Habañero Leadership Blog

Why be a great workplace?

csanders — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 00:06:53 GMT

With the latest Aon Hewitt results being released today, it seems a good time to explore this most obvious of sounding questions: why be a great workplace?

Some answers that spring to mind:

Why not be a great workplace?
Because it’s more fun!
Side benefits like engaged employees who seek to delight your customers, improve the business continually, and have great things to say about your company.

But maybe an error lies in deciding to make “being a great workplace” the goal, rather than an outcome of other efforts.

Consider the dimensions Aon Hewitt uses to determine workplace engagement:

If you squint and look a little sideways at this list of characteristics, you could just as easily be looking at the same elements that fundamentally make up a really well-run business (and not just from an HR perspective), but rather looking at a business holistically and from all angles.

Think of the Balanced Scorecard strategic planning and management system:

1. The learning and growth perspective:

This perspective includes elements involving employee training and corporate attitudes to self-improvement. And it’s more than just training; this also encapsulates mentoring, coaching, tools and processes to inspire “high performance work systems”.

Now turn your eye back to the workplace engagement model and see how many elements fall into this arena:

Opportunities; Learning Opportunities — being an organization that supports learning and development of its employees.
Ensuring there are systems and tools in place so that your people can make the most of themselves as possible. This in turn will have an impact on the quality of leadership and on respect amongst co-workers.
Intrinsic motivation (or, “getting a sense of accomplishment from work”) — there are few greater motivators for individuals beyond continual learning and self-improvement.

2. The business process perspective:

This is all about your internal business processes. How well is your business running; are you meeting your customer needs? And in workplace engagement-speak:

Opportunities; Career opportunities — have options for your star performers so that they can contribute more to the organization to make it a better-run business.
Creating a positive work environment, helping people understand your organization’s goals and how they can help meet them, and having work processes so people can be as productive as possible.

3. The customer perspective:

As you’d think, this is everything to do with your customers. Are they satisfied? Loyal? Do you really understand your customers’ needs? (If you don’t have paying customers, you at least have members you serve or some analogous relationship with people outside your organization.)

Using an engaged workforce lens, you would be looking at:

Work/Motivation; Work tasks — as in, if someone enjoys their “tasks”, they’re probably leaving happy customers in their wake.
Quality of life/values; Work/life balance, Physical work environment, Employee health and well-being — again, people with balanced, healthy lifestyles will have great interactions with customers.
Quality of life/values; Organizational reputation, Corporate Social Responsibility — one a longstanding established route to customers, the other proving to be just as effective a method for inspiring customer loyalty.

4. The financial perspective:

How your business is doing financially, but may also include risk management and cost-benefit data. Not surprisingly, a number of engaged workplace facets are represented here:

Total Rewards

Much of an organization’s cost base can be centered in this area and often that’s where most of the tension between “happy workplace” and financial performance can seem to stem from. However, as many companies have discovered, seeking to aggressively save money in Total Rewards can lead to higher turnover (cost to the organization), unhappier clients (cost to the organization), less productivity (cost to the organization), and a restricted talent pool (cost to the organization).

Work/Motivation; Resources

What are the smartest investments in the business that will allow people to have access to the tools and processes they need to be the most effective?

So to come back to the original question of “why be a great workplace”, really the better question is “why be a well-run workplace”. Set out to be an overall well-run organization, and the “great workplace” can’t help but follow.

Using your intranet to increase workplace happiness

cradcliffe — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 04:47:05 GMT

Many executives understand that their corporate intranet is an important vehicle for driving higher levels of employee engagement. Although sadly, many intranets today are doing the reverse and are not making a positive impact on workplace happiness! When intranets are poorly designed, organically mismanaged or left to decay without the required love and support, they can have a detrimental impact on an organization. It takes a special combination of thinking outside the box — beyond the world of features and functionality and into the complex world of what makes people tick.

Intranets, and for that matter successful corporate cultures that drive stronger levels of employee engagement, generally have:

Simplified access to everything

Employees want quick and easy access to the tools, information and subject matter experts they need to effectively do their job. Good intranets have strong information structures that get out of the way, and allow people to find who and what they need. If designed correctly an intranet can break down corporate silos and barriers, but creating these types of structures generally requires a special understanding of corporate politics, change management and information design.

Community and social interaction

Studies show that employees who have a best friend at work are happier and more engaged. A “best friend at work” is someone who you can confide in and count on. In addition, workplaces where strong social connections are fostered are often happier. Social networking capabilities not only help people feel more connected but also help them be more connected and share ideas or provide help when someone needs it. Few things are more satisfying than feeling appreciated and recognized for one’s contributions.

Idea generation, discussion and feedback — fostering input so that opinions count

An important driver in becoming disengaged in an organization is feeling like your opinions and ideas don’t matter. If you aren’t respected, listened to, and making a contribution then it’s inevitable that you’ll feel like a replaceable piece in a puzzle. Organizations that understand this and appreciate the value of unlocking the ideas stored in their employees’ minds are turning to social features like discussions, commenting, ratings, rankings, and forums to fuel feedback loops into intranets to improve the content, gather innovative ideas and thinking, and to help communities form across like-minded individuals.

Clear and compelling communication

Many executives and corporate communications practitioners understand that using storytelling techniques to communicate the mission, vision, strategy and direction of the company is critical to employee alignment and engagement. Communicating this in a vast sea of information is difficult. A good intranet will allow for both effective top-down strategic communication, but also give employees access to more reciprocal, raw just-in-time messaging. This requires not only a trained communications team, but also a great web publishing framework with thoughtful channel management from corporate to department to team to individual — with an increase in the more ad-hoc social networks.

