On many occasions through my career I've heard people tell me that they have given up with planning, because external factors would always
intervene which would break the original plan.

This is a bit like saying that you won't plan out a route on a map before a car journey because there will probably be a road closed somewhere along the route, which means that the route planned will have to change, so what's the point? As long as we know the destination, we'll get there somehow...

Planning, particularly in projects, is a continuous activity, not some process of divining the future. If you think that your first cut of the plan will be the one that gets you through, you're either very lucky or rather naïve. But planning is only one element of the necessary skills of the project manager, and for most projects probably of lesser importance.

If we come back to the idea of route navigation, the idea of maps these days is an increasingly old fashioned one. SatNav has taken over the windscreen of so many people's cars that the complicated origami ritual of refolding an Ordnance Survey roadmap is a skill that's being lost. SatNav not only can plan your route, but many these days also have the intelligence, data and processing power to be constantly replanning based on current flows of traffic ahead. The perfect project planner?

Well, not really. Planning, as well as being a constant activity, also needs to be a collaborative activity. That's one of the early keys to another chest in the project manager's armoury - influence.

My wife hates SatNav. And the reason, I think, that she hates it is because it is in no way participative in it's planning process. The smooth voice barks orders, and the driver needs to blindly follow its automated commands. You have to give up complete control to the authoritarian master.

How many project managers have you worked with who've taken that approach? And how much, exactly, did you hate them?

At the end of November I am going to be reaching the decimally-significant age of 40. Rather than having a rather public mid-life crisis, I seem to be dealing with my departure from the ranks of thirty-somethings by embarking on a series of miniature personal projects which have no particular significance and are significantly cheaper than a sports car.

#summerlookup is the first, and I've another photography-based initiative for the Autumn, but I'm also about to embark on a musical adventure that is much more closely related to my impending birthday. Over the next few months I'm going to be compiling a mixtape (or, at least, its Spotified 21st century equivalent), comprising a track from each of the 41 calendar years I've been around.

The first few years are likely to be songs that I got to know later in life, but a level of research is going to be required throughout. With the madness of Wikipedia I've already just found out that my birthday marked the day in which Hendrix's Voodoo Child was toppled from the top of the charts by Dave Edmunds' I Hear You Knocking. How upsetting...

I'm dreading the mid-80s through to the early 1990s as these were my formative teenage and student days and the choice is going to be overwhelming. And also 2004, because I can't think of anything from that year that sticks in the mind. But I'm sure that there will be something.

The rules (because this sort of thing obviously needs some rules) are that there will be one song each from 1970 through until 2010, the song needed to be released in the year in question, and finally that this needs to be a compilation that makes some sort of musical sense when listened to from start to end...

I'll kick off with 1970 very soon. You can follow the sonic adventures here.

At the end of last week I had an interesting insight into how online, collaborative documents might change the way people in different organisations work together.

I had a small software development requirement and needed to quickly get a quote from a prospective supplier. I had briefed our account manager, and he arranged for a technical consultant James to phone me. In advance of the call, I quickly knocked out a specification document, and shared it in
Google Docs with James. I still had the document open on screen, and within a few minutes of having given him access, could see that James was viewing the document. A few minutes later, and because I had given him the rights to share the document on to others, I could see that a further two people at the supplier were viewing the document.

That small piece of information is a significant difference from what has come before and the world of file attachments. You send, and then can get no further feedback. As I increasingly point out to people these days, probably not even a bounce back if you've mis-addressed the message, and the reason why there's no read receipt in Gmail is because it never meant anyone had actually "read" anything.

In this new world, the document became the focus of our collaboration. James' team made comments on the document (which I could watch them do) and when we caught up on the phone it turned into just an extension of our document-based conversation.

For many, many years I have heard how documents should be 'living' objects, but have rarely seen it happen. Often, it's because the technology has limited people to think in terms of old world published (and therefore static) analogies. However, it's also fair to say that much of business convention is tied to those analogies (how, or more importantly, when, do you "sign-off" a multi-authored collaborative document, for example?).

In that old world, documents weren't ever anything but abstracts of the world around them - minutes, for example, aren't what happened in a meeting, but what was agreed that happened. Those types of documents are very different from those that can be generated in services like Google Docs (or, for that matter, using technologies like Wikis). It's this sort of subtle yet profound change that makes for interesting times ahead.

