Stu Downes

On Saturday BBC Radio 4’s business discussion programme, The Bottom Line, covered the topic of Mobile Working.  Listen again here, or subscribe to their podcast.  Worth listening to, the main discussion is in the first 10 minutes.

It was an excellent discussion with important points raised around meeting people in person, eye contact, the power of serendipitous conversations in the office, being able to visually assess products (and how that can’t be done remotely).

The discussion moved quickly and then talked about home working, given travel issues this week with snow in some areas of the UK it was relevant.  The panel were quite divided in their view on home working, but all agreed that it suits specific individuals better than others and that actually a hybrid working pattern is their favoured approach.

I tend to favour the views that support location independent working, and absolutely agree that everything is a hybrid, I cannot think of any way that people could work 100% at home, or for me I find it strange to think of a world which would be 100% office (but again that comes down to work requirements and work style – and my work can be performed flexibly).

One point they didn’t raise which was a shame was day extenders, or time shifters.  Those who’d like to work in the evening in order to spend more daytime with families.  I think that will be more and more important in the future.

For those of us who regularly want to copy and paste information from numerous slide decks into a new deck relying on an open office tool has always been a requirement, and on many locked down corporate builds this isn’t possible (and to be fair what I’m suggesting here may not be possible on heavily locked down machines).  A solution exists!!  Firstly I have to thank George for sending me the link and thank the Please Make a Note Blog:

1. Create a new user on your machine
2. Locate the Powerpoint icon in your start menu (or search for Powerpoint in your start menu)
3. Press "Shift" and right click on the icon
4. select "Run as"
5. Enter the credentials of the newly created user

Voila!
Now you have a new Powerpoint instance that you can place on a second monitor.
Alternatively, for the "programmatically" inclined users, you can invoke the "Run as" command through the command shell

1. Open a new command shell (Start menu/ search for "cmd")
2. Type the following

   runas /user:username "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\POWERPNT.EXE"

3. Press enter

Voila!

Some caveats/additional information:  I’d recommend the run-as window is used to copy from.  The reason I say this is that saving files from the session running as the secondary user proved problematic for me on vista with UAC (even running in admin mode and granting permissions to folders), as by default it wants to save files into the second user’s my documents area.  Also some plugins for powerpoint will complain if they detect their processes are already running (Camtasia plugin was the main one I noted) and I didn’t test any of those plugins while 2 powerpoint sessions were running.

When the second window opens it automatically stacked on top of the existing powerpoint icons making me initially think it hadn’t worked, it had – just needed to move that version across to the second monitor.

Congrats to a government department!  (didn’t think I’d say that).  Their new service at http://www.traffic-england.co.uk is great, especially their Motorway traffic flow graphs where you can turn on or off various streams of information, here is the M6 close to me when I wrote this:

The only things that aren’t quite there are the interactive map isn’t working at the moment.  I was also surprised that the agency hadn’t considered mobile users on smartphones.  I feel that even though they have a telephone number (08700 660 115 – cheaper than a lot of the premium rate services offered by others) they should have a mobile accessible site … oh and if anyone reads this from the agency could you make the number text rather than embed in a graphic so folks with soft phones or those who have opened the site on a telephone can call it without typing in the number (thanks!).

Like most of the folks reading this I’ll spend a good proportion of my day in remote meetings.  Generally these are:

• one to one
• multi-way audio
• multi-way web meeting (some with integrated audio)
• Video calls (few)

But more importantly I’ll class those meetings as:

• relevant to me for most of the meeting
• relevant for some of the meeting
• only relevant for a small portion of the meeting
• irrelevant

Now hopefully you’ll have sent me an agenda before the meeting so I won’t even attend the last category, so lets ignore those (I tend to duck out politely).  The top of the list is easy, I tend to remain totally engaged throughout those meetings as they are completely relevant to me and what I need to achieve.

The problem comes of meetings where only a portion of the meeting is relevant.  When this is the case I suffer the temptation of distraction, like you I have lots to do and this call is dragging on and I’m not to interested in what X is saying.  The problem is that after we’ve switched off something relevant comes up and a question is directed our way – “could you repeat that please” becomes a well heard phrase.  So in order to maintain attention I have to take some basic measures (which are actually more difficult than they sound):

• Audio calls:  I walk around!  Carry a notepad and pencil and literally stretch my legs (sometimes outdoors) but generally round the house when working from home.  I really find it helps maintain concentration – but more importantly takes me away from distraction!
• Web meetings:  I have to force myself not to get into IM’s, read emails, tinker with my action lists or write that report I need to finish.  Its really hard – I know I’m not the only one who finds it hard.

In summary my survival technique is to avoid all calls with limited relevance and for those where I have limited input either pre-arrange a subset of the call to attend OR really concentrate on avoiding distraction.

What are your tips?

As we draw to the end of 2008 a quick post to say thanks for reading!  Its been a busy year at this end with challenges and changes at work, together with the challenge 2 young boys bring to the equation.  Although both bring their own fun and have been immensely satisfying.

