Welcome to 2012! I want to start the year off properly by providing a solid plug for the CorasWorks v11 solution platform. Last month, we released our Top 10 of 2011 list of Custom Solutions built with CorasWorks. We got a lot of interest. We also got some feedback saying basically, “You all need to talk more about these custom solutions and the power of the CorasWorks v11 platform?”. It is true. Last year we spent a a lot of time communicating about our productized solutions for Social Collaboration, Idea Management, Project Portfolio Management and how customers were leveraging them. The reason is that they were new, they were hot, and, they have broad appeal. (I am guilty as charged).
So, to level the discussion in this article I’ll talk about the Top 10 Custom Solutions and the secret sauce of the CorasWorks v11 platform in delivering the business value.
First, at the bottom of the post is a summary chart of the Top 10 solutions. The range of industries and business functions where the solutions are used is very broad. In addition, most of these solutions are “mission critical” – very deep. A couple quotes from customers about this. “80% of our business relies on this solution ($10m business)” “This app can’t go down, it would bring down our business (multi-billion dollar internet company).”
Second, congrats and hats off to the business owners – They deserve a great deal of the credit for the success of these solutions for two reasons a) it was the business user that understood what solution was necessary to drive the business value, and b) the flexibility of CorasWorks means that the business user has the ability and responsibility to tailor the solution to optimize the business result. A couple quotes from customers related to the business value “It was a 6 month project. We got our payback for the CorasWorks software and services in one month of operation” “We have gotten a 10,000% improvement in the efficiency of responding to customer requests” (BTW, I got the zero’s right).
Third, in effect for solutions in this category CorasWorks is delivering two levels of value. One is the lower cost, time, risk of creating the solution and maintaining them. Another is the operating business value the customer receives from cost avoidance, cost reductions, and revenue increases. A third value that really started to be realized this year for our productized and custom solutions was the ability of our customers to avoid the cost of very expensive COTS solutions that they would have had to spend a lot to rip up and customize. In effect, over the last couple of years, the cost to build a comparative “custom” solution leveraging CorasWorks v11 is often dramatically less (factor of 2 to 3) than the COTS option. And, most customers would say that they are better because they really meet the precise business need, even as the needs change over time (cheers for flexibility).
Some key things about the building/delivery of these solutions:
- They were all built with CorasWorks v11, running on either SharePoint 2007 or SharePoint 2010.
- While the solutions are custom, they are not custom developed – meaning no custom compiled code. These incredibly powerful, broad and deep solutions, including database applications, where all built without having to install custom compiled code or for the most part ever crack Visual Studio. This drives down the development costs, the risk, and, the maintainability of the solution over time.
- It takes a community – each solution was built/delivered by CorasWorks Professional Services, CorasWorks Partners and/or customer IT. In most cases the parties collaborated to deliver the solution. Again, because we have the v11 platform, any of the folks can pick right up and maintain, enhance, or extend the solution.
- Leveraging the Advanced framework of v11 – many of of the solutions leveraged the Advanced framework. This toolset, incorporated into the platform in v11, enables the designer/builder to deliver very deep, custom solutions that functionally are all based upon a standardized, integrated, component framework. It is really the secret sauce of the Top 10 and the reason that so many mission critical solutions got built with CorasWorks this past year.
- In general, each solution came in within budget and time. This is pretty tough since the expectation is that a CorasWorks solution will cost half of other options and be delivered much more quickly. It is the way with CorasWorks because we are building with a configurable solution platform (not a development tool), with standard design patterns, largely repeatable solution frameworks, a standardized, reusable componentized framework, and, no need for custom developed code that introduces risk. Thus, this allows the provider to accurately estimate what it will take to deliver the result.
Below is the table listing the Top 10 solutions. You’ll note that there were actually 11. This is because with CorasWorks you always get more than you expect 
Have a tremendous 2012!
william
In my post Top 5 Collaborative Apps to Liven Up SharePoint in 2012 I gave you some ideas to get people off to an engaged and lively collaborative start to the year. A good dose of lively, self-managed, engaged collaboration is fantastic and it will grow on people. And, if you prepare to drop a little Managed Work into the apps I mentioned you’ll really get a boost.
Here is how it works…
You set up your engaging collaborative community. Let’s take the Workplace Concierge Community (one of the 5). People are asking questions, answering them and helping each other to succeed. Let’s say you are watching the activity. You find out that you are getting a lot of questions about the clarity of your HR or Sales Policies. So, you look into it and realize that you aren’t doing a great job with how you are publishing that information. With some CorasWorks Work Management magic you can screen the collaborative activity and then drive tasks to others to make improvements and track the progress. You can then comment on the item when new and improved material is available.
For instance, below we show a collaborative community for an R&D Research Project. It is a listing of various posts in this community. Here the project people collaborate to get things done.
The next tab is Managed Work. Behind the collaboration is the ability to look at the collaborative activity and drive things forward in a structured way. Below we show a view of the posts in Managed Work display. These are available for managers/moderators to drive forward using CorasWorks actions. These automate work. You can create a broad range of actions to meet your needs. Below we are getting ready to create a task that will be tracked as part of the managed work for a particular item.