Project achievements included:

- decommissioning of the London secondary machine room
- starting the evaluation of new laptop supplier
- setting up for the final stages of the London networks project

Additionally:

- good sessions with the European CEO...
- ...and his US equivalent
- beginning to see the benefits of Google Docs when working inter-organisation
- and The Times interview appeared on Tuesday (page 7 of http://np.netpublicator.com/netpublication/n43027614

Next week in one word: dependencies

As yet another briefing session with colleagues gets postponed due to client work commitments, it gets me to thinking about how client-centred organisations can make the time to improve and innovate.

I saw a presentation recently about how Google innovate. At the centre of their philosophy is the 20% time - one fifth of all the time that Google engineers have available is to persue personal projects. From that, commercial products spin out. But R&D time in a product-centric organisation can be fairly easily accommodated (as Google's sliding shipping dates testify!).

Move that into a client-centred organisation, though, and it becomes problematic. My team has a half-hour, all team catch up every two weeks. It has to be in the middle of the UK working day in an attempt to allow both my New York and Hong Kong team members to try to attend via WebEx, but even that "0.6% time" is frequently interrupted by pressing, urgent issues.

When you are providing paid-for services to your clients, it's very difficult to be able to interrupt work for staff development, training or service innovation initiatives.

Maybe technology can help here - and for those willing to learn and engage, asynchronous collaboration tools from Twitter upwards can provide ways of enabling time at the times it can fit into individual's diaries. I'm about to launch a group to help people to share experiences of using the Google services. It will be interesting to see, first of all, who signs up, and then who might actually contribute...

An interesting way to understand the power relationships that exist within organisations is to look at the trump cards that are played - whose name is used to be able to try to ensure action on urgent tasks? "X says that this has to happen today!"

In privately-held organisations, especially where the head of the operation has a large stake in its ownership, it's their name that will often be bandied around. The two companies that I have worked for like this also were client service-focused businesses, so important clients' names would also be used and, for a double-trump you would hear "the owner says that the client says that..."

Coincidently, I wonder if a distinction between whether a company has clients or customers might be "does the client actually get referenced by name to justify decisions?". I can't see rushed actions being taken by South West Trains because Matt says that it feels like the aircon isn't working properly again...

Publicly-listed firms operate in the interests of shareholders. The shareholders are often a faceless, nameless (usually institutional) bunch, so trump cards are unlikely from that direction. Senior board members names are usually used but, particularly for companies who are losing their way, 'the analysts' (the sage-like banking researchers who with almost six sense divination have significantly less insight than the average octopus) are frequently used to play trumps on short-term decisions.

The public sector (from my exposure) trumps with 'the minister'. There's going to be an awful lot of that going on in the coming months and years, and I can only pass on my sympathy as a member of an electorate that screwed up earlier this year. We should all be very sorry, and probably will be.

The health service and education are both basket cases when it comes to trump power. In the NHS, senior non-medical managers and consultants both wield significant power, often it feels just to spite the other. In no other sector do so many suppliers have so much weight behind them. The higher education world is even worse, where (with obviously many exceptions) senior academics can be extremely unaltruistic and ironically distinctly non-collegiate. In either sector, one can imagine dozens of trumps being played on a regular basis.

Different models of commercial organisation also have different structures of power... I started my career at an accountancy partnership (KPMG) and names would be thrown around, but usually with a fairly clear understanding of the power hierarchy and relative weight behind each. I'd be fascinated to know if and who are used as trumps at John Lewis, a partnership model that I have always found very inspiring.

Understanding these trumps is a good grounding in where power lies in any particular organisation. And if you find that most of your decisions are being justified by a trump, either you've become CEO or you've run out of influencing techniques...

Project achievements included:

- Sydney office upgrade work completed
- Google Docs deployment continued
- budgeting for 2010 Capex

Additionally:

- analysis of the 2010 IT Survey - a short paper coming soon
- met with our new Adobe account manager
- was a guest author on the Google Enterprise Blog
- tried an iPad

Next week in one word: times

We are starting to get into detailed discussions about data and content management strategy across the business, and the thing that is unbelievable is our capability to produce vast amounts of data. As Moore's law has exponentially increased processing power, the net result has been bigger and bigger file sizes, and more and more of them.

