Decision-making | Vertabase Blog

Aug 5, 2010
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Social Networking, Permission Boundaries and User Adoption

Last week I gave a presentation at the Internet User Experience conference on Social Networking, Permission Boundaries and User Adoption. Based on the many requests for it, the presentation is now available online.

The presentation introduces a framework for deciding which social media components to include in your company or in any software you run.

Given the tremendous growth of Facebook, Twitter and other social media networks, many companies and organizations are rushing to add social media components to their software or marketing mix. However, there is little in the way of how to decide on what to implement nor how to figure out if people will use it or interact with it.

The presentation takes a classic user adoption approach (the user’s cost/benefit calculation on whether some is a pain to do or not) and applies it Social Media components.

It introduces the concept of PERMISSION BOUNDARIES as a way of capturing the cost side of the equation.

It recommends identifying and describing specific SOCIAL TRANSACTIONS to capture the target benefit the user is going for.

This should provide a robust way to help make decisions on what will likely work or not, to think about whether people will interact with your company or not before you invest in the social media tools they could engage with.

Aug 21, 2009
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Waterfall Beats Agile for Visibility on Projects

Different project management techniques impact the type of information you can collect on projects and therefore the level of visibility you have on your processes - both for single projects as well as for reports across all projects.

One of the advantages of a more classic, Waterfall approach, is that time is a variable that can shift and be measured. With this approach you:

create a task list or work breakdown structure,
assign resources,
assign estimated hours,
enter start dates and due dates for each task.

Then, you can measure how long it takes to actually complete the tasks in several dimensions.

First, in terms of calendar dates: when the task was started and when it was completed.
Secondly, you can measure in terms of duration: the number of days it took to complete.
Thirdly, in terms of actual hours: the amount of people hours worth of effort it took to complete the task.

When measured and kept over time it creates a robust data set that can be used to improve estimates on projects.

If you bill by the hour or by project, this data can help improve your pricing and profitability by providing visibility into the actual time it takes to do the tasks or projects you are charging for.

If you bid on projects, this same data will improve your understanding of the variables you can look at when pricing your bid.

In a more Agile project management approach, time is generally held constant and it is the functionality or amount of work that shifts. The amount of work that can be accomplish shifts according to the time allocated, the skill set of the team and the complexity of the work involved.

This can provide a benefit for the project manager -they don’t have to worry about schedules and effort estimates in the same way as a Waterfall approach. It also makes it easier to track progress and shut out distractions for the team.

However, it comes at a price of reduced visibility and decreased data for management to use to make strategic decisions. The variables often left to management for decision making then become ones of:

hiring more people,
working on the team’s skill set,
firing people or
limiting project scope to the constraints of the team’s historic performance over a fixed period of time.

It limits the information that can be generated from projects and therefore the data that can be used for strategic decision making, portfolio management or long term planning.

Feb 8, 2009
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Making Good Decisions: Tips for Management

In Why Decisions Fail (Berrett-Koehler, 2002), Paul C. Nutt makes the astonishing statement that “failure is four times more likely when decision makers embrace the first idea they come across…” What can cause the manager to make these kinds of choices? What are some ways to prevent these mistakes?

One major contributing factor is familiarity. Most decision makers have substantial experience in both the industry and company culture in which they work. This experience, while very helpful in most regards, tends to create a paradigm within which potential solutions are often limited. The reasons for making familiar choices are often obscure, if not forgotten.

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