To the users that are participating, this back-end management may be invisible. The users may just interact in the community and see collaborative activity in their Activity Streams as shown below. They are focused on easy and convenient collaboration.
However, to managers you now have great resources to work with. Lets, take a look at the other 4 of the 5 collaborative apps I wrote about and see how a little work management behind the scenes can leverage the collaborative activity.
News Channels – you can set up a process for people to submit News that only they see. You then approve it and it is public and the collaboration begins.
SharePoint Users Helping SharePoint Users – As the users do their work, you now have the best source of information to drive formal support content, knowledge bases, and training. So, you can start creating tasks and tracking them for individual articles. The contributions by the community become the source for more formal output. BTW, make sure to provide recognition to the contributor and collaborators. A simply comment that you are using this for x does the trick.
What is Working? – This is vehicle to get ideas. Thus, you would put a simple process behind it to evaluate the contributions as ideas and approve them and then task them out for implementation. It is a great feeder for best practices. Again, make sure to provide recognition.
Build-Our-Workplace Request Community – This is really a process at its heart. People make requests and collaborate. But, by design it is publicly known that Team ABC is screening these items, engaging as a collaborators, and, approving items and pushing them forward. The Community will be looking and watching for action and results on their requests.
Wrap Up
So, just because you have lively collaborative communities doesn’t mean that you aren’t leveraging these resources to make things happen that are concrete and purposeful. CorasWorks makes it easy to get both elements, engaging collaboration and structured work management, all wrapped up into one package.
william
Over the last year I’ve worked with CorasWorks customers on lots of deep and broad collaborative systems leveraging the social business collaboration capabilities of CorasWorks Cim on SharePoint 2010. Examples of some projects are broad idea and innovation management systems, process-intensive knowledge management systems, deep multi-phase R&D innovation processes, and complex enterprise best practices systems. Its been an intense year.
During this holiday season I am transitioning to 2012 and lightening up a bit. Here is my thought – start 2012 with some simple, lively, useful collaborative apps to get everyone quickly engaged within your SharePoint 2010 work environment, and then, we can turn back to the heavier stuff.
So, with that here are my Top 5 Lively Collaborative Apps for you to start with in 2012…
NOTE: The key for all of these is that all of the collaborative activity for communities that users watch will get feed into their CorasWorks Activity Stream wherever they work – so for 2012 you are starting off with ease and convenience for all of your users. This will be welcome.
News Channels to Watch and Engage In
The News in most SharePoint environments is really far too passive and too managed. You see the News, which is controlled, for wherever you are working. We can do better. Start off the year dropping in a few News Channel communities. They can be departmental, enterprise, topical. Think different channels for news. The key is that leveraging the Cim Activity Stream Watch feature, the user can decide what to watch at their leisure and let the news flow to them. Plus, let them vote and comment – liven it up in 2012 and give your users a choice.
Workplace Concierge Community
Put all of your helpful people at the service of each person. Drop in a collaborative community for people to post questions to the group. Typical categories are Where is?, Who is?, What are?, How can I?, Do we? People ask questions and they get answered. It should be open, lively, and rated. The great part is that each time the question is correctly answered you’ve created useful knowledge. You’ll really be rocking in a few months when people are referencing this new resource.
SharePoint Users Helping SharePoint Users Community
People are using SharePoint, right? Instead of having the pros write formal support content let your community of users play a bigger role by collaborating. Users can post tips, tricks, questions, links, ideas, needs, etc. etc. Let it be raw; let them go. And, let them vote, comment, and even do reviews of how useful it was. Let the cream posts rise to the top. Have a pro or two moderate it and lend a hand, but, you’ll find that your average user knows a lot better what they need then your pros.
What is Working? Communities, Challenges, or Contests
This is one of my real favorites. In my work on Idea & Innovation Management, a core tenant is that people don’t know what other people don’t know. So, if I’ve been doing something for 2 years, and you ask me for great new ideas, I don’t think of it. And yet, that thing that is working may be a brilliant idea for the other 20 offices around the globe. You need to encourage people to share. Do this by bringing up a What is Working? community and/or launch What is Working? Challenges such as What is Working in Selling to ABC Industry or through XYZ channel. Let the crowd contribute, vote, comment, and do evaluations where others note whether this idea didn’t work for them or did. It is a great way to discover best practices.
Build-Our-Workplace Request Community
At its best SharePoint 2010 is a living, breathing, evolving work environment. So, let folks request things. But, don’t just have a hidden, black box request process. Open it up so that all requests, through this channel, are open for comment, voting, enhancement, discussion. The objective is to let the users know what is being considered and find ways of improving on ideas and pre-aligning on good ones and letting not so good ones die a natural death. Of course, behind the community you will have a process to formally evaluate the requests, hopefully taking into account the community feedback, and move approved items forward with the system keeping all interested parties in the loop.