Not only that, but the traditional barriers to regulate the creation of new content (mostly, film stock and processing costs) have all but disappeared. For example, the number of photographs that we take to record one of the events we work on has probably increased five-fold. And the reality is that the digital storage of content on technology models is substantially more expensive than the old ways of storing reels or sheets of celluloid in tins. According to research by AMPAS from 2008, up to 12 times more expensive.

At present, on average, our London office generates around 150GB of data every week. That's from about 200 people, and excludes most of the moving image material. To support that growth we have around 12TB of high-availability, high resilience NAS storage, a few 10s of TB of nearline archive, and about 90 TB of offline storage (which is where most of our moving image archive resides). The offline storage costs about £100/TB as a one-off cost and the NAS £30,000 per year (for our external costs). If you include all of the surrounding costs of staff, power and so on, that figure probably rests at about £100,000. By comparison, I could get 16TB of storage from Google each year for about US$4,000, or from Amazon for about US$2,500.

It seems that the business has gone through cycles about every three to four years where we run out of space, panic a bit, and then invest in a new technology platform that at the time appears to solve the problem forever. Except that in about three years time it's full to bursting. This is M25-theory. If you build more capacity without regulation, you generate more demand that eventually creates a feedback loop of uncontrollable consumption. Compare that to the M6 Toll Road... still, to this day, a pleasurable driving experience because it is empty (or is it because it speeds you past Birmingham?).

A technological approach to the problem would be to find cost-effective ways to find more space more cheaply. That's certainly something we will do, and the economics of storage now seem to point to the need, above everything else, to invest in bandwidth to get to cheap storage.

However, in isolation, that's the equivalent to just adding a new lane to an over-busy highway. Tolls are required to regulate demand, and by increasing the use of pay-per-use infrastructure services, that scalability of cost becomes something that is equitable. On-premise models of charging for services are inherently nonsensical because the lumps of costs that a firm had to endure to introduce or enhance a service were usually massive multiples of the charges doled out to consuming business units. If one department decided they didn't want to use a particular service, that cost needed to be reallocated across the remaining consumers. Cost actually had no relation to usage.

Moving to scalable charging models alone, however, is unlikely to lead to a desired change in behaviour. Often such models just end up with profit centres scrimping and saving and having inappropriate services as a result, and cost centres hoovering up resource "because that's the cost of our operation" (if you want evidence of that, ask a CFO to quantify the business benefit of his ERP system...)

The changes that we are going to need to make are to introduce more rigorous processes of librarianship. Whilst at a consumer level, data volume issues are seemingly solved, at a professional level the boundaries of affordable data storage are constantly being pushed. 4,000 line video from Red Camera doesn't upload to YouTube too well. We have to be able to make decisions about what is worthy of our archive, and also what is the swarf that has been generated along the way and should now be discarded. Software will help us - and a push for 2011 will be content and asset management - our ability to make valued decisions about what is worth storing is crucial too.

Yesterday, to the amusement and bemusement of many in my team (a small crowd formed), I spent about forty minutes in the presence of iPad In response to requests from one of my clients, I wanted to find out what would iPad be like as a presentation tool.

The device is sleek, shiny, slightly bulbous and a bit heavier than maybe one would ideally like (prediction: iPad 2 will be thinner and lighter). The screen is great, but in a well-lit office with skylights the viewing angle was susceptible to reflected glare. Overall, I do worry that all of these tablet type- and smart-phone devices are going to turn us into a nation of hunchbacks. Whilst the human-computer interfaces I'm sure now are ergonomically sound, the physiological impact of them is yet to be seen.

IPad without network (as I realised in the Dixons store in Heathrow recently) is a sleek, shiny doorstop. Connecting iPad to the test WiFi network in the office posed my first challenge. It's probably because I'm used to the Android touch screen interface, but I hadn't realised that the enter key on the on-screen keyboard had re-named itself "Connect", and I was looking for a non-existent confirmation button on the dialogue box that came up to enter the wireless access key. It is this kind of subtlety that lends weight to the claims of Mac or Windows users that they can't use the other platform (using a Mac always makes me realise how much I right-click in Windows, for example).

Once connected, I had one mission alone. Not for me the delights of multi-touch piano or the infamous Fart gadget. I just had to try and get a presentation to be presentable on screen, full-screen. First step - a Google Docs presentation, for this, my friends, is the future.

