"Productivity tools" speech

Good evening, My name is Elizabeth Cook. My company is The Crunch Bunch. I'm an information architect and marketer and The Crunch Bunch is a full service agency.

I'd like to introduce Richard Piotrowski to you. Richard is Director of The Logic House. As well as doing the usual websites the Logic House specialise in custom extranets and web applications.

Richard and I met when we were both young entrepreneurs. Now he's a young entrepreneur and I'm just a business owner. We started working together because we share a very pragmatic view of software. We both find it frustrating when people think that buying an expensive piece of software is a solution in itself instead of a tool to create a solution.

A big problem area that our clients have is collaboration. Collaboration can be wonderful. When a group of people get together and there's energy in the room then great things can be achieved. That's the upside. That's face-to-face communication in the same place at the same time and that's quite easy. It's the best form of communication.

It's not always easy for people to be in the same physical location at the same time so thanks to technology we can now communicate at the same time from different places. Video conferencing, instant messaging, real time chat and so on. There are many free solutions so I'm not going to discuss these.

The downside of collaboration is that quite often you need to be working at different times. You could be based in the same office but other commitments and flexible working patterns mean that you're rarely around the same time as your colleagues. This becomes doubly hard when you are working with someone who is not on the same team as you, in the same department or even the same company.

Running a team of people in this situation becomes difficult. You end up relying on telephone calls and email to manage these people. It becomes even more difficult if you have responsibility for this but no authority over these people. You are left trying to manage by persuasion alone.

The problem we identified was that the important messages from the project manager were sent in the same way as routine messages. This meant that not only were messages from the project manager all assigned the same value, they were all reduced in value to the team members.

In marketing we have the rule that all communications should be relevant, timely and to the point. A person's time and attention is their most valuable gift and we don't abuse it. Why is that not the case for internal communications?

Our solution to this was to automate the routine tasks of project management communications. Instead of many broadcast emails from one project manager we changed the focus so team members get personalised communication.

The base of this communication is an extranet where each team member has their own account and identity. Extranets are wonderful things that host forum boards, support distributed publishing, allow document libraries supported with version control, all in a secure space.

• Each member of the team has their own account on the extranet.
• The project member creates a task and a deadline and assigns it to one or more team members.
• Option: team members accept or reject the task.
• Once a task is assigned and accepted the system goes quiet - until the reminders kick in.
• The project manager can set when reminders are due to start. For example if it's an eight hour task due on Friday 9am they can set reminders for Thursday 9am or, if they want to be realistic, Wednesday 9am.
• Once the team member completes the task on the extranet or signals that they have completed the task they get an acknowledgement and all communications about that matter cease.
• If the team member does not complete the task communication ramps up and the project manager is alerted. The project manager can then use personal communication by telephone or personal visit with the errant team member.

The advantages of managing projects by extranet
It provides concrete tracking information about who is supposed to be doing what. This information can be kept private to the project manager or it can be shared amongst the team community The project manager's communications retain the value they should have. The project manager has more time to spend on the valuable communications.