J.D. Meier's Blog

Simple Enterprise Strategy

JD Meier — Wed, 22 May 2013 20:29:39 GMT

One of the challenges my General Manager put on my plate, was to tell a simple story, as simply as possible, about the essence of doing Enterprise Strategy.

Here is what I ended up with:

The way I told the story is …

We use scenarios to scope meaningful chunks of change (vs. boil the ocean)
Big scenarios are actually chunks of organizational change.
We drive a program of change using a repeatable formula: Current State, the desired Future State, the Gaps, the ROI, and the Roadmap for Business Capabilities, People Capabilities, and Technology Capabilities.
The value is in the change, and this connects business and IT in a significant and meaningful way.

He loved it.

I elaborated.

I shared a simple Workstream Frame to show how when we drive Enterprise Strategy, we can use the following canvas as our backdrop:

It’s a simple map but it helps chunk up and think about how you are making the changes:

Program Governance – This is the space of operational excellence and governance.
Business Value – This is where the business-led conversations and business-led changes flow.
IT People/Process – From a pragmatic perspective, this is where IT-led conversations, and changes to IT people and process happen.
Technology – This is where the fundamental technology changes happen – the IT platform for the business. Again, dominantly IT-led conversations.

To fully appreciate the simplicity above, below is what I first walked my General Manager through, and he said, while he could appreciate the essence of it, it was too complex:

At the end of the day, I think he was right, and I was glad that he pushed me to find a simpler story and to be able to tell it quickly at the whiteboard.

When people see that it’s all about driving a chunk of organizational change, and that it’s by changing the business, people, and technology capabilities, light-bulbs go off, and people get excited by how they can reshape the future of their Enterprise story, through Enterprise Strategy.

Xbox One

Microsoft Secret Stuff

The Microsoft Story

Microsoft Explained: Making Sense of the Microsoft Platform Story

Microsoft Developer Platform at a Glance

Office 365 at a Glance

Windows Azure at a Glance

Xbox One

JD Meier — Wed, 22 May 2013 04:55:56 GMT

“Xbox One is designed to deliver a whole new generation of blockbuster games, television and entertainment in a powerful, all-in-one device” -- Don Mattrick, president, Interactive Entertainment Business at Microsoft

Key Features of Xbox One

Integrates the cloud, voice control and gesture technology.
All-in-one entertainment solution: Live TV + video-on-demand + web chat.
Measure your heartbeat
Recognize your voice
Voice activation, motion, and facial recognition control the Xbox One
A new set of universal gestures to control your TV
Improved Kinect sensor will track wrist and shoulder rotations
TV on Xbox One. “Navigate and watch live TV from your cable, telco or satellite set-top box through your Xbox One. Microsoft is committed to bringing live TV through various solutions to all the markets where Xbox One will be available.”
Snap Mode. Offers a second screen and allows users to run two activities – such as watching TV and browsing the internet, or using Skype – simultaneously.
Home. “Turn on your entertainment system with two powerful words, “Xbox On,” and a custom-tailored Home dashboard welcomes you with your favorite games, TV and entertainment.”
Skype for Xbox One. “Specially designed for Xbox One, talk with friends on your TV in stunning HD, or for the first time ever, hold group Skype calls on your TV.”
Trending. “Stay on top of what is hot on TV by discovering the entertainment that is popular among your friends, and see what is trending within the Xbox community.”
OneGuide “Find your favorite entertainment easily, searching by network or name, all with the sound of your voice and presented in a tailored program guide.”
Content maker + platform provider
Main camera can record 1080P RGB video at 30 frames per second.
Powered by 300,000 servers (more than the entire world's computing power in 1999)
8 gigs of RAM, 8-core CPU and GPU SoC, and a substantial 500GB HDD
A Blu-ray drive as well as USB 3.0 and integrated 802.11n Wi-Fi.