Wrap Up
Think about it. As we get into the year, we will start getting back to the quarterly sales, the project management, and the ROI decisions. But, by dropping in some of these collaborative apps we will get folks engaged at the start and can then channel their energy into the more routine and process/project oriented work.
william
I recently read an article by Toby Ward posted October 18th, entitled Despite SharePoint’s Success, The Social Intranet is Still Rare. He talks of the massive adoption of SharePoint. He does a good job of describing how Intranets are evolving and the use of social media tools to create a Social Intranet. Then, he provides data showing that users of Intranets with social media tools actually are showing low levels of satisfaction. He also says that enterprise Social Intranets are rare, particularly on SharePoint. Bottom line is that I agree with what he writes. In this article, I’ll give you my take on why this is and talk about the other half of the story which is about where else people are going with SharePoint 2010, and, how fast.
The beginning…
SharePoint 2010 was launched in the spring of 2010. Basically, the features that got in were those that were in the market circa 2008. Things like blogs, wikis, discussion forums, social networking, I Like It tags. So, when you implement SharePoint 2010 out of the box, this is what you get – various social media features that can be used in a Social Intranet.
Recognize there are two perspectives of what SharePoint is (even within Microsoft). About 70% of customers think that SharePoint is “an application”. From this perspective, a Social Intranet is probably the high end of the stack of where they plan to go on 2010. The other half (less than half) see it as a platform. They view SharePoint as an enterprise, distributed work environment. It is a canvas to use to meet their organizational goals. For these folks, they may not even go to the Social Intranet, because it isn’t relevant to their objectives – they just leap frog over it.
What you end up with is a bit of a desert in the middle in the range of the Social Intranet at this point in the life cycle. It is too high for most right now. It is too low and irrelevant for the others.
Now, companies like CorasWorks cater to the platform half. We enable these organizations to go to the next level. In our case, in the context of social collaboration, it is deploying Social Business Applications on top of this platform that deliver a new layer of value and leverage an entirely new set of technologies. This next generation of applications are designed to tap into all those zillion users, engage them, and most importantly, channel their collaborative potential into activities that drive business value.
Below we show two comparative lists of items. The ones on the left are the capabilities that the super majority (largely IT-focused) people talk about in the context of a Social Intranet. The ones on the right are the Social Business Applications that the other half (largely business group driven) talk about putting in place to leverage this collaborative work environment to achieve a business result.
When we talk to customers, we are talking about the apps on the right. The conversations are just different. They focus on specific scenarios and how you get there leveraging what we offer along with everything else the customer may have.
It is true that our solutions provide a whole new set of technologies that leverage that collaborative potential and put it to purposeful use -things like Business Activity Streams (that actually filter out social and email noise), Stage-Gate processes, Task Automation, Collaborative Management Reviews, Portfolio management, custom forms, supporting activities etc. But, they are the means to the end, not the end in and of itself.
An interesting change up is that the majority of our customers for these new solutions purchase our products and services BEFORE they deploy SharePoint 2010 in production. This is really new for the SharePoint 2010 cycle (it didn’t happen in SharePoint 2003 and SharePoint 2007). We believe that these customers absolutely get the new breakout potential for SharePoint 2010 and are immediately moving to leverage it to drive business value. In today’s world, it is a luxury to invest the time and effort on something like SharePoint 2010 for a nominal benefit. These organizations are simply looking for leverage to drive significant tangible business value.
Those that breakout
I go back to my original question, “Why would you want just a Social Intranet?”. My guess is primarily because that is what you perceive the high-end of the use case of SharePoint to be within a given view of the cost, time and risk. You are not alone. In fact, as stated above, right now you are in the majority. However, I have a feeling that at this point this position is a risk. These new technologies and the applications they spawn for purposeful collaboration are powerful. Plus, we’ve gotten a lot better at reducing the time, risk and cost to get there. SharePoint 2010 is one of the great platforms to make this happen. Those organizations that figure it out are simply going to outperform those that do not.
william
We kicked off October as an exhibitor at the SharePoint Conference in Los Angeles. At our booth, we were showing our two core solutions for SharePoint 2010 – CorasWorks Cim for Social Business Collaboration and CorasWorks PPM for Project Portfolio Management. These are two robust solutions that work great stand alone. However, we got people really excited by demonstrating business scenarios where the two are combined to drive a new experience. In this article, I’ll cover the three combo scenarios that we were showing and give you an explanation of how they come together.
Background
Over the last year, we have driven each of these solutions forward in their own categories with at least 3 releases for each. Each solution has its own competitor vendors. Thus, your analyst reports treat them separately. And, most customers see them as separate animals. However, when you start to consider the scenarios where they work together on top of SharePoint – you begin to uncover business results magic.
The three scenarios are as follows:
- Project Collaboration
- Project Initiation, Approval, and Management
- Innovation Management
Project Collaboration
In our PPM solution, people primarily work in project sites like many other solutions. It has all of the great structured project management features you’d expect. Yet, how much of the success of a project is based upon structured management vs. collaboration (people communicating and working together)? 80/20? 50/50? 30/70?
With Cim we have collaborative communities that can be embedded into the CorasWorks PPM project sites. Thus, smack dab in the middle of structured project work you have a very robust collaborative community. In addition, users can be anywhere else in SharePoint and go to their Cim Activity Stream and see, contribute, and collaborate within any or all of the project communities for all of the projects that they watch. Even further, other people that may not be part of the specific project team can be enabled to also watch the community and help drive success.
