I had the privilege of being appointed a particularly special mentor, the Vice President of Sales within our organization. As an engineer deep in the engine room of a large software company, I’m usually focused on developing stuff and hadn’t officially met him. He was hired from outside the organization a few years ago and has proven himself since. His analytical approach leveraging numbers and transparency to focus and inspire his people has shown itself to be an effective motivator that has increased sales.

We’ve met a few times now and I always come away inspired and motivated. I find myself thinking deeply about the things we discuss, the practical lessons and principles he’s learned and applied through the years. Like principles of Open Book Management he practices to educate and motivate his salespeople.

The problem is that developing software is not at all similar to selling it when it comes to motivating those doing the work. As Dan Pink suggests, reward and punishment are not great motivators for creative thinking type people wielding specialized cognitive skills.

As lead software engineer, it is my job to lead other engineers by helping them understand what’s going on, how things fit together, scheduling, the direction management wants us to be headed, and what they can do to help. After thinking about the ideas behind open book management, the importance of transparency, accuracy, and attention to change, I realized there were things I could be doing to better inform and motivate those I lead.

Over the last few months I’ve been experimenting with different data analysis approaches to show what we’ve accomplished, who is working on what, the priority of each association, and an algorithmic approach to calculating percentage completeness. I’ve used this data to encourage focus, discussion, and development. While not perfect, it has done exactly that. Working on it, thinking about the projects and people involved, has really helped me think about and coordinate efforts to get more done in less time.

Since then, I’m exploring the information I can retrieve via RSS feeds against our ticketing system. I loop through the data, adding up code changes and ticket updates per ticket, per release and per team member. Factoring days between releases, changesets, and updates, I can calculate some interesting numbers that are empirical and predictive. I can produce all kinds of statistics, numbers, and trends, but what numbers matter the most?

What are the “critical numbers” that help us do our work more effectively? What numbers can help us understand how we’re doing as team to deliver our product enhancements and fixes on time? What numbers are most interesting to upper management? This idea of critical numbers was brought up at my last mentor meeting. It got me wondering.

It got me wondering; can I use numbers to show that we’re performing better? Or not performing as well? What does ‘better’ mean? How can performance be measured when you’re developing software? What are the benefits of measuring observable actions of engineers? What numbers are most important?

Questions for my next mentor meetings perhaps…

1. The editor in WordPress is telling me ‘mentee’ is not a word. So I researched it briefly at Wikipedia; “The student of a mentor is called a protégé.”

But what does it mean to focus on user experience? Isn’t that what businesses have been doing all along? Yes of course. But things are different today. Especially when it comes to software and services involving the Internet.

Consider some of the first automobiles. Your heating system consisted of a lever that opened a hole into the engine compartment. The heat from the engine would warm the cab. Air conditioning was similar, except drawn from the outside. Cars today have dual temperature zones, heated seats, and back-up cameras. Why is that?

The features and amenities on cars are the result of a continuous effort to improve the experience people have with the vehicle. To improve the experience, car manufacturers had to make decisions about features and amenities they thought would improve the experience for their customers.

Enjoying and driving a vehicle is only part of the experience these days. The relationship with the dealer and the automobile company is a significant factor in the experience of owning a car. Looking at it that way, marketing, sales, support, and customer service all play a role in the experience of owning and maintaining a vehicle.

Car companies, and many software companies, often have a department dedicated to researching user experience. Researching user experience focuses on understanding how people interact with other people or products when trying to achieve a goal. Using different data gathering techniques and quantitative analysis, insights can be discovered.

Insight from user experience research is leveraged by sales and development within an organization to improve both the product and the experience of owning it. Good experiences lead to more sales. It’s always been true.

What is also true is that human-computer interactions are increasingly complex these days. We expect more from technology than ever before. The instantaneous-ness of everything is critical to our experience, allowing interactions like never before. The connectedness of people and information through technology involves many interactions. These experiences need to be understand to identify areas for improvement. Improvements increase sales.

My perspective was to have a wiki that was an island of content, relevant to the responsibilities and projects of those tending it. A more personal place. A place where a search returns your own pages. It would be like having to search through everything in your house as well as my house to find that missing thing. It’s easier to find things when you’re looking through your own stuff.

