Nick Seeber's blog

Gill on Fish, and dyslexia

Whilst looking for the address of Fish Club*, a restaurant around the corner from my house which I wanted to review on Yelp, I came across a Times restaurant review that AA Gill did a while back. Whilst the review was useful, what was really interesting was the first two thirds or so of the review, where he was talking about dyslexia:

I was asked by the nice facilitator what dyslexia had ever done for me. I said it had given me a brilliant lifelong excuse not to do things. I’m excused forms. I don’t do phone numbers or thank-you cards. I don’t text. I’m not Sudoku-, crossword- or Scrabble-friendly. And I don’t do quizzes, tests or exams.

It's a good, down-to-earth and succinct dissection of people's attitudes to dyslexia, and as you would imagine, it skewers a few myths in the process (emphasis mine):

In truth, of course, dyslexics end up in the art room or the music studio or the drama class after school, because it’s the only place they aren’t special-needs remedial. They get good because they can’t do anything else. We can be every bit as culturally rubbish as you — it just tends to take us longer to find out.

...

The people who really suffer with dyslexia are parents — mostly mothers, who get hysterical about statementing and special teachers and vivas and computers with coloured screens. They hurry their frightened and guilty children around the small coterie of nice-little-earner experts who repeatedly make them do spatial-awareness tests and talk in quiet, smiley voices.

School is never going to be a place for a dyslexic. The spine of education is words and numbers. But if you can get over the English bourgeois, obsessive snobbery with hardback reading, and just remember that the vast majority of people who ever lived never read a line of Jane Austen, then dyslexia should be a problem that, while it’s worse than having an annoying laugh, isn’t nearly as bad as halitosis or premature ejaculation. If you’ve got it, get over it; if your kid’s got it, forget about it.

Whilst on the subject, I highly recommend Gill's book The Angry Island, which has a passage on War Memorials which should be part of the History syllabus.

*The Fish Club website has the nasty 'design' feature of re-sizing your browser window to 1024 pixels wide. I was tempted to dock a star from the Yelp review just for that...

8 great online project management tools

Online project management tools are becoming the norm for obvious reasons - data is held centrally, it can be updated in real-time by lots of people, and they handle version control, back-up and archiving automatically.

There are lots of options out there - this is just an overview of eight of the most popular. If you find others which you think I should list here, please let me know using the comments field at the bottom of the page.

- Nick

 

Basecamp

Website: http://www.basecamphq.com

"Every day the world’s most respected brands, small businesses, non-profits, and entrepreneurs depend on Basecamp to make their projects run smoothly. Safe, secure, and reliable. Since 2004."

My view: From 37signals, who also provide Highrise (online sales process tool), Basecamp is the benchmark for all other online tools. It keeps on getting better, and is a cinch to set up and get started. The only note of caution is that XML / iCal feeds put authentication in the URL, so these should be used very carefully. Overall though - with 3 million users and almost all good feedback, very few people have bad things to say about it. Definitely worth a try if you don't mind paying for it.

Cost: $$$ - 30-day free trial, then $24 - 149/month depending on number of projects, online storage, time tracking and security options.

 

Edit 13/03/09: an option I inexplicably missed...

5pm

Website: http://www.5pmweb.com

"5pm can be your central location for project and task management, team collaboration, time tracking, reporting and more... "

My view: Somehow I'd never come across 5pm before, but it looks great, with clear, intuitive menus and some nice advanced features. Offering a one-step data migration from Basecamp is clearly a great feature, as it undercuts its larger competitor. User reviews are very positive, so this seems a 'must-consider' alternative to Basecamp.

Cost: $$$ - Free trial then $18 - $175 / per month depending on number of projects, online storage and number of users.

 

Zoho Projects

Website: http://projects.zoho.com/

"Online Project Management & Collaboration: Plan, Track, Collaborate and Manage your Projects Online"

My view: Part of the much larger Zoho product family, it's the obvious choice if you already use Zoho. Cheaper than Basecamp and you can use it for one project for free if you fancy trying it at no risk.

