Four months into an intranet implementation with Microsoft SharePoint it’s nice to be moving up the hill a bit further. Fairly new to .Net, I’ve been configuring the site and leading the team project. Next month we start the launch in phases over the course of the Fall. The requirements are steep and development will be ongoing. I’m sure, just about the time I get comfortable and accomplished in SharePoint development another major initiative will come along, just to keep me on my toes.

Sometimes I wish for more ruts in my life, but honestly if I got my wish I’d go mad. Being a glutton for punishment and constantly in learning mode has certainly been an asset. As a successful professional techie I see some key traits that have served me well. I also recognize these traits in others that I’ve worked with over the years:

• Stay flexible and don’t personalize technology. I know Apple has made a mint by personalizing technology. That’s all fine and good when it comes to your iPod or Mac book, but getting personal with technology, expressing a strong bias will limit the possibilities. In truth, the major development platforms, languages, methodologies all have their merits or they wouldn’t have stuck around.
• Stay on the learning curve to keep relevant. Technology is in a constant state of change, well no duh. Staying technically relevant therefore dictates maintaining a constant state of learning. If "research or die" is the mantra of the college professor, "learn or die" would be for the techie. Speaking of technologies state of change, watch "Kevin Kelly on the next 5,000 days of the web" on Ted.com. It will blow your mind or make you wanna crawl-up into the fetal position.
• Say yes as much as possible, but follow-through. Being known as a go-for-it guy can be quite dangerous, but it also presents opportunities. Being honest and not over committing is essential. When beginning this intranet implementation project, I was asked what it would take to effectively launch the site. I said six months to get a good start. The higher-ups said, "let’s do it in three." That’s all fine and good, but as I indicated it will take six months to fully launch the project, and so it will.
• Know your limits and then push past them. The curve always posses challenges that are beyond my existing skill set. Honesty enables one to assess the required learning curve to climb the next hill. There is such a thing as getting-in so far over ones head that the project implodes. Not a good thing.
• Don’t under-rate yourself. If you have been working aggressively in technology for any length of time you are probably worth more than you are getting paid. Being on a constant learning curve helps to keep ones feet on the ground, but it can also strike at your ego. You are likely more gifted and bring to the table more resources than you realize.
• Serve people not technology. What’s the point if it doesn’t positively affect people. Keeping your eye on the end-user will also drive your relevancy as their needs constantly change. It’s easy to get caught-up in pet projects and lose sight of pressing needs.
• Win as many hits as possible. In a large project, sometimes I hit barriers in the curve that are more difficult than I anticipated. So, keep moving and knocking-out items while I keep hammering at the biggies along the way.
• Be a life-long learner. Taking classes, attending conferences, joining user groups, building your network, reading industry sites and magazines should be a given.
• Just when you got it figured-out, the rules will change. Comforting I know, but such is life.

Change happens. In the words of Paul Simon, "What are you going to do about it? that’s what I’d like to know." What do you do to stay current?

1. Listen. A great lesson for many of life’s situations, but listening is a key in leadership. Hearing the expectations of upper management, the concerns and ideas of the team and getting feedback from the company or organization in general is invaluable. Building surveys and interviews into the process will give some beefy information.
2. Communicate. It is up to the team leader to take initiative to communicate often, thoroughly, timely and succinctly. To keep the team engaged and encouraged, consistent communication from you breathes life into the process and helps to keep the team objectives front burner.
3. Plan. Planning is huge and encompassing for team leadership. Developing and continually revising issues, tasks, milestones, team meetings and reporting mechanisms is critical.
4. Report. Invest time into report creation. Monthly reports are a summary of the process and are a good accountability structure. I leverage the time to tie-up loose ends and advance objectives in the process of report creation. Keeping the next report in mind with every task helps in staying the course when issues arise that would become a side eddy for the teams efforts.
5. Illustrate. Nothing like pretty pictures to tell a story. Illustrations, graphs, charts, wireframes all help to paint the picture that both the team and leadership need to see.
6. Work hard. Team leadership requires a level of committment and industry that is not for the faint at heart. More responsibility than authority, more service than honor, but it can be a fascinating process to see something concrete develop through the course of the project.
7. Be diplomatic. Issues such as the development timeline, objectives, structure and features are often negotiable with a bit of diplomacy. The reporting structure provides a means to address key issues along with ad hoc meetings with key stakeholders.
8. Make no assumptions. Everyone has the best intentions in a team meeting. Follow-up and building-in accountability structures will help folks stay on task.
9. Research. Know your subject well as you will now be seen as an expert. The more you know the better communicator you will be.
10. Share the load. It’s called a team for a reason. Engaging all the team members in the process is critical for it’s success.