Microsoft Summary of New Generation of Xbox Live

Smart Match. “A new Smart Match matchmaking system virtually eliminates waiting in lobbies by estimating wait times and finding people you want to play with while you are enjoying other activities — reputation fundamentally matters and helps find best matches.”
Game DVR. “A dedicated Game DVR captures and accesses your magic moments, all saved to the cloud. Along with sharing tools, you will have the most amazing bragging rights with Xbox Live.”
Living Games. “Dynamic, living worlds evolve and improve the more you play, and advanced artificial intelligence can learn to play like you, so friends can play against your shadow.”
Expanded achievements. “A new and expanded achievements system captures video of your epic moments, continues to grow a game’s achievements over time and rewards you in new ways, and your Gamerscore carries over from Xbox 360.”
Xbox SmartGlass.“Xbox SmartGlass is natively part of the Xbox One platform, built in from the beginning with the ability to quickly render content directly onto your device, and now more devices can connect at one time for multiplayer and shared entertainment.”

Microsoft Summary of Xbox One Look and Feel

“New Xbox One hardware is sleek and modern and complements any décor. The console is shaped in the 16:9 aspect ratio and employs a horizontal orientation optimized for its high-speed Blu-ray™ disc player. It is molded in a deep and rich liquid black color and includes a distinctive beveled edge.”
“The completely redesigned, revolutionary 1080p Kinect is more precise, more responsive and more intuitive.”
“Xbox controller is refreshed with more than 40 technical and design innovations. Updated directional pad, thumb stick and ergonomic fit immerse all gamers in ways that are uniquely Xbox, and precision and control have been dramatically increased with all new vibrating impulse triggers. The Xbox One Wireless Controller is designed to work in concert with the new Kinect, allowing the two to be paired automatically to create seamless player syncing.”

Interesting Deals for Xbox One

NFL Deal - Integrate coverage of the sport with game-like elements such as a Fantasy Football app, allowing viewers to manager their own fantasy sides while watching the real thing in action.
Stephen Spielberg Deal - Stephen Spielberg will be producing a TV series based on the best-selling Halo game, exclusively available to Xbox One.
EA Games - Four new titles exclusive to Xbox: FIFA 14, NBA Live, UFC and Madden.

Analysts on Xbox One

Gartner: "The Xbox One really looks to advance the state of video game technology and entertainment in a way that we haven't seen before," said Brian Blau, a director of Gartner Research."
Greenwich Consulting: "The Xbox One is set to mark the beginning of a new generation of games, TV and entertainment." -- Fred Huet, a managing partner at Greenwich Consulting

Key Links for Xbox One

Microsoft Secret Stuff

The Microsoft Story

Microsoft Explained: Making Sense of the Microsoft Platform Story

Microsoft Developer Platform at a Glance

Office 365 at a Glance

Windows Azure at a Glance

How NOT To Make Money Online

JD Meier — Tue, 21 May 2013 18:37:47 GMT

I mentor several folks on how to make money online, either because they are trying to supplement their income, or take their game to the next level, or simply trying to reduce the worry around losing their job.

An interesting pattern is that many of the folks that I know that make a second (3rd, 4th, 5th) income online, show up strong in many ways. Their second source of income is always a “passion business.” They find a way to monetize what they love in a way that’s sustainable and creates a ton of value for their tribe of raving fans.

They end up spending more time in their art, so they recharge and renew, and show up fresh at work because they found a way to spend more time doing what they love (it’s an interesting question when you ask the question, “What do you want to spend more time doing?”, and then actually do it

One of the most important success patterns I see is that people do what they would do for free, but pay attention to what people would pay them for. This does two things:

It forces them to figure out what they really do love and can do day in and day out (where can they be strong, all day long)
It forces them to be smarter at business (otherwise, it’s not sustainable and it slowly dies)

I see people succeed at making money online by doing lots of experimentation and continuous learning. The ones that do the best, learn from success AND failures. The ones that create truly outstanding success, learn the patterns of failure to avoid, and the patterns of success to do more of.

Lucky for me, I got to see several people right around me making $10,000, $20,000, etc. a month online, and they happily shared with me what they were doing, including what was working and what was not. The variety was pretty amazing, until I started to see the patterns. As I started to see the patterns, what surprised me the most is how so many people fail to make money online because “they try to make money online” – it’s like chasing happiness, and having it always evade your grasp.

How ironic.

There are so many ways NOT to make money online. In fact, they are worth enumerating because people still try them and get incredibly frustrated and give up.

