Overview: Change & Project Management

While my focus at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre has been on their Knowledge4Policy platform (K4P), I've recently been pulled in to help design their internal communications, community, collaboration & knowledge management strategy as they grapple with migrating from Jive to M365.

people started sharing selfies on Facebook and stories around the office. Participants gained new insight into the workings of other departments. People realized they faced common issues and brought new perspectives to problems. Ideas for future collaborations and projects took root. It was assisted serendipity in action... this evolved...into r…

Just one topic in this edition, sparked by Collaborative Overload (Harvard Business Review)... reported “time spent by managers and employees in collaborative activities has ballooned by 50% or more”

becoming a learning organization was nothing like winning a marathon ...cultivating an award-winning orchard... nurturing systems and culture to produce meaningful results... We embarked on a systematic and phased approach to cultivating the organization we all wanted.

as CEO... your power and privilege leave you insulated... from information that might challenge your assumptions and allow you to perceive a looming threat or opportunity. Ironically, to do what your exalted position demands, you must in some way escape your exalted position... at firms that are highly successful innovators, leaders are especiall…

Work management... the current state-of-the-practice in task management. Task management tools formerly were limited to a list of tasks... Nowadays, the most competitive tools incorporate social communications, like chat, @mentions, and messaging: these I consider work management tools, like Asana, Trello, and many others. I recently published a G…

the most valuable tools make it easier for employees to collaborate—and could even transform the way organizations work... We asked executives about their companies’ use of social tools, digital technologies, and big data... using social begets better use of these other technologies. When organizations digitize a process’s work flow ... using soc…

it only takes few weeks before you receive a full diagnostic report providing you with new levers to accelerate the development of your organization. Your employees invest less than 10 minutes completing a user-friendly questionnaire that they can do from their work or home computer, tablet or smartphone – we will do the rest.

at #EuroComm16... “Beyond Engagement.”... how uncoupling the IC function from a focus on Employee Engagement survey scores could have a liberating effect on the function and the profession, and potentially on employees and their enterprises as well... We weren’t here to praise the Employee Engagement Survey. We were here to bury it... In giving …

What happened when I was invited to “do a Rápido” at the IABC’s conference in Rotterdam earlier this week.

Work management is a term that has emerged in recent years as task management tools were enhanced with various social communication capabilities... The primary distinction here is the degree of emphasis for task-centric versus message-centric tools.

"Slack is just another stream ... of continuous information that you have to follow. I remembered I found it distractive and stressful because it was so easy to miss out on stuff.... This is what drives Slacks’ success. Because if you don’t follow Slack all the time you do not and cannot take part in the conversation with your team members anym…

"In the next five years, millennials will make up half the workforce and 75% of it by 2025... We want to contribute to building something great... with meaning. We’re also talented, driven, and have really high expectations for the companies we join and the type of work we engage in... companies need to ask us what we think and how we feel. Unf…

"People bond. Barriers dissolve. Connections are made. Trust increases. Knowledge is transmitted. Wisdom is shared ... a deep sense of interdependence is felt... If you are part of an organization, no matter what it's shape or size, it's time for some meaning making ... by creating engaging opportunities for everyone, from mail room to board ro…

"The problems that most resist solutions are system problems. In a system problem, if you’re part of the system, you’re part of the problem. This illusion of objectivity is often particularly acute in senior leaders, because there’s a tendency for people to tell them what they want to hear." - If you’re part of the system, you’re part of the pr…

"If you’re embracing online collaboration as a necessary evil — the only way to work with an increasingly dispersed team of global or remote workers, for example — then you’re doing it wrong. Online collaboration is not a second-best substitute for face-to-face work: It’s a complement with its own perks and benefits." - Collaborating Online Is So…

"most digital transformation deployments fall into the 'deploy and pray' category, a minority address known pain points and use cases, whilst only about 20% of projects involve a concerted organisation-wide roll-out aimed at creating a connected company. ... paradigm shift is needed to go beyond just adopting social technologies towards creating a…

"today’s social collaboration tools ... are focused on the wrong things, or at least on the wrong scale.... enterprises do business, but people do work. We will see a shift away from tools designed around ‘business’ and instead see a swing to tools that help people accomplish their work... the mantra will be — people first, mobile first, cloud f…

"Much of what social collaboration tools are designed to support is shallow work, and the stuff of managerial oversight... deep productivity comes from supporting deep work - cognitively demanding activities that leverage our training to generate rare and valuable results, and that push our abilities to continually improve - trying to support…

A timely and interesting article... "Gossip is an effective way of achieving these goals in an unhealthy social system. People engage in gossip when they lack trust or efficacy. We become consumers of gossip when we don’t trust formal channels... We become purveyors of it when we feel we can’t raise sensitive issues more directly... The problem w…

"On the surface, no single factor seems to set Slack apart from a plethora of other collaboration tools. However, a closer look using the model described the book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Product, reveals the user psychology behind the company's success." - The Psychology of a Billion-Dollar Enterprise App: Why Is Slack So Habit-Formi…

"the basics of human resources management goals and practices have remained little changed, philosophically and practically.... The main metaphor today’s HR professionals live in is still a machine with its designed-and-fitted parts and cogs, as opposed to the ‘living’ system of social networks in which people participate and interact... Let’s …

"recent scientific work is putting a much finer point on just how stories change our attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors... to motivate a desire to help others, a story must first ... develop tension during the narrative... it is likely that attentive viewers/listeners will come to share the emotions of the characters in it and continue mimicking t…

"We couldn't understand why people without technical knowledge had to tell programmers "what" to do and, furthermore, they had to supervise "how" programmers did it." At last. Someone said it. And also quite a bit more about the timesucks that are meetings, email and commuting. These guys avoid all of them, work 4 days/week and are growing …

"the biggest impact on competitive advantage comes not from products, processes or technology, but empowered employees. And with the lines between Internal and External Communication becoming increasingly blurred, ensuring your people are engaged and empowered has never been more critical.... Leading Internal Communication teams are already bla…

'Innovation' threaded its way through a lot of the resources added to my TumblrHub last week: from innovation-friendly management through to innovative Content Management Systems for tomorrow's newsmedia business models and personal productivity tools.

"Employees don't want to be "satisfied" as much as they want to be engaged. What they want most is a great boss who cares about their development, and a company that focuses on and develops their strengths." - Employee Satisfaction Doesn't Matter | LinkedIn

"Internal communications are responsible for engagement, which can enable employees to actively play a part in shaping the values and the type of experience customers have. Engaged employees who have been inspired and experience the vision, values and mission will then be strong advocates as they work and become involved in the brand themselves…

" Engaging employees internally has a direct impact on how the company is perceived externally. While the term employee engagement (or any of its variations) don't appear in the report, it's clear that combining social media with good management practices produces more engaged employees who have a direct impact on how the outside world views the o…

"Constellation's Connected Enterprise is the intimate innovation summit for senior business leaders successfully using disruptive technologies such as social business, cloud computing, mobile enterprise, big data and analytics, gamification, and unified communications/video to drive business value and transform business models."