There are undoubtably many more takeaways I’ll gain from this experience. Hopefully, I can keep these points in mind as the project moves forward. There are so many good lessons to learn from leadership. Any thoughts come to your mind? I’m always in the market for good pointers.

Some folks say, "I’m not good at learning languages." Often their experience with formal study of a foreign language resulted in a frustrating and intimidating experience. Truth is everyone learns multiple languages throughout their life. Here are just a few of the languages I speak:

• Geek Speak: Seen the bumper sticker "There’s no place like 127.0.0.1"? The default IP (Internet Protocol) address for every machine is 127.0.0.1 which is the home address.
• Design Terminology: Publishing text in a graphic from Photoshop is often kludgy (kludge meaning something is crude or inelegant). Text is more pristine when exported from a vector format such as .eps.
• Texan: Hi ya’ll.

The list goes on. Other languages I "speak": web developer, Engineering, Christianese, Higher-Ed, Austinisms, Marketing, business… and of course various standard spoken languages such as English, Spanish, Turkish and bits of Hebraic, Arabic, and Italian.

Think about all the life experience one gains over decades. With each job, each place you lived, each area of study, the first thing to pick-up is the language, the coding system for communication. Learning the right terminology is critical for success. How many tribal languages do you know? How many do you use from day-to-day? What tricks have you found in your station in life to pick-up new terminology?

1. Be specific as possible. Vague information leaves open questions that require follow-up.

• Site the specific URL or file location when applicable
• Make note of when the problem occurs and how repeatedly
• Any other information such as browser version, specific program or process related to the issue.

2. Put it in writing.

• Submit every request through appropriate channels whether a work request or email.
• Follow-up conversations with a request.

3. Plan ahead or allow for process time.

• Response to issues can take time. Expect a routine delay of one to three days for requests as they are funnelled into the cue.
• If it is a major issue plan ahead to reduce last minute crisis when possible.

These few guidelines will result in more efficient service in getting your issues resolved more promptly. To my IT support friends, are there other suggestions you would add?

I recently read a rather didactic book on productivity, familiar to many techies called "Getting Things Done." The basic premise of the book by David Allen is to immediately categorize info into buckets thereby either doing it, defering it or delegating it but not ignoring it and letting it pester you until you do something with it. By creating systems for storing tasks and projects you can literally forget about it and focus on solving real problems. I identified with it as something my first boss taught me many years ago.

While the system is tried and true, it didn’t help illuminate in my brain the way I work or more importantly the way my brain works. I have to categorize stuff constantly and come back to it frankly because my memory is just not that good. Half the time I forget my cell number or confuse numbers with my wife’s when asked by someone. So that’s fine and good.

Right now I’m staring at some pretty daunting deadlines this summer to launch an intranet, produce a video and create a website for an international symposium, develop some flash presentations and drive forward the regular agenda’s for development and upkeep of the main site at work. This doesn’t take into account the myriad of other processes and events happening outside of work.

I have come to see work like water. I have never been one to step-down from a challenge, but in the realm of productivity often I find from hour-to-hour the path of least resistance is the most productive. When it’s an opportune time to get a task done, do it. Constant evaluation of the full landscape reveals crevices in projects that I can fill.

As a random nonsequential thinker, I don’t know if I truly understand my thought processes. Left-brained thinkers like to break it apart for other left-brained thinkers. That is all fine and good and I appreciate its instructiveness. For me though, in the rubber-hits-the-road reality of today, this morning with much to get done, it’s just water flowing to the lowest points on the horizon.

Just hoping I don’t drown in the process.

