People often ask me how I know so much about computers and how I get all these things done so fast. Webcomic xkcd just figured out my trick and made a flow chart. I rarely know all the shortcuts or where the buttons are in an application, it’s a matter of poking around and just figuring it out. Usually, I succumb to the last box, “Google the name of the program plus  few words related to what you want to do.”

Here’s a few Google Searches I’ve done before:

• microsoft outlook mail merge
• excel vlookup
• excel macro pulldown list
• word page numbers by chapter

Tech Support Cheat Sheet <xkcd>

One more bonus tip: I use Google 411 by dialing 1-800-GOOG-411 to do the voice directory search. It’s free and fairly accurate, useful when you’re driving (use a headset).

As a consultant, I put in long hours and a lot of travel. By the time I get home, doing chores and household tasks isn’t on the top of my list. In an effort have more quality time during the weekends, rather than catching up on chores, I opted to engage in some outsourcing services. Below are five ways to automate and outsource domestic activities:

1. Hire a housekeeper. One of the most cost effective chore to outsource is cleaning. A typical maid/housekeeper service will cost about $50 – $75 per session. The cost and services performed is negotiated. Services include dusting, wipe all surfaces down, vacuum, clean bathroom, clean kitchen, load dishwasher, clean stovetop, wipe refrigerator surfaces, clean baseboards, clean doors, and overall tiding everything up. I opted for every two week (although I would love to have weekly service). By the end of my two weeks, my home is a nightmare and when I return home from work, it’s sparkling clean. It’s the same feeling I get when I stay at a hotel and return after housekeeper comes through.
2. Replenish supplies with Alice. Almost everything you need can be purchased online, including books, music, movies, and so on. For household supplies, we still get in our car and take a trip to Target/Safeway. Instead, consider using Alice, an online tool that lets you purchase household goods direct from the vendor. They use their sourcing tools to get you the best price, and even apply coupons when available. You can even specify the frequency that you go through certain goods, such as every two weeks for toilet paper. Alice will automatically set up orders to replenish your inventory. Finally, it’s free shipping, making the economics of ordering supplies feasible.
3. Get fruits and vegetables delivered weekly. Where I live, Farm Fresh To You delivers packages of seasonal fruits and vegetables grown from local farms. During off season, they source the produce from other locations. You can easily stock up on groceries and save money by buying in bulk, however, produce cannot be stocked up. Using this service, I ensure that I get the best produce weekly and reduce time spent at the grocery store stocking up on perishables.
4. Have your groceries delivered. Remember the craze during the dot com era where online grocery ordering was all the rage? You can still order the bulk of your groceries online. Some traditional grocery stores now offer delivery service. Safeway offers most items, including meats, fruits, and vegetables.
5. Outsource your laundry. Most laundromats offer some type of fluff and fold service. This typically includes sorting your clothes, wash, dry, and fold (match socks as well). I’ve seen prices averaging about $1.25 per pound (which can add up in cost). Add delivery service to the mix and you have completely outsourced your laundering duties.

While issue management is not specifically addressed by the Project Management Institute (PMI) Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK), it is a key process necessary for effective project management. An issue is something that requires a decision made and associated actions performed. It is a situation that has occurred or will occur, as oppose to a risk that is a potential of a situation to occur. Typically, issues are tracked from a simple whiteboard, to a spreadsheet, to a full scale issue tracking and management system.

Issue management systems serves its purpose. However, it requires issues to be categorized and classified by the project management team. Feedback by the project team or end users require each issue to be assigned and prioritized. Often, team members and end users complain about the lack of transparency on the prioritization process. What gets ranked critical vs. high vs. low priority. In a previous post, I introduced you to using IdeaScale as a tool to solicit customer feedback and ideas. An alternative use of the tool is to implement it as an issue management system. Rather than priorities defined and assigned in a top down approach, using IdeaScale allows you to “crowd source” a bottom up approach.

Here are the conceptual steps to process from issue submission to closing.

1. Team member (and end user) identifies an issue or or problem that requires attention or decision.
2. The team member logs onto the IdeaScale portal and submits the issue.
3. All team members (and end users) access the portal to review the issues list, and vote up or down, the priorities of each issue.
4. Over time, and with critical mass usage of the portal, priority issues will rise to the top while less important issues will remain at the bottom. Ideas that reach a critical threshold (through the voting mechanism) will be assigned to an owner and tracked as part of the project management process.
5. After the issue is addressed and resolved, the “idea” is closed by the site administrator.

Develop Issue Management and Escalation Procedures

The first step to building an issue management process is to document the associated procedures. The State of California Office of System Integration defines the issue and escalation process as follows:

The Issue and Escalation Process describes how the project identifies, tracks and manages issues and action items that are generated throughout the project life cycle. The process also defines how to escalate an issue to a higher-level of management for resolution and how resolutions are documented.

Since the focus of this article is to crowd source the tracking of issues, here is a great example by the State of California, Office of System Integration – Issue and Escalation Process.