Here are 50 Ways How NOT To Make Money Online.

It’s serious stuff.

I took a pattern-based approach, so that it’s easy to see the principle behind each recipe for failure.

You can actually apply many of the insights whether it’s an online or offline business, and whether you are a one-man band, or a business partnership, or working in a corporation.

It puts a distillation of many business basics, great business lessons, and business skills at your fingertips.

I’m hoping that more people can be entrepreneurs and create their financial freedom by doing more of what they love, in a business-smart way.

Also, I’m hoping this helps more people get their head around the idea that we’re in a new digital economy and the ways to make a living are changing under our feet.

The future is here and it belongs to those that create it and shape it.

Own your destiny.

Daniel Cook on 8 Laws of Productivity

JD Meier — Sun, 19 May 2013 15:35:54 GMT

Daniel Cook has a great PDF on the 8 Laws of Productivity. The subtitle is “8 Productivity Experiments You Don’t Need to Repeat.”

It’s the synthesis of Dan’s learnings and research over the years on how to create more productive teams.

Right up front, Dan defines productivity as work accomplished, minus work required to fix defects, and minus work required to fix bad design decisions. He adds that it’s possible for productivity to be negative when workers end up doing more harm than good. Dan says, “People commonly measure ‘what was accomplished’, but often this is a poor measure of productivity. It is possible to check in code and design decisions that must be later fixed or removed at great cost. If you only measure work accomplished, you could generate great ‘productivity’ numbers but never ship a working product. The real measure of productivity is valued working code in customer hands.”

Here are the 8 Laws of Productivity according to Cook:

Law #1 - Working more than 40 hours a week leads to decreased productivity
Law #2 - There is Always a Cost to Crunch
Law #3 -- Repeat experiments on knowledge workers, not factory workers
Law #4 -- Teams on overtime feel like they are doing more, but actually accomplish less
Law #5 -- Productivity is maximized in small teams of 4-8 people
Law #6 -- Seat People on the Same Team Together in a Closed Team Room
Law #7 -- Cross-Functional Teams outperform siloed teams
Law #8 -- Scheduling at 80% produces better products

Law #1 - Working more than 40 hours a week leads to decreased productivity

What happens if you try to improve productivity by working longer, either through more hours in a week, or more hours in a day?

Cook summarizes the results:
<40 hours and people aren't working enough
> 60 hour work week gives a small productivity boost
The boost lasts 3 to 4 weeks and then turns negative

Cook tells us that according to Ford, and 12 years of experimentation, 40 hours was the most effective.

Interestingly, an early XP practice was 40 Hour Week, before it became Sustainable Pace. The main idea is that "productivity does not increase with hours worked."

A key point here is that "After a certain tipping point, teams tend to be more destructive than productive." (see InfoQ on Sustainable Pace)

I've experience the benefits of a 40 hour work week and wrote about it in 40 Hour Work Week at Microsoft.

An interesting data point is that 6 of the top 10 competitive economies prohibit employees from working over 48 hours/week. (See MBA on Bring Back the 40 Hour Work Week.)

Law #2 - There is Always a Cost to Crunch

What happens if we work harder in bursts? Can we take advantage of the burst that comes from working overtime? What happens if we crunch for a week and then 'only' 40 hours for another week? Are there other patterns of scheduling work that might be more efficient?

Cook summarizes the results:

Anything over 40 hours results in a recovery period, no matter how you split it up.
35 to 40 hour weeks can be divided in a variety of ways, such as four 10-hour days on and three days off.
These 'compressed work weeks' can reduce absenteeism and, in some cases, increase productivity 10 to 70%

Law #3 -- Repeat experiments on knowledge workers, not factory workers

Do the same rules apply to creativity and problem-solving as manual labor?

Cook summarizes the results:
Studies show that creativity and problem solving decreases faster with fatigue than manual labor.
Grinding out problems by working longer on average result in inferior solutions.
Lack of sleep is particularly damaging.

Law #4 -- Teams on overtime feel like they are doing more, but actually accomplish less

If many workers self-report that they are the exception to the rule and can work longer with no ill effects, and overtime workers report they are getting more done, is this true?