1. Keepass – I don’t know what I did all those years without a solid way of storing passwords. What a conundrum it poses. On one hand, best practice says to use unique passwords that are long and cryptic. On the other hand there needs to be a system for storing them. Perhaps I’m showing my age but I find it more and more difficult to do so. Keepass is a small utility that stores passwords in an encrypted file on your desktop. I also heard of some IT folks storing the file on a server and opening it locally for a shared resource.
2. Google Calendar Sync – After years of ambiguous and conflicting appointments between work and personal life, I’ve started syncing my work calendar in Outlook to Gmail. For Getting Things Done enthusiasts, this one is a no brainer. It’s nice to open-up my calendar mindspace and not worry as much about calendaring conflicts.
3. Beyond Compare – This little utility, free for the 30-Day trial then $30 to by, allows you to synch files between two folders. Originally I used it to synch web folders but have found it very useful for backing-up documents to a network drive.
4. YouSendIt.com – Moving large files around the globe can be a real hassle. Our intranet system is in development and sometimes there’s no more efficient way to get stuff to folks than uploading it to a second party. The service is free though as a department we’ve subscribed to their first tier of service. They also offer secured service if you have highly sensitive information.
5. Google Adwords Editor – The Adwords Editor just makes life a little easier for maintaining one or more accounts. Management of the campaigns can be handled from the desktop and then sync’d when done. Works nicely when multiple folks are working on the same account as well.
6. FireFTP – This FireFox plug-in gets constant use. It keeps life streamlined for me to pop open an ftp client within the browser. It’s quick to launch and works pretty darn good. I’ve used it for upwards of a year now and have very little complaints.
7. Gmail Manager – Another FireFox plug-in, but probably the most used utility I posess. It enables me to keep a constant eye on email w/out going to the account. If there were such a bird for Outlook my work life efficiency would be near shangri-la.
8. MeasureIt – A little FireFox plug-in that measures anything on the screen. I should mention Colorzilla as well though for some reason just don’t use it as much. MeasureIt is uber handy for getting dimensions when modifying graphics for a web page.
9. Ad-aware – We use Norton Anti-virus at work and to put it mildly, it’s under par as an all-encompassing anti-virus utility. I prefer AVG Anti-virus which is free though I have a paid subscription for my home computing environment. Regardless of the version of anti-virus software I use, Adaware does a decent job of catching malware and spyware that they others let slip by.
10. Microsoft PowerToys Image Resizer
    – This little utility performs a nice function to resize images with a right-click. While I absolutely love working in Photoshop, it’s a real hoss in terms of launching the program and a pain when a simple resize is all that is needed. Image Resizer is an ideal utility especially for blogging.

There are many other utilities that are credible and that I use fairly regularly, but these mentioned above range between hourly to weekly, stuff I depend on. What ones could you not live without?

In this specific case we are implementing MOSS 2007 (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server). While I find some clunky aspects to the platform, overall it provides some pretty slick features out of the box and nice integration with Microsoft Office.

MOSS, much like blogging platforms or other Content Managed Systems, have evolved to the point where rapid publication is quite possible. The tough reality is effective implementation from an information architecture standpoint proves to be the real challenge.

Just yesterday, I was speaking with a friend of mine who is dean of the college of business at a local university. He remarked that they recently migrated their intranet over to MOSS as well. The ability to rapidly expand the site has, in some ways, proved to be to their detriment as it is becoming unwieldy.

As the tools continue to become more user-friendly the need for effective development of information architecture grows in direct proportion to the proliferation of information within a corporation.

There are two basic ways of categorizing information:

1. Navigational Taxonomy – how the site is structured to maneuver through the information.
2. Metadata Taxonomy – how the data is tagged for searching through the data.

Seems easy enough.

Navigational taxonomy in many respects proves to be the most challenging from a conceptual standpoint. Thinking of information from a landscape perspective can be challenging as one can only fit so much information on a screen. How do you go about making a large amount of information easily accessible without having to drill-down fourteen layers?

Metadata taxonomy, the basic means by which the web is structure, is much easier to conceptualize as a few descriptive tags to a document returns effective results in search. The major drawback however, is the human factor. People have been trained to stick information in folders, in locations rather than tagging information.