Although maybe not quite yet on iPad. The presentation, by default, seems to render as one, very long, HTML page, which you can swipe down a screen at a time. With no obvious way to take the browser full screen (a la F11 on a Windows browser), you are left with a browser bar across the top too. OK, but not slick... And remember that this whole exercise is to try and make us look cooler than the opposition.

Next up... A PDF presentation. Now with this I can't quite work out if I was unable to escape from the Google docs environment, or if it's just that the PDF viewer on iPad is a bit crap, but overall it had a similar visual impact as the Google Doc... It had a navigation bar permanently across the top. I don't know why, but I'm also kind of loatheD to recommend that anyone uses Adobe software on Apple devices at the moment.

And so onto a PowerPoint file in native format. At this point, trying to pull the ppt file from Google Docs, I realised that Google gave the option to switch between Mobile (the default) and Desktop modes. In mobile mode, you just can't get to any source files... the Google service renders a presentation in Docs. Switching to Desktop mode means that a native Docs presentation renders much better (identical to on a proper computer except that the chat function doesn't work because it needs Flash). However Desktop mode also allowed the download of the PowerPoint file which then opened up into Keynote. At this point, at last, we were up and running with a full-screen presentation.

But with one problem.

For about a year I have been trying to convince our creative community that we need to ditch our in-house fonts for all of our own work, and rely on using 'standard' web fonts for everything other than logos. (Clients, obviously can have whatever they like, but enlightened companies like Ikea have already made this step). The reason is because these days we never know where our material might render.

In Keynote, for example, on iPad. Looks like that if I am going to have to provide some of the darn things, at least I can use it as a strong lever to get some better Web-centric typography standards in place...

I wrote a few days ago about the Client Experience model, a way of thinking about the elements of your organisation's client service over and above your core offer.

In it, I gave the example of how EasyJet used the TV programme Airline to help manage down the expectations of air travel amongst their potential customer base. I believe that, as we enter a new, consumer-product led, commoditised world of IT, that our industry needs to find ways to do the same.

Yesterday I had the first request for an iPad from a general (non-Digital content producing) area of the business. Our competitors are starting to turn up to presentations with iPads and are looking cooler than we do with our laptops. Working in an aesthetic-led industry, 'looker cooler' is very, very important. IPad's (do you capitalise the 'I' of iPad at the beginning of a sentence?) use in a business context, though, opens up a huge can of worms.

Firstly, like mobile phones, iPads are revenue-generating devices for their vendor, not a piece of distinct capital investment. Whilst Total Cost of Ownership is a concept that has been well known in IT circles for many years, there's TCO and then there's TCO. A big lump of capital cost (into something that doesn't have any real value after you've bought it) plus an ongoing subscription (because, if these devices are going to be really used on the road, a generous 3G data allowance is going to be a requirement) is a whole new game. At least we get given mobile phone hardware for free...

Secondly, there's the "me too!" effect that starting to deploy iPads will have. Apple know how to market - and if you want evidence, just look at all the doey-eyed marketing people lovingly gazing at their latest iPad/iPhone/iPod/iBand in an agency near you. Start deploying a few, and unless you have a strong mechanism to control demand, a floodgate of requests will open. "Me too!"ism had, when I arrived at Imagination, bloated our annual mobile phone spend in the UK to double what it needed to be (and with a poor service being delivered because of the huge diversity of devices which were attempted to be supported).

It is the support of these devices that becomes the real challenge. Apple devices are famed for their ease of use... except, that is, when they maybe aren't designed with the best ventilation, the right wi-fi aerial, or with ease of handling in mind. If you are a home user and you experience such issues (or challenges with getting data in or out of a notoriously closed environment), you speak to Apple, and Steve usually tells you to, in as many words, eff off.

In a business environment, you tell your IT department that it doesn't work and that you want it fixed. Now. Because an important piece of work for a client relies on it.

Now, in the old world of IT that would be fine, because all of this would be happening in an environment where change is controlled. Sure, Windows XP is ugly, stupid and full of problems, but we haven't got around to changing it for ten years so we know how and why it's ugly, stupid and full of problems.