Cook summarizes the results of measurements where Team A works overtime and Team B does not:
Team A feels like they are doing much more than Team B.
Yet, Team B produces the better product.

Law #5 -- Productivity is maximized in small teams of 4-8 people

Does productivity change for various team sizes and which size team produces the best product?

Cook summarizes the results:
Productivity for small groups is shown to be 30-50% higher than groups over 10
Cost of communication increases dramatically for groups larger than 10
Smaller groups don't have enough breadth to solve a wide array of problems well

Interestingly, the Navy Seal create super teams with teams of 4.

Law #6 -- Seat People on the Same Team Together in a Closed Team Room

What is the most productive physical work environment? Are cubes, individual offices or team rooms most effective? Every individual has an opinion, but what is best for the team?

Cook summarizes the results:
Studies show 100% increase in productivity
Being nearby means faster communication and problem-solving
Few external interruptions to the team (not the individual) means higher productivity

Law #7 -- Cross-Functional Teams outperform siloed teams

How should workers of different disciplines be organized? Should teams be composed of a single discipline? For example, all programmers or all artists? Or should teams be mixed?

Cook summarizes the results:
Cross-functional teams produced more effective solutions in the same time
Cross-functional teams have more likelihood of generating breakthrough solutions
There is some negotiation of norms of front, but this is a short-term loss

Law #8 -- Scheduling at 80% produces better products

What percentage of team capacity should be officially scheduled? 110% to promote people to 'stretch'? 100% because that's what they can do? 80% because slacking is good?

Cook summarizes the results:
Scheduling people at 100% doesn't give space to think of creative solutions
Not lost time: Passionate workers keep thinking
The 20% goes into new idea generation and process improvements
Producing 20 great features is usually far more profitable than producing 100 competent features

Dan included some of his research sources:

Crunch in the Game Industry
IGDA - Articles - Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work: 6 Lessons - http://www.igda.org/articles/erobinson_crunch.php
InfoQ - Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work, by Ben Hughes - http://www.infoq.com/news/2008/01/crunch-mode

Best Team Size
Is Your Team Too Big? Too Small? What's the Right Number? - http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/articles.cfm?articleid=1501
Team Performance and Team Size - http://www.teambuildingportal.com/articles/systems-approaches/teamperformance-teamsize.php

Sickness and Overtime Correlation
Relationship between self-reported low productivity and overtime working - http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=15461524

Prioritization
First Things First (book) - http:///en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Things_First_(book)

4 Day Work Week
Alternative Work Schedules and Work–Family Balance: A Research Note - http://rop.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/28/2/166

Team Spaces
"Rapid Software Development Through Team Collocation" IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Volume 28, No. 7, July 2002

Additional Resources

INFOQ: Does Sustainable Pace Mean a 40 Hour Work Week?

MBA on Bring Back the 40 Hour Work Week (Info Graphic)

40 Hour Week (C2 Wiki)

10 Big Ideas from Getting Results the Agile Way

40 Hour Work Week at Microsoft

How I Use Agile Results

Any Activity Can Be Turned into a Game

JD Meier — Sun, 19 May 2013 14:06:36 GMT

Any activity can be turned into a game, if it meets the right criteria. Wise words from Dan Cook:

“If an activity can be learned…

If the player’s performance can be measured…

If the player can be rewarded or punished in a timely fashion…

Then any activity that meets these criteria can be turned into a game.”

Gamification is hot. I called it out in my Trends for 2013 roundup. When all things are equal, fun is a differentiating factor.

Microsoft Secret Stuff

The Gamification of Education

Wearable Computing

Free Time Management Skills Guide

JD Meier — Fri, 17 May 2013 04:00:19 GMT

30 Days of Getting Results is a hard-core time management course.

It’s a 30 Day Sprint with a lesson each day, but you can go at your own pace. For example, I every now and then I scan through it in about 20 minutes to remind myself of the best time management skills to work on.

Some of you have let me know that you can’t get to the site. I’m not sure why.

Regardless, I have a free PDF version of 30 Days of Getting Results available.

It’s powerful stuff. If you want to master time management, productivity, and work-life balance, this short-course will help you do that.

