Here are five examples of common workplace activities that Google Wave can support.

1. Conferences and Professional Development

This one probably seems obvious. Departments can set up Google Waves to discuss what’s happening at a particular event. A company with limited funds could send one person to a conference and use Google Wave as a reporting mechanism. Or if several people attend, they can divide/conquer the event and post their ideas and comments in one place.

For example Chris Hoyt, author of the blog The Recruiter Guy, set up a Wave for the human resources and recruiting community during last year’s Social Recruiting Summit. Both attendees and those of us who were interested but couldn’t make it in person were able to join the Wave. It was an opportunity to gain exposure to the content and learn more about the event so people could budget to attend the following year.

One thing I could see emerging from conference Waves are “back channel” discussions. Conference organizers in particular will want to pay particular attention to this and not necessarily view it as a bad thing. If managed properly, it could bring some opportunities for improvement to light during the event.

2. Decision Making and Problem Solving

Using Google Wave to discuss a company challenge could be very beneficial — especially when all of the players aren’t located in the same place. That’s exactly why Troy Peterson, CEO of Nibi Software, used Wave to get the company’s development plan finalized.  He brought everyone together in a Wave and let the conversation flow. “The real-time document functionality allowed us to have ‘arguments’ and solve problems together that might otherwise have resulted in ‘back and forth’ threads that went on forever.”

Peterson did mention that adoption was an initial challenge. “Although several of my contacts immediately had Wave accounts, they weren’t necessarily the people I was collaborating with on projects.  It required some arm wrestling to get people on board.” But the results were worth it. “In the end, we have a succinct document that we have all agreed on and that we can compare short-term objectives against.”

3. Project Management

The same decision making philosophy applies when you have a project and need to collaborate not only with internal stakeholders, but an external supplier. Google Wave provides an opportunity for collaboration. Hopefully, consultants and/or contractors are able to tap into that dialogue by sharing their Wave account info with client companies.

Rachel Levy, Founder/CEO of the startup website WebinarListings, is using Google Wave with her developer. “We have the list of open items in the Wave, so we can discuss each one. I add an open item, and he can ask me a question about it, or mark it as done.” The main advantage to using this application was being able to track conversations.

This could also be a valuable way to manage the dreaded “scope creep.” You can lay out the entire project in a single Wave once the parameters are agreed upon. Then, you can work through each facet with each side tracking progress and those pesky project deviations. And everything gets documented along the way. New project requirements can even be moved to a new Wave for later consideration.

4. Brainstorming and Idea Cultivation

Brendan Gill, with the firm Staircase3, said he and his partners use Google Wave as a medium to organize and facilitate conversations and feedback. “We are a team of entrepreneurs who like to have an idea and make it happen quickly. We use Google Wave to brainstorm our ideas for new business projects.  It’s a great tool for collecting a series of conversations, and we use a different Wave for each different idea.”

Gill explained they would have traditionally used group e-mails for this purpose, but found Wave has numerous advantages, including serving as a centralized repository, and the ability to use add-on features for enhanced productivity. This was especially useful since their management team is located around the globe. “The Ribbit conferencing feature is great for staging an ad hoc conference call. Furthermore, the simple voting widget is a useful way to end each of our Waves where we can stage a vote for a given idea — whether or not we want to put the idea in motion, or just cut it loose.”

5. Virtual Meetings and Reduced Travel

Let’s face it. Bringing groups of people together can be expensive. Depending on the project, Google Wave could help foster dialogue without a lot of travel, phone calls, etc. Gill mentioned using Wave to make edits and adjustments on business proposals without having people travel to a central location. “Using Wave definitely reduces the need for thousand-dollar transatlantic flights and many tons of carbon emissions. Obviously without Wave, we would still use e-mails and teleconferencing, but using a better communications platform has definitely cut a number of flights out of our schedule,” he said.

Gill added that, “Collaboration can be done in real-time, if required, which is useful if you’re trying to rush out a project that has to happen quickly or not at all. Or for longer-term projects, you can take your time to think about an idea and come back to the plan at any time you like.”