There was lengthy debates on why we shouldn’t become a small island of information, but my intuition and purpose told me it was the right thing to do. We now have 100′s of pages in our team wiki, organized into guides, how-tos, references, diagrams, and even pages with color coded SQL queries for those recurring requests. It is a focused island of contextually important information, increasingly critical to the maintenance of the product and systems developed by my team. I use it everyday. But this perspective does not mean I’m opposed to centralization of information. I think there are effective ways to do it that allow for integrating islands while leaving them islands.

All wiki systems are islands of content. The quality of information offered by an island is up to its inhabitants. Unfortunately, there is one thing I have found over years of cultivation and encouragement, is how unwilling people are to create or update wiki pages. That happens to be a big challenge.

It has helped to have our own sandbox, our own private island, to shape and transform. Most wiki users are hesitant or don’t understand how to create and edit pages. It happens to be a very public thing, authoring wiki pages, writing blog posts. Constraining the context to a team, tasked with overlapping responsibilities, the island is likely to get better care¹. This type of ownership is important to cultivate in a large organization. It is the soil in which roots of synergy and innovation take hold.

There are many islands of information content, some larger, some smaller. But they are all islands. If you explore them you’ll discover whether they are truly cared for or not. Dig a little deeper and you can discover if they are really used or not. Traffic analysis is a dead give-away.

In an information rich, island friendly organization, people can find what they’re looking for because of how things are organized. Organization of information relies on awareness of other islands of information, not conquering and subsuming. At least not right away. The people using the information will know when to migrate, if they know the option is open to them and can discuss its appropriateness.

For example, I don’t publish these blog posts on corporate blog resources because they don’t belong on that island. But if you’re curious about me, you can find this island from the corporate one. That’s how the web works. It’s beautiful.

Image: This was taken with my iPhone during a day long training session on working across cultures. I wrote the word “nerds” in the culture part and “Hunger” in the human nature part. The teacher was explaining work done in this field, Hofstede came up.

1. This is completely unsubstantiated I realize. I would have to research and analyze data from content islands used within an international corporation to validate this claim, but my intuition is clear on this

I was in a graduate class the fall of 2007. It was being taught by Gary Olson, a professor at the School of Information. In 1992, he published research showing the effectiveness of shared editing using a program they developed called ShrEdit. Professor Olson showed us pictures from their research project. One was a room filled with monochrome screens. Very old school looking.

Everyone knew how difficult it was to collaborate on a report or lengthy paper. Having network access helped, but then only one person could edit it at a time. Emailing a document back it forth happened a lot. Track changes could be useful if you knew how to use. In 1992, it was paper, pencils and a whiteboard or old school CRTs. The Internet was in its infancy.

It was in this course that I worked on a group project analyzing Google Docs, a web based document editor by Google. It was similar to MS Word, but in a browser. Better yet, a number of people could edit at the same time. Google Docs was a better way. I knew it immediately. Such things could make working with others so much easier.

The group project required that we find ways to improve it, and we came up with a few ideas such as showing the cursor position of other people editing the document. Since then, that feature and a number of other improvements, have been implemented by Google.

The technical challenges associated with multiple people working on the same digital artifact are significant. But the advantages afforded to people working collaboratively on the same document is considerable. Being able to see where a person’s cursor was, and whose cursor it was, and to see what they typed as they were typing it was mind boggling and totally awesome. I loved it!

This type of editing revelation was similar to the one I had when I first learned about wikis in 1999. I was using ModWiki, a Perl based web application, and wondered why more people weren’t using wikis. When I realized how simple it was to enable people to create and edit web pages together, I knew it would change the world. Just like I knew that databases behind web applications would change the world.

Fast forward a decade and I’m writing my 507th blog post talking about how people interact with technology. I’m doing it as the first featured blog post for a corporate wiki about collaboration resources!

Every day I interact with technology that connects me to co-workers, family, and friends. I’m in meetings using my computer, phone, and a video camera to interact with a dozen people in different locations. I can see when someone is talking but forgot to unmute their microphone. I can see people yawn or lose interest in what’s being said. All the while I have various instant messaging threads going with co-workers and teammates. Even people in the same web meeting, via yet another instant messaging application.

My daily life involves using working with computers and people to get work done and to help others get work done. I think about it how to make things better all the time. I love gadgets and technology that allow me to interact with information and people in different ways.