Here is a schematic depicting a typical user experience where Kim White, a web designer, is working on multiple projects. She only needs to go to her Activity Stream to collaborate on multiple projects.
Let’s look at the types of items that you’d find in your project community. How about: project updates and snapshots, meeting agenda and notes, issues and resolutions, all points bulletins for required resources and responses/volunteers, technical challenges and solutions, posts of core knowledge/information, announcements of handoffs, ideas to move the project forward and discussions…
One collaborative community to handle information, communication, discussions, and resolutions to drive the success of a project by getting the team and the expanded community to work together. (NOTE: in many of the types of posts, you have two way communication, like a question and an answer or answers).
Project Initiation, Approval and Management Workstream
I previously wrote about this scenario with a focus on the New Project Initiation part of the workstream. That article describes the business value of having a robust front-end project initiation process so that you make sure that you are doing the right projects.
Our full demonstration shows an integrated workstream where you start with people entering their ideas for projects. This gives them visibility and allows for robust collaboration. Then, the projects are evaluated via the Cim Process Management site that enables management and subject matter expert collaboration. Once approved, you are ready to go into the project execution phase. The approved projects may be pushed into the PPM Program Management Office. Or, they can be pushed into a PPM Project Portfolio to kick off the project.
Thus, in this scenario the two solutions are aligned in a sequential workstream. Again, at any point users can collaborate from their Cim Activity Stream. Accordingly, a user that proposed the project can track the entire process and be engaged via the project community in the actual execution. This is depicted in the following schematic.
Innovation Management
This is another workstream similar in design to the scenario above but delivering a different business value – innovation success. In a typical innovation scenario you have a number of front-end communities. They may be standing communities or challenges that capture ideas and allow for collaboration. Then, the ideas go through a process where they are reviewed and worked on. The additional boxes below at the process stage represent task management. For instance, you may assign tasks to technical teams or marketing teams whose work supports the decision process. The users can just use SharePoint team sites or they can use CorasWorks PPM sites so that the tasks can be more thoroughly managed in a programmatic manner. The approved ideas are then pushed into project execution phase which might be managed by a Program Management Office, a Portfolio or Program Manager, or just a Project Manager.
As in the above scenarios there can be a great deal of collaboration at the front-end, amongst managers, subject matter experts, and, delegated teams in the process phase, or, as part of the project execution phase. This collaborative activity is all surfaced via the users Cim Activity Stream wherever they like to work.
The Wrap
Typically, we have thought of the two types of solutions as separate animals. They have been targeted at different user groups who see themselves working in very different ways. With CorasWorks, we have now designed the solutions so that they can be naturally integrated to drive the types of scenarios noted above. They give you the structure you need to properly manage work and the power of robust collaboration to drive the results. And, it all works on top of one platform – SharePoint.
william
We’ve just released a small wave of items that are able to be leveraged by Cim Pros using CorasWorks Cim on SharePoint 2010. This wave consists of the following: 1) the v2.1.1 Hotfix release of Cim, 2) a new Community module flavor called “Quick Facts”, and 3) the New Project Initiation application.
These three items are all released to the Cim Pro community of the Cim Learning Center. They are only available to Cim Pros that have access to the Cim Learning Center and are using these items in licensed environments of CorasWorks Cim. Here are details for each.
Cim v2.1.1 Hotfix
This is a pure hotfix release containing fixes to issues in v2.1. The majority of the issues are somewhat cosmetic UI issues. They are documented in the release notes. The release consists of updates to 11 of the 14 Cim modules. It does not require the installation of any new DLL’s. In addition, this release adds some new support for Cim Snaplets. You’ll start to see the advantage of this over the next few months as we release some cool new Snaplets, particularly around the Activity Stream.
Quick Facts “Flavor” of Community Module
Technically, this is our first formal release of a separate “flavor” of a Cim v2.1 module. A flavor is simply a customized version of a module that is enhanced with new features, styling, or look and feel. In general, flavors lend themselves to be used for certain scenarios. Accordingly, you now have a fourth flavor of Community (this one in addition to the communities for Collaboration, Process, and Innovation).
The Quick Facts flavor of the Community Module allows you to easily expose fields of information from the Articles list of the Community in the web 2.0 listing and detail displays of the community. It adds a box, the Quick Facts box, to do the job. The release documents how to modify the Quick Facts box and some supporting features such as Pinpoint Search.
PS-We use this new flavor in the New Project Initiation application.
New Project Initiation application
The New Project Initiation (“NPI”) application is proving to be quite popular with customers. We’ve gone ahead and psuedo-productized this for our Cim Pros. The application gives you a comprehensive front-end process for managing the onramp of new projects. For the business value of NPI see my post Driving Business Value with the New Project Initiation social business process This release is designed for enterprise-wide implementations, but, it may also be implemented at more local levels (say for just IT Project Onramp).
The release contains three customized Cim modules (Portal, Community, and Management Hub). These are complemented by other out-of-the-box Cim modules to deliver the complete solution. The release contains an Implementation Guide that provides an overview of the application scenario, the deltas of the modules from the OOTB modules, the implementation tasks, customization options, and, appendixes covering technical items and extended deployment scenarios.