Cost: $$ - 1 project for free, $12/month for 10 projects / 2GB, $80/month for unlimited projects & 25GB space

 

Workamajig

Website: http://www.workamajig.com/

"As web-based job tracking and integrated project management software, Workamajig® streamlines entire ad agencies and creative firms, from new business and sales leads to staffing and creative execution, and all the way through a project's cycle to accounting and financial reporting."

My view: Squarely aimed at the creative environment, Workamajig is more specialised than some other tools, which may be an advantage for some users. Bespoke costing though, which presumably means spending tens of thousands of dollars, may be a drawback!

Cost: $$$$$ - bespoke, call for a quote

 

activCollab

Website: http://www.activcollab.com

"activeCollab is a project management and collaboration tool that you can set up on your own website. Have an area where you can collaborate with your team, clients and contractors and keep projects on track while retaining full control over access permissions and your data."

My view: A different take on the 'online project management' theme, activCollab is analogous to WordPress in that you install it on your own website and then use it online from there. It's not too pricey but will require some work in getting set up.

Cost: $$$$ - two options: Small Biz ($199 initially, $99/year from second year) and Corporate ($399 initially, $199 from second year).

 

LiquidPlanner

Website: http://www.liquidplanner.com

"LiquidPlanner is the only project management tool that lets you easily adapt your project plan based on real-life change and uncertainty. The result? Realistic schedules that make planning, collaborating, and hitting deadlines a breeze."

My view: Seems to require a lot of input to make the advanced features work. However 'per user' pricing structure will certainly be offputting for some - with 50 users would be £1250/month!

Cost: $$$$ - 30 day free trial, then $25/per month/ per user thereafter...

 

goplan

Website: http://goplan.info/

"Manage multiple projects with ease using Goplan's intuitive user interface. No click-trickery to get to the information you need to work on - all your projects are immediately accessible from your account dashboard, next to your assigned tasks, issues and calendar events."

My view: Neat-looking app with all the basic features executed well. Cheap and cheerful, with more good features coming in goplan 2 (active blog and engagement from the developers, always a good sign).

Cost: $$ - free to try, $10-$100 per month depending on options.

 

Project2Manage

Website: http://www.project2manage.com/

"Project2Manage is a free hosted project management solution that virtually anyone can use.  It’s free so sign up today."

My view: Super-simple, free tool - lacks some of the polish and advanced functionality of the competitors, but being free is a major selling point!

Cost: n/a - it's free :-)

 

Wrike

Website: http://www.wrike.com/

"Wrike is an integrated online project management solution that helps you manage projects, teams and businesses."

My view: With some interesting advanced features, Wrike seem to be selling themselves as an enterprise solution - so not the sort of thing that you'd use to build a website or organise a wedding! However that's no bad thing as it offers differentiation versus the competitors. It's priced per user, but this probably wouldn't be a problem for the target market.

Cost: $$$$- $5 - $15 / per user / month

"using your telephone keypad, press 1 for Sales..." - the alternatives to IVR

As I work for a company that uses telephone menus (press 1 for this, 2 for that...) a LOT to route all inbound calls, I often get asked why they do so - given that most customers can't stand them. As you might imagine, it's for reasons of cost: call handling time by real people costs a lot of money. Time spent transferring customer to the right call queue is valuable, especially in a large organisation with lots of different departments.

Unfortunately using 'natural language' command systems ("say which department you'd like to talk to"...) just aren't up to the task of replacing real human beings. As such, getting the customer to provide some information using their telephone keypad about what they want to talk about is very cost-effective, albeit whilst incurring a non-monetary cost of poor customer experience.

Given all this, I'm quite pragmatic and see IVR ("interactive voice routing") as evolving from the need for companies to be competitively priced and cut all 'non value add' costs. But if IVR is badly designed, or cynically implemented to actively prevent a customer from speaking to an advisor, I have a VERY big problem with it, and feel that it seriously damages a companies' brand.