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a way to streamline communications on your next project, Peterson suggests that you “Sign up and use the tool. It may not revolutionize your company’s communications, but it is useful and worth the effort involved in figuring out how it works for your organization.”

Remember the success of a Wave is contingent upon the active participation of the individuals involved. Waves need engagement, attention and clarity. You can’t just ask a question and walk away for a couple days. According to Levy, “The bigger the Wave gets, the slower it gets.” Managing activity and open items becomes essential for productivity.

Via Mashable

Related posts:

1. How to Manage a Group Project in Google Wave
2. Google Tech Talk: Inbox Zero
3. What is Yammer?

1. Define the task and identify the outcome, not the process. The process that works for you may not work for others. Maybe you’ve been doing a job one way, because that’s how you were taught 20 years ago. When delegating, describe the successful outcome and let the person to find their best way to completion. Who knows, you might learn something from them.
2. Give enough authority to accomplish the task. If the person receiving the task has to get approval at every or most step of the way, you might as well have done the job yourself. Turn the employee loose, with the resources to achieve the desired outcomes.
3. Monitor the process, but allow people room to work. Don’t micro-manage! (See tip 2.)
4. Make yourself available for support or feedback. Just because you’re not micro-managing doesn’t mean you disappear completely. Let the delagatee know that you are there to answer questions or to review milestones.
5. Reward and recognize effort as well as results. An employee who is trying a task for the first time, may not get the whole thing correct. Make sure you recognize and reward the effort expended and the steps done well. Then, the next time you delegate, they will be able to build on the successes of the earlier effort.

Plus: Don’t dump your garbage jobs on your employees. Delegation is not an excuse to get rid of the crap your don’t want to do. You employees will recognize that strategy and will not see it as a development opportunity.

Through effective delegation, you can expand the range of what you can accomplish, as well as developing the skills and strengths of the team you manage.

Via ismckenzie.com

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1. What is Yammer?

Here is a cool graph to help you with the decision!

Obviously your choice of chart and data will depend on who you’re presenting the data to. From my experience, don’t try to show a scatter chart with response times to a business executives.

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1. Updates on the Blog

Note: If you haven’t gotten your Wave invite yet, check out our invitation donation thread first (or, better yet, keep an eye out for the same thread this Friday). If you have gotten into Wave, search for title:"Invite others to Google Wave" to find the wave with your invites. Wave’s only fun if your cohorts and workmates also have it, so give our your nominations to the people you want to wave with.

Wave’s invitations have been rolling out steadily over the last few weeks, so you and your co-workers might have already gotten some Wave love. If so, let’s take a look at how you can manage a project in the real world, even given Wave’s current unfinished state.

Background: Over the last two months, I’ve co-managed a large-scale group project with a team of six people in Wave: the production of Adam’s and my new book, The Complete Guide to Google Wave. We didn’t write the book in Wave, mind you—but we did manage the project in Wave, where we collaborated on everything behind the scenes, from the book’s style guide, to its pricing plan, and to iterations of its cover design. Whether you’re writing a book or planning a weekend trip, here are a few techniques you and your workgroup mates should know that make Wave a great project management tool.

Shared Tags and Saved Searches

To keep all the project-specific waves into a single bucket, the first thing all the members of your group should do is agree on a project-specific tag. Unlike email folders or Gmail’s labels, Wave’s tags are visible to all wave participants, like Flickr or Delicious tags. So if you decide your project’s tag is “Vacation plans,” everyone tags project waves the same and can find waves based on that tag.

To easily see if there are new updates on the project’s waves, save a search for the tag. In this case, search for tag:”Vacation plans” and click the “Save Search” button on the bottom of the search panel. (You can even assign a color to the saved search for some visual flair.) Once that’s done, you have a project-specific “inbox” (so to speak) in the Searches area of the Navigation panel.

In the screenshot at the top of this article, you can see that for the book project, the agreed-upon tag was “cwg,” and in my Wave client, it was colored gray.