BTW, for those of you with both Cim and PPM, this application is a no-brainer bolt on to the front end of PPM. The documentation covers the core integration scenarios for pushing approved projects into PPM.
Enjoy,
william
We often talk about CorasWorks Cim to be used as a tool to drive innovation. Therefore, we tend to think of new ideas, processes, and creating something novel. However, one of the biggest opportunities for larger organizations is taking things that are already working and get them working in other parts of the organization. I’ll present you with a solution we call “What is Working?” and describe how this simple mechanism can drive continuous improvement.
Your organization is already innovative. If it wasn’t you’d be out of business. Your people already are doing really effective things. They came up with ideas and implemented them, usually at a local level. Someone, somewhere, is doing something valuable in the most effective way. Who are they and where are they? What if you could find out and then give it visibility so that others could also be doing things that way?
The problem is that people don’t necessarily think of good practices that they are doing as brand new innovations. They don’t know, what others don’t know. So, instead of just focusing on innovation, you have to use messaging and provide a channel to your organization that is explicitly focused on getting people to share what is working for them.
Let’s call this solution “What is Working?”. Your objective is to get your people to tell the rest of the organization what is working for them, their team, their group. What you find out is that what is working for people at a local level, maybe they’ve been doing it for years, is not common knowledge or practice. To that local group, it isn’t a novel, innovative idea. But, to lots of others, it is brilliant.
How you would implement it
- You launch a “What is Working?” campaign
- You tell your organization “We are often so overwhelmed with how innovative you all are. You just come up with great ways of doing things. We really want you to share what you are doing so that others can learn. If other people pick up your way of working, we will reward you for sharing. We are providing a channel to make this easy and natural to do.”
- You then provide a Cim community for people to share and collaborate.
- You enable the Cim peer review mechanism so that others can try out a “way to work”, get results, and share the results with the community.
- You have a group of people to keep track of and manage the flow.
- You then provide a mechanism to provide recognition and rewards for things that people are doing that they share, that are copied, and, that prove to work.
- You use “What is Working?” to then drive other activities such as an Enterprise Best Practices process, to kick off bigger idea, and to augment your Training curriculum.
Wrap Up
In sum, launching a “What is Working?” campaign is an easy and effective step to drive continuous improvement. It starts with the recognition that people don’t know what others don’t know. By sharing what works for them others learn and can collaborate. In many instances, people that share will find even better ways of doing something and/or just validation from others. They also make connections with others from around the world that are working in areas where they are working and care about getting better.
The nice thing about “What is Working?” is that you don’t need a lot of back end process. In effect, the community, through sharing and collaboration, becomes self-innovative. People now have a channel to share what they do and learn what others do in an open way. It puts a mechanism in place and a burden on people to self-improve. The management group participates to encourage, recognize, reward, and take findings to drive bigger adoption and better results.
william
There are a lot of organizations that are new to Idea & Innovation Management solutions such as CorasWorks Cim for SharePoint 2010. One of the most significant best practices we emphasize for those new to innovation is the use of event-based Challenges to drive innovation vs. general idea communities. In this article, I’ll drill down into Challenges as a key ingredient in the standard enterprise recipe for innovation.
Specific Challenges vs. General Idea Management
First off most organizations use both approaches, general idea management and specific challenges. A mix is the best recipe. Let’s look at each.
Most organizations initially come to the idea and innovation game with the thought of having a general idea community to capture ideas and sort through them and find the great ones. It is typically implemented as an open, ongoing community with a team or teams for evaluation. What they are looking for is breakthrough ideas? This does work. People will randomly come up with novel ideas and you are providing a channel and a mechanism to work them when they pop up.
A Challenge-based approach to drive innovation is different. A Challenge is a targeted, time-limited, request to your community for ideas that address a specific objective. With this approach, we first decide what business objective we are after. And, ideally, upfront we allocate resources to invest in ideas we approve. We then set up the challenge community (like questions asked, information to be submitted) and evaluation process (how, who, when, etc.) in a way that specifically relates to the challenge. Then, we launch the Challenge, gather the ideas, collaborate, review, evaluate, make decisions, invest, and drive results.
Specific Benefits of a Challenge Approach
A Challenge approach delivers specific benefits as follows:
It Focuses Management on Defining the Challenge – Management must get clear on the challenge and how to present it to the organization. This insures that the challenge is a real one.
It Focuses Your Innovators and Collaborators Thoughts on the Challenge – Imagine saying to your employees “When you get around to it, submit ideas to make us better” vs. saying “You have 2 weeks to submit your idea for how we can grow the SMB market by 50% in 2012. We have $2m to invest.” It is simply easier for most people to focus their thinking on something specific. And, you therefore get specific ideas that are relevant to the challenge.
You Have the Resources to Act – If you get general ideas, they can come from anywhere. Thus, you can’t know in advance if you have the will and resources to act. But with a challenge you know what you are asking for. Thus, you have the will. You also can align the resources in advance to insure that you can and will act. You are telling your community that you intend to drive change that drives results.