The supplier-controlled, constantly changing world of consumer devices is one where, if you want to use it for business purposes, two things are going to have to change. First of all, if things break or don't work like you thought they should, well, tough. Just because it's your IT team that are getting told to "eff off" by Steve (or Sergey, Larry or Eric, for that matter) isn't going to make them able to fix it. If you are taking the device into a risky situation, you're going to need to learn to think on your feet and accept those risks.

But secondly, and more fundamentally, if the devices aren't designed to be supported by a corporate function, it's going to be impossible to support them cost-effectively in that old model. Which means that, if you are going to want to use this cool stuff, you are going to need to invest the time to learn to use this cool stuff, because if you don't, and are expecting someone to come and press all the buttons for you, you're not going to to look cool. You are going to look like an uncle on the dancefloor at a wedding.

Wearing socks and sandles.

I stumbled across an article from last year by Rob Gray at Google in the early hours of this morning (that's early as in "woken up by the eight month old" as opposed to "up all night" these days...). In it, Rob talks about seven tips that Michael Porter identified for new CEOs. It struck me that many of these rules, however, are just as applicable to new managers at any level in the company hierarchy.

One of the most rewarding pieces of my career to date was time that I spent in the middle of this decade working with first- and second-line managers at one of the UKs big telcos. Some of the people I worked with were relatively new to work generally; graduate scheme members thrown in at the deep end of management with call centre teams, or burly, surly gangs of field engineers. Some would swim, and some would quite obviously drown.

Alongside the youngsters, however, there were long-serving staff who, twenty or so years into their careers were making their first steps into management. It was with these (mostly male) management freshers that I coined the "my manager is a ****er theory." It goes something like this...

For my generation and before (and possibly after, too, but we'll come back to that), work tends to culturally be seen in terms of hierarchy, and of "us and them". I guess that this reached a politically sensitive peak in the industrial strife of the 1970s and 80s, but its legacy remains to this day. (Personally I blame the political indoctrination of 'Carry on at your Convenience", but that's another story).

Whilst political trade unionism is now the exception (if it ever really was the rule), the 'us and them' thinking tends to manifest itself in an unrealistic expectation of what management is capable of, and a crisis of confidence as a result when someone steps into a management position. In this cultural world view, managers tell us what to do, have ultimate authority, should always be right, and are therefore ultimately ****ers when they eventually show themselves to be fallible mere mortals.

When someone then steps up into a position of management, they are then confronted with the cold, hard reality of being nothing but human. For some this results in an extreme delivery of Theory X-style authority. But for most it just leads to a period of extreme self-doubt; "I am coming to realise that maybe I, too, have become a ****er".

Now this cultural positioning, whilst not unique to British work culture, is not ubiquitous across other employment markets. Australia, in particular, seems to just not really have the hierarchical expectations (as evidenced it would seem by the safety record of Qantas, for example). It will be interesting to see whether "Business 2.0" will lead to a dismantling of the British expectations of management, as democratisation and transparency of decision making could both happen in the workplace.

Underpinning all of this for me, though, is a basic challenge for managers. Good leadership tends to come from helping teams to achieve their potential. If you spend all your time just telling people what to do to try and achieve that, chances are you've turned into a ****er.

Project achievements included:

- Shanghai office services (mostly) deployed
- and the Sydney office upgrade started
- Google Docs released to the first pilot users
- and the start of sessions with pilot groups on what they might be able to achieve with the new tools
- potential advisers for the managed printing services project identified

Additionally:

- the Computing article at last made the light of day (even if they did spell my name wrong)
- a good lunchtime chat with Phil Dickinson which triggered a hopefully interesting article here
- a reader survey (which some people have actually completed)
- received an invitation to Google Atmosphere in Paris in the autumn
- and had a weird excursion into the plans for new gTLDs at proposal stage at ICANN

Next week in one word: specifying

For the past ten years, I have always made an assumption that, no matter what investment an organisation has made in process-centric software, most of the day to day logic resides in Excel spreadsheets. Millions of pounds invested in ERP and CRM, and its the spreadsheets squirrelled around the place where the business really happens.

There are a number of risks associated with this. First of all, there is no audit trail in spreadsheets. Secondly, there is no ability for more than one user to access the same file at the same time, so files tend to multiply.

In the new world of browser-delivered business applications, multi-user, version-controlled spreadsheets might not only address the problems of Excel described above, but may even end the need for bespoke development. To understand why, one needs to look at why Excel has emerged into its powerful yet clandestine role that it has today, and also at how organisations could be making decisions about technology investment into the future.