You can even break down project tags even further by combining them. For example, you could tag waves specific to hotel research “Vacation plans” and “hotels.” Then, a search for tag:"Vacation plans" tag:hotels will narrow down the results further. Here’s more on saved searches and Wave filters.

Choose to Reply Below a Blip, Inline, or Edit the Blip

Unlike email, where you can either reply to an entire message or chop it up into quotes and reply inline (which is a tedious and manual process), in Wave you can do either of those things—OR just edit the message that someone else wrote, as if it were a Google Document. This ability to co-author a single message and see past revisions of that message in one place is what sets Wave apart.

In a public wave situation where anyone can edit anything that anyone else has written, it can be total chaos (see, for example, the Lifehacker public wave we tried out with readers). But within a trusted circle of co-editors, revising a single blip together—and having the option to have threaded inline conversations about that content as well—makes getting work done much easier.

For example, if someone asks a series of questions, others can reply inline like email (but more conveniently). But if someone’s drafting a document and needs help filling in the holes and keeping it updated, others can just dive in and hit the Edit button, like Wikipedia. In the screenshot here, you can see a message that has had two authors (Jon and me) but also contains inline replies.

Wave’s three modes of interacting with and editing content—replies, inline replies, and co-editing blips—makes its collaborative abilities in a single context very powerful. Here’s more on the three ways to update a wave.

Private Replies

Sometimes in a group conversation, you want to direct a private reply to a single member or subset of a group about a larger issue—and Wave makes that very easy. Inside the context of a single wave, you can click on the timestamp drop-down and choose “Private Reply” to say something to a subset of that wave’s participants that no one else can see. This ability comes in extremely handy whenever someone has something to add that’s only meant for a few people’s eyes. These private conversations with you appear inline on the wave that everyone else can see—so it can feel weird, like you’re talking behind the backs of others but right in front of them—however, not everyone can see the private back-and-forth in wave. Here’s more on how to send a reply only certain people can see in Wave.

Playback and Wave Forking

Since Wave is more a document collaboration tool than an email replacement, its contents are living things that go through a series of change and revisions over time. Wave’s playback feature lets you move forward and back through those revisions. If a wave has changed too much, and you want to restore an older version of it, Wave makes that possible. While you’re in playback mode, in an older revisions, from the timestamp drop-down, choose “Copy Wave” to create a new wave that contains that old revision. (Currently you can’t restore a wave itself to an older version of itself; you have to copy that version to a new wave.)

Here’s more on how to play back wave changes over time to catch up on a conversation or restore a past version.

Helpful Bots, Gadgets, and Add-ons

There are tons of Wave bots and gadgets out there, and the ones that will help with your project depend on what you’re doing. But there are a few that could help in almost any situation.

The XMPP Lite Bot: One of the issues with adopting Google Wave into your workflow is the whole “yet another inbox” problem. If you’re working on a project in Wave but forget to check it every day, you can get notifications of wave updates via IM. The XMPP Lite bot can GChat you as project waves get updated. To use it, add the bot to your contacts (its Wave ID is wave-xmpp@appspot.com), and then add that same contact to your GTalk contacts list. Add the bot to any wave you want IM notifications from, and click the Subscribe button.

The Yes/No/Maybe Gadget: One of the simplest and most useful Wave gadgets available, the Yes/No/Maybe gadget makes asking a simple question of a group and tallying responses dead-simple. To use it, type a question into your wave that have the possible answers, Yes, No, or Maybe. Then, click on the Yes/No/Maybe button on your Wave toolbar. (It’s got three small boxes—green, red, and yellow.) Then, wave participants can just click on their response and add a little note by clicking the “Set my status” link.

Here are a few more great gadgets and bots for Wave.

Google Gears and a modern browser (or a plug-in for IE): The advantage of using a web application is that you don’t have to install software other than a web browser onto your system to access it. That advantage comes with some caveats in Wave. Google Gears, the browser add-on that ships with Chrome but that you have to download and install for Firefox and Safari, isn’t required for Wave, but adds essential functionality: the ability to drag and drop files into Wave. The bad news for Mac users is that Gears is still(!) not available for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (why, Google, why?) and it doesn’t come with the Mac build of Chrome, either. However, if you’re on a PC and you want to easily share files in Wave, you need Gears. (In fact, Wave is speedier and more stable in Google Chrome than Firefox and Safari, so if you’re on a PC it’s worth using Chrome for Wave.)

