Twitter provides a great rule of thumb for what kind of information to share with other people on a project.

Before inviting someone to a meeting or sending them an email ask yourself:

Is this information something they’d choose to “follow” on Twitter.

If yes, send it to them.

If not, or if its something you just think they “should” be following, don’t.

This will help keep meetings in check and emails in check and hopefully more aligned with the specific information each person needs to do their job (and not get bogged down in useless information).

As discussed in my recent article in ComputerWorld, this works because Context Trumps Content (as the growth of Twitter makes abundantly clear).  There is no end to the amount information people can find.  What is valuable is not the quantity of information, but the quality of information. To be high quality and valuable, the information needs to be relevant to the recipient.  (And Twitter makes it easy for people to receive only the information they find relevant to themselves.)

A new case study was released describing how Creativity, Inc. of Van Nuys, California doubled the productivity of their internal art department using Vertabase project management software. The case study looks at performance over the last four years and concludes:

“I would strongly recommend Vertabase to coordinate project management activities for internal creative teams. There is absolutely no downside.”

Here are links to the case study, a pdf of the case study and the press release about it.

To move your organization forward you have to manage change.

Change can come from outside the organization, like a change in the laws or the economy. It can come from inside the organization, like a quality improvement initiative.  Or, it can come from the market.  Often, you need to proactively make changes to succeed.

These can include changing the way you do things, changing the products or services you provide or changing how you market those products.

Here is a six step guide to managing change successfully. It connects the dots from the previous two posts (with a philosophical p.s. on the importance of change and good project management).

First, a definition. At its core, change is about going from where you are to where you have to be.

1. Create a work-flow. A good work-flow gives you a picture of your current state.  Analyzing the work-flow can help you decide where you want to go. Use data on the effectiveness of the current work-flow as a baseline against which to compare your future work-flow.

2. Create what you want your future work-flow to look like.  This is your target work-flow. It should be driven by your goals. That is, figure out what it is you want to improve (customer satisfaction, profitability, job satisfaction, costs, etc.) and build a target work-flow that should deliver those improvements.

If change is being imposed from outside your organization (e.g. because of the economy) your target work-flow is about figuring out how to do what you currently do in a different, but equally effective, way.

3. Build a project plan that maps out how you are going to get from here to there. It should tell you the road you’re going to take, who’s getting you there and  how to keep moving forward when you hit road-blocks.

4. Once you get there, once the target work-flow is implemented, measure its effectiveness to see if it meets your goals. Did it improve what you wanted it to?

5. If it didn’t meet your goals, figure out what else has to change and go through the process of creating that change.

6. If it did meet your goals, find another area to improve and do it again.

It has been said that change is inevitable. All things change. Having a process in place to manage change makes it more comfortable and increases your chances of have a successful transition.

On a Philosophical Level:

Economic growth depends on change. If that’s the case, a good project manager, one that can manage change and make positive changes a reality, is an engine for economic growth.

What makes a good work flow?
A good work flow accurately captures the way things are done, it spells it out clearly for all stakeholders to see and provides information on where anything is in the process.

Why make a work flow?
To speed up the time it takes to get things done. So people always know what the next step is and what’s the hold up. To find ways to scale up or scale down with knowledge.

On a philosophical level:
A workflow captures reality and makes it easier to study and work with that reality. It expresses our belief in the wisdom of how we’re currently getting things done and a confidence that improvements will be discovered on the job.

What makes a good plan?
A good plan maps out the steps to get something done, builds in mechanisms to accommodate risk and paints a picture of how to do things better.

Why make a plan?
A plan shows you how to get things done, despite things going wrong and with an eye to continual improvement.

On a philosophical level:
A good plan is an exercise in optimism and an expression of our belief in our ability to always move ahead.

A good organizational chart displays and defines roles.  It defines the path of information and decision making.  It tells you who does what.

This is an important tool in developing processes and standards-based management (which is the root of managing for growth).  You can’t make a plan, much less execute it, without knowing what everyone does. The org chart is like an old fashioned program at a baseball game. It tells you who all the players are and what position they play.

An org chart helps point you in the direction of where improvements can come from. It spells out who is responsible for defining a process or work-flow for other people. And to use a thought from the linchpin world, it can show you who is doing something new and unique, or on their own.

That misspelled slip on an instant message chat says it all.

So many managers “hear to talk.”

They listen to find places they can interrupt, contradict, assert power, make a correction or effortlessly start talking on their own.

Take the time to actually listen.  So the next time you “hear to talk” you really are there.

On the Flipside

The most effective managers do the opposite.

They “talk to hear.”

Spend time asking questions and move the conversation to learn what the person talking has to say. That is the benefit of working with a team - getting each person’s unique contribution.

Manufacturers in the retail supply chain are under increased pressure by retailers to cut costs. This is coming from Wal-Mart and other competitive big-box retailers.

One way to improve costs is to manage the production cycle with project management techniques.

I’ve seen creative departments radically improve their cycle-times, efficiency and responsiveness to customers by having a project plan in place for each creative process.  It has reaped huge benefits: upwards of 2x increases in productivity and speed.

Designers can do upwards of twice as much work.

The creative department can deliver finished product in half the time.

When a customer says “go” on a concept you’ve shown them, the project plan assures that you can hit the ground running.

More responsiveness, higher customer satisfaction, faster production with lower costs, these are the exact items demanded by competitive retailers.  And these are exactly the items project management can deliver for manufacturers in the retail supply chain.

I heard a great anecdote from Ed Brodow that sums up the importance, and power, of listening.

A women in England went on separate dates with two very famous people who had very different personalities, William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli.