Implement IdeaScale to Capture and Monitor Issues

As shown below, the IdeaScale entry page can be customized to collect the information you need to properly manage the issues submitted. By default, the required fields include title/subject and description. In this example, I included stakeholders affected, due date, decision required, and suggested action. A category field is used to segregate issues vs. suggestions. As team members and end users submit their ideas, it gets included in the issues list. Other end users and team members can log into the portal and vote up, and down, the issues that are relevant to them.

For the IdeaScale method of issue tracking and management to work, it requires a critical mass of users. Crowd sourcing a task requires active participation in the community. If only a handful of users actual log in and submit issues and vote, then it emulates the traditional form of issue management. However, if a large enough group of users consistently log in and participate actively, then the concept of crowd sourcing issue management will work.

The bottom up approach of issue management increases transparency in the process. Users are part of the discussion and actually have input through the voting mechanism. The community polices itself and prevents abusers from rigging the system. Through IdeaScales API’s, the issue management system can be integrated to the project portals such as SharePoint, or other project management tools.

Bottom Line

As with any tool, whether it be a simply paper list, Excel spreadsheet, or a crowd sourced IdeaScale issue tracking system, it does not replace good project management and communication with the team. Before attempting to implement the described process, determine if the readiness of the project team and willingness to participate in the process.

This is my first screencast and is an experiment on the viability and demand of reviews and tutorials of web products. This week, I demoed IdeaScale, a Seattle-based company whose product line includes QuestionPro, the popular online survey tool. Their latest product is IdeaScale, a powerful feedback application similar to Digg. Users can log in, submit ideas and vote up and down other ideas. Overtime, the most popularly voted ideas percolate up the chain while less than popular ideas remain at the bottom. Companies like Starbucks use similar technology (albeit with different software) to gather customer feedback.

Let me know what you think of the video, any feedback would be greatly appreciated. For future projects, I plan on developing a series of three videos.

1. High-level overview
2. Walk through key settings and customizations
3. Examples of implementation

The post will also include a thorough narrative review of the product, as well as examples of quality implementation. It will also include approaches for implementation.

If your company has  a web, or software product that you’d like to to review, please contact me.

Periodically during the weekends, I’ll recap a few posts that were long forgotten in the archives. Today, the theme is social media:

photo credit: claudia vieira

• Social Media Policies and Procedures
  This was one of my best posts that was tweeted by @chrisbrogan and drove in a lot of traffic. There’s a strong business interest from companies and organizations to develop their own policies regarding the usage of social media at work and off work.
• Social Media Strategic Plan
  This post is the follow up to the policies and procedures post. A quick Google search doesn’t reveal very many viable social media strategic plans and therefore lead to a strong demand by my commenters for me to expand further on this post. More to come.
• What is Twitter and Twitter Resources
  Although this post is getting old, I found myself often referring back to it and using some of the resources I pointed out.
• What is Social Media
  This is a series of Common Craft videos on what is Social Media and what is Twitter.

In addition, here are a few highlights of some great individuals I’ve recently communicated with:

• Jun Loayza
  Jun is an amazing and energetic entrepreneur and specializes in developing web 2.0 social media interactive sites. He is in a class of his own and shares invaluable knowledge regarding social media.
• Cody McKibben
  Cody is a Location Independent consultant that specializes in WordPress and blogging design, operations, and maintenance. I referenced a post I wrote regarding our one-hour consultation recently.
• Natasha Wescoat & David Hoang
  I added Natasha and David to this list because they are unique, and different users of social media to promote their art.

A short report, presentation, letter, memo, or document is often many times as hard to write than its long counterpart. Anyone can write a 20 page report, it takes talent to condense all that information in to a one page briefing. So why do you see such poorly written documents both online and offline?

The amount of effort required to draft, edit, and produce any type of document increases exponentially as you approach one page. However, short documents are many times more effective at conveying the message and initiating action.

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” – Mark Twain

An example of a writing program

Washington State Governor Gregoire issued Executive Order 05-03 which requires all Washington State public agencies to use simple and clear language when communicating with the public and businesses. The “plain talk” guidelines include:

1. Understand customer needs
2. Include only relevant information
3. Use words your customers use
4. Use the “active voice”
5. Use personal pronouns
6. Keep sentences and paragraphs short
7. Design clear pages

photo credit: geishaboy500

Simplify your writing to effectively communicate your ideas

Writing is a life long learning process. It takes years to develop an effective style and voice. I’ve found that my best work often is the shortest documents but also took the most of my time to develop. All my writing is customized based on need, audience, and subject matter. In all cases, it’s written so a layperson can understand it without needing to know background context and technical jargon.

“I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English – it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.” – Another Mark Twain quote

When traveling, I always prefer to visit the local coffee shops to get a sense of the local community and the uniqueness of each city. While the national chains, such as Starbucks, offers consistency no matter where you go, the local mom & pop shops offers a little more personal touch. Below are two of my favorite coffee shops in the Bay Area.