Time management and extreme productivity are a few of the things that I regularly mentor individuals, teams, and leaders on.

It’s 129 pages, and very easy to flip through.

Each lessons includes an exercise to make it real and drive it home.

If you download and go through it, please rate it on Good Reads.

Enjoy.

Chalene Johnson on Personal Development, Productivity, Motivation, and More

JD Meier — Thu, 16 May 2013 19:06:53 GMT

To do great things, it helps to study people that do great things and show us better ways to do things. It helps us build our reference library of what’s possible and it helps inspire us to new levels of success.

Most importantly, it expands our capabilities.

Chalene Johnson is a powerhouse when it comes to personal development. She continuously pushes herself, while expanding and exploring what’s possible physically, mentally. and emotionally. She’s a unique blend of entrepreneur, physical fitness expert, choreographer, author, life changer, and motivational speaker … and we can learn a lot from her approach.

I wrote up 27 lessons from Chalene Johson, but my favorite lesson is actually Lesson #7 – Success isn’t magic, it’s a method:

Chalene says, “It’s NOT luck — it’s KNOW HOW. There is a formula for everything.” You have to study the people that have the results that you want. Learn from their formula. Study what made them successful. If you can find the proven practices and the methods that work, you’ll speed up your success, and you’ll avoid the dead-ends. Finding a formula helps you establish and practices routines that will help you get better and better over time.

Personally, I’ve found this to be true time and time again. Whenever I got stuck, it was my strategy or approach. I just didn’t know the right formula or who to model from. There’s always a recipe. One of the most important things I learned on the Microsoft patterns & practices team is that if you look to the right sources, you’ll find the proven practices or the patterns that really work, even if it’s not well-known (in fact, part of our job on the Microsoft patterns & practices team was really to share and scale this knowledge more broadly.)

I’ve shared my personal rapid results formula before in The Way of Success, and it helps elaborate on how to model success in a more effective way. As Tony Robbins says, success leaves clues. We just need to be good students of possibility to find them and apply them.

Even if you’re not into working out, I think you'll enjoy lessons from Chalene Johnson on personal development, productivity, motivation, and more.

What Do Customers Teach Us About Business?

JD Meier — Wed, 15 May 2013 18:54:20 GMT

Everything.

This morning I started and finished, The UnStoppables: Tapping Your Entrepreneurial Power, by Bill Schley.

It’s a powerful book that brings us the essence and lessons of entrepreneurship, including what we learn from a band of Navy SEALs, Israeli investors, a branding expert, and a chairman of a multibillion-dollar tech company.

But my favorite nugget is about what we learn from customers.

Customers teach us how to be better.

They are our ultimate business mentor, if we listen and learn.

Schley writes:

“Customers might as well be air and water; your business has no life without them. Success is something you must learn from them because only they can teach it to you, through what they need, where their pain and pleasure are, how they want to be sold to, what kind of relationships they want to have with a company in your category, and so forth. Customers hold the answers to all your most important questions about your product, service, and brand. The Wonderful Paradox is that the secret of getting what you want is to think most about what they want.”

I’ve always been a fan of customer-connected development to build better software and ship better products. Empathy for customers seems to be the difference that makes the difference when it comes to envisioning and creating great products and services. (It works for education, too, when you put the learner-first, great things happen.)

How To Use Tasks in Microsoft Outlook More Effectively

JD Meier — Tue, 14 May 2013 16:45:42 GMT

If you just have a long list of tasks in Microsoft Outlook, then it won’t help you focus on immediate actions. The key is to organize your tasks in Microsoft Outlook by priorities.

The challenge is that the first thing you’ll most likely want to do is sort by a custom priority.

While it’s not very complicated, it can be incredibly frustrating if you just want a simple task list that sorts by your custom priorities, and you don’t know the precise steps to make that happen.

Let’s do it.

If you do want to use Microsoft Outlook for tasks, here’s the trick to making it more useful:

Add Start Date (it’s often more important to know when to start something, than to know when it’s due – this helps you bubble up critical actions better)
Add a custom priority field. In the example below, I created a “Pri” field and used P0, P1, and P2 for the priorities. Here’s the trick:

Don’t use the “Custom Priority” field that’s readily available in “Field Chooser”. (You won’t be able to edit the text and you’ll get frustrated.)
Instead, add a custom field by clicking “New…” on the “Field Chooser” – see below.