Recognition 

Let’s face it, recognition feels good and there is a reason! Recognition provides acknowledgement to people that their efforts are appreciated and have made a difference. A well-designed intranet takes this into account and provides visible recognition. In addition, strong intranets allow people to develop their personal brand, which serves to help authenticate someone’s value proposition and expertise in a certain area. That may help them connect with others or be asked for help, which further reinforces their perception that they matter.

A commitment to usability and long-term improvement

People have an enormous tolerance for bad user experiences, but that doesn’t mean it’s acceptable to waste their time. Not only do messy site structures, inconsistent navigation systems and poorly written content disorient employees (online), but they also reflect poorly on the company’s brand and leave the impression that the organization doesn’t have its s%#t together. The real secret to optimizing the usability of an intranet comes from a long-term dedication and investment from people who care. The design and implementation phase of your project is a chance to start off on the right foot, but additional value is often realized once an intranet has had a chance to evolve. Some might argue that usability doesn’t drive engagement, but it clearly helps avoid disengagement!

Is your intranet having a positive impact on employee happiness? I’d love it if you were to share some of the ingredients that have fostered this. Drop me a line or leave a comment!!

Career transitions: a step by step process

moconnor — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 01:00:23 GMT

In the first part of this post, I broadly discussed how we think about career transitions in the context of our views on performance management here at Habañero. In this segment, I’d like to introduce in detail the process that we use with our employees to help them architect their career plans or transitions.

Career Planning Process

Explore and confirm strengths

During this initial brainstorm session, we walk through an exploration of strengths. I usually ask people to do their own homework and come prepared to speak to their strengths. We sometimes use tools like a mind map or strength finder reports to find out what people are doing when they feel happiest at work. This session can often last a couple of hours to really explore and pick apart the activities that give a person energy and excitement.

Some good trigger questions can include understanding the nature of the work a person is doing while they are “in the zone” at work and to pick up any patterns or consistency in the scenarios. For example, is a person only excited when they are involved at the visioning stage? Or, are they really stoked when they see their solution or design launch for real users and hear their feedback? Do they prefer solo or team activities? All of these questions help to isolate the areas that align with their strengths.

Define current state

A key step in heading in a new direction can be identifying what it is that you actually do today. If your organization uses a time tracking tool with reporting, a pie chart of how a person’s time has been logged over the past year can stimulate a lot of conversation. If, for example, you are a business analyst but spend 90 percent of your time doing project management work (which you don’t love), it could explain why you feel burnt out or unexcited about work.

Identify future state

The next step involves imagining yourself in a future or ideal state — what are you doing and in what portions of your time? The future state could involve the same activities as today ... but as in the above example, could be 10 percent project management and 90 percent business analysis. Or, it may involve adding new categories to the pie to represent areas of desired growth.

This stage builds on the work done to identify strengths and involves a lot of listening and probing to surface what the future could look like. Some questions that could influence the pie can include:

What type of work are you doing?
What role would you like on projects?
How are you sharing your experience and knowledge with the team?
What types of relationships do you foster? (i.e., mentorship, leadership)

Create a plan to get there

Working back from the future state, this step involves identifying the supports required and skills needed to arrive at the future state. The gap between the current and the future may simply be a matter of changing up how a person is resourced on projects or bolstering some skills, but for a significant career transition it could involve developing a whole new skillset. Managing the process to get from the current “pie” to the future state may be something that a person can navigate mostly on their own but to be successful it requires the support from a variety of people within the organization, from their performance manager to their peers.

Examples of supports include:

Connecting with potential mentors or peers
Identifying training opportunities
Starting to evolve roles on project work
Obtaining professional designations
Identifying external networks
Setting up leadership or networking opportunities outside of Habañero (like speaking at a conference)

Sometimes the plan can include changing performance managers to better align with future goals. This isn’t always a bad thing and a fresh perspective can often reinvigorate engagement!

Validate the plan

In this final step we work with the employee to take ownership of the plan by documenting it and communicating it to others it may affect (i.e., team members, sales team, resource manager). This part of the process is critical in validating whether the plan is a good fit for the individual: does the plan fit with Habañero’s goals? Do we have the type of projects that can support it? And how long is realistic to transition from today’s role to the future state? Overnight or over the course of a year?

What do our folks say?

People who have participated in this process have been keen to share their enthusiasm for it:

“I find it very helpful when thinking about what you want to focus on in the next quarter/year (sometimes it’s difficult to come up with a plan without knowing the destination)”

“It creates a shared understanding with your performance manager as to where to you want to be and brainstorm ideas on how to get there”

“I love how it focuses on things that motivate you and things you love to do”

In a perfect world, we come away from this process with one happy, healthy engaged employee, ready and raring to take on the next phase of his or her career. But one potential outcome of this process is that we may find that the ideal world and role our employee sees for him or herself does not exist here at Habañero. And that’s actually okay — if we can help to support our employees by finding the right career path, I think that benefits everyone.

Career transitions: more than just annual goal setting

moconnor — Sat, 14 Jan 2012 00:12:00 GMT

Over the past year our performance management team has been fine tuning its approach to developing effective career plans for our employees, especially those who are at a critical career transition. In this post I’ll outline how we think about performance management. I'll follow up with a post that goes into detail about the steps in the process.