You Uncover Options to Narrow Challenges – We typically address challenges and opportunities with a small group of people. When you take a narrowed challenge to your organization you will almost always be surprised by three things: a) how many options you really have, b) how much information and experience you have already, and c) who are the people that have something to contribute.
You Drive A Result – With a Challenge, you are taping into the broad potential of your organization and channeling their thought and experience towards your objective. With the breadth of ideas and the resources to back them up, you have your best shot at innovating around that targeted business objective.
CorasWorks Cim for Challenge Management
I’ll touch on five key features of Cim that make it particularly effective for managing challenges as part of a SharePoint 2010 work environment.
Separate, Customized Challenge Communities – With Cim, each challenge is a discrete entity. You can customize the contribute form, the questions, the experience and even look and feel, the categorization within each challenge, the user options, the visibility, etc. Further, the data is separated as with any Cim community it is technically a separate SharePoint site.
Multiple Challenges into Central Process – In a Challenge Management initiative you will have many challenges. They are easy to set up. They can all feed into a central management process, your Challenge Management hub, where they are evaluated and processed.
Separate Challenge Workstreams – At the same time, you can also have challenges where the front-end community and the evaluation process are part of a separately managed workstream. This provides you with the ability to have separate workstreams for say different types of challenges (Corporate vs. Technical vs. Market Development) or challenges driven by different business groups.
A Single, Easy and Convenient User Experience – With Cim, users have a single, consistent, easy and convenient user experience across multiple challenges, separate challenge workstreams, mixed with general innovation communities, and, with their other collaborative communities. When you launch a Challenge it just lights up at the fingertips of the user in their Cim Business Activity Stream. Thus, they can see new challenges, contribute and collaborate from wherever they normally work vs. having to go somewhere. In addition, all of the collaboration activity and process activity flows to them across all of the challenges and other communities. This drives visibility, engagement, and collaboration.
Drive Downstream Results – With Cim, after you have evaluated and approved the ideas in the Challenge you can push them into downstream activities to make them come alive. You can push them into Team sites for teams to implement. You can push them into a PMO to kick off and drive projects. You can push them into Program sites to implement an idea as part of their program. You can even push them into external systems, such as separate Project Management systems.
Wrap Up
In sum, challenges are designed to let you tap into the broad potential of your people across the organization to address targeted business objectives. They are a key ingredient of the standard enterprise recipe to drive innovation. Armed with Cim running within your SharePoint environment, you have the means to just light up your organization and channel their thoughts and experience to help you drive results when and where you need it.
william
This week we’ll be doing a webcast on the new release of CorasWorks Cim for Idea & Innovation Management on SharePoint 2010. Our approach to Innovation with this solution is different from the pack of other offerings in the space. This is because our solution runs natively on SharePoint and we have designed it to really leverage the full potential of SharePoint to drive innovation. In this article, I’ll give you a heads up of the reasons behind this which we’ll be talking to and demoing in the webcast.
With Cim we compete in the Idea & Innovation Management solution category with about 10 other main software vendors. Every one of them offers their solution as a SAAS offering. They have collectively centered on a certain group thinking about innovation systems. It goes like this:
- we have a great solution for Idea & Innovation Management
- we have figured out how to optimize it and offer you the perfected application
- and it runs SAAS, so you don’t have to maintain servers and software
- just tell your users to go to this URL and your organization can start to innovate
- using this application you’ll get breakthrough ideas that will become major growth businesses
Now, this may appear a bit simplistic. It is. However, when you distill it down this is the approach. Innovation is supposed to be an application that you can send users to and all is great. This may be true in certain limited scenarios. However, for most organizations, their objectives with innovation initiatives are varied to start with and tend to evolve. As a note, CorasWorks uses many very specific applications via the SAAS model. When the application is very specific, for a specific set of users, with a tightly defined use case – SAAS apps are a very cost-effective vehicle.
But, we simply don’t believe that successful innovation meets this criteria. Further, we think that the core challenge/opportunity for enterprise innovation requires a very different approach. Enter SharePoint 2010 and the CorasWorks approach with Cim…
The Core Innovation Application
Like the others we start out with a very nice full featured Idea & Innovation Management application. At first glance, feature by feature we do offer the same core I&IM solution as our competitors. If we stopped here, the customer would be comparing the I&IM from the 10 SAAS vendors with ours that happens to run on the SharePoint platform.
The SharePoint 2010 Innovation Environment
Let’s say you are seriously thinking about CorasWorks Cim. Okay, so you buy it and the application gets dropped on top of your SharePoint infrastructure. Now, it is conceivable that you would treat it as a siloed application just like the SAAS ones. In truth, this is almost always the first though of OUR customers – “Here is the new innovation application, and, here is the URL you go to to use it and be innovative.”
But, wait. Your Cim application is running in the middle of a broad, distributed, multi-purpose collaborative workplace called SharePoint. It is very broadly available across the enterprise. People go to SharePoint, and, their place within it to do more and more things. And, where they go to work is not the URL of your new innovation app.
