LIFT conf ( Day 1 )

It’s pouring outside and I’m taking a quick moment to publish my unreflected notes that I took in today’s sessions, pêle-mêle, off the top of my head, in shorthand:

Morning session:

The slides are available here.

Evaluating and monitoring projects doesn’t need to be costly, esp. with free web survey and website statistics tools.

Goal is “to prove and improve” website and communication projects.

I liked the way Glenn emphasized the ending of words: “outputt”

Another point I found important: in many projects the emphasis lies on the activities, the processes and the output, instead of the outcome and the impact or goal.

Afternoon session:

In the afternoon I went to Clark Eliott’s workshop on Collaboration and Innovation in Workspace.

Teamwork needs to be reflected in the workspace, but should also offer focus areas if you need to concentrate on a single activity (like writing, coding) and phone booth areas.

People are resistant to change and will come up with thousands of “Yes, but…” Go ahead with the change plans and offer to be on location and change things when disaster strikes.

“Ideas come from everywhere. Share everything you can”

Knowledge workers work on average 9.1 hrs a day.

Knowledge sharing should be rewarded. But often the reverse happens instead, people who withhold or retain knowledge are promoted.

Some ideas how to offer virtual collaboration areas:

• offer a mashup between online calendars and online map to show where people in distributed teams are currently located
• offer some kind of a company Twitter
• one guy reported that they’re announcing successful or failed software builds using a toy jingle, has become some kind of a team ritual
• identify location of distributed teams using RFID tags
• greet knowledge worker in their personal workspace using RFID tags. RFID tags are cheap and can be used to personalize various settings.

Source of stress: arbitrary decisions without communication of the reasons behind them.

Most people go dry and run out of ideas when asked how they would like to improve their workspace.

Discover your work day and then start changing it.