Steven Sinofsky, Board Partner with Andreessen Horowitz, recently shared his thoughts on the impact of new technologies...and on the sure signs that you are deploying them WRONG. So many of these struck a chord with my recent experience, that I couldn't help but share...lol...ENJOY!!! (or cringe, as the case may be...)
- Spend more time summarizing or formatting a document than worrying about the actual content. Time and time again, people over-invest in the production qualities of a work product, only to realize that all that work was wasted, as most people consume it on a phone or look for the summary. This might not be new, but it is fair to say that the feature sets of existing tools and implementation (both right for when they were created, I believe) would definitely emphasize this type of activity.
- Aim to “complete” a document, and think your work is done when a document is done. The modern world of business and product development knows that you’re never done with a product, and that is certainly the case for documents that are steps along the way. Modern tools assume that documents continue to exist but fade in activity — the value is in getting the work out there to the cloud, and knowing that the document itself is rarely the end goal.
- Figure out something important with a long email thread, where the context can’t be shared and the backstory is lost. If you’re collaborating via email, you’re almost certainly losing important context, and not all the right folks are involved. A modern collaboration tool like Slack keeps everything relevant in the tool, accessible by everyone on the team from everywhere at any time, but with a full history and search.
- Delay doing things until someone can get on your calendar, or you’re stuck waiting on someone else’s calendar. The existence of shared calendaring created a world of matching free/busy time, which is great until two people agree to solve an important problem — two weeks from now. Modern communication tools allow for notifications, fast-paced exchange of ideas and an ability to keep things moving. Culturally, if you let a calendar become a bottleneck, you’re creating an opening for a competitor, or an opportunity for a customer or partner to remain unhappy. Don’t let calendaring become a work-prevention tool.
- Believe that important choices can be distilled down into a one-hour meeting.If there’s something important to keep moving on, then scheduling a meeting to “bring everyone together” is almost certainly going to result in more delays (in addition to the time to get the meeting going in the first place). The one-hour meeting for a challenging issue almost never results in a resolution, but always pushes out the solution. If you’re sharing information all along, and the right people know all that needs to be known, then the modern resolution is right there in front of you. Speaking as a person who almost always shunned meetings to avoid being a bottleneck, I think it’s worth considering that the age-old technique of having short and daily sync meetings doesn’t really address this challenge. Meetings themselves, one might argue, are increasingly questionable in a world of continuously connected teams.
- Bring dead trees and static numbers to the table, rather than live, onscreen data. Live data analysis was invented 20 years ago, but too many still bring snapshots of old data to meetings, and then often digress into analyzing the validity of numbers, further delaying action until there’s an update. Then the meeting debates the validity of the data or the slice/view of the data. Modern tools likeTidemark and Apptio provide real-time and mobile access to information. Meetings should use live data, and more importantly, the team should share access to live data so everyone is making choices with all the available information.
- Use the first 30 minutes of a meeting recreating and debating the prior context that got you to a meeting in the first place. All too often, when a meeting is scheduled far in advance, things change so much that by the time everyone is in the room, the first half of the hour (after connecting projects, going through an enterprise log-on, etc.) is spent with everyone reminding each other and attempting to agree on the context and purpose of the gathering. Why not write out a list of issues in a collaborative document like Quip, and have folks share thoughts and data in real time to first understand the issue?
- Track what work needs to happen for a project using analog tools. Far too many projects are still tracked via paper and pen which aren’t shared, or on whiteboards with too little information, or in a spreadsheet mailed around over and over again. Asana is a simple example of an easy-to-use and modern tool that decreases (to zero) email flow, allows for everyone to contribute and align on what needs to be done, and to have a global view of what is left to do.
- Need to think which computer or device your work is “on.” Cloud storage fromBox,Dropbox, OneDrive and others makes it easy (and essential) to keep your documents in the cloud. You can edit, share, comment and track your documents from any device at any time. There’s no excuse for having a document stuck on a single computer, and certainly no excuse risking the use of USB storage for important work.
- Use different tools to collaborate with partners than you use with fellow employees. Today’s teams are made up of vendors, contractors, partners and customers all working together. Cloud-based tools solve the problem of access and security in modern ways that treat everyone as equals in the collaboration process. There’s a huge opportunity to increase the effectiveness of work across the team by using one set of tools across organizational boundaries.