Additionally, Wave doesn’t play nice with vanilla Internet Explorer. Since it relies on new and emerging web technologies that IE doesn’t support yet, if you try to access Wave in IE, you’ll get prompted to use another browser or use the Chrome Frame IE add-on. This might throw a wrench into your plans to collaborate with co-workers in IT lockdown, without the ability to install an alternate browser or IE add-on on their office computer.

While Wave doesn’t have classic project management tools like to-do lists or Gantt charts built-in, it’s great for a project-specific real-time messaging and collaborating. (Plus, to-do lists and more are no doubt on the way in the form of Wave extensions.)

Via lifehacker.com

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1. 5 Ways to Use Google Wave for Business
2. First result on a Google Search
3. Google Tech Talk: Inbox Zero

The original article can be found here and I also created a PDF version to make it easier to read.

Thumbs Up for this statement:

“IT people have lives and other interests.”

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Maslow’s theory have a wide influence due in part to the high level of practicality of it. His theory accurately describes many realities of personal experiences. Many people find they can understand what Maslow says. They can recognize some features of their experience or behavior which is true and identifiable but which they have never put into words.

Maslow has set up a hierarchy of five levels of basic needs. Beyond these needs, higher levels of needs exist. These include needs for understanding, aesthetic appreciation and purely spiritual needs. In the levels of the five basic needs, the person does not feel the second need until the demands of the first have been satisfied, nor the third until the second has been satisfied, and so on. Maslow’s basic needs are as follows:

Physiological Needs
These are biological needs. They consist of needs for oxygen, food, water, and a relatively constant body temperature. They are the strongest needs because if a person were deprived of all needs, the physiological ones would come first in the person’s search for satisfaction.

Safety Needs
When all physiological needs are satisfied and are no longer controlling thoughts and behaviors, the needs for security can become active. Adults have little awareness of their security needs except in times of emergency or periods of disorganization in the social structure (such as widespread rioting). Children often display the signs of insecurity and the need to be safe.

Needs of Love, Affection and Belongingness
When the needs for safety and for physiological well-being are satisfied, the next class of needs for love, affection and belongingness can emerge. Maslow states that people seek to overcome feelings of loneliness and alienation. This involves both giving and receiving love, affection and the sense of belonging.

Needs for Esteem
When the first three classes of needs are satisfied, the needs for esteem can become dominant. These involve needs for both self-esteem and for the esteem a person gets from others. Humans have a need for a stable, firmly based, high level of self-respect, and respect from others. When these needs are satisfied, the person feels self-confident and valuable as a person in the world. When these needs are frustrated, the person feels inferior, weak, helpless and worthless.

Needs for Self-Actualization
When all of the foregoing needs are satisfied, then and only then are the needs for self-actualization activated. Maslow describes self-actualization as a person’s need to be and do that which the person was “born to do”. “A musician must make music, an artist must paint, and a poet must write”.

These needs make themselves felt in signs of restlessness. The person feels on edge, tense, lacking something, in short, restless. If a person is hungry, unsafe, not loved or accepted, or lacking self-esteem, it is very easy to know what the person is restless about. It is not always clear what a person wants when there is a need for self-actualization.

The hierarchic theory is often represented as a pyramid, with the larger, lower levels representing the lower needs, and the upper point representing the need for self-actualization.

I’m not an expert on the subject, so pardon me if I misunderstood some concept.

Why is this so important?

From my point of view, Maslow’s theory can help us on rationalizing the things we already knew in some sort of way. Rationalizing this knowledge helps us plan and act accordingly. Still not getting the idea?

Motivation will always impact PEOPLE. Since we all know that projects are done by PEOPLE, motivation will always be an important factor in a project or functional team.