Effective planning and design of a system that’s the hard stuff. And if you are ready for a real challenge, take on training with the hope of behaviour modification of 750 people in how they do their job on a daily basis. Now that’s the tuff stuff.

A Worker is Worth His Wages

As you move-up in your career you will find fewer customers that will pay $75 to $100 per hour for web development or design. Those customers however will be very serious and the compensation will be worth your while. As your salary continues to rise your need for side work will continue to diminish and your hourly rate will actually prove to be a protection for your time.

This formula assumes you are picking-up side work in addition to full-time employment. I would not use this pricing structure to launch a business. Running a business full-time will entail much more overhead.

It’s All or Nothing Baby

A year ago I devoted a good deal of time launching a site for our start-up church CedarRidge. I told our pastor that he couldn’t pay me for the work in any form. I’ve made the decision to never do discounted work. There are three distinct categories in my mind:

1. Pro Bono – This type of work is only done for causes in which I have a high degree of vested interest and only on a limited scale.
2. Limited Free Consulting – My line in the sand is when my hand touches the keyboard to configure, design or implement any changes for a friend or acquaintance. I’m always happy to engage in conversation even for a couple of hours to help someone out. That is one of the motivators for this blog. I find it stimulating and enjoy the process. Two or three hours is about my limit in this category. If the person needs more time than that, they will need to start compensation at my going rate.
3. Full compensation – If someone is ready to pay my hourly rate in my field for their site, then they are very serious about the project. I don’t by-the-way charge or engage in related work such as system administration. Though I’ve worked as a system admin, I’m not up-to-speed to the degree that I would charge someone and not interested in working in that area. I’m happy to lend a hand on occasion to a neighbor in which I classify that as free consulting.

The “going rate” for web design or development is all over the map. In no way would I want to take advantage of a customer but in the same vein, if I am going to spend night and weekend hours, I want to be compensated well for that effort. If you, like me work professionally in any given area you will become an expert in your field. That knowledge has value that should receive compensation. Don’t sell yourself short.

What’s your experience with side work and compensation? How have you figured what you would charge?

A good number of sites make the topical feeds option very obvious. Sites such as:

1. Craigslist.org. I like to keep an eye on the Austin real estate market. I added the feed – http://austin.craigslist.org/rfs/index.rss to my reader.
2. FastCompany.com. Rather than combing through all of the articles, I subscribed to the FC Experts feed -  http://feeds.feedburner.com/fastcompany/experts.

Other sites are not as obvious in however in providing topical feeds, but can be utilized nonetheless. Sites such as:

1. YouTube.com. Perhaps you want to collect media along by a certain search string. I thought it interesting to monitor what was published for CSS and HTML. I added the feed – http://youtube.com/rss/tag/css+html.rss to my reader. The search "css+html" is the query string that returns those videos. You can add your own string of words. For instance you could put "jimmy+buffett" to track one of my favorite musicians.
2. Flickr.com. For online publication it is helpful to keep an eye on photos along certain topics. Living in Austin, I’m curious what photos are being taken from my hometown. I added the feed – http://flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?
   q=austin+texas&format=rss_200 to my reader. Again, you can replace the string "austin+texas" with your query string of choice.
3. Blog topics. Lastly, if you want to follow a specific topic for a WordPress blog such as the ever useful productivity tips on thoughtsparks.net, you can subscribe to http://www.thoughtsparks.net/category/productivity/feed in your feed reader. That way if you would like to by-pass my meandering thoughts on other topics, you’ll get just the meat you are wanting to extract.

As you begin to explore other sites and blog platforms you’ll discover similar hacks for getting the select information in your grid of interest.

Do you user other RSS hacks that are useful?

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Spammers use tried and true systems to infiltrate email and database systems. Put simply, spammers don’t like change.

As a professional web developer and author of two blogs my email accounts intake over 500 email per day which is 1.8 million a year. When I add-up spam, newsletters, business and personal correspondence, blog comments, log file reports, contact submissions and other miscellaneous email, effective management is essential for productivity much less shear sanity.

Managing email in general boils down to a few over-arching concepts; filter, segment, change and simplicity.

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