Losing sleep over leadership
By swilson | May 8, 2012
It has to be something really big for me to lose sleep over it. I’ve been losing sleep since Tuesday night. Over baseball.
No, it’s not because of the Rockies record. It’s my son’s baseball team. Not really the team, but the coach. The players and parents have been witness to some of the most alarming coaching behavior I have ever seen.
The coach speaks with sarcasm in his voice, in demeaning, humiliating and degrading language. Positive feedback or compliments are few and far between. His voice always sounds as if he is anticipating failure.
Sometimes, he mimics player behavior in a clown-like way to demonstrate to them how wrong they were. If a boy makes an error in the field, he pulls that child almost immediately. These are not high schoolers or college kids. They are 13 years old.
It reminds me of some corporate managers I’ve run across. They try to motivate with fear, threats and un-constructive criticism. When someone looks at you, arms out, hands palm up and asks with a sarcastic tone “Really?” What do you do with that? How do you know how to improve? It implies “what, are you stupid?”
Leadership, whether it’s in the office or on the ball field, is about teaching, painting the picture of what’s possible and clearing the way to success.
Even with adults, who aren’t as impressionable as 13-year-olds, positivity has been shown to be more useful in motivating behavior than negativity. Reinforcing the good and educating about the new always gets better results than making people feel stupid or humiliating them in front of others.
No one is perfect. Everyone has room for improvement. Managers, executives, plant-floor employees, coaches. I know I can always work to be better at my craft and at my interactions with others.
So far, our coach hasn’t had that epiphany.
Content migration: a tagging (or taxing) experience
By swilson | May 3, 2012
We’ve spent the past 4+ weeks working on a client’s content migration. They asked us to first address taxonomy and metadata for their nearly 48,000 portal documents. They wanted us to select the correct terms for each document in a spreadsheet so they could pull that information into their new portal electronically, thus dramatically improving search results.
Perfectly reasonable. Exactly what we would recommend. One catch – they hadn’t first identified what actually needed to migrate and what did not.
As a result of this skipped step, the client has paid us to look at and tag financial reports from 2001, procedural statements from 1997, memos and emails of policy changes made in 2005. There were countless duplicates, such as a PDF of a status report, side-by-side the original Microsoft Word file. Or, an .xls file next to its twin with the more recent Microsoft extension of .xlsx.
There were many, many ZIP files. These present an interesting set of problems.
- It’s difficult to precisely tag a group of files contained in a ZIP file
- ZIP files present a security risk because they demand downloading and unpacking, leaving files on a computer that may not authorized to have said files
- ZIP files on an intranet result in a proliferation of files on local hard drives or shared drives, where users may not be able to find what they need or may return to use something now out of date
- ZIP files are a poor usability solution as they require downloading, unpacking and the launch of an application to open the document
- ZIP files do not leverage version control and in-browser editing that some platforms, such as SharePoint, offer
The most surprising find was a manuscript of a novel – the client is not in the business of publishing fiction.
Suffice it to say, a review and decision about whether or not to migrate or archive each piece of content should have been done first. Our experience indicates that you will typically migrate one third of all the content currently residing on your intranet or portal. Don’t waste your time or money on the rest.
If document retention demands that it be kept, archive it. But remove it from potential search results and limit access. That way after you move the new stuff over to your new platform, the newest, most accurate will be the only things that can be found.
Each step in content migration is important. One missed step, and you may wind up wasting resources on the next one.
I’ll be presenting at the IABC World Conference in Chicago in June on content migration. I’ll bring insight and tools from our very recent work to help you guide your migration to a successful end.
In the meantime, look for more here on the topic. We have multiple recent projects to talk about.
Topics: content migration, Intranet and Portal | Comment »
Content migration: an instructional guide
By swilson | March 15, 2012
Last year, we did a huge content migration for a client. It involved thousands of sites, pages and documents. We helped them inventory everything. We helped them establish a consistent process and toolkit for their migration. We created training for the content developers. We even reworked a pile of content for them.
At the moment, we’re working with several companies on similar assignments. Everyone always says, garbage in, garbage out. But how do you keep the garbage from entering your lovely new platform during a migration?
Here is my 10-step guide to migrating great, usable content:
- Understand what you have – how much do you have, how is it segmented or grouped, when was the last time individual pieces were viewed, who owns what
- Archive items that haven’t been viewed in a long while, say 18-24 months
- Look at what’s left – is it in a proper format to facilitate consumption (not delivery), is it written for online consumption, is there feedback from users about the content
- Make decisions about what will move over and what will join the previously archived pile of content
- Make decisions about what format the content should be in once moved to its new home
- Make decisions about what clean up is required: a light edit, a really hard edit, or a complete rewrite
- Teach content developers to improve their own content
- Do the clean up work, incorporating metadata and taxonomy picks along the way
- Move the content!
- Conduct quality assurance checks and perhaps a little usability testing to make sure you’ve hit the mark
It’s not easy. It’s actually really challenging to do migration well. It demands time, commitment and persistence. In the end, your users will thank you and be more productive.
Look for more on this topic as I share what we learn in current projects and prepare to speak on the topic at the 2012 IABC World Conference in Chicago.
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