Motivation is deeply affected by the needs.Understanding Maslow’s theory can help you understanding people’s needs and consequently helping you understand how to motivate people around you.

If you’re in a position like mine, where you have to deal with many people all the time and depend on their work to get things done, understanding their needs and helping them motivate is a great skill that can determine the success or failure of a project!

Source: Wikipedia

Related posts:

1. Myers-Briggs Type Indicator

Yammer is a simple way for employees to connect and share by posting messages. As employee participation grows, Yammer becomes a corporate social network, discussion board, and knowledge base all rolled into one easy-to-use interface.

From my point of view:

Yammer is a fancy Twitter.

As a Twitter enthusiast, perhaps I’m not the right person to rely for opinions on Yammer, but to me it seems like a great tool to keep everyone on your functional or project teams informed about what you’re doing and also the other way around too, letting you know what your colleagues are doing.

Obviously we have to be careful about the purpose of this new tool and what to use it for. From my point of view, Yammer is not here to replace a report sent by e-mail or the official company’s internal communication method. For those thing we have e-mails and IMs. Think about the reliability of the information, storing method and coverage. You cannot guarantee that all employees will receive it, or even if all employees check it frequently. Also, for important information, the kind you have to keep, Yammer creates a problem. You cannot control for how long they will keep this information.

My tip here is, account for these factors when deciding how to implement this tool on your company.

Wait a second, things are not all bad. There is a really good things about Yammer. Quick team discussions (many to many conversations) are a great use of it. If your whole team is using it, it keeps things simple and avoid all those “Reply to All” e-mails.

Project status report is also a great use for Yammer. On most projects I work, my tasks depend on tasks performed by other project members and the other way around too. Keeping everyone informed about what you’re doing and what things are holding you back is always useful. It also helps keeping the status meetings short, since everybody will already know what other people are doing.

If you’re curious about it, have a look at yammer.com!

If you have ideas about how to use Yammer or Twitter in your company, feel free to leave a comment!

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Fundamental to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is the theory of psychological type as originally developed by C. G. Jung. Jung proposed the existence of two dichotomous pairs of cognitive functions:

• The “rational” (judging) functions: thinking and feeling
• The “irrational” (perceiving) functions: sensing and intuition

Jung went on to suggest that these functions are expressed in either an introverted or extroverted form. From Jung’s original concepts, Briggs and Myers developed their own theory of psychological type, described below, on which the MBTI is based.

The Myers-Briggs typology model regards personality type as similar to left or right handedness: individuals are either born with, or develop, certain preferred ways of thinking and acting. The MBTI sorts some of these psychological differences into four opposite pairs, or “dichotomies,” with a resulting 16 possible psychological types. None of these types is “better” or “worse”; however, Briggs and Myers theorized that individuals naturally prefer one overall combination of type differences. In the same way that writing with the left hand is hard work for a right-hander, so people tend to find using their opposite psychological preferences more difficult, even if they can become more proficient (and therefore behaviourally flexible) with practice and development.

Attitudes: Extraversion (E) / Introversion (I)

The preferences for extraversion (thus spelled in Myers-Briggs jargon) and introversion are sometimes referred to as attitudes. Briggs and Myers recognized that each of the cognitive functions can operate in the external world of behaviour, action, people and things (extraverted attitude) or the internal world of ideas and reflection (introverted attitude). The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator sorts for an overall preference for one or the other of these.

The terms extravert and introvert are used in a special sense when discussing the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. People who prefer extraversion draw energy from action: they tend to act, then reflect, then act further. If they are inactive, their level of energy and motivation tends to decline. Conversely, those whose prefer introversion become less energized as they act: they prefer to reflect, then act, then reflect again. People who prefer introversion need time out to reflect in order to rebuild energy.

The extravert’s flow is directed outward toward people and objects, and the introvert’s is directed inward toward concepts and ideas. There are several contrasting characteristics between extraverts and introverts: extraverts are action-oriented and desire breadth, while introverts are thought-oriented and seek depth. Extraverts often prefer more frequent interaction, while introverts prefer more substantial interaction.