Our performance management approach

At Habañero we believe performance management and career coaching is one of our most effective levers in creating engaged, high functioning teams. Some elements of our approach:

We keep the ratio of performance managers to managees as low as possible — usually no more than one to five. This gives each pairing enough time and attention while still allowing each of our performance managers enough time to be effective in his or her other roles at the company.
Performance managers check in monthly (or more) with the folks they work with so there's a constant flow of support (and challenge) and so that there aren't any surprises in the year-end reviews.
We work really hard to meet regularly as performance managers to share knowledge and experiences, struggles, and successes.
We require potential performance managers to “interview” for the role — as if they were being hired for a new job. Our peer performance management model means that tenure doesn’t drive working relationships — interest and passion does. And we are clear that becoming a performance manager isn’t the only path to leadership within the company.
We allocate time (for both managers and managees) in our resource planning for performance management to make sure that it’s not squeezed in as an afterthought.
We work on the strength-based model of aligning an individual’s areas of passion and strength with Habañero's business values and direction. (See Jim Clifton/Gallop strength based books: Now Discover Your Strengths, Strengths Finder, and Strength Based Leadership http://www.strengthsfinder.com/home.aspx)
We schedule our performance management week in mid-January every year, and with few exceptions all reviews happen that week.
Year-end reviews are as much “reviews” as “go forwards”. The importance of the review portion of the two hour session is to set up the most effective and engaging plan for the coming year.

When is someone ready for a career transition?

Often an outcome of our performance management process is that it becomes obvious that an individual is ready for a transition between one role and another or one level of responsibility and the next. It’s important to identify when a person is ready for a role or career transition shift ... but it’s not easy necessarily easy to make it happen. Why?

Habañero is a relatively flat organization without a lot of the traditional org-chart style advancement opportunities. As a result, career planning takes some creativity and effort on the part of the individual and their performance manager.
It’s difficult to find that perfect moment to start the process: when an individual is itching for challenge or change and they’re still extremely effective in their current role but before it’s been too long period of “churn” and the person starts to get frustrated and disengaged.
The career transition process covers lots of unknowns and possibly highly challenging conversations and not everyone is comfortable in this territory.

Principles of career planning

The good thing about our approach to career planning is that it's a natural extension of our strength based thinking at Habañero. We focus on what people are passionate about and how they can best align those passions with our company's values and direction. Some key principles of our career development work with our employees:

Ownership is with the individual: for the process to succeed, it requires self-awareness and a willingness to participate in an exploration of all the possibilities.
The career planning process doesn’t have to be conducted by the person’s performance manager — in fact, sometimes it’s helpful to have a third party facilitate.
The process emphasizes facilitation and support — helping people articulate and identify their happy place.
It’s based in reality — if the happy place doesn’t exist at Habañero, the process can expose a fit challenge and allows us to support a transition to other opportunities.

Please carry on reading the second part of this post: Career transitions: a step by step process.

Launching our new ERP services venture

lagger — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:07:01 GMT

I joined Habañero exactly five years ago to start an ERP consulting practice at Habañero and it’s been a fascinating journey marked by milestones and achievements. In the next month or so we’ll be launching a brand new ERP services venture to focus exclusively on the needs of growing mid-market companies. The purpose is to enable organizations to focus on doing business and achieve their goals by expertly implementing and managing their core business systems.

It’s an exciting time and it’s got me thinking about why we got into ERP consulting at Habañero in the first place. For many years I was a client, working for mid-market manufacturing organizations responsible for implementing ERP solutions and trying to make sense of how to partner effectively for the service and support we needed. I had a bunch of concerns at that time and wondered if the whole industry was moving in the right direction. I still wonder. What I experienced boils down to three things:

Partner responsiveness and accessibility was awesome as long as I was buying software or planning an implementation. After go-live, not so much. My experience was that the partner moves on and becomes distracted with shiny new things and we were left on our own to figure out how to make the most of our investment. What I needed was ongoing guidance and support.

ERP consulting firms often couldn’t help me implement creative solutions for business processes where data capture or presentation happens outside of the ERP software itself. Point-of-sale, e-commerce, CRM, supplier systems, mobile solutions, reporting, barcoding, and dashboard and document management are examples of places I needed to look elsewhere for support. When I had to work with multiple firms, challenges often led to finger-pointing and disclaimers like “it’s not our data causing the problem ….”

Client satisfaction and value realization seemed less important to firms I worked with than their internal considerations like consultant utilization and resource optimization.

When I started the ERP practice at Habañero I felt it was critical to focus on delivery excellence and a model that valued long term relationships and the ability to take a very holistic approach to the overall solution concept. I’m more committed than ever to delivering on that promise.

I’m disappointed by ERP’s track record in the markets we serve and I can understand why clients are reluctant to launch new projects. The perceived risk is often too high and the result is that organizations may miss critical opportunities. Done right, ERP is such a powerful enabler that can support any business strategy, flowing critical data through the organization and delivering tight integration across the entire value chain.

The sad part is that as an industry, we the ERP consulting partners, the experts who should lead companies to a brighter and more successful future, have largely failed and continue to do so — creating an environment where new ERP systems are only selected when there is no other option. It should not be that way.

I meet leaders from companies every week whose organizations can benefit significantly from the capabilities that ERP solutions can offer. And they know it. They show up with an exciting vision and a boatload of fear. They complain about being “sold to” by people who “don’t listen” and they talk about how critical it is to ensure their board of a successful project. They are wary of ending up in a stalled project or a semi-successful implementation that really doesn’t move the needle.

What they need is for real business transformation to occur in a safe and controlled manner. And they need implementation and service partners that show up like an extension of their own business aligned to a vision of seeing the ERP investment as an ongoing commitment.

We’ll continue to work hard to earn our clients’ trust and respect by staying true to our intention from day one: to build long-term relationships with our clients based on trust and mutual respect, and deliver solutions that exactly meet our clients’ needs.

Our new ERP consulting venture will be built on the following brand promise:

No surprises. We manage all the risks. Our commitment to being over-prepared and obsessing about the details means we can provide failsafe, stable solutions, projects that meet their goals, and responsive support.

