Business and Productivity

This post from 37 signals provides a nice understanding of estimates.

A friend just emailed me the following question:

As a Business to Business Company is it better to have your company blog hosted on the company website or should it be more indirect and hosted on wordpress or something like that. 

I am getting conflicting answers from my people and was wondering if you had any advice.

The following is my response back.  Hope this helps you as well.

In answer to your question about whether a B2B company should have their blog hosted on their website or on something external I'd look at the importance of the following:

1. Branding
2. Maintaining the technology
3. Lock-in
4. Reasons to not be on your main company site

Branding

To me, branding is the most important.  If your blog is a key part of your communications strategy then you should have full control over all the elements that show up on the blog:

This is not to say you can't use a service hosted off your current servers.  Just that the logo, design, content, domain, comments system, auto-emails, and even functionality should all reflect your brand.  I recommend the blog be on your company's main domain.  If it must be hosted somewhere else, then a sub domain can work.  The key is that you do not dilute your brand across multiple domains. 

Additionally there should be no third-party content that could show up on your blog without your direct control, such as advertising automatically shown by the blog network you may be hosted on.

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After reading the book version of this article, Big Macs vs. The Naked Chef by Joel Spolsky I wrote down a few thoughts on the difference between knowledge management and creating a procedures/rules book.  

I often examine processes to improve productivity. On my teams I push for documenting solutions to record and share with other team members. However, it’s important to understand that documenting process and procedure alone does not equal the spread of knowledge or an increase in expertise within your team or organization.

As any phone call to Dell tech support will show you, the act of following a tech manual step by step will usually not get your computer fixed. Procedures are nothing without very smart and experienced people working for you to find a solution. It’s also the very smart and experienced who don’t really use a procedures manual.

As Joel Spolsky writes in his “Big Macs vs. The Naked Chef” post:

1. Some things need talent to do really well.

2. It's hard to scale talent.

3. One way people try to scale talent is by having the talent create rules for the untalented to follow.

4. The quality of the resulting product is very low.

So what do we use in our teams and organizations instead of rules and regulations?

1. We hire very smart and experienced people
2. We implement a knowledge management system

Knowledge management helps when you have a team of experts or hire really smart people, instead of just hiring people to follow a rules book.

Knowledge management means that geniuses within your company may apply different and varied solutions instead of a single cookie cutter one, as long as:

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I've been both developer and manager for years on both large and small projects with various sized teams. During the week to week management of these teams I tend to send little notes to help guide our work process. This week I have been breaking in a new team.

I thought it might be useful to other technical project managers and team leaders if I shared some of this week’s raw notes. I hope it’s useful for other managers to have a glimpse into the day to day notes of another in their same place.

Time Sheets

Please enter your time regularly into Fresh Books. Smaller more frequent time entries are preferred. Try to break them down by tickets and tasks in those tickets. Please always include the ticket number you were working on.

Please keep your entries up to date daily while on a project.

SVN

I believe in update and commit often.

Make sure you update and resolve conflicts before committing.

Enter in notes about what you are committing and when possible, enter the relevant ticket number.

Commits will auto deploy to the server within a few minutes. If you break something, you can roll it back but email the rest of the team to let us know so we can make sure to match our revision to the latest version on the dev server.

To roll back, log into [Spring Loops], choose the project, and then deploy the previous version number.

Remember that other devs are working in SVN too. So, update often, typically before starting a new change set. And commit often. I can help with any merging issues if you need it.

[Info here on how to contact me for an urgent need.]

Further Notes on SVN

The following is just a brief reminder about steps to take to not over write others work.

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Rapid application and web site development.  Increasing demand for web standards. New standards and technologies appear, grow, and morph together within shorter and shorter cycles.  Webmasters must be more productive than ever. 

These seven tips will help you become a more productive webmaster:

1. The right tools
2. The right environment
3. Patterns
4. Study
5. Web communities
6. Good work habits
7. A life

1. Use the right tools

Webmasters can find plenty of excellent tools now to:

• design and develop faster
• meet standards
• reduce redundant tasks
• automate repetitive tasks 

The old saying, "Use the right tool for the right job", remains true today.  Invest time today in finding yourself the right tools for the jobs you do. 

You have more choices than ever before.

The net houses a myriad of web developer software.  Some of the best web development applications and tools are free or open-source.  Yes, many excellent web design applications still cost, yet can be worth paying for. 