The blog is still here, still posting as much as possible, and about 220 of you subscribe via RSS, 3 via email and about 90 hits per day look at content generally from search engines.  Most of the search engine hits are for Sametime plugins (for which Google rank me 2nd – how do you demote yourself!?!?).  Congratulations to the one person who visited after searching for “sleepwalking data”. 

Twitter remains my primary status update tool (“follow sdownes1972” in twitter or go here). On days then I post to the blog and inform twitter about it the web hit count shoots up.  I expect that trend will continue perhaps to the detriment of RSS.

Looking forward I expect we will all be touched in some way by economics, only today on Christmas eve a family member found their employers hadn’t paid any staff.  I expect though that in my areas (collaboration and end user technology) there will be continued demand where organisations seek benefits in terms of travel reduction, exploiting partnerships and removing cost through virtualisation.

I’m thinking of some themes for the blog for next year (and your thoughts are welcome):

• Tips:  Sharing ideas, tools, or techniques that I feel help me and may help you.
• Remote Meetings:  A series exploring remote meetings, what works, what doesn’t, how I best use the tools available to me.
• Novel and New:  My take on consumer tools which maybe haven’t hit the enterprise.

A Merry Christmas and just in case I don’t get to post here before 2009 a Happy New Year.

Technorati Tags: Reflection

Its nice to reflect at this time of year on how technology is making a difference (7mins long):

Link to video

Seamless Teamwork

I’ve just finished Michael Sampson’s book "Seamless Teamwork > Using Microsoft SharePoint Technologies to Collaborate, Innovate, and Drive Business in New Ways"

The intended audience is not techies, its business users who need to use SharePoint within their organisation to aid projects, especially where the team are not co-located.  Michael gave lots of great advice in terms of forming a team, understanding stakeholder requirements, developing deliverables, status reporting before finally setting direction, drafting deliverables and seeking feedback.  Michael discusses how to use SharePoint to the level that the project leader would need to understand (creating lists, modifying views, using the wiki, document libraries, workflows etc.).

I found the book an easy read and could relate the advice and recommendations to my every day project work.  I think everyone will learn something from the book, I certainly did.  Even better is the price, its about the cost of let me think, minutes worth of consulting, yet give this to key evangelists within the business and rewards will be great.  This is especially true for most organisations where the business leaders aren’t savvy enough to make best use of the IT they are provided.  If you are running a SharePoint implementation and would like better adoption then give this book to key people, read its message and use the techniques in your self help implementation.

It makes me realise that as IT organisations we miss a trick after we’ve delivered a project – but actually makes me think that vendors should all offer works such as this to help business users gain from their solutions. I’m sure it will do the rounds in for my local readers.

Well those who follow my twitter stream knew this weeks ago (there is a sign of the times).  I have a new role, still at CSC.  See more on LinkedIn.  I’m going to try and continue blogging here but due to the nature of the role its more likely to be general thoughts, tips and opinion rather than posts on my day to day working activities.

I’ve used this for a while but realised in conversations not many people do.  How many times have you wanted to be on Sametime and broadcast a Do Not Disturb except to a select Group.  Well you can in 7.5 or above.  When logged in go to File-Preferences, select Privacy, enable the function, then find/add names to the list.

I find it amazingly important for my stress levels to be able to stay on top of everything I need to do.  Even if it means that the list of things I need to do (or delegate) is sometimes overwhelming.  I’ve shared previously how I was working with OneNote and Notes for recording tasks while in meetings and then action them from the to-do list in Notes.

Well a new adventure started about a month ago.  I’m afraid neither Notes or Outlook worked for me as task management tools.  I like lists, and lots of them.  Remember the Milk is all about lists.  I’m not going to explain how it works here as they do it much better here.

The biggest differentiation for me is the multiple modes of device I can use to input tasks.  I can email tasks, I can access the web (both mobile and full featured) or I can simply twitter.  And this for me is the best feature for inputting tasks, in that is is intelligent.

d rtm do this action next friday

Becomes just that a task called “do this action” due for completion next Friday.

And d rtm !today returns all the tasks I have today in twitter, but I normally use the weekly action list as a reminder of today’s tasks and those coming up (and more twitter shortcuts).  It means during meetings I can rapidly add actions to my lists, I can also do it from the blackberry using twitterberry which means when I remember something I can simply fire in a task wherever I am.

Being a non-sanctioned tool within most enterprises folks may wish to generalise some of the task names so as not to give away any secrets, as I found recently its easy to type “s rtm taskname” accidentally in twitter and broadcast the task to your followers.

Working on the web the ajax interface is superb and the supported shortcut keys really help in terms of using it productively without constantly clicking or tabbing through boxes.  Anyone designing a to-do list feature should look at this product, I’m hoping it will influence the future products we see in our desktop software.

I also utilise the googlemail firefox plugin and the google gadget on my firefox browser home page.  All in all, if you don’t like your task management tools give remember the milk a whirl.

Cudos to Mrs Downes for she wanted a tool to use, I suggested RTM, and she raved so much I just had to try it.  Now I’m hooked!