In the future I hope that it'll be possible to keep costs low whilst delivering a great customer experience that doesn't use IVR. There seem to be a few alternatives:

Fonolo provide a really interesting option - they do a number of cool things to improve the experience of calling companies with IVR:

- Never have to listen to a phone menu again. fonolo transcribes phone menus from many large companies, so you can scan them quickly.
- Skip the navigation. Get right to the business. fonolo lets you “Deep Dial” to any point in a company’s phone menu.
- Stop scrambling to find notes from your last call. fonolo automatically organizes your notes and recordings from all your calls.

Obviously this requires all customers to be using Fonolo, which is unfeasible - however, companies could actually license the Fonolo technology to display their IVR call trees on their websites, or indeed use their own mapping to enable customers to "deep dial" themselves.

Alternatively, companies could get customers to request a call-back - this gets rid of the problem of leaving the customer to find the right department, and cuts out the time of customers waiting in queues listening to awful music. However, the call-back needs to be very close to real-time, so that the customer gets their problem resolved as quickly as possible, and feels 'in control'.

The final and best option, is that companies could obviate the need to call, by adding more functionality for self-help to their websites, whilst retaining a smaller and more highly-skilled group of advisors who have the authority to use their discretion in resolving difficult problems or tricky customer service complaints. For example - in 3 years of dealing with Amazon, I have only once spoken to their contact centre, and they resolved the problem immediately.

So in summary, my advice for businesses is to either:

- don't use IVR at all - route all calls to advisors immediately (expensive but a good selling point!)

- accept the prctical need for IVR but use it minimally and sensibly, and keep 'wait time' as low as possible - no-one likes hearing Mozart on repeat for 20 minutes

- encourage 'deep dialling' by your customers (like fonolo) by publishing IVR trees (innovative but potentially embarassing if your IVR structure is a mess)

- get customers to request an 'instant' call-back online from the appropriate team (very good if you can get customers to use it, but requires a great tracking system)

- reduce inbound calls by investing in great, easy, quick online self-help, and keep advisors to a minimum (the long-term goal of most businesses these days)

Web 2.0 & what it means for work ethic and language skills

In response to a question on LinkedIn Answers:

Question Details:
--------------------

Are "work ethic" and language skills still relevant for "tomorrow", or must we redefine them for "Generation Y"?

While facilitating a workshop on interpersonal communication and work-life skills (for adult professionals) I was asked whether "good old fashioned" work ethics and language skills (speaking and writing; English primarily) that we know from corporate and government experience are still relevant as we experience 24-7 flex work hours, world-wide communications, diverse colleagues, abbreviated language (IMs and texting), and more. Do we need to re-define acceptable standards as we teach today's youth how to succeed in the workplace? Your thoughts and perspectives will help with future workshops.

My answer:
--------------------

There are two aspects to the question you've asked, which are (a) 'traditional work ethic' and what happens to it, and (b) 'whether language skills will change in their significance'. I'll address them separately.

Clearly the value of consistent hard work in acheiving a defined goal won't go away any time soon - don't think anyone would disagree with that. However, what 'work' means may change - rather than the sort of regular grind that typically constituted our grandparents' working lives (40 years working for the same employer), it's likely to be a lot more fluid, with different jobs and skills at different times in our lives. Emphasis will be on flexibility, real-time collaborative working, constantly adapting to change, learning constantly. We cannot any longer abdicate management of our careers to paternalistic companies, and now need to be very aware of our personal value, relevance and, critically, brand.

In response to the second part of the question, I would argue that now more than any time in the past, great communication skills are the differentiator between people who are effective and those who aren't. Being able to effectively motivate and persuade people we've never met through the medium of text, as we do now so often within the Web 2.0 universe, is crucial. Our writing and language skills are the medium through which we communicate ideas, arguments, emotions.

'Txt spk', or abbreviated language, is an artefact of using phone keypads or touch screens to generate text, and the now irrelevant capacity of networks to carry large volumes of data (the 160 character limit of SMS is a particular bugbear of mine!). Once voice recognition or other text capture mechanisms become more useful and integrated, it'll disappear except as a deliberate affectation.