To drive innovation, we want visibility and engagement amongst our users. So, instead of thinking of your Cim I&IM system as a siloed application, think of it as a solution, that drives innovation across your SharePoint-based work environment. With this perspective, we now open it up so that the innovation challenges, activity, listings, supporting tasks, downstream activities, reports, etc. are available to everybody no matter where they are working across this environment. Below we show a schematic of the idea that this app (like other apps) now becomes part of the DNA of your collaborative workplace. What we are talking about is making innovation part of the daily work of users wherever they work vs. a place to go.
The Full User Experience
Remember, a key to innovation is visibility and engagement. Okay, so as above we are seeing innovation as being distributed across a broad collaborative workplace. There is another step to take and this is to think about the full user experience. Typically, when we think of the user experience we think of how the user experiences “our app”. We think of what the user sees and does when they go to that URL to use the app. But, it is not the full user experience in SharePoint 2010 (or in general). A user with access to SharePoint may have access and need to engage with 5, 10, 20, or 50 information resources, communities, project sites, teams, and yes, idea management communities, corporate challenges, and, business processes that are part of your innovation initiative.
The full user experience is as depicted below for Kim White. We have bolded the various “applications” that probably relate to your innovation initiatives.
As part of Cim we provide a unique feature called the Cim Business Activity Stream that is designed to provide users with a better collaboration experience across SharePoint. It puts your innovation apps right at the fingertips of the user. From wherever they are in SharePoint they can engage. New innovation communities and challenges light up instantly. They can watch them. They can contribute and collaborate with others. They can see the collaborative activity and the process activity. They can see user profiles of people they don’t know and check out their My Sites and tap into that persons social network. They control what activity they see and thus weed out the noise to focus on what is relevant to them. All without every leaving “home”.
Now, if the innovation initiatives are relevant to Kim white, it is now easy and convenient for her to engage and stay engaged. Further, innovation work is right there next to HR Policies, Sales Collateral, and Department Community. As she works, if she has an idea, she just engages. Kim White has one easy and consistent experience across many “apps” that span the environment. Your innovation “apps” are now part of her daily work.
An Innovation System Designed for Evolution
Now, we have the user in our sights. We know we can put just what we want at their fingertips. From this new perspective, the key is now to put the right “apps” at their fingertips to drive innovation. We believe that the key is that your organization will want to innovate in many different ways. You’ll want some general innovation initiatives such as General Ideas and specific event-style Challenges. You’ll also have far more targeted innovation initiatives such as challenges for specific technical solutions or specific processes such as change requests for a product that is being revised. Some might be managed by a central “innovation team”. Others will be driven by specific business groups. Some may be enterprise wide, while others are for specific business groups or communities of users.
The reality is that the average organization will have many different innovation initiatives. They will evolve. They will change. They will have different drivers and owners. Accordingly, CorasWorks Cim is designed to be unusually flexible. You can quickly drop in new Challenges that light up at the fingertips of users. You can dream up specific innovation initiatives or processes and drop in “customized” workstreams that span your work environment. To the end user, they have a consistent experience. To the innovation business owner, they get a unique workstream modified to fit the business objective.
Bringing It All Together
The fact that your organization has invested to deploy SharePoint 2010 means that you have a unique work environment to leverage. With Cim on top, you can now drive innovation across this environment and engage your users wherever they work. You have tremendous potential. You have little risk. You have a flexible innovation system. You can try, and learn, and improve – yes, you can innovate.
william
ENC
Last week we added the New Project Initiation (“NPI”) application to our App Showcase. This CorasWorks Cim-based app running on SharePoint 2010, front-ends your Project Management systems and provides you with a broad funnel for new project idea/proposal capture and collaboration and a process to review, evaluate and approve them. In this article, I’ll look at the business scenario, drivers of business value, and common objections/pushback that you get by adding this front-end app to your project work.
The Business Scenario
All organizations do project work and we typically have many tools to manage the details of execution of a project. CorasWorks even provides such a tool, the CorasWorks PPM, for Project Portfolio Management on SharePoint. In working with our PPM customers, we found a major gap and opportunity to better manage the front-end funnel of project work – a gap that we have now filled with this NPI app.
Any standard Project Management methodology will talk about the importance of Project Initiation. They reference techniques such as the form of a good Project Charter, the review criteria, etc. However, the big opportunity is to change the game by adding a collaborative front-end. The idea with the Cim New Project Initiation app is to open the front-end to a much broader group of people. To make it easy for them to contribute new projects. To provide a rich collaborative environment for them to enhance proposed projects and vet them. All of this activity then feeds into a managed process (that can vary) where the proposed projects can be reviewed, further enhanced, evaluated, and then approved or not. Then, the approved ones get pushed downstream to be worked on as a project.
The schematic below depicts the typical way that the end-to-end “workstream” works. The Cim application handles the Collaboration and Process phases of the workstream. It then connects to the Projects phase which is where you manage “execution” through your normal Project Management tools. You have feedback loops across the workstream.
The Business Value
The business value that you derive by adding this NPI front-end comes in a number of different ways. it boils down to lower costs, better return on your project investments, increased chances of making the right investments, and, less friction and greater readiness internally when the projects are delivered. Let’s look at some key drivers of these outcomes:
- Eliminate Duplication – What projects is your organization doing? Which are duplicative and even wasted, unmanaged competitive efforts? By having a visible front-end, you eliminate or lessen duplicate efforts that cost you valuable resources and time to market.
