How to do diagramming on a wiki

This week, I will like to share with you my experience with Gliffy. Gliffy is a online diagramming tool which is also available as a plugin for the Confluence wiki.

Before Gliffy and Confluence, we were using Microsoft Visio or Microsoft Word and a number of other tools to draw diagrams (process flow diagrams, flowcharts, UML diagrams, etc.) for our work. It was very tedious to work then. We have to open Microsoft Visio to draw the diagrams, and then copy and paste into the word documents. Finally, we can email it to our colleagues or external parties for review. However, the story does not end there. Sometimes, the other party do not have Microsoft Visio or the tools to view or edit the diagrams, we will  have to convert it to pdf format and the original author will need to spend time to understand the comments and integrate the changes into the diagram. That was very tedious for collaboration.

The moment I saw Gliffy for Confluence, I immediately recommended my boss to buy it.

After we installed Gliffy on our Confluence wiki, collaboration became much more easier. We can create diagrams easily on the fly without having to install applications like Microsoft Visio on our computer. It can be easily done on any computer with a web browser. It is easy and simple to use with a user friendly interface. We can edit the diagrams without worrying overwriting the original files as it keep tracks of the history automatically (it’s a real chore to restore overwritten diagrams). And the diagrams created with Gliffy look professional without much formatting effort.

Indeed Gliffy is an useful tool for working with diagrams. As a matter of fact, I think Gliffy helped us to pull more people onto the wiki bandwagon as it enabled people to do things in a fast and efficient way. If you are curious, I have embedded a short video demo on Gliffy below

Sustainability – A lesson from the 2008 financial crisis

This week is the anniversary of the fall of the Lehman Brothers and the financial crisis. The media has been giving a lot of coverage on it. One of the most popular topics is about the compensation scheme of the top banking executives in the States. Before the crisis, they were given huge annual bonuses based on the profits earned by their banks for the year. This has encouraged a short term view and risk taking within the industry. Currently, proposals are given to implement the Clawback scheme where the bonus earned in the current year is to be distributed in a number of years.

I think this spirit of the idea is also applicable for the IT industry. For the last few decades, IT improvement initiatives are usually packaged as a transaction between the buyer and the seller. The seller will help the buyer to deliver the required solution based on the requirements provided. At the end of the project, the seller will receive a monetary reward for the services provided. The buyer can optionally choose to continue the thread-thin relationship by signing up for a maintenance contract with the seller.

However, there are some weaknesses with this model to both the buyers and sellers at different stages of the project.  The underlying reason is because of the one-time payment as a transaction.

Beginning of the project

For the buyer, they will need to incur a large sum of money upfront to “invest” in the IT solution that can help the company. This result in a lot of time and effort spent to justify for the “investment” and to manage the project.

For the sellers, they will to ensure the profitability of the business. Therefore their pricing may limit themselves to the bigger players who can afford, and leaving out a large majority of smaller players untapped. They have to spend more time and money on marketing and sales to clinch new projects.

During the project

As the project progresses, we will see more weaknesses showing up with more changes in the requirements popping up.  Because the project is a one-off project, there is a tendency to scope the project as big as possible to enjoy the economy of scale and larger revenue. However this increases the complexity of the project as it is very difficult to gather 100% of the requirements upfront.

Therefore new change requests will definitely arises during the midst of the project. The buyer will try to get the sellers to do more without busting the budget whereas the sellers will try to charge back from the extra work to be done. In an effort to meet the schedule and cost constraints, some projects will suffer from a buggy system or a system that is difficult to use and maintain. In some extreme scenarios, there are a lot of unhappiness generated and losses incurred at both sides.

End of the project

Once the system is implemented, the end users will be sent for the training. However from then on, new end users will be trained on the job basis by those people who have been trained. Little or no additional training will be given for new features added subsequently. As a result, we hear illogical stories from end users like this. “You need to resize this window before you click this button, otherwise the system will crash”. End users will start developing their unorthodox ways of using the systems which limit the benefits of the original design of the system. It is like spending hundreds of thousands buying a sports car and putting it to waste by filling it up with diesels instead of petrol.

And as the world is getting more and more dynamic nowadays, we see more changes in the business rules and processes. The end users will devise new ways of using the system like overloading the original features of the system.

For the buyers, they are losing the productivity due to additional distraction of their staff and system failure due to incorrect usage.  After a few years, they will realize that the system is not delivering its purposes and they have to spend money to invest in another brand new system. In fact this is a common sight in the industry where money is being wasted on migration to new systems every few years.

For the sellers, they are losing the opportunity to provide their assistance to their valued customers for additional revenue. They get bad publicity when people blog or comment their systems are lousy just because the end users are not aware of certain features or correct way of usage.  If their solutions are truly helping their customers to earn more money, I believe it will be much easier to justify for a better reward.

So is there a better way?

I am sure that a lot of IT professionals will agree with the points that I have stated. In fact, some of them have come up with other pricing models to address these weaknesses. One of which is the Software as a Service (SaaS) pricing model that is popularized by Salesforce.com. Rather than to pay a huge sum of money to invest in IT solutions, companies can now enjoy the benefits of the IT solutions immediately by paying for monthly usage fees.  This provides a consistent flow of the revenue to the service providers and lowers the barriers to entry for the IT adoption. We should extend the idea of the SaaS from hosted applications to on-site implementations.