Responsiveness. We’re never too busy. Our proximity and client-service orientation means that when clients need us at any stage of the process, we spring into action quickly.

Experience and versatility. We solve the toughest problems. Our depth of proven experience with similar projects means certainty and results for our clients. Our roots in software development mean broader solutioning capabilities for our clients.

The official launch is about a month away and we can hardly wait. The market is overdue for a breath of fresh air and our brand promise is more than words. It is who we are.

Making the Leap with ERP!

efishman — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 21:04:32 GMT

I’ve got a real thing for ERP software. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software offers more business improvement opportunities than any other category of IT, including the internet. It’s a bold claim, but one I am willing to bet on now and into the future.

I love its flexibility and versatility. It dramatically improves every process it touches, from financial management to purchasing, asset management to human resource management, and from manufacturing to warehousing and distribution.

My passion for ERP goes back a long way. In 1996 I was part of a consulting team implementing PeopleSoft at Columbia College in Chicago. The goals were lofty — speeding things up, reducing errors, eliminating waste, and reducing business risk. The results were instantaneous and obvious; everything simply ran more effectively because people had access to the information they needed. And better decisions were being made. It was a giant leap forward. I’m happy to note they are still getting value from it and it appears to be integrated with other critical line of business systems like Raiser’s Edge for Fundraising and SharePoint.

Since then I’ve worked with many ERP systems in a wide variety of industries. In every case, the organization had reached a critical inflection point and looked to ERP to replace a mess of disconnected applications and spreadsheets. And in every case ERP provided real visibility into the organization’s most critical data and integrated people and processes across the business.

In 2007 we launched Habañero into the world of ERP and established a Microsoft Dynamics AX and NAV implementation practice. Steven and I hired ERP veteran Lars Agger who built a team of expert consultants and a vision for a new kind of ERP service offering.

Lars likes to say that ERP doesn’t live inside the four walls of the company or just inside the software anymore. What we see in our clients are ERP processes that extend into their ecommerce websites, supplier and customer collaboration, knowledge work and enterprise portals. His vision was to go far beyond the capabilities of the typical ERP implementation services firm and deliver fully ERP-enabled processes, regardless of the technology or interface. He succeeded.

One of the most impressive successes of our five-year history with ERP is the number of existing Dynamics NAV and AX user companies that have turned to Habañero for ongoing support and enhancement services.

In the ERP consulting industry there is a tremendous pressure to sell software. For clients this often means not hearing from their implementation partner after the initial implementation is complete. And while initial implementations are exciting, the real transformation is what happens after as the organization embraces the full extent of ERP capabilities available to them.

Over and over again during these past five years, our customers tell us that our ERP solutions work because:

There are no surprises. (We manage all the risks.)
We are incredibly responsive. (We are never too busy.)
We bring deep experience and versatility. (We solve the tough problems.)

I am proud to have been a part of launching an ERP services organization that has earned this kind of reputation in such a short period of time.

And I’m feeling completely pumped about the next five years, as we catapult ERP to the next level and prepare to expand our ERP focus in Western Canada.

Ready for something completely different? Keep watching this space for details about some exciting changes, new faces, and a new identity that matches our vision for ERP.

Is being social a bad thing?

dching — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 01:04:30 GMT

Embracing the social features that intranets have to offer is not an easy sell in many organizations. When asked, most of our clients rate user adoption as one of the top priorities for the success of their intranet. However, the mention of using social features to help achieve a successful intranet is often met with caution and hesitation.

Perhaps the term “social” is not the best word to use. Instead of asking “Would you like social features on your intranet?”, we can ask “How important is it for employees to connect with peers and mentors?”, or “Would you like to leverage feedback from end-users to improve the content on your intranet?”

At the Social Intranet Summit in Vancouver this year, there was a great presentation by Deane Barker called “Overcoming the Fear: What C-Level execs are afraid of when it comes to social intranets”.

Aside from the great content, he presented an interesting technique for facilitating this feedback and uncovering what executives are really afraid of. Using a fictional character (Julie, an HR manager at BigCorp), he created profile updates which included planned trigger points around three things:

Non-work related information (“Heading out for the weekend!”)
Personal opinions (“Not a fan of this Congress at all. We should throw them out!”)
Information critical to the employer (“Had a great sales meeting this morning. This year might be our best yet!”)

He then asked, “Does this bother you? Why?”

The Fear Findings: (Disclaimer that identification is NOT endorsement)

Lack of social filters
Fear that there are people who haven’t been indoctrinated into the social norms of the organization such as new hires and new professionals.
Productivity
Interestingly, he found that people were more concerned around the perception of productivity loss than the actual loss of productivity. The implied message behind social features is that “It’s OK to do other stuff during company time.”
Confidentiality
The concern that employees will post a seemingly innocent yet confidential statement; “Feeling great after our annual meeting. This year will be our best yet!” There is a fear that too much is being shared.
Diffusion of official communication
For example, a status update from the accounting department to “Please complete invoices by the end of today” does not seem as official as a memo. The fear that employees may not be able to evaluate the “officialness” of multiple communication channels.
Trails of discoverability
The fear that everything that is posted may turn up in an audit and may be used in the future as a legal record; e.g., “My job frustrates me to the point where I might do something silly.”
Concerted activities
The fear that employees will organize, and give a union-like power to the employees. The National Labor Relations Act protects union organizing activities and protects employees whenever they collaborate to improve their terms of employment.
Mob mentality
If one person complains, everyone will.
Asymmetrical usage
Since it’s expected that some people will communicate a lot and some will communicate very little, what value judgments will people draw from this?