Think of how the great contemporary communicators use language - do Seth Godin, or Barack Obama, or Steve Jobs use abbreviated language? No, of course not. Essentially their use of grammar, punctuation, and vocabulary is that of any educated person. Reality is that our ability to produce brief, clear and persuasive text in our language of choice (though realistically that probably means English or Chinese!) will be the difference between those who succeed and fail on the Web 2.0.

Finding a mentor

This morning I answered a question on LinkedIn Answers about finding a mentor.

Good plan! Having a good mentor is a massive advantage in your personal growth & development. Personally I don't think there is a right TIME to find a mentor -- it should be something that you're doing continuously throughout your career -- but it's crucial that you choose the right PERSON. Fundamentally, if you don't admire and respect your mentor there's no way that you will get the full benefit from the experience.

Perhaps unusually, all of my mentors started off being either (a) senior colleagues who worked in other parts of the company, or (b) clients who I had completed consulting engagements for. This meant that they had a very good understanding not only of me and the way I work, but also a view of my industry (telecommunications). Over time, of course, they've moved jobs and so have I -- so now I'm lucky enough to have contacts spread across a cross-section of different job roles and industries, which is great.

I went about it quite informally, but thinking about it I followed these three steps:

- find two or three people who you admire the most within your company (but not your immediate line of reporting) and, crucially, whose roles you could see yourself performing in 4 to 5 years' time. I think that this is about right, as the person will have recently gone through similar dilemmas and decisions to those which you're facing now.

- write each of these people a brief, personalised e-mail explaining who you are, and asking if they would be prepared to meet with you over a coffee for 45 minutes during the next month or so to give you some advice. Don't pitch it as a long-term commitment -- you might find that actually they aren't the right person for you! Also, who wants to sign up for six months of mentoring someone they don't know? Most people will be happy to give up 45 minutes, though if they decline don't worry -- send a thank you note and leave it at that.

- when you first meet with someone, don't immediately dive into what they can do for you! Talk about yourself, what you've been doing, where you think your strengths and weaknesses are, and what your immediate plans for the future are. Then ask for their advice. If what they say resonates with you, or makes you aware of something new about yourself, you're onto a winner. Make sure that you finish promptly, and thank them for their time.

During the next week, drop them a note to say thank you again -- then spend the next two months putting their advice into practice! Then, when you write to them again, you'll have plenty to talk about next time.

I hope that this is useful, good luck with finding a great mentor.

Nick

Terminator: Salvation - kick-ass trailer

Following my earlier Terminator geekery, I finally got round to watching a trailer for Terminator: Salvation... and it KICKS ASS.

I can't WAIT for 21 May :-)

Slate's theories on why 9/11 hasn't recurred in the US

This morning I noticed this nice compilation by The Null Device, of Slate articles on the threat of terrorism:

Slate has a series of articles examining various theories on why there hasn't (yet) been another 9/11-style attack on the US. The theories are:

• The terrorists-are-dumb theory (i.e., they just got lucky)
• The Near-Enemy Theory (i.e., they're too busy in Pakistan/Afghanistan)
• The Melting-Pot Theory (i.e., American Muslims are too well integrated to sympathise with al-Qaeda)
• the Burden-Of-Success Theory (i.e., 9/11 has set expectations that are hard to meet)
• The Flypaper Theory (i.e., why kill Americans in the US when you can kill them in Iraq?)
• The Bush-Kept-Us-Safe Theory (i.e., invading Iraq and abducting and torturing random Muslims actually worked)
• The Electoral-Cycles Theory (i.e., they're timing their attacks to influence elections)
• The Time-Space Theory (i.e., al-Qaeda is just biding its time, just you wait...)

Very interesting, albeit rather worrying.

Decided I also need to read up on the RAND Corporation...

The Pirate Bay - pirate ship or merely a noticeboard?

Sam has written a defense of The Pirate Bay's legality on his blog.

