jason
Many companies use contractors frequently to support their business. These virtual or “temporary” employees serve significant roles that a company doesn’t have or doesn’t wish to retain on an ongoing, fully employed basis. They perform important tasks such as:
- Sales augmentation
- Marketing
- Public relations
- Web development
- Human resources
These are core skill sets for a company’s ongoing success. Ironically, these people are often poorly connected into their clients and rely on email to perform their work. They struggle to communicate and collaborate effectively with the company, whether it is in their best interest or not. When their contract ends, they walk away with the majority of the experience and learning they gained. This isn’t something they intend to do – it is simply the way it works in most situations.
There is a far better way to work with contractors to not only retain their valuable knowledge but also make them more effective while working for you. Using GroupSwim, you can make them a part of your company without the overhead or trouble:
- Collect documentation and processes to ramp new contractors up quickly
- Create groups for different firms or contractors and work with interactively
- Use web documents (wiki pages) to track versions and work collaboratively with them
- Discuss issues and questions using a private forum
- Document issues, track milestones, and measure results
- Amass emails from prior engagements and add new information as it is created
- Manage important files and documents to find them in the future
GroupSwim offers the features and flexibility to maximize your investment in contractors. Using email as most companies do is wasting money letting valuable information walk out the door.
Tags: collaboration, Contractors, GroupSwim
Posted in CMC, Enterprise, Methodology | Leave a Comment »
June 10, 2009 by Jason
I don’t do this much on the Diving Board but I’ve recently used 3 products that completely blow my mind. Here they are:
ZipCar – this service allows you to reserve cars in large cities. It is an awesome process to see unfold. You reserve the car on the internet, go to one of many lots where they sit, flash your card on the windshield and you are ready to go. You can extend your reservation through a very easy to use phone system, gas and insurance are included, and it could not be easier to sign up and get started. If I lived in a big city where ZipCar was available, I would use it in a heartbeat and not buy my own car.
The Kindle – I doubt I’ll ever buy a physical book again unless it isn’t available on the Kindle. It is very comfortable to hold and use. The interface is intuitive and quick to learn. You can download books instantly and start reading. This is actually dangerous because it is so easy to spend money. I even got two bonuses I didn’t expect. First, I’m reading much faster. I know it doesn’t take much time to flip pages, but it does take some time, you need re-balance the book in your hand after you flip, etc. With the Kindle, you click a button and keep reading. There is no time elapsed between pages and you literally read faster. Second, you can email in long PDF documents that sit on your desktop that you never read or have to print out. Things like white papers, analyst reports, etc. are much easier to read on the Kindle than reading on the computer.
Safari Browser – I use many browsers these days, and Safari is much better than FireFox (which I’m completely done with) and better than Internet Explorer. It is blazing fast and extremely easy to use. I recommend trying it.
Posted in CMC, Random | Leave a Comment »
June 9, 2009 by Jason
Gartner is currently hosting a Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit in Orlando. One of the sessions was to present the Cool Vendors in Portals, Content, Collaboration and Social Software. Go figure but we were voted the coolest. We found out by seeing a bunch of folks at the conference tweet that we won on Twitter. I’m not a big Twitter user but I have to give it a shout out in this case.
Tags: Cool Vendor, Gartner, GroupSwim
Posted in Analyst, CMC | Leave a Comment »
May 18, 2009 by Jason
Starting tomorrow, we begin testing the next release of GroupSwim. It is filled with great new features and improvements. In addition to new stuff, we are changing our application infrastructure to be 100% cloud-based. This will not only improve performance but also ensure the highest possible up-time; it also allows us to scale indefinitely as we continue to grow. Here is a list of some of the new features:
- Content moderation – this is a new way to interact with content. Group owners can determine whether or not to moderate discussions, files and/or wiki edits. Once a user contributes something that is moderated, it goes into a group queue where a group manager can approve the content or not.
- Search everywhere – by popular request, we are adding more search boxes so users can search from almost anywhere in GroupSwim.
- Home page refresh - we are adding additional feeds to the home page including the “Following” list and “Your” stuff, which lists anything where you have contributed.
- Improve watchlist – we are rebranding the watchlist to “Following” and making it more prominent on the home page.
- File uploader - upgrading software for uploading files and making it more intuitive.
- Internet Explore 8.0 – adding support for IE 8.0.
- Performance – we are taking additional steps to improve performance. We are tackling this in multiple stages and this is the first one.
We look forward to rolling out this release in about two weeks. Stay tuned.