Proposed solutions:

The benefit must be sold

Any type of organizational communication carries a certain level of risk. Broadening and improving communication has a benefit larger than the inherent risk. Perhaps show examples of other organizations that are using social such as Accenture and eBay.

Localize

Decision-makers were much more receptive to inter-team communication than organization-wide communication. Allow only certain people to communicate to the entire organization. Communication needs context and localization can give this context.

Promote respect for the norm

Start off by providing fewer social features, and then expand over time. Maybe tie the ability to communicate to the length of time one has spent in the organization.

Leverage your vendor’s experience

Be honest with your vendor about the state of your internal communication (even if it’s embarrassing). There is a tendency to pretend irrational reasons don’t exist, but we should be asking vendors what they have done to overcome the issues of social.

Heather Harmse, portal manager for Vancity, made a great point at a recent VanUE presentation. She said that Vancity trusts its employees to manage the finances of its members. So why not trust them with some social features?

Do you need a SharePoint infrastructure audit?

dhelmer — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 18:19:48 GMT

Rationale

How well do you know your SharePoint infrastructure? From my experience this question is not readily answered and often avoided altogether. After all, SharePoint is a broad technology with a number of complexities so it’s only natural that these discussions come with a certain degree of apprehension or uneasiness. Nonetheless, as an IT professional or business manager we must broach the subject to do our jobs effectively.

The infrastructure of a SharePoint implementation is its foundation and directly impacts the health of the farm. A SharePoint farm that is reliable, scalable, performs well, and is maintainable relies upon utilizing suitable hardware, creating an appropriate topology, and ensuring things are configured correctly.

A poorly architected infrastructure can pose unexpected challenges resulting in loss of productivity and loss of confidence in your SharePoint deployment. An infrastructure audit is a proactive way to assess the status of your organization’s environment and can help ensure the future stability of your farm.

Benefits

At the very least, an infrastructure audit provides you with a base level of understanding about your environment. It allows members of your organization to be on the same page when talking about infrastructure related issues and can help address common questions where the answers are not always straightforward. Is your environment configured according to best practices? Do you have the ability to scale your farm up or down? Do you have a verified backup and recovery plan?

A properly executed infrastructure audit can help identify areas of risk to key business operations that rely on SharePoint. It can pinpoint performance bottlenecks and in some cases can even uncover options to reduce software and licensing costs by consolidating existing hardware.

Activities

An ideal SharePoint infrastructure audit provides a complete, end-to-end assessment of existing and planned infrastructure. This involves an investigation of the environment, including network, servers, and workstations. Some of the areas of investigation are:

SharePoint service configuration
web application, site collection configurations and databases
network and account security
the business continuity plan and implementation
solution performance and monitoring
scalability and planning for future needs

Recommendations can then be provided to introduce or improve system monitoring, enhance security, and adhere to common best practices.

Challenges

A SharePoint infrastructure audit does not come without its challenges. Like any kind of audit, an infrastructure audit has the potential to uncover problems. Nobody likes bad news, but I would suggest that in this case bad news is actually good news! By exposing these problems it helps you take steps towards resolving issues that might otherwise go undetected. Remember, the longer these problems go unaddressed the more potential they have to fester and wreak havoc sometime down the road, often when we least expect it or can least afford it.

An infrastructure audit can also be politically sensitive as it can reveal issues that can result in finger-pointing and blame being assigned rather than focusing on the recommendations of the audit itself. It’s important to keep in mind that SharePoint is complex and your environment is constantly evolving, so issues that are discovered now are not necessarily the result of something done wrong in the past. Try to focus more on resolving the issues and when possible, use an outside audit to prevent politics from getting in the way.

An infrastructure audit can pose logistical challenges as well. Ensuring all the right people are available at key moments in the process can be difficult. If hardware and human resources are geographically distributed this can also be an encumbrance. In addition, some of the tests we need to run can be intrusive and often need to be scheduled outside of regular working hours.

Finally, there are some technical challenges that may be encountered when performing an infrastructure audit. Sometimes there is little or no documentation to prepare for the audit (likely the reason we’re doing the audit!), so you’re often required to understand the complexities as you go. In addition, integration with line of business applications, services, and data sources can often add to the complexity.

Real world scenario

Habañero was recently approached by a company in the healthcare sector that was preparing to deploy a new workflow solution to facilitate a number of document management processes. They had some questions surrounding their infrastructure and whether or not it would support their intended usage levels while maintaining optimal performance and security. The Habañero infrastructure team was dispatched on site to work closely with the client’s internal IT resources. An objective investigation was made into several areas of the environment including hardware, topology, installation, configuration, and storage. In addition, operational concerns about performance, backup, recovery, and scalability were also assessed. Issues discovered in each area were analyzed from a risk and impact perspective and assigned a priority level of low, medium, or high.

Conclusion

If you are a business manager or IT professional there is value in taking the time to assess your organization’s understanding of its SharePoint infrastructure. A bit of planning and care can make all the difference to a successful and maintainable SharePoint implementation. Regardless of the shape and size of your organization, an infrastructure audit will help build confidence that your SharePoint foundation has the ability to meet current and future needs.

Presenting Windows Phone 7.5!

bedwards — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 21:50:35 GMT

(Disclosure: I’m a Windows Phone fanboy who adopted the platform in my heart long before it had even launched.)

Today I was a Microsoft stand-in to present on the developer opportunity, market options and advantages for developing applications for Windows Phone 7.5 (previously code named Mango). It was one of the few presentations I’ve ever done where the actual practical knowledge of the content is not likely to need to be retrieved from the annals of my mind ever again. But while pre-educating myself for the presentation, I became aware that Microsoft’s entire Windows Phone ecosystem: the developer experience, the marketplace and how they were differentiating themselves in the market was captivating me just like my fanboy WP7 device does. Perhaps being late to the mobile device market has given Microsoft the proper time to sit back, glance and learn from the ecosystems of their competitors: RIM, iPhone and Android.