In brief the point he makes is that by hosting torrent files (which can refer to a torrent 'in the aether' containing anything at all, legal or illegal) the hosting site is merely providing a service which others abuse:

Suppose I set up a market stall furnished with a noticeboard, and I allow passersby – unsupervised, and at their own risk – to post notices to the board and to read ones already there.

If the passersby just post notices about car boot sales and community fairs and other entirely legal activities, then all is hunky-dory.

If a user posts a notice advertising, say, illegal drugs for sale, then this is more problematic. Suppose this happens, and another user uses the instructions in the advert to locate a dealer who does indeed sell him drugs. Would I have abetted that by offering the noticeboard service?

There are four people involved here:

1. me, the provider of the noticeboard service;
2. the noticeboard user – let's call him the adman - who posted the advert offering the illegal drugs;
3. the noticeboard user – let's call this one the addict - who, after reading the ad, bought the advertised drugs; and
4. the dealer who sold the addict the drugs.

I think we can confidently assert that the last three of these people have committed crimes. The dealer sold the drugs, which were illegal to sell; and the addict bought the drugs, which were illegal to own. The adman greatly facilitated the selling of the drugs by posting a notice explicitly referencing them and explaining how to obtain them.

Did I, as the provider of the noticeboard, commit a crime? After all, the noticeboard is where the adman posted his ad, so looking at the noticeboard is how the addict found out where to get his drugs.

It's a good argument - though how well it will hold up in court is anyone's guess.

Project Management 101

This morning I posted the following advice on lightweight project management on LinkedIn Answers and thought it might be useful for other people more generally:

If your project is quite small, you've got 5 steps you need to carry out BEFORE you start any project work. They'll take a couple of days at the start but it'll be well worth it in the long run.

Briefly:

1. Identify sponsor(s)
2. Define scope
3. Create activity plan
4. Agree governance
5. Track actions to completion

In more detail:

1. Identify who the SPONSOR is - the person (or people) who's going to sign off the project once it's complete (note that this might be multiple people). You're going to need to keep them informed of your progress throughout the project, and escalate issues that you can't resolve to them. the key priority for them is NO SURPRISES.

2. Next step is to write a definitive SCOPE STATEMENT - this makes it very clear what you're going to do, and more importantly, explicitly states what you're NOT going to do. Get this signed off with your sponsor ASAP.

3. Once you're certain what you're going to be doing, you can make a ACTIVITY PLAN. This doesn't need to be in MS Project, or anything fancy - simply make a list of ALL the activities you need to do, including:
- unique reference number for each one (allows you to refer to them unambiguously in reports)
- brief description (<10 word)
- status (not started, in progress, closed)
- owner (obviously not required if it's only you on the project!)
- planned date (this DOESN'T CHANGE)
- estimated completion date (this can change, but you should keep it honest or you'll stitch yourself up in the long run)

4. You're almost done - now agree the GOVERNANCE for the project - this is you reporting to your sponsor on progress. This will normally include (a) regular reports (typically weekly) which will include issues you've encountered and what you're doing to resolve them; and (b) longer face-to-face 'milestone' meetings (typically monthly) to give a more detailed run-down on progress.

5. Finally, now that you have a sponsor, fixed scope, realistic plan, and governance in place - rest assured that you're in the top 10% of projects already. But now you need to execute effectively. The best way to do this is to make a WEEKLY ACTIONS LIST - here you're breaking down the individual activies (e.g. 'Interview architect') into smaller chunks (e.g. 'Book meeting room'; 'Send invite'; 'Organise tea and biscuits'; etc...). Then it's a case of constantly crossing off activities and ensuring that they're taking you in the right direction.

If you stick with this lightweight framework RELIGIOUSLY you won't go too far wrong...

Let me know how you get on! :-) Good luck...

Zeitgeist - The Gubernator and robo-dogs

Wired's Gadget Lab blog picked up on The Big Picture's robots collection and, pleasingly, also enjoyed the shot of Arnie meeting the giant robot hand that I posted about yesterday (before being distracted by Terminator geekery).

I also saw that they posted the video below of the creepy US military 'robot dog' that featured in the collection too. It's REALLY weird...