And I know there is always an easier way. It just takes time to find it.

Image: This is a picture of an adaptation made by a novice installer when code dictated a 4 inch pipe, even though the coupling was for a 3 inch pipe. It took some effort to crip the metal like that. But I couldn’t help but think there had to be an easier (and less hacked) solution. There was. That’s another story as well.

But the thing is, it’s really difficult sometimes to determine your job. There are so many, we have so many.

One of the first dividing cuts that separate job types is often between personal and professional. It’s a dull blade that dissects this level, and the edges are usually rough and imprecise. But there are things that don’t surface in one or the other. It’s just the nature of sharing and how much you have time and inclination to reveal. So there is personal and professional.

Managers often see the most jagged edge as they must journey further into the personal, the deeply personal at times, with their professional subordinates and direct reports. Regardless of what you know or what you reveal, it is still important to stay focused on getting better.

Getting better means not forgetting the past, learning from it. Not being prejudiced by it, knowing there are so many variables to any event. Sometimes, trying the same thing a second time can yield different results. If the failures are different, perhaps there is the chance to get better, learn from mistakes. Is that happening?

Then there are the times where you find yourself in a repeating loop. You keep trying to find that break, that terminating condition. But there isn’t one. Knowing I need to get better, that it’s both a personal and professional thing, how do I improve those situations where I have little to no direct influence? Do they exist? Am I just missing something, perhaps not saying the right thing at the right time?

It’s complicated. More complicated that I’d imagined yet almost in an intentional way that seems simple and instinctual. An evolved complexity that embraces the simple solutions invisible to others.

Here it is, over a month since my last post. Things keep happening, I don’t always know how much to share. So I skim the limited surface of sharing via Facebook and Twitter. Yet it becomes more complicated finding the balance between sharing and revealing.

Perhaps it is the forked tongue revealing glimpses and riddles, which allows the creative and cunning mind time to develop and maneuver. In the end the complicated things are simple and their happening seems obvious and unavoidable.

This is how we live our lives.

If that is true, it could also be said that having impersonal things in our environment can make us unhappy. Lack of control over one’s environment is pretty much the same thing. Within the constraints of effective choices, having some choice allows exercising of the free will and oftentimes the intellect. Preferring one type of tool to another that accomplishes the same task is such a case.

When it comes down to it, who cares if I coat the outside of a tissue box with rocks I picked up at the beach? As long as the rocks aren’t stolen blood diamonds or lumps of radioactive waste, what does it matter? If in doing so, I feel more satisfied and later happier for having it in my environment, then it can’t be viewed as anything other than beneficial.

Understanding the constraints governing choice is part of making good choices. A good choice is one in which nobody is hurt, there is little risk, and someone benefits through positive feelings or basic utility. Both of which are available in a tissue box covered in stones from a summer vacation.

Image: This is a work-in-progress on my shop work bench. It’s taken me half a year to get it to this point, but it doesn’t bother me just sitting there in its unfinished state. Seeing it like it is makes me happy. And yes W., I will finish it someday.

Is every employee going to have a laptop, or a video camera, or a headset with a microphone, or a Dick Tracy style watch¹, chatting via video with coworkers?

For those of us whose daily lives involve being jacked into the networks, we rely on our technology to make that a useful experience. Not only hardware, like having multiple monitors or HD video equipment, but having software that works and isn’t so difficult to figure out that you give up on it.

So I’m in this committee tasked with cataloguing collaboration software and tools with a focus on their availability, use, education, and training. I absolutely love this stuff. Right before a meeting I’m trying to tweak the firewall configuration on some servers to avoid filling system logs with unnecessary packet handling. I join the meeting, watching the desktop of the presenter on my middle monitor. On my right monitor I have video feeds for the participants with an SSH window behind it connected to servers in another state. Behind the SSH window is a program where I have a number of active chat sessions going on with my team and folks in other departments. On my left monitor are the various documents we’re discussing in this meeting and some windows tailing logs on some servers.

During the meeting, coordinating via chat with the Waltzing Bear, we test a firewall modification. I’m listening to and taking notes during the virtual meeting while taking a moment here and there to answer questions from my coworkers via chat. Towards the end of the meeting I am made the presenter, I share my desktop,² and give a demonstration of a Wiki I’d configured to address a need to collaborate on some information harvesting.