- Encourage managed competition – What projects is your organization doing? Sometimes you actually want managed competitive efforts, such as two projects to vet two different technical approaches. They are duplicative in terms of the objective by design, yet, by making them visible and managed you can quickly determine the right way to go and reallocate to the winning solution.
- Balance Project Work with Resources – There is a never ending desire for projects. They always outstrip available resources. By seeing the full pipeline of proposed projects and the portfolio of active or completed projects, you can throttle the projects that are initiated to match the available resources. If people are required to put projects into the system to allocate resources (of course over a threshold) then you can manage this balance.
- Do the Right Projects – Which are the right projects to do? If you could always do the right projects at the right time, you’d be unstoppable. First, you need to know the Pipeline (future) and Portfolio (active and past). Then, you can leverage your entire workforce to weigh in and vet projects collaboratively in the Pipeline. You can then evaluate the Pipeline projects against one another AND against the ones that are already active or that were done. You are leveraging the front-end for collaboration and then using it in your decision making for your project portfolio.
- Scope Projects Right – The benefit of the visibility and the collaboration on the front end is that the project gets more eyes on it, in a comparative context, and, the “charter” can be enhanced to try and arrive at just the right project scoping that is relevant to the objective, the resources, and the time. You’d be surprised how a small fact from someone usually outside of the normal, back-room process, such as a new competitive initiative or market change, can alter the scope and thus the ultimate success of the project.
- Visibility Driving Readiness – The app never sleeps. As a proposed project goes through the cycle the status and supporting information is at the fingertips of the organization. They get to have their say up front. They know which projects got funded. They can track the progress of execution and be ready – to help or benefit by the result. The system takes care of keeping interested people informed.
The Pushback to Adopting the New Process Initiative App
Many of our customers are adopting this use of Cim. In particular, our customers using CorasWorks PPM are dropping this application onto the front-end to have an integrated project work stream all running on SharePoint. But, these champions and most others face pushback within their organizations. Let’s look at some of the common objections:
“Our people aren’t ready for this level of visibility” – Most are not. But, isn’t that perhaps the problem, the constraint, and the opportunity.
“We don’t know our process to approve projects” – This is very common. Many organizations don’t have a process or criteria to approve projects even at department and division levels. A manager just approves it if they have resources. If they need resources, they go to their manager. One approach is to use this system to have people ONLY register projects. Then, learn how they go about approving them, getting their resources, and, what the success is. You’d don’t have to even have a process to approve projects to realize value. You don’t need the same approval process and criteria for all divisions and project types – in fact, it should vary and the Cim solution supports different work streams.
“We have a very deep process” – We can accommodate that also. Cim is unusually flexible and deep on Process Management. But, whether you have no process or deep process the key is the front-end capture and collaboration that feeds into it and supports the decision making.
“We already have a PMO” – Great. They can manage the process of approval for that threshold of project. Now, just bolt on that front end that engages the whole organization, department, division, get the collaboration going, and, they will now have some real-world input into their process. In addition, you can capture and manage projects at a lower threshold, effectively having mini-PMO’s so that the value of good visibility, collaboration, decision making, and management gets pushed deeper in the organization.
“What about our secret projects” – Secret projects like Corporate Acquisitions should not go into a broad, collaborative front end. This solution is about the super-majority of the projects, not the few. (NOTE: We could provide you with a secret project solution like we do for our Military and National Security customers.)
“We really need to get our Project Management system going first” – Maybe. But isn’t this a bit like building your manufacturing plant before you have a handle on demand. Maybe getting control over the project pipeline, and getting people used to engaging and collaborating on the front-end should be the first thing that you do. Then, use that to determine which tools will be best to execute on which type of project.
“We use different Project Management systems” – Everybody does. The truth is that the number 1 tool is the spreadsheet. The key is that this front-end can be open, collaborative, and consistent, and then, integrate with multiple execution tools. The Cim solution integrates natively with the CorasWorks PPM. It also integrates with native SharePoint Project Sites, third party apps on SharePoint, and Microsoft Project Server on SharePoint. And, it can integrate to external systems such as Sopheon, Siebel, Salesforce, MS CRM, Clarity et al in a read-write manner.
Summary
In summary, by taking a broad view of project work across your organization, we hope that you can see the value of greater visibility, engagement, and collaboration on the front-end. And yes, there are internal objections. It helps that Cim is quite flexible so that you can start in a way that makes adoption more organic. You may use it for just registering projects or put strong process behind it. You may just start with a single department. Or, you may open it to a whole division or the entire enterprise. And, you may have different work streams for different project types or business groups. Whether you have one NPI work stream or many, you are able to see across them all and the full life-cycle to help you make the best decisions that you can.
I believe as the research indicates, that for most industry segments the organizations that master the front-end will out compete those organizations that master the mechanics of project delivery. You need both to succeed, but, right now most organizations are lacking on the front-end, since the types of tools such as Cim are relatively new and just getting adopted.
william
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