Navigating an Ever-Changing Landscape with Continuous Learning

In a world that's evolving at an unprecedented pace, the ability to adapt and learn continuously has become a key factor in personal and professional success. The rapid advancement of technology, shifts in global economies, and the constant emergence of new ideas make lifelong learning not just a choice but a necessity.

The Need for Continuous Learning

Gone are the days when education was seen as a one-time investment in the early years of life. The Fourth Industrial Revolution has ushered in a new era where skills become obsolete faster than ever before. In this dynamic landscape, those who embrace continuous learning gain a competitive edge, ensuring they stay relevant in their chosen fields.

Adapting to Technological Advances

Technology is at the forefront of change, and staying abreast of the latest developments is crucial. Whether you're a professional in the IT industry or a creative artist, understanding how technology shapes your field is vital. Continuous learning enables you to integrate new tools, platforms, and methodologies into your work, enhancing efficiency and innovation.

Navigating Career Transitions

Career paths are no longer linear, and individuals often find themselves switching industries or roles multiple times in their lives. Continuous learning facilitates these transitions, providing the knowledge and skills needed to excel in new environments. It's a mindset that fosters resilience and agility, allowing individuals to pivot when necessary and explore new opportunities with confidence.

Cultivating a Growth Mindset

At the core of continuous learning is a growth mindset—an understanding that abilities and intelligence can be developed with dedication and hard work. This mindset empowers individuals to embrace challenges, learn from failures, and persist in the face of setbacks. It's a mindset that not only fuels personal development but also fosters a culture of innovation and adaptability in the broader community.

Harnessing Online Learning Platforms

The digital age has democratized education, making learning opportunities accessible to people around the globe. Online platforms such as Workbench "Always on the Job!" offer a myriad of courses, workshops, and resources, allowing individuals to tailor their learning journey to their specific needs and schedules. From coding bootcamps to language courses, the options are diverse, enabling everyone to pursue their interests and passions.

In a world that's constantly in flux, the power of continuous learning cannot be overstated. It's a lifelong commitment to growth, adaptability, and resilience. By embracing the ever-changing landscape of knowledge and skills, individuals can not only thrive in their careers but also contribute to a more innovative and dynamic global community.

Automate More, To Increase Productivity. Makes Sense, But Why Don't Organizations Do That More Often?

 By now, most organizations should understand that automating processes does more than just make work go faster. Besides decreasing the overall cost to undertake tasks, workflow automation can help the staff avoid wasting their energy on repetitive tasks -- such as sending emails and following up on leads or generating documents. This frees them up to execute more productive and important tasks. 

Aiming to implement automation enables staff to avoid insignificant, repetitive tasks. They can shift their focus to value-oriented functions such as innovation in the development of new ideas and processes. Organizations that automate business processes change their workflows by reducing mundane activities and increasing team productivity. By automating business processes, companies can improve their processes, shorten business process cycle times, and maximize efficiency. The automation of processes completes tasks that were previously manual.

A good strategy for automating business processes can help maintain control over processes, reduce  errors, improve communication, and improve quality. Let's face it: repetitive and boring tasks can be frustrating, which leads to lower employee satisfaction. The use of automated processes in knowledge work processes can help a company produce higher quality deliverables and increase profits. For this reason, using technology to automate processes can help increase efficiency, productivity, and stabilize levels of quality control.

With tools that enable decision makers to monitor every step of the process without checking in with every employee, process automation enables staff to hone their precise role. The processes and tasks for which staff are responsible become streamlined, demonstrating one of the major benefits of workflow automation: it takes a lot of the pressure off staff. Think of when there are a lot of operational tasks that need to be done.

For example, when a team member needs to work through a list of ten items, chances are there are one or two tasks that one might dreading doing. When these tasks are automated, it provides relief for everyone and lightens the workload. Another great workflow automation benefit is that companies can hire more remote workers and keep their expenses down.

Read an Article about Group Problem Solving, Improved by Distance

From the BBC, we learn of the latest psychological literature suggesting that less communication might actually be better than constant inputs. Collaboration in an "always on" mode may in fact reduce ‘collective intelligence’ (a team’s joint problem-solving ability). Instead of always staying in touch with colleagues with continual chats on Slack, for example, the study suggests a better model would be to concentrate group communication to short, intermittent bursts – a single daily video call, for example – to boost team problem solving and creativity.

Besides helping us to make better use of our time during the current crisis, these findings could help to shape the ways that we go about team decision making in the future. Even if we are in the office, we might all benefit from having a bit more me time and a bit less team time.

Read more and download a PDF of the article.

Project Management Tools - Analog and Digital - Have a Place in Agile

The value of cloud-based task and project management software is obvious -- link teams, keep all information in one place, automate workflow and progress monitoring.

With a good interface, an online tool enables teams to manage Agile projects to plan, assign, prioritize and track tasks efficiently. Use drag 'n drop kanban and backlog/sprint planners for easy and smooth overviews and assignments of tasks.

In the case of scrum, we find there will be multiple sprints. Teams needs to plan quickly for each daily standup. Does this preclude upfront identification of milestones with a WBS? Marrying the two styles is not as incompatible as one might think.  One can use an issue tracker as a to-do list that is focused on accountability. Such issues are the building blocks for progress and can be classified as tasks, bugs, or change requests. Being able to plan out milestones on Gantt charts might seem a strange crossover when applying Agile project management techniques such as Scrum or Kanban. But a timeline-based view of tasks and sub-tasks can aid in communication.

When a project management tool is highly integrated with Git, Subversion, or other code repositories, an integrated workflow