Asked about her evening with Gladstone she said,

“he took me to the symphony and by the end of the night I felt like I was with the most sophisticated and smartest man in the world.”

And how about your evening with Disraeli? her friends asked.

“He took me to the opera. By the end of the night I felt like I was the most sophisticated and smartest woman in the world.”

Gladstone spent the evening talking about himself.

Disraeli spent his evening listening to her. Disraeli made her feel great.

Engineers are trained to deliver high quality, repeatable processes. That is very good.

But very good is not good enough in today’s marketplace.  Books with titles like “Good to Great” and “Purple Cow” are rife with the sentiment that “good is the enemy of great” and “very good is not good enough.”

What is needed in today’s economy is to be remarkable.  Only remarkable stuff gets people’s attention. Only remarkable stuff can survive.

Remarkable, incidentally, doesn’t mean the next biggest invention.

As Seth Godin says, remarkable is anything worth remarking about, worth telling someone else about. It can be a cool new product. It can also be the a wonderful interaction between a client and customer or between a project manager and team member.

It takes innovation to produce remarkable stuff. You have to take risks and put yourself out there. You have to be willing to invest part of yourself into the thing that you’re doing, make it personal.

So, the challenge for engineers, and the people who work with them i.e. entrepreneurs, managers, and a State like Michigan -that has more engineers than any other state, is to create an environment, a process that pushes engineers to not just be very good, to not produce testable, repeatable processes.

The challenge is to push engineers to be remarkable and produce remarkable stuff.

This phrase exemplifies the power of exclusion.

I heard it from a successful businessman. He started many projects and companies on his own because he was shut-out from other opportunities. By keeping him out, they created their own competition.

By excluding people, you create impediments to your project’s success.  It affects driven and capable people the most (who are exactly the people you want on your team, the linchpins).

Take the time to listen to people on your team. Make people feel included.

Thomas Friedman has an inspiring article in the NY Times on a virtual start-up.  Virtual companies are nothing new in the world of software and services.  What’s new here, though, is that this company is a virtual manufacturing company.

“‘Three guys with laptops’ used to describe a Web startup,’” writes Chris Anderson from Wired Magazine (as cited by Friedman). “Now it describes a hardware company, too” thanks to “the availability of common platforms, easy-to-use tools, Web-based collaboration, and Internet distribution. … Global supply chains have become scale-free, able to serve the small as well as the large, the garage inventor and Sony.”

In the world of the virtual manufacturing company, production capacity and manufacturing flow seamlessly to the cheapest source, much like programming services have in the world of software development. Producing a widget is no longer that special. It can be done in many places at a relatively low cost. Like the name of the essay in Wired Magazine says “Atoms are the New Bits.”

And this is the kind of thing that can actually save manufacturing-based economies like Detroit.

What?

You may ask how it could possibly be a good thing that other countries or regions can produce high quality goods at cheaper prices and that companies can by from them so easily. How is that good for Detroit?

In a word: Value.

You have to look at where the value is.  Where wealth is created, where the unique advantages is.  It isn’t any longer in producing run of the mill goods.  The value is in creating a really great product.

Virtual manufacturing means that a clever innovator with a good idea can experiment with a new product and produce that product for a lot less money than it used to take. Engineers and product managers can get a new ventures off the ground with much less capital and much faster than ever before. It means that the amount of risk involved in manufacturing is less than its ever been.

It means its easier than ever to create a valuable product. It is easier than ever to create a product that is truly remarkable.

All of that is great news for Detroit.

It used to be that only software and service businesses were cheap and easy to get off the ground.  From the 1970’s on the remarkable breakthroughs were in software or innovative financial products.  That helped create the success stories of Silicon Valley, Seattle and Wall Street.

The cost of getting a manufactured product off the ground was high. It made it risky to invest in or to quit the day job, as it were, to give it a try.

But now, that has all changed.  And that plays into the strength of the people in Detroit.

As the article states, this can be a huge engine for growth in the United States.

Invented and financed in the West, further developed and tested in the East and rolled out in both markets.

Inventing and managing the lifecycle of a manufactured product is right up Detroit’s alley.  And not just Silicon Alley. I’m talking about the straight, old-fashioned grease covered alley of Detroit’s past. The alley filled with mechanics, backyard tinkerers and engineers.

If mechanics, engineers and tinkerers can dream it up, it can now become a reality. And if there’s one thing we have lot of in Detroit -its mechanics, engineers and tinkerers.

It is up to them, and to each one of us, to help make it a reality.

A friend of mine consistently receives negative feedback from a manager.  It is a complete drag on his projects and his daily life. He is not alone.

Many people have managers that use negative feedback to get things done.  Instead of letting it drag you down, here are some guidelines to help.

Understanding negative feedback can help you dig yourself out from it.

There are two types of negative feedback.

• Guilt
• Shame

They both make you feel bad. But they are different.

Guilt is feeling bad about something you did.

Shame is feeling bad about yourself.

Guilt can be a productive tool for professional improvement.  Managers who use guilt are trying to get you to perform at a higher level or pay more attention.  With guilt, there is a way to make things right. The manager who gives these kind of negative comments should provide a clear path to how things should be done differently. To be constructive, the criticism shouldn’t focus on outcomes (”don’t screw up again”) but on techniques and processes (”next time, do x and y, instead of z”).

Shame is a tool of manipulation and control. It is destructive negative feedback. Managers who shame other people want to make them dependent and easier to push around.  With shame, the only way to feel better is to make the manager happy.  And there is no end to that road.

Sadly, there are managers who thrive on destructive negative feedback. It gets them the results they want and the power they crave. If you find yourself with this type of manager, you need to get out.   (Definitions courtesy of Ed Schild.)