By any other name

Try as I might, I just couldn’t get a full day off on Friday. I declared a ‘Green zone for maintenance’, a bit of humor meaning I was headed to my physician and dentist for checkups. In between those stops and a dozen other things that piled up a a lot of mail came into my Blackberry. I expected a certain volume because we’re preparing for a killer week. We’re expecting very high traffic through the systems – 2-3 times more than we can handle – and it’s been ugly when we hit our peaks. Various parts of the infrastructure just fall over and nobody is entirely sure why. Our friends from Oracle are on hand to see it for their own eyes and help us figure out what exactly is blowing up.

But what caught my eye was a message from the folks who are trying to pull our multiple LMSs into a single global instance. They’ve hit a snag in the fact that we send everyone to the ‘Employee Portal’ when in fact not everyone who is a worker is an employee. Now, this isn’t a new phenomena, and in an earlier time I had to work with HR Legal to get some carefully worded language explaining that non-employees may be using this system for very limited reasons. As I recall that was driven by certain countries’ Works Councils. Upshot – they’re recommending we rename the Portal, removing all vestiges of the word “Employee”.

Now, my wife is an attorney in Tech and Intellectual Property and between sharing stories with her and my own experiences I’m not blind to the legal perspectives on semantics and implied meanings. But this is getting a bit fussy IMHO. I hope we can resolve this with another go at the disclaimer language. I’d love to hear if anyone else has dealt with this and how you may have resolved it before I go back in on Monday and take up the Good Fight.

In the meantime we’re expecting a minor blizzard here in the northeast US, so after I’ve dug out I’ll check back in tomorrow afternoon. Thanks, all!

Deck the halls

Mostly off topic…my life has been inundated with PowerPoint. Starting with a summary presentation of the strategy meetings I detailed last month, one by one they increased and soon I was juggling decks from all sides, including from my school-age children.

I’m reasonably adept at PowerPoint, and I believe that in the right hands it can do some very cool things. Musician David Byrne has done some interesting work using it as an artistic medium. However, in the case of most business applications, I tend to agree with Edward Tufte’s sardonic assessment of the cognitive limitations that template-driven PowerPoint imposes. One of the better examples, by Peter Norvig, is here.

The next presentation I had to deliver was at a benchmarking group. Mulling over my topic and this love/hate relationship I have with PowerPoint, I decided to try a presentation modelled after the “Lessig Method”, named for Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, whose presentation style of using slides with short phrases or even single words has gained some notice. More about that here.

Generally I don’t work from detailed speaking notes. I usually present on subjects that I’m close to and am relaxed speaking freely about. My slides are typically milestones of what I’ll cover verbally. In this case I created my deck by essentially figuring out how my rap would go by rehearsing it a few times and pulling out lots of key words and phrases per Lessig’s approach. I ended up with 50 slides for what would probably have been 10 or 12 if I’d used the typical title-bullet-transition approach.

Sad to say, it didn’t resolve my PowerPoint angst. My presentation was very well received, right up there with highly entertainment-oriented ones where I’ve pulled out all the multimedia effects. I was asked by a reviewer at my office if he could have a copy so he could steal it for his own presentations. Yet at the same time I can’t escape feeling that perhaps it was well received only because of it’s novelty, a break from the bullets. And the impression that I get from the presentation style, and others I’ve seen like it, is that of ‘MTV for meetings’ – lots of quick cuts, flashing screens and only tiny amounts to digest in one bite. Well, if that’s my worst burden, I’ll deal with it.

My daughter in middle school has been using PowerPoint for a few years, they teach it in school these days. For my son’s 10th birthday she made him a presentation instead of a card – with photos, clip art, animation, sound and timed transitions. And now my son is getting the same instructions she had a few years back and together we created a deck for his research project. And he demanded backgrounds, type effects and cool transitions too.

I used to be in graphic design. Maybe I still am.

Help wanted – Language translation services

I’m looking for additional sources to work on custom translations across multiple systems. Does anyone have any vendors to recommend that can handle HR and technology jargon? Thanks!

The speed of Fusion

Computerworld reports that “Oracle Corp. is already claiming to be ahead of plan” on delivering Fusion, saying that they are halfway along.

More meeting

We spent the morning of our second day identifying what, by application, we percieved as the major business benefits from what’s delivered in the PeopleSoft upgrades. This was particularly compelling for our regional HRMS folks as they were able to compare and contrast approaches. There was a really positive flow of ideas, and you could practrically feel the group come together into a working team. This was possibly the best take-away from the event. I’ve seen time and again that the power of a motivated, smart group is incredibly more effective than individual efforts, no matter how informed.

If we expected to hear anything more specific from Oracle about Fusion, it wasn’t forthcoming. They’ve rebranded exisiting middleware as Fusion, but nothing that gave the HR product landscape any more substance was brought out. In terms of timing, they told us that the first Fusion applications are slated to begin appearing in 2007, the first Fusion ‘application suite’ for HR is targeted for 2008 and to expect it to be well beyond then before it’s sufficiently stabilized for enterprise-scale environments.

Our last day was a wrap-up, and we caught our planes back to our respective continents and cities. It was a US holiday Monday, but already emails are flying aorund following up on specifics that were raised. This morning our team met and we’re working on our summaries, follow-ups and thinking hard about how to maintain the energy from this event.

This event should mark the last of my travels for this season…I hope. I’ve been away from home a lot and it gets very tiring to be slogging aroung like that.