In additional to that, we should create the additional role of the Solution Specialists. These experts will visit the end users on a regular basis to coach them on the best way to use the systems and identify any new needs or changes required. They will also update the management of the companies on the best practices from other companies and latest innovation in the market that might be applicable to them. And because the companies are paying on a subscription model, there is incentive for the service providers to continue to refine the system to retain the customers.

Conclusion

We will be able to create a win-win relationship between the buyers and the sellers by changing the reward model for IT projects. Instead of treating IT solutions as a commodity that can be traded in transaction, we should look at it as a service or utility. In this case, the cost of implementation can be lower. The payment will also be tied to the value and contribution to the business over the long term. This will encourage the sellers to align their solutions to the business. For the sellers, they will be able to have a larger and consistent flow of revenue. This is what a real business partnership should be.

Trade in your bug tracker for a free version of JIRA 4.0

Atlassian is currently running a promotion for JIRA 4.0 for users to trade in their bug tracker for a free version of JIRA 4.0 (10-user licenses)

Beside keeping track of bugs and change requests, JIRA can also be used for

• Project Management – Track, allocate and report on project tasks with real-time statistics
• Technical Support /Helpdesk – Escalate cases, monitor response statistics and manage team workload.
• Agile Development – Estimate, allocate and track your iterations.

For those that haven’t tried using JIRA, here’s a good opportunity to try out the full enterprise edition of JIRA with no cost!

For those are using JIRA, you might want to share this information to your colleagues who are still using Excel worksheets, Bugzilla or other tools to track issues.

Here’s 10 more good reasons why you want to consider this attractive offer now.

For more details on this promotion, you may check out Atlassian’s website.

And here’s a quick preview on the new features to be launched in JIRA 4.0

How to accelerate the benefits of Enterprise 2.0

This is a follow-up post to my previous blog post How come Enterprise 2.0 is not everywhere yet?”

I have to apologize to Peter for such a long delay between the two posts. Firstly, I was very busy the last few months. Secondly, I was wishing for more like-minded people to participate in the discussion. Lastly, I was a bit hesitant to reveal our unique business idea.

In my previous post, I mentioned the 3 obstacles to Enterprise 2.0’s adoption:

1. the probability of success (ability to replicate the success enjoyed by other companies)
2. the courage to invest (due to inability to guarantee the ROI)
3. the lack of in-house expertise

With respect to the 1st obstacle, to be very honest, I don’t have a 100% foolproof solution. This is because the tool is only 1 part of the solution. It has to depend on the suitability of the work environment and culture to attain success. However, it is possible to maximize the success rate with experience and best practices. I have encountered a case where a manager requested his team to use the wiki upon learning its benefits. But his team continued to use emails and word documents for their work and did extra work to copy the information again onto the wiki. This isn’t the best way to improve the productivity. Another team also wanted to capture their knowledge, but most of the time, they are away from their computer. As a result, the adoption was not very successful.

It takes a confluence of factors for the team to extract value from the implementation of the tools. You can only know whether it can benefit your organization only by trying it.  One good idea on how to reduce the barriers for trying is the SaaS concept that is popularized by Salesforce.com. Under the SaaS model, people do not need to spend hundred of thousands to buy the system. They only need to pay for a monthly usage fee.  If the system cannot satisfy their requirements or there is another better system around, they can just stop using without incurring any heavy penalty. After the company has confirmed that the system is valuable to them, it will be much easier to justify for wider adoption.

However,  most companies providing SaaS services are storing their data within their data centre through the Internet. This worries a lot of companies that regard their data to be confidential and strategic. In order to encourage them to try, it would be better to set up the applications and databases within their network.

The most important element of success is the people. People who have the knowledge and the experience on using the system. This is especially more important for Web 2.0 applications that can serve multiple purposes and can be enhanced with new plug-ins and mash-ups. They will be very useful as they are able to synthesize the user requirements together with the features of the application to come up with functional and usable solutions quickly. We always heard the stories about a large percentage of features in Microsoft Word is unused.  This is because a lot of people are unaware of the features. Therefore it is important to have someone around who can coach them on the features and helping them with their queries and suggestions. This will encourage them to use the system to improve the way they work. It makes a lot of difference having someone who have the passion and skills to do the job.

To address these issues, we are providing unique and personalized services to

• set up and maintain the applications at our clients’ premises
• provide 2 pricing models (one-time cost & monthly fees based on usage subjected to a cap) depending on our clients’ preferences
• having on-site visits to coach and guide the users on the best way to use the tools, and seek feedback to improve the system continuously

I believe as a service provider, we will be able to spread the benefits to more people and organizations. Do let me know if you got any good ideas. At the same time, I am looking around for other service providers that have the same idea as us.

Akeles Consulting is One

Today is the first anniversary of Akeles Consulting. For the past one year, we have helped our clients to improve their productivity in the area of Collaboration and Project Management. This is done by coupling our best practices together with good tools like Confluence and JIRA.

We will like to take this opportunity to thank our partners, clients and associates for their friendship and support.
Thank you