Awaken Cafe

414 14 Street
Oakland, CA 94612
(510) 836-2058

Awaken Cafe is a local East Bay favorite in downtown Oakland. It offers art, community, and sustainable coffee. They have a variety of organic, fair trade coffee that they freshly grind on site. Rather than plain brewed coffee, they use a French Press, giving their regular coffee a grittier hearty taste. Enjoy your coffee, knowing that Awaken uses 100% recycled cups that are fully compostable and lids that are made from potatoes and break down in 30 to 45 days. If you’re around, you can toss your cup away in their composting bin. While you’re waiting for your coffee to be made, also check out the ever changing artwork hung up in gallery style from local artists.

Philz Coffee

3101 24th St
San Francisco, CA 94110
(415) 875-9370

Philz Coffee has over 25 different roasts and each cup of coffee is hand made, meaning it’s brewed specifically for you. While a typical “brewed” coffee comes out to be $3 for a small cup, the quality and freshness can’t be beat. After you pick from the huge range of available coffee, even Jamaican Blue Mountain ($7  a cup!), you order your size and how you want your coffee: plain, cream, sugar, in addition to traditional espresso styles. The barista carefully grinds your coffee, loads up the coffee filter, gently fills it with hot water, and with care, slightly shakes the filter around to get an optimal brew. When it’s done, she’ll pour it out into a cup, back into the container, and back into your cup again, filling your cup with air and goodness.

Earlier this week, Google announced the release of their new communication tool, Google Wave. It’s already available for the select group of developers who attended the Google I/O convention. I’m going to take a chance now and say that it’s going to be big. Up until now, Google has separately released a number of powerful, but siloed tools. This includes gmail, calendar, contacts, chat, docs, and a host of other one off applications. All have been web-based and hosted on Google servers. While each tool has been incredibly powerful, they lacked the true integration that kept them from becoming a realistic competitor to enterprise business applications like Office.

From the 1:20 demo, we can see the first proof of concept of the new features. They include real time collaboration, language tools for contextual spell check, and extension to other mediums like blogs. Think of this tool as Facebook, except its everywhere and not limited to just one isolated social networking site.

Reasons why Google Wave may change the way we work

1. It looks like local software. The way you interact with Google Wave mimics so closely to native desktop applications, you’ll forget you’re using a browser.
2. It’s on the cloud. Data is stored safely in Google’s data centers. No need to worry about backing up and syncing.
3. Collaboration. Until now, collaborating on a document meant only one person could work on it at a time. You’d track changes, send the document to a reviewer who would review the changes, make more changes, send it back. This process repeats, some versions are lost and duplicated. Instead, Google Wave allows for real time collaboration on a document.
4. Open source. This isn’t going to be proprietary software. Google is making all the programing API’s available for limitless extensions and plug ins.
5. Mobile. You can take it with you on the road on your iPhone, or Google preferred Android phone.

Business Applications

This may be the first time that Google Wave will force business to take a hard look at their enterprise application strategy. Using web-based software significantly reduces the IT support cost for maintaining licenses and desktop configuration. Google Apps for the enterprise was only the first model. Google Wave may make this a truly robust enterprise solution for information workers and much improved collaboration.

I have already submitted a request to be a beta tester. Watch the demo after the jump.

My blog is going a major revamp process, including a redesign, subject-matter change, and a focus on my core knowledge area. This site has been up since 2000 and started as a forum to keep friends and family up to date on my life. Since then, it’s evolved and gained a fairly substantial following and readership.

Recently, Cody McKibben of Thrilling Heroics sent out a call for help to promote his consulting business. As part of that contest, the winner would receive an hour of his consulting services. Contrary to my track record for winning contests, Cody pulled my name out of the hat and announced the official results.

Summary of the one hour consultation

Before our phone conversation via Skype, Cody asked for a set of questions and what type of consultation I’m looking for. I asked him to review this blog, provide some thoughts on the design, format, and content and assist me with a strategy for growing it beyond its current state.

• Start with a premium template. I was already using the Thesis theme on WordPress and was a step ahead. Thesis allows of easy customization to the design and format.
• Develop a brand. While my existing design is attractive, it’s not memorable. Cody suggested redesigning the header graphic, including using a personal picture of me somewhere on the front page.
• Enhance the about me page. Cody liked the elements of my about me page but suggested moving the elevator pitch to the top of the page.
• Consider removing Google ads. Because I wasn’t really gaining any significant revenue from Google Adsense, Cody suggested removing it to keep from alienating loyal readers.

Upcoming changes to the blog

Over the course of the next few weeks, and likely next few months, the writing will change to three core topics:

• Management Consulting
• Business Development
• Travel

These are three key areas of a consultants work life. I’ll focus my content specifically on those three areas. The travel section will likely spur some interest in the blog and keep it from becoming too “boring.” Within these three areas, I hope to provide video screencast tutorials, step by step tutorials, video posts, and more. The primary focus is to provide original content, that’s not a rehash of existing content found on the web.