We didn’t go into all of the troubles plaguing mobile developers today. These problems include varied device specifications, varied and inconsistent development approaches by vendor, a moving target of standardization and a very rapidly growing and changing market. What we did cover was how Microsoft was differentiating itself inside of these challenges, and while I’m hoping I’m not the guy on the sidelines shouting “Beta is Better”, I’ve got to think Microsoft is well positioned to make a significant impact to the future of mobile app development.

Download presentation

Habañero at the SharePoint Conference 2011

dflippance — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 18:08:24 GMT

The SharePoint Conference 2011 was a great learning opportunity for all the team. The following video highlights some of our experiences over the three days of the conference held in Anaheim, California.

Embracing the business needs of SharePoint

johara — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 01:30:33 GMT

[SharePoint Conference 2011]

New this year at the SharePoint Conference was a track for business, which was nice to see. Some ten years after the inception of SharePoint the community has started to more fully embrace the importance of concepts like user adoption, governance, user interface design, change management, and the cultural shifts that are required to help users understand and maximize the benefit of the platform.

Historically SharePoint has been driven by IT, and while this is changing, we still don’t see the broad skill-sets that can effectively guide these shifts on SharePoint projects. Resourcing still remains a primary obstacle.

Recently at the Calgary SharePoint User Group I facilitated after a great session by Chris Harper on information hygiene and the psychology behind the change required within organizations to facilitate this change, one of the attendees spoke up and remarked that it didn’t bode well for all the IT folk in the room that they were now required to be psychologists — as well as all the other hats they wear on a day to day basis.

It was funny, but it struck a chord with me.

This isn’t just a technology that IT implements. It’s a platform that dramatically alters the way people work. It requires commitment on the part of organizations, partners, and implementers to ensure that SharePoint implementations have the right skills and people on their teams including business analysts, change management experts, and user interface designers, in addition to the great work and skills our IT teams bring to the table.

It's a good start to see that awareness of these needs is growing.

Habañero: A Lattice Organization

sfitzgerald — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:00:00 GMT

I’ve recently had the opportunity to speak to MBA students at the University of British Columbia and at Simon Fraser University about Habañero’s organizational structure and how after fifteen years of evolving it I think we’re a good example of an alternative to the hierarchical organizational structures almost everyone is accustomed to. Millennials tend to aspire to get more out of work than moving up a corporate ladder and it was clear from the feedback I received that the business students I talked to were very interested in hearing about how a non-hierarchical structure can work in practice. Here’s a little of what I discussed in my presentations.

Habañero is the consummate project-based organization. Almost everything we do, we do as a project. Back when Habañero was a two person company we had no choice but to collaborate and be interdependent. We seemed to make a somewhat unconscious choice as we moved ahead to focus on a team/wolf pack sort of approach. We got clear pretty quick as we started to grow that this was a source of strength for our company and, in retrospect, we were learning that we could build teams where the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. That meant we could punch way above our weight class in terms of the projects we could do and clients we could attract.

As we grew, managing this interdependent, team-oriented company started to grow in complexity. Communications, knowledge sharing and-most of all-personal connection seemed to be critical ingredients that were put under strain with growth. We started to focus on performance management, team performance and clarity of accountabilities. At that point, we were fully and consciously committed to being a lattice organization.

Hierarchical organizations are what we are all used to. From organized religion to the military to the corporate world, most of the organizations we know are built on a top down authority structure that can be neatly summarized by a classic org chart. They have been around forever and really started to take form in the industrial revolution when it was important to maximize the productivity of the factory worker. From my perspective, it’s based on the idea that processes can be best implemented and controlled by isolating people in well-defined roles. The more you can control about exactly what each person does, the higher your productivity. It takes a lot of work to make hierarchies humanistic!

The lattice is something pretty different. It’s not defined by a hierarchical ladder. People, ideas and information flow in any direction based on need. It’s messy, complicated and beautiful, just like human beings.

There are a huge number of ingredients that go into supporting this idea of a lattice organization in Habañero. However, there are three that really stand out.

You have to be purpose driven. It has to be authentic and mean something important to the whole company (and hopefully your customers too!) The more we push autonomy, the more we need to support people with the context provided by Habañero’s purpose.
You have to be able to build meaningful custom career paths. We focus on a strengths-based approach, which is powerful, but you have to be willing as a company to slice and dice roles to find the sweet spots between what’s best for the company and what’s best for each career. You have to remove traditional markers of career ladders to make the custom career path idea authentic. For example, we have a real focus on putting people in leadership roles because they are the best leader, not because they’ve been around the longest or they are the strongest person in that group (i.e. the best developer does not become the leader of the developers). We also work hard to weed out and remove silos, whether they are structural or cultural to make sure we don't inadvertently create barriers to career movement within Habañero.
You have to let teams flourish. We think that the ability to build high performance teams is an organizational capability that we have to continually work on. Everyone in Habañero belongs to many virtual teams, some that last a long time and some that are focused on short-term tasks. These teams need to have the same interdependent structure with clarity of accountabilities and purpose that Habañero needs as a whole. One example is our Operations Team that consists of a set of interdependent roles devised to reflect the tensions that are natural in our business.