11 hours in a conference room

Long day but it was actually a good expreience. We’re having a strategy meeting about upgrading our full PS environment – 4 HRMS instances, sPro, EPM and Enterprise Portal – to 8.9. We started with sharing a definition of our target state. These are the carve-em-in-stone principles we want to deliver and/or achieve, regardless of requirements or technology. They’re simple and high level:

• a quality user expreience,
• timely and accurate data sourcing and feeds management,
• powerful and practical reporting and
• maximal system and service consolidation.

These four objectives contain many characteristics or best practices, each of which in turn will expand out to identified gaps between the as-is and terget state. The first order of business was to get agreement on the objectives and characteristics. Having that, we then went around the room with each functional owner speaking to the top of mind gaps in their areas, which we managed to filter into a single list of key gaps from a global perspective. Some of these will take years to address, others hang low but now we all agree on what they are. Everybody has to go hame and produce an exhaustive catalog.

The next stage was to identify what we wanted to achieve with 8.9 from a purely business side. How are we improving processes, enhancing services, shortening cycles, etc. The plus is that we now have a common ste of standards by which to measure any aspect of this effort – if it doesn’t deliver on one of the target state characteristics, we can fairly ask why we’re doing it. Further, with each of the 4 regional HRMS managers present in the room, talking to their goals, there was ample opportunity for sharing and comparing that was exercised in a really positive way.

By 6:30 PM we broke to go to dinner after an spontaneous whiteboard session between EMEA and Asia-Pacific on tree standardization, inspired by the warehouse and North America discussions on their respective approaches. Much lubrication followed and people were voicing their wonderment that we hadn’t started like this 3 years ago when we took this effort on on a global scale. Honestly, we didn’t have the luxury of strategy back then. We were racing a clock and a leaky budget, and we had to get the ‘plumbing’ in place. We made a lot of compromises and there’s no question that what we’re doing now is unraveling some of that.

I believe that with a vision, communications and a strong group working together we’re going to realize some cool achievements. With some blood and guts spilled, no doubt.

Orace is telling us about 8.9 and Fusion tomorrow. I’ll have to see what I can share, we’re under non-disclosure.

Back to it

Back for the new year! Hope you all had some good times over the holidays. We’re gearing up for a gathering next week of the functional heads to discuss our target state and how we get there. We need to have this discussion as a level setting prior to beginning to upgrade seven PeopleSoft systems to 8.9. We plan on beginning with fairly high-level, truth-and-beauty type of stuff positioned as the guiding principles and working our way to identifying the business drivers for the upgrades, identifying the deltas between the target state and our current state(s), and how to leverage the upgrade opportunity to close gaps, eliminate customizations and standardize.

There’s a fair amout of angst in some groups about all this. It’s hard enough to manage an upgrade like this without cluttering it with a desire to quantify and seek improvements for the greater good. We’re keeping this as a business-only session so we can keep a sharp focus on having business justification for the upgrade activities. For example, there’s a very interesting proposal floating around that shows ho we could gain advantages by moving some of our regional instances onto combined hardware platforms. There’s no denying that it would bring clear advantages but very few of them will improve the business processes that the systems support – and in fact it may make some of them more difficult.

Given that these are proprietary discussions, I’ll try to extract some meaning from them to report, but my mileage may vary.

Lessons learned

The usability focus groups are done, so what was learned? Well, Bogota wasn’t as scary as I feared. I only spent a day and a night there but the folks that I worked with were great, very positive and helpful. Mexico City was similar, and Dallas provided one of the best sessions overall in terms of engagement and interest on the part of the participants.

In terms of the prototype, the reaction to the approach and information architecture was positive and surprisingly universal. We were looking for cultural variations, but there weren’t any major things that have to be accomodated. Despite that, in each session there was at least one suggestion for a feature or an aspect of usability improvement that was unique. This was an enormously valuable exercise and provides important considerations for our self-service approach.

I now feel that I have a much freer hand to build on top of the concepts that I used for the enterprise portal, and I’m figuring on having a model in the next 90 days. I’m going to assume no constraints from a technology/vendor perspective because a) I want an ideal state and b) it will be necessary to get some people’s thinking out of the current application-centric model. I’m also less concerned about how this nascent concept will play around the world.

If things quiet down I hope to dig in between the holidays to model some of this out. But first, I’m taking a little break with my family for a few days of fun in Vermont. I’m about as mediocre as it gets but I love to ski. My daughter is a bit of a skier, and this will be her first time on a full-size mountain, we visited a junior mountain last winter. My younger son has visions of shredding the slopes on a snowboard…so he’s signed up for beginner lessons and I’m keeping my fingers crossed. My wife is the sane one, she’ll be chilling off the slopes. We’re heading off tomorrow morning, so everybody have a wonderful holiday weekend.

The End is Here

Today is the last day to vote for the Recruiting.com 2005 Best Blog Awards. Make sure you stop by and give your nod to the community – and thanks for your readership.

Kick me

While I was in Texas I stopped to visit the folks who staff our North America service center. They seemed pleasantly surprised to have me visit, and they were more than open to sharing some of their experiences related to employee self-service. All the while, I’m wondering, why on earth we haven’t managed to connect before now? We’ve agreed to have a monthly review of user issues, some of which we probably wont be able to manage away but with others we can surely improve the experience so these folks don’t have to call in their problems.

Another discusstion we had was about the segregation of the knowledge tools they use from the learning materials provided by the application teams and the content that goes on-screen at the interface level. These are three distinct stovepipes and I need to make them come together. Authoria has been orbiting around us on this subject for some time, but I need more languages than they provide and I’m not convinced that there’s a next choice.

Anyway, I have to rank the service center teams with the same status I assigned to the data warehouse folks in my rant below – we’d be dead without them, and they don’t get the respect they deserve.