While all that was happening, I was thinking to myself, “this is the workplace of the future.” I grabbed my iPhone and took a picture of the screen, thinking about writing this post. I took a few minutes using Photoshop to remove or blur the innocent and protected information³.

I am one of the people experiencing what the workplace is going to be like for tens of thousands of technology company employees all over the world. It’s pretty exciting developing usable experiences.

1. Now known as Facetime on the iPhone.
2. Embarrassingly, I shared the wrong one and everyone in the meeting got to see my chat conversation with the Waltzing Bear helping me verify the firewall configuration changes didn’t affect web stuff.
3. Such as a user name and IP addresses in the SSH window behind the video feeds.

The thing is, we rarely actually use our elephant rating system. Every project or task that is defined and tracked¹ but we don’t really use the rating system. The fact that we don’t use the difficulty rating radio buttons is only a symptom of the problem.

The problem is we don’t document what we’ll need to know later. We don’t talk enough about what we’ll need to know to know what we should document. However, as I was writing this it occurred to me that there is record of comment histories, timestamps, and check-ins. Maybe it would be easier to look backwards, asking questions after the fact, after that history can be reviewed.

We are going to forget why we did something or used something we shouldn’t. Or we’re going to create something we shouldn’t. The “shouldn’t” allows for a form of unchecked growth that erodes our ability to understand all that we’re creating.

There are all kinds of other consequences to not understanding what you’ve supposedly created. Like troubleshooting. Something isn’t doing what is expected and you need to figure it out why. But you don’t know the plumbing, wiring, architecture, venting, object structure, or programmatic infrastructure well enough to imagine the functional flow necessary to find the root cause.

That’s when I really wish we’d written something down about what should be happening.

1. We use Trac. If you’re a nerd you’ll appreciate this play on words … bazinga!

As I stay awake for another hour or two to assist in a release that we’re hoping will address a performance issue we’ve been experiencing. My confidence isn’t high and I have a growing list of other attacks and strategies to solve this. I digress, but only a little.

Reflecting on my actions over the past month, I’m noticing something familiar. Too often I’m thinking to myself, “I’ve been here before.” The only problem; it was not a place I liked.

That place I’m talking about is that place where all the roads have deep ruts and you’re in a wagon pulled by a stubborn horse. It’s the place where you go because you don’t remember where you’re supposed to be going and it’s easier for the horse to use the tracks. Making them deeper.

Image: After decorating our tree, Ozzie strikes his unique folded cat pose while taking in the memories, lights, and brilliance of our traditionally fake Christmas tree.

And it’s a good cause: raising awareness about autism and Asperger syndrome. Families or individuals affected by either need help understanding these disorders and how to live with them. And people do live with them. I don’t know much about either but am slowly learning more. I’m part of one of those families.

This isn’t Facebook, it isn’t Twitter, it isn’t a social networking service like those. However, there is some socializing that takes place. Commenting is interaction. Facebook and Twitter, while being similarly asynchronous communication mediums, are increasingly synchronous. That distinction means you are interacting with others, who are aware of each other, during time specific periods like sporting events and holidays.

Is blogging a form of social communication, in the ranks of Facebook and/or Twitter? I started pondering that this morning, thinking about how raising awareness of something means communicating information about it. Donating is involved as well. These programs need funds to support the communication costs associating with raising awareness. I imagine you can give at any time. What I don’t know is if you’ll forever after be on their communication lists.

Which is why I thought I would help by communicating to raise awareness.

It’s time insensitive (I’m assuming) because autism and asperger syndrome aren’t just going to go away and I don’t really know who reads this anyway. I have an idea if these posts are actually read. There is little interaction and what interaction there is tends to be widely asychronous. So I don’t think it’s like Facebook or Twitter that much.

These blog posts are just me gathering or sifting thoughts in a way that I’m ok with someone else seeing. The act of writing is sometimes helpful to me, but it’s not easy. It’s like brain exercise. Maybe the goal of such exercise is to write stories or a book. Something more interesting than my random mutterings on my life and interest in human-computer interactions.

Image: This is an eerie picture I took of a deer inside a shed near an archery range in the middle of the Outdoor Discovery Center near Holland, Mi. It kind of freaked me out a little. The place was deserted and cold and then I saw this deer looking out at me.