Why is Excel so powerful? Well, generally because organisations have made huge investment into process-centred IT into which business processes are hard-baked. Changing your business process then involves making fundamental changes to software, which costs money, takes forever, and is outside of the control of the business unit which is trying to change. In steps Excel using which the business remodels itself, and the process-centred system festers, being used only half-heartedly.

When I worked at the BBC, there was a project which, having been specified around a set of processes which involved a single supplier, was shot to pieces before it even launched when a regulatory change scaled the suppliers from one to in excess of 200. The hard-baked processes documented were out of date before the system arrived.

However, there is something more fundamental to consider here: if you are going to encapsulate business processes into software, which should you choose, and what software approaches should you take?

There are two, two-by-two matrices (the consultant’s favourite!) that I’ve seen to help address this question - John Ward and Joe Peppard’s, and Geoffrey Moore’s. I’ve tried to pull the two together to something that has made sense for me.



Business functions loosely fall into one of four categories, based on two dimensions - whether something sets you apart from your competitors (“Market differentiating”) or not (“Non-differentiating”); and whether you have decided that that function is a “Core” activity (in that it generates value for your and/or your clients) or not (it’s basically a cost). Ultimately, what is seen as core activity is at the heart of an organisation’s strategic direction.

The four quadrants determine different approaches to how technology support should be given:

Non-core, non-differentiating functions are basically your cost centres - transactional activity that every organisation needs to do to exist, but don’t offer any great benefit. This includes accounts payable and receivable, payroll, IT systems management, often facilities and so on. In all of these areas, the first question that should be asked is whether the organisation should be doing the activity itself at all? In most instances, these are areas in which there are economies of scale to be made, and opportunities for services to be improved through finding partners for whom this is their business. Running an email system these days is best left to a Cloud provider, for example. Running payroll is best left to the professionals....

Non-core, potentially differentiating functions are basically a company’s R&D activities. Here, there is potential opportunity to create new services or products but, unless you are in the game of software development, it’s unlikely that much above standard collaboration and office tools would be required.

Core, non-differentiating functions are the things that you and your market competitors all have to do, but are unlikely to set yourself apart on; in my company’s case, this is mostly about the generation of content - and here we buy in tools (mostly for us from Adobe) to perform that task. CRM might be another example, and packaged solutions (or SaaS) are the route forward. Especially if it’s a process-based activity, there is almost certainly a product out there already these days.

The final box is the interesting one - in previous models, the area where bespoke software development was seen as a likely approach. My argument would be that for most organisations these days, with the exception of those who are involved in either software development or heavy number-crunching (hedge funds and so on), market differentiation on your core functions comes from your people, and whilst enabling them to exploit collaboration tools effectively will be of huge value, there is little software development to be done.

One final thought on this for now. I wrote recently about the merging of the transformational elements of HR and IT roles. Looking to the future, the goal for this kind of transformational, collaboration function should be to help an organisation improve its ability to deliver in the top left-hand quadrant: at best, to actually be in that top left-hand quadrant. Helping people to use collaborative tools in innovate ways to set out from the competition; recruiting the right (not necessarily though just “the best”) people; helping teams to function at the best of their ability.

Thanks to Phil for the conversation at lunch yesterday that help me to gel some of this stuff together (I think!).

I seem to be getting anywhere between 50 and 150 people visiting the site on any one day... I'd like to find out a little more about who you are (if you'd be good enough to share that with me). No motive other than to satisfy some of my curiosity, and maybe shape some articles in the future.

There is a short, five minute survey available at http://www.surveygizmo.com/s3/326546/mattballantineblogsurvey. Be good to hear from you...

A nice catch up with Phil Dickinson this lunchtime, and a wide and varied conversation over a sandwich on Charlotte Street.

One connection that we made during our conversation was a fundamental difference that current Web2.0-type services that stream updates (such as Twitter, Facebook or Buzz) have from the Old World. In the Old World, if something was worth writing down, then it probably meant that what ever "it" was meant that the recipients were expected to both read and then action upon "it".

In the Twitterverse (Jeez!), if you try to read, let alone action everything that is posted to which you have subscribed, then you will go mad. These media are there to be grazed. It's casual conversation stuff, "water cooler moments" (or "fag breaks" as it used to be in more nicotine-obsessed times).