I believe Habañero's lattice structure is a key element that drives employee engagement and is integral to our overall success as a company. A lattice organization is not without its challenges and as our population grows, and we contemplate expanding into new regions, maintaining our lattice structure will take work. Having the opportunity to explore the theory and practice of our approach with a group of smart, engaged business students really helped gel some of our thinking. It also provided confirmation that a great deal of the best talent out there is very keen on building their careers in lattice type environments like ours.

I’m always happy to discuss Habañero’s organizational structure and where we still want to go with it. Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

The Habañero Intranet Success Framework

lkerney — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 20:15:54 GMT

Our sustainment offerings are a steadily growing part of our business, and we expect the sustainment team to play an even larger role in the future as we build long-term impactful relationships with our clients.

What is sustainment?

Sustainment includes the support, maintenance, and evolution of applications. Our sustainment offerings include foundational service elements (such as release and deployment management, incident and problem management, etc.) that ensure a stable, well-performing platform for growth. Additional service elements focused on value realization (such as user adoption initiatives, analytics reporting and analysis, etc.), ensure that an application evolves to meet changing business needs and continues to have a significant and meaningful impact on business outcomes.

Why is sustainment so important?

During the initial implementation of an intranet, a lot of thought and effort is put into the business outcomes expected. As is often the case though, once the solution is in sustainment, we (and our clients) can easily lose sight of the business objectives and simply focus on completing tasks and reacting to requests.

However, it’s during sustainment — when an application or system is in production and being used — that the value of a solution is actually realized. In addition, sustainment provides a consistent level of engagement over a long period of time, in which we gain a deep knowledge of our clients’ business and they build trust in our ability to help make their business better. Simply responding to requests from clients is no longer good enough. We must have a significant and meaningful impact on the business outcomes achieved by each of our clients over time.

To that end, Colleen O’Neill and Ellisa Calder have been working on developing a framework to help us ensure that we are continuously improving the business impact our sustainment team has. Our first version of the framework is geared towards intranets and collaboration platforms and we have already put the framework into practice with a client whom we've been working with for a number of years.

Intranet Success Framework

The Intranet Success Framework is intended to guide Habañero (and our clients) in ensuring that our sustainment work has a significant and meaningful impact on business outcomes. It should be used with every initiative related to the intranet. Examples of related initiatives could include implementing SharePoint My Sites, integrating video capabilities, or implementing a custom workflow for a business process.

There are three parts to the Framework:

One: Environment Analysis

During the environment analysis stage we take each initiative and answer the following questions:

What are the desired outcomes of the initiative?
How does the initiative align with or support the overall company goals and strategies?
What is the current state?
Who is the business owner that is accountable for the overall success and championing of the initiative?

Two: Implementation Strategies

We’ve also recognized that there are six implementation strategies that need to be considered for every single initiative related to an intranet. Not all of them are relevant for every initiative, but they are all important to consider.

The first two are a common focus of discussion with most clients about a new initiative:

The new or revised functionality
The new or revised design

The remaining four implementation strategies can be critically important to the success of the initiative, but can easily be overlooked:

Content Strategy (e.g. Who is the audience? Who is creating the content? How frequently is content updated?)
User training (e.g. What training is required by users for this initiative to be successful? Is it technical “how to” training or “conceptual” training? Are the users educated on the “why?”)
Promotion (e.g. How are the outcomes of the initiative going to be promoted? How will users learn about the initiative? How will they be incented to start using and take advantage of it?)
Governance (e.g. What types of governance needs to be in place to ensure the long term success and relevance of the initiative (not just successful implementation))

Three: Impact

The third part of the Framework is getting clear about the intended impact of the initiative and how we are going to measure results to measure success. This can include quantitative (e.g. analytics) and qualitative measures (e.g. interviews).

As we’ve started using this framework on client initiatives, some of the immediate benefits we’ve seen include:

A better understanding (shared between us and our client’s business and IT stakeholders) of the expected business outcomes of an initiative.
Increased awareness of the overall impact and costs (not just the technical implementation costs) required in order to make the initiative successful.
A higher level of commitment to an initiative from business stakeholders.

Ultimately we plan to use a similar approach with many of our different project types to help ensure that we continue to increase the measurable impact we have on our client's businesses.

Intranet user adoption themes

brichards — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 21:12:41 GMT

User adoption reminds me of the proverbial sound of a tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it. If you create something with great features but no one uses it, was something of value ever created?

I’ve been able to focus closely on user adoption for three different intranet projects in the last few months and the following are some of my observations about the themes that I’m seeing regularly.

Intranets are not new to people

The concept of a company intranet doesn’t need to be sold to employees. Something I hear commonly now is: “When I used to work at Company X, our intranet did Y and it would be great if our intranet did that too.” A few years ago, employees had more trouble making suggestions or envisioning the potential of intranets.
In general, intranets do basic publishing quite well. Most intranets do a good job delivering company news, HR and other company information (departmental information, forms, policies and general company info) and employees use the intranet to get this information.

People want collaboration and SharePoint team sites but need support

SharePoint team sites have a lot of functionality that people want. There is a desire to get off of a file share, have one source of truth for shared documents, and to work online in a security trimmed site.
Most people need support to set up and learn to use SharePoint team sites. Almost all team site success stories involve investment in training, business process analysis and governance. Whereas, most failures to adopt are linked with lack of support to set up team sites to mimic business processes or a lack of training in how to use them.

Investing in user experience can facilitate user adoption, but it’s not usually enough

Some things are too complex and not intuitive enough for training to be unnecessary for most employees (e.g. creating a SharePoint site to reflect a business process.)
People sometimes need a level of proficiency that requires training. For example, people working in call-centres or under other time constraints may need training to use systems optimally, and content authors need more proficiency than other employees.
Good information architecture and design won’t solve content issues. (See the next point.)