Don't skimp. 

Come up with creative ways to buy the software you need.  When I started freelancing, my first client bought me Dreamweaver Ultradev and Fireworks (2 then 3 - back in the stone age of web design).  I simply built the purchase into the up-front costs of the project, and convinced the client of the need.  If you are a professional web designer, build the costs of new software into your next job. 

A technical discussion of methodologies for choosing the right software:

http://www.ddj.com/architect/184415067

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Need to send yourself an email quickly, without interrupting your work flow?

Here's a Gmail tip I found on LifeHack.org. It was also published on Web Worker Daily as part of a great article titled, "10 Ways to Pimp Your Gmail."

Here's how:

(Modified slightly from the version on Web Worker)

Quick compose tip:

The Task: Set up a quick compose bookmarklet in Firefox to send an email within Gmail.

From within your Gmail account,

1) Click on "Compose Mail" in Gmail, and then click on the "New window" pop-out button on the right hand side of the compose area to bring it to a new window;

2) Once the new window has opened right-click on any part of the blue space within the opened window. In the drop down menu that opens, select "Bookmark This Page" and save it in your Bookmarks Toolbar folder.

3) Minimize the compose window. On the Firefox bookmark toolbar, right-click on the new bookmarklet you've just created, select Properties and check "Load this bookmark in the sidebar".

Now just click on this bookmarklet at any time when you want to send yourself a new task, or send someone else a quick email.

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Steve Pavlina over at Personal Development for Smart People proposes a solution to avoiding the “enormous blob of complexity” when working on large projects.  Many of the regular projects we work on daily have an already well defined path to completion.  Steve proposes breaking those types of projects “down into a lengthy list of ‘microtasks,’ planning it all the way from beginning to end if possible”.  In doing this preplanning upfront, we can move into the project and just flow from microtask to microtask until completion (next action to next action for us GTD users). 

Steve wrote an example list of microtasks involved in writing a new blog article.  You can find his original steps here:  http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/07/microtasks/

I have modified his list for my own purposes.  Below is Steve’s list with my modifications highlighted in yellow.

Writing a new blog article. 

The steps are in sequential order:

1. Define a primary objective for the article (inform, persuade, entertain, or inspire).
2. Brainstorm topic ideas, or review the list of reader-submitted topic suggestions, starred and shared Google reader items, recent delicious links, article ideas in someday list.
3. Select a topic.
4. Do a quick and dirty, free-form writing session to get ideas down without regard to structure.
5. Decide how to organize the ideas for clarity (chronological, topical, hierarchical, sequential, etc).
6. Sort the output of #4 based on the desired structure.  Define the main sections and subsections.
7. Identify supporting material to include (examples, analogies, quotes, statistics, images, stories, links, Wikipedia, etc), and add it to the outline.
   • Checkhttp://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/03/where-to-find-g.html
   • http://www.sxc.hu/
8. Refine the outline from #6 and #7 for completeness and balance.
9. Expand each section of the outline into paragraphs (and bullet lists if appropriate).
10. Insert meaningful subheadings into the article.
11. Write the opening.
12. Write the closing.
13. Edit the article for content, clarity, and conciseness.
14. Spell-check the article.
15. Brainstorm possible titles for the article (clear, interesting, keyword-rich).
16. Select a title.
17. Select blog categories for the article.
    • Look at delicious  for examples
    • Look at technorati for examples
18. Decide when to post the article (now or future-post).
19. Publish the article.
    • Post with Live writer or on-line editor.
    • View post on-line.
    • Look for display problems.
    • Verify tags and images are fine.
20. Tag with delicious, digg, and other places.
21. Email and tell people you know who would be interested in the article.
22. After the article has been online for several hours, evaluate reader feedback and fix any reported typos.
23. Make sure I am subscribed to all places this article might receive a comment on.
    • My own blog
    • Digg
    • Delicious
    • Technorati
24. Set date to check back on article in one month for stats.
    • See who’s linking.
    • See where other traffic is coming from.
    • See what search phrases land people on the article.
    • Evaluate opportunities for further promoting.

--modified from http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/07/microtasks/
--(used by permission)

Steve Pavlina has a number of great articles on his blog Steve Pavlina's Personal Development for Smart People . Another favorite of mine is Freeing Mental RAM at: http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2005/08/freeing-mental-ram/ .

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