If you take a tweet at the value of an old-fashioned memo, you're in trouble. Equally, if you issue out tweets as commandments, you'll be highly frustrated.

Since lunchtime, it's also struck me that this is where email is causing no end of problems. Some people seem to see them in the old context of read and action; others as info-grazing fodder. Conflict thus ensues...

The creative world and the software programming world share more traits with each other than maybe either group would like to think (although comparing creatives to geeks will probably upset more creatives than the other way around). One of the things that comes out of this is a lot of "push" influence that can ultimately lead to management challenges.

Another 4-day week, so an early weeknote...

Project achievements included:

- completing presentations to the board about Google phase 2
- seeing the deployment of group-based permissions
- describing a potential crm service
- client reference meetings for the networks project

Additionally:

- Google video and Computer Weekly article published, interviewed for The Times and wrote guest Blogger article for Google enterprise blog.
- found out how well video chat can work
- saw quite how bad the iPhone aerial issue is
- continued to get no joy from lenovo
- planned a trip to the US offices

Next week in one word: summery

So, following on from the theory, what have I actually been doing with the client experience model?

A couple of points to note: first of all, if your underlying product or service is a pile of crap, there is only so far one can, to coin a phrase, 'polish a turd'; secondly, this is a continuing process, and we still have much to do.

Managing the promise of what we offer has been a big challenge. The IT department that I inherited was one that was shrouded in secrecy. As a result, there has been a breadth of expectation about the services that can be offered, much of which hasn't been made.

Recently we have been doing work to define our service offering in a way that is easily (I hope) digestible by everyone in the business. There are four elements: core services (devices, networks, security); software services (which are what you use the core services for, and split loosely into collaboration services and creative tools); service delivery (keeping all of the top two running); and projects (infrastructure ones that make changes to the core services, and business change ones that add or alter our software services).

Publishing a team structure that explains who does all of the above, and some basic commitments on availability and response (opening hours, service levels for incidents and requests) forms the basic elements of the IT Promise. I have deliberately kept away from the language of things like ITIL, but used its key principals.

Further down the line, a clear service catalogue is the next big step. But, in the meantime, I have been taking the above out (literally) on the road to let anyone who is willing to listen know about it.

Managing the perception of our service has also had it's challenges. The team was split into two offices at either end of a basement corridor when I started, and the comparisons with The IT Crowd were not difficult to make. Moving everyone into a single office space, providing good meeting room and
workbench facilities, and generally smartening up (including a clear desk policy) have helped to make us appear more like the professionals that we are.

There is still work to be done in many of our interactions with our clients, but we are steadily improving with an influx of very people-centred support analysts. A new helpdesk system later this year which will replace a somewhat ramshackle bespoke effort will also help, and we are running some workshops with volunteers from around the business to make sure we implement process that fits need.

Providing a lightweight, but coherent and effective project reporting and team structure framework has also greatly improved not only our ability to deliver, but our client's trust in our ability to deliver, and recent projects have been seen by many on the board as exemplary.

Proving the quality of services back to the business was probably the easiest area to start implementing - it's all about being unafraid to tell people about the stuff you're doing, and realising that they might actually be interested. Monthly project and service delivery reporting at board level, meetings with key managers on a regular basis, and presenting to anyone who will give me the time have been key (as well as sharing all of this in the team as well). An annual staff survey has been another great way of picking up on trends and being able to feedback. I surprised quite a few this year by actually emailing everyone who had comments for suggestion or some negative feedback- and the workshop volunteers for the service improvement work came from people who commented on the survey that our helpdesk service could be improved.

Recently I have also been working with our PR team to get publicity on our work externally as well. This is virtuous for both internal perceptions of how we are doing, but also for the company profile in general. Computer Weekly this week provided more positive messages.

Still, we have much to do, as all of the above runs in parallel to the fundamental overhaul of our services. But factoring our client's perception is also having some impact on our project scheduling. From a pure technology perspective, it would have been preferable to refresh our core networks before moving into cloud collaboration services - but that would have left no visible change in the services that actually mattered to people for far too long. The calculated risk of moving to Google in advance of refreshing much of our network infrastructure was one that had to be taken. Now we have the credibility and trust to be able to make major decisions about the underlying infrastructure.