Tips For Dealing With Information Overload

Philipp Lenssen over at Google Blogoscoped asked a few people the question “What are your top tips for dealing with information overflow?” Read here what the folks at the top do to stay on top.

Say goodbye to e-mail – wikis are bringing the workplace together

I just ran into this story run by the Globe and Mail buried deep down in my bookmarks. It is an interesting take on how wikis are tending to replace email as a means of group communication and collaboration. As ScrumMaster, I’ve been running my sprints since February using wikis. I find that if used consistently, collaboratively and with discipline, by the entire group, they make for a powerful solution to:

1. Reduce time lost in reading, archiving and tracking emails (wikis provide for pull-style information access whereas I find email a solid push distraction)

2. Effectively track progress and ownership

3. Maintain transparency in the group as well as the organization

Erstwhile wiki hosting service JotSpot is now Google Sites. There are several others out there as well.

Excite and JotSpot founder Joe Kraus maintains an inspiring Google Site here.

Day 134 - Event Horizon

_Captain’s Log, StarDate 2007.11.18-08.32_

Work, work and more work. As deadlines come closer, time starts passing by faster. The same thing happens (or atleast is supposed to happen) to objects (spaceships with humans in them) that approach a Black Hole. The Event Horizon is the point of no return, and its equivalent in the software industry is the last phase of the project when you’re supposed to be testing and integrating, but are actually still working on completing stuff so that it can be tested and integrated. That’s when you know you’re sunk!

lifehack.org

Daily digest and pointers on productivity, getting things done and lifehacks

Accomplice

Accomplice is a free, on-and-offline application for personal and project management. The best part is that it can even sync with your PDA!

BaseCamp

BaseCamp is a free-ish online project management and collaboration tool.

FranklinCovey - Personal Organization

FranklinCovey claims to “enable greatness in people and organizations everywhere.”

Project Management

Software Project Management is as much about people as it is about software. A technically inept team of so-called “software professionals” can never produce a satisfying result no matter how good the project plan is. Similarly, a team of exceptionally good developers can not deliver results if the planning isn’t done well.

Looking closer still, there are two more factors. The first is the composition of the team. A development team needs to be balanced. A team made up of self-assured, highly competent people can not work as well as a team in which there are both leaders as well as followers. Which brings me to my next point - leadership. It is very important that the leader and/or Project Manager distinguish him/herself in the eyes of the team. People work for managers, not companies. I have seen outstanding managers get outstanding results out of mediocre teams and I have seen mediocre managers get mediocre results out of outstanding teams. Most people just need a reason to perform. Or not to.

While we’re at the topic, another thing that I’ve learnt is that leaders create leaders. Instead of holding on tightly to their knowledge and position, good leaders share and give away everything, in the process creating new leaders who can take their place, so that they themselves can move on to higher responsibilities.

Another interesting fact is that the world is increasingly getting flatter, more and more people are getting empowered and hierarchies are getting flattened (think Wikipedia and YouTube). While on one side there are more and more “suits” getting their MBA degrees and company cars, on the other there’s a new breed of high-performance teams emerging. These are teams that are self-organizing, with minimal intervention from “the management” (more on that later).

One of the biggest challenges in project management today is the management of distributed teams - usually across countries, time zones and often cultures. I think that the open source community is the best example of a self-organizing, distributed and high-performance team (or rather a cluster of teams, more on that too later).

Resources:

• The Mythical Man Month: Essays on Software Engineering (20th Anniversary Edition), by Frederick P. Brooks (Addison-Wesley Professional, 1995)
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar, by Eric S. Raymond (Version 3.0, 2002)
• Homesteading the Noosphere, by Eric S. Raymond (Version 3.0, 2002)