Posted in Release | Leave a Comment »
May 13, 2009 by Jason
Most project managers have horror stories about trying to manage projects using some combination of spreadsheets and Microsoft Project. The vast majority of the time they are totally overkill. Most projects have a workable number of tasks that get the majority of a project manager’s focus. The previously mentioned tools are good when the number of tasks is large, but fall on their face in terms of ability to update quickly and disseminate information. Using these tools creates a morass of file versions, software compatibility issues, etc.. I personally have experienced problems many times where I put together a project plan and then find out the client doesn’t have project or the right version of excel to see my plan. THERE IS A BETTER WAY.
Use wiki pages (GroupSwim of course) to manage your projects. There are good reasons:
- It is the ultimate shared platform – all you need is a browser
- Wiki pages are always up-to-date by their very nature
- All versions are captured and available in case of an audit or mistake
- No training or software required
Here is an example of a wiki page we used to manage a release of GroupSwim:
- The schedule is at the top of the page and available for everyone to see
- Each row represents a feature we built (or could be a task or phase of a project)
- The narrow columns represent the different engineers participating in the release and how many hours of work they have (all zero since the release is complete). At the end of each day, they updated their work with the remaining time
- The final column was for status or issues
- The links in the table connected to actual designs or other relevant documents that could be other wiki pages, documents, or discussions
- The list below the tags shows every person who contributed to the wiki page or updated it
- The list below this shows other related wiki pages, discussions or documents associated with this project
- After updating the wiki page, you can blast out an email to all contributors letting them know there is an update for review
This one page represents an excellent snapshot of the project at any given time and does not require a complicated symphony of document updates and email exchanges. Furthermore, if there is a question about the project or any specific line item, the user can launch a separate discussion that is linked back to this wiki page for context.
Using wiki pages to manage projects is clearly a better way provided you don’t need the feature of something like project that include automatic dependencies, critical path calculations, etc. In my experience, few projects require these feature and even fewer project managers know project well enough to justify the effort of creating and updating the plans. What’s your experience?
Tags: PM, PMO, PMP, Project, Project-Management, wiki, Wiki page
Posted in CMC, Enterprise, Methodology, Random | 2 Comments »
May 1, 2009 by Jason
Most of us use spreadsheets to track information that involves no math or calculations. The spreadsheet becomes a glorified table to hold and update information. There are several reasons why this is a bad idea:
- Spread sheets are good for making calculations, they aren’t good and tracking who made what change and when
- Spread sheets are files and are not built to make version tracking easy
- Spread sheets need to be sent back and forth using email or downloaded changed and then uploaded
I’m not bagging on all spreadsheets because I use them all the time. However, I use them when I’m doing math or require sorting, not tracking information.
The alternative is using wiki pages instead. Here are the reasons why this is a good idea:
- There is only one version and no file to worry about
- All changes are tracked and can be backed out with one click
- No software required – all you need is a browser
- Updates and notifications are automatic
Issue logs, status reports, customer records, lists, text based documents are all ideal candidates for a wiki page versus a spreadsheet. I’m not suggesting that all spreadsheets are bad and never use Excel. I am suggesting the next time you automatically assume you need a spreadsheet to track or list things, you should consider using a wiki page instead.
Tags: Spreadsheets, wiki
Posted in CMC, Random | Leave a Comment »
April 28, 2009 by Jason
Collaboration software like GroupSwim addresses one or more issues organizations face today. They could include:
- Losing information in a morass of email and disconnected documents
- Wasting customer time as they struggle to find information they need to solve their problems
- Getting work done and communicating across distributed teams and systems
If you are wondering how, you are in luck. Here are some examples of how collaboration software looks when it is deployed and in action.
SmartCompany is an example of a company that is using GroupSwim to collaborate internally. This site is one of our demo sites; it is configured so you can access it, but most internal sites are private. You can see there are a variety of groups that are a mix of organizations and functions. Try a couple of things to see the power of GroupSwim:
- Once you are in SmartCompany, search on “GroupSwim” in the search bar at the top right of the home page. You will see we provide a list of all discussions, emails, files or wiki pages that have anything to do with GroupSwim (this is a demo site so the content may not always make sense). Our search engine is extremely powerful and even searches the contents of documents like PDFs, PowerPoints, etc..
- Click on this link to see one of our wiki pages. This particular wiki page is an example of how you can combine images and text into a really easy to use “Frequently Asked Question”; your site comes with this same page. Wiki pages can be used to track issues, competitive profiles, request for proposals, and other dynamic documents that change frequently and multiple people work on them.
The Pool is an example of a customer community site. It is an excellent way to build a relationship with your customers. Try a couple of things to see how a vibrant customer community works:
- Check out the group we use to gather feature suggestions from our customers. They provide valuable input for us as we plan future releases.
- Click on this customer’s profile (he is awesome). He shares best practices about GroupSwim and provides great suggestions for us.
I hope these two examples provide a good vision of how collaboration software like GroupSwim might function.
Tags: collaboration, GroupSwim, Software
Posted in CMC, GroupSwim | Leave a Comment »