Functions: Sensing (S) / iNtuition (N) and Thinking (T) / Feeling (F)

Jung identified two pairs of psychological functions:

• The two perceiving functions, sensing and intuition
• The two judging functions, thinking and feeling

According to the Myers-Briggs typology model, each person uses one of these four functions more dominantly and proficiently than the other three; however, all four functions are used at different times depending on the circumstances.

Sensing and Intuition are the information-gathering (perceiving) functions. They describe how new information is understood and interpreted. Individuals who prefer sensing are more likely to trust information that is in the present, tangible and concrete: that is, information that can be understood by the five senses. They tend to distrust hunches that seem to come out of nowhere. They prefer to look for details and facts. For them, the meaning is in the data. On the other hand, those who prefer intuition tend to trust information that is more abstract or theoretical, that can be associated with other information (either remembered or discovered by seeking a wider context or pattern). They may be more interested in future possibilities. They tend to trust those flashes of insight that seem to bubble up from the unconscious mind. The meaning is in how the data relates to the pattern or theory.

Thinking and feeling are the decision-making (judging) functions. The thinking and feeling functions are both used to make rational decisions, based on the data received from their information-gathering functions (sensing or intuition). Those who prefer thinking tend to decide things from a more detached standpoint, measuring the decision by what seems reasonable, logical, causal, consistent and matching a given set of rules. Those who prefer feeling tend to come to decisions by associating or empathizing with the situation, looking at it ‘from the inside’ and weighing the situation to achieve, on balance, the greatest harmony, consensus and fit, considering the needs of the people involved.

As noted already, people who prefer thinking do not necessarily, in the everyday sense, ‘think better’ than their feeling counterparts; the opposite preference is considered an equally rational way of coming to decisions (and, in any case, the MBTI assessment is a measure of preference, not ability). Similarly, those who prefer feeling do not necessarily have ‘better’ emotional reactions than their thinking counterparts.

Dominant Function

Although people use all four cognitive functions, one function is generally used in a more conscious and confident way. This dominant function is supported by the secondary (auxiliary) function, and to a lesser degree the tertiary function. The fourth and least conscious function is always the opposite of the dominant function. Myers called this inferior function the shadow.

The four functions operate in conjunction with the attitudes (extraversion and introversion). Each function is used in either an extraverted or introverted way. A person whose dominant function is extraverted intuition, for example, uses intuition very differently from someone whose dominant function is introverted intuition.

Lifestyle: Judgment (J) / Perception (P)

Myers and Briggs added another dimension to Jung’s typological model by identifying that people also have a preference for using either the judging function (thinking or feeling) or their perceiving function (sensing or intuition) when relating to the outside world (extraversion).

Myers and Briggs held that types with a preference for judging show the world their preferred judging function (thinking or feeling). So TJ types tend to appear to the world as logical, and FJ types as empathetic. According to Myers, judging types prefer to “have matters settled.” Those types ending in P show the world their preferred perceiving function (sensing or intuition). So SP types tend to appear to the world as concrete and NP types as abstract. According to Myers, perceiving types prefer to “keep decisions open.”

For extraverts, the J or P indicates their dominant function; for introverts, the J or P indicates their auxiliary function. Introverts tend to show their dominant function outwardly only in matters “important to their inner worlds”. For example:

Because ENTJ types are extraverts, the J indicates that their dominant function is their preferred judging function (extraverted thinking). ENTJ types introvert their auxiliary perceiving function (introverted intuition). The tertiary function is sensing and the inferior function is introverted feeling.

Because INTJ types are introverts, the J indicates that their auxiliary function is their preferred judging function (extraverted thinking). INTJ types introvert their dominant perceiving function (introverted intuition). The tertiary function is feeling, and the inferior function is extraverted sensing.

Whole type

The expression of a person’s psychological type is more than the sum of the four individual preferences, because of the way in which the preferences interact through type dynamics and type development. Descriptions of each type can be found on the Myers & Briggs Foundation website.

There is an online personality test based on Myers-Briggs typology at HumanMetrics.

My type is ESTJ, what is yours???

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBTI

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