Content issues affect the reliability and value of the intranet to employees

Content accuracy and currency is almost always an issue on intranets (I’ve never actually seen it not be an issue) and the areas where content is accurate and regularly updated are the areas most used.
Content authors often express a desire for more feedback on how the content they work on is used, either through web analytics, feedback forms or other research so they can make content more targeted and useful.

People like people

Using attributes (department, name, location) to find people is highly valued. The people directory is usually one of the features of the intranet used the most, and the biggest source of negative feedback when it doesn’t work well.
People want to know what others are doing, especially in large organizations. Profiles written about people and news and announcements about people’s activities are often noted as a favorite thing and show up well trafficked in web statistics.

High quality search makes people happy

This seems so obvious I almost wanted to leave it off the list, but it is one of the most common things employees mention. Improvements to search are noticed and appreciated by employees and lead to them using the intranet more.

Tools like a buy-and-sell can increase adoption

This seems sort of trivial compared to the other purposes intranets serve, but when a buy-and-sell area for employees is provided it is usually one of the most trafficked areas of the intranet. It works like Craigslist, minus the security risk and with some reassurance that your co-workers won’t rip you off. It’s the type of service that can be easily provided to employees and will help drive traffic and connect people across the organization. It can be an amazingly successful intranet social tool.

Social tools in the workplace are still approached cautiously

People in their 20s and 30s have just as many reservations about social tools at work as people who are older. Some use Facebook and some don’t, but either way they aren’t sure about how social tools can provide business value.
Linkedin is a better reference in discussing the potential of social tools than Facebook.
People are the most receptive to executive blogs and reading other people’s open comments on news stories.
There is concern over the ability to respond to comments and questions made using social tools.
Pilot studies around a process, group of people, or around a topic area for the use of social tools is a good way to introduce them to the organization.

Today’s information landscape requires a lot of brain power to navigate

An intranet is more and more a platform that helps employees makes sense of complex information landscapes. There is a lot of value in using an intranet to simplify those landscapes for them.

Those are the themes I’m seeing regularly that affect what people are adopting, or what they are ready to adopt. If there are other themes you’re seeing, I’d love to hear about them.

Habañero vs. the agency

bskelton — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 20:14:37 GMT

Chris Staples at Rethink wrote an interesting article last year about specialist digital shops and how, as ad agencies expand their online offerings, the specialty digital firm will find itself in trouble. There is a lot of validity to the argument as online marketing budgets are increasing and agencies more than ever are learning that they need to truly understand the Web. So what does this mean for Habañero? How do we compete? Should we be worried?

Although we’ve had good experiences working with a number of our client’s agencies over the years, we at times feel like a lion tamer. Things may be going great with the lion and they may be playing nice, but you have to watch out — if you turn your back even for a second the lion might try to eat your lunch (or more likely, you). We have been fortunate that over the years our deep strategic insight, user experience and technical skills have allowed us to keep the lion at bay.

At first glance it would be easy to continue to dismiss the work that agencies do as fluff and argue as Adaptive Path CEO Peter Merholz did “When criticizing ad agencies, you have to begin at the core—advertising, as it is widely practiced, is an inherently unethical and, frankly, poisonous endeavor that sees people as sheep to be manipulated, that vaunts style over substance, and deems success to be winning awards.”

However, I feel that this wouldn’t be the soundest business decision. Chris is a smart business guy, and I wouldn’t bet against him.

So what does this mean? First off, I don’t believe Habañero is a specialist digital shop — we are an organization that helps people (our customers, internal employees or partners) find information, share and collaborate. The solutions we build, whether it's a collaboration platform for an organization such as The City of Calgary, a partner portal for BC Hydro, a website for Servus Credit Union or a call-centre application for Fortis BC have one thing in common — they are all about helping people get and use the information they need, be it structured or unstructured.

On the intranet and extranet side we don’t see much competition from agencies, and I don’t think this will change in the short term. The projects are large, the platforms such as SharePoint and SAP are challenging, the integration issues are complex, and the change management and training skills required are unique to the enterprise.

On the Web side however, I believe we are going to continue to see more and more competition with agencies. They tend to have the ear of the CMO, understand an organization’s marketing strategy in much more depth than us, and are getting better at creating websites. So how do we compete? Do we still want to be designing and building websites?

I believe we do, but we want to build smarter and smarter sites. Let me give you an example.

I’ve got Telus Optik TV. The service is awesome — love it! The website on the other hand isn’t. If you are a new customer the website is fine — they have the marketing elements down, the fun pictures of the animals are there, and I can sign up for service. Once however, you become a customer, the site seems a lot less useful.

As a customer you can view your bill, but that is pretty much it. If you want to do anything to your account you have to wait on the phone for an hour. It makes you wonder: Why can’t I customize my channel line up? Why doesn’t the site recognize what channels I watch and suggest additional channels I would like based on my viewing habits? Why doesn’t the site let me know that there are channels I never view that I could remove? Why do I have to call to do anything useful?

I believe it is because the Optik TV site, like so many others, was built with a marketing focus, not a customer focus. Building a site with a customer focus is hard. Creating a website that allows customers to fully interact with your business is technically complex. It requires integration, be it with your CRM, ERP or one of a gazillion other back-end systems that organizations have.

The good thing for Habañero — we have these skills. We leverage platforms and build solutions that pull data in and out of CRM and ERP systems, where the ability to really understand your customer lives. We have the tools, technology and capability to continuously build smarter and smarter websites.

My three-year goal involves not competing to build dumb websites anymore. I want us building smart websites — websites that understand and adapt to each customer or potential customer. Websites that treat each visitor as an individual and enable a true conversation with the business. If we are able to do this I think we will do just fine against our ad agency friends.