Group by your custom field. After you add your custom field for priority, to group by it, you need to use the “Group By” option (it won’t be listed under “Arrange By”)

Note -- You need to switch “Select Available Fields” from the default to “User Defined Fields in Folder” (otherwise, you won’t see your custom priority field)

Here it is visually …

This is just a simple set of tasks in Microsoft Outlook, nothing fancy, so we keep our focus on the key thing – a list of tasks organized by priorities with a start date.

When you right-click on the fields, you can click the “Field Chooser”, and then click “New …” to create a “New Column.”

To group your tasks by your new custom priority field, you can again, right-click the fields at the top of the Tasks, but this time, click “View Settings.” From there, click “Group By …” and then change “Select available fields from” to be set to “User-defined fields in folder.” This will then let you set the “Group items by” option to your new custom priority field (“Pri” in my example above.)

Remember, the key to effective task management isn’t managing your tasks. It’s actually doing the most important tasks that achieve your goals, at the right time, in an efficient and effective way.

Are You Using Agile Results?

Agile Results on a Page

How I Use Agile Results

Agile Results: It Works for Teams and Leaders Too

7 Ways to Take an Outside-In View of Your Group

JD Meier — Mon, 13 May 2013 18:54:19 GMT

I was helping a mentee take a new view on their business, so they could transform their business to compete in a new arena. Here are the 7 ways I outlined for them to get a better view on their business to shape significant change:

What are the key deliverables that the company cares about? (Who are the stakeholders and why do they care?)
How does the money flow? (Who funds and why? If they gave you more money, what more would you do? If you got less money, what would be cut? This gives you a fast business sense)
What is the cadence of your deliverables? (Do you ship 3 big thingies or 30 thingies per year? .. what would a “fast” cadence look like? More importantly, what would people value? For example, can you focus on 3 big wins each quarter that have high impact?)
What’s the roadmap look like? (Can you put it on a one-slider to show the big impact in a way others get?)
What are the critical few KPIs that tell you whether you are keeping up, falling behind, or changing the game?
What is your unique set of capabilities of your product/service?
What is the unique set of capabilities of your people?

If you can answer those without a lot of work – congrats!

The above lens gives you quick insight and a critical view into the customer, the value you provide, the cost, and the capabilities you can use to drive meaningful change and transformation.

To put that into context and apply it, when business leaders look to shape a business, they tend to look at the capabilities. They want to know what’s unique and what’s redundant. If you can’t differentiate at your capabilities, then you have a problem articulating your unique value.

Capabilities help give you a simple language for talking about value and unique strengths. They are also a business tool for consolidating and improving efficiencies by maturing or outsourcing capabilities.

Use them wisely.

J.D. Meier's Blog

Simple Enterprise Strategy

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Xbox One

Key Features of Xbox One

Microsoft Summary of New Generation of Xbox Live

Microsoft Summary of Xbox One Look and Feel

Interesting Deals for Xbox One

Analysts on Xbox One

Key Links for Xbox One

You Might Also Like

How NOT To Make Money Online

Daniel Cook on 8 Laws of Productivity

Law #1 - Working more than 40 hours a week leads to decreased productivity

Law #2 - There is Always a Cost to Crunch

Law #3 -- Repeat experiments on knowledge workers, not factory workers

Law #4 -- Teams on overtime feel like they are doing more, but actually accomplish less

Law #5 -- Productivity is maximized in small teams of 4-8 people

Law #6 -- Seat People on the Same Team Together in a Closed Team Room

Law #7 -- Cross-Functional Teams outperform siloed teams

Law #8 -- Scheduling at 80% produces better products

Additional Resources

You Might Also Like

Any Activity Can Be Turned into a Game

You Might Also Like

Free Time Management Skills Guide

Chalene Johnson on Personal Development, Productivity, Motivation, and More

What Do Customers Teach Us About Business?

How To Use Tasks in Microsoft Outlook More Effectively

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7 Ways to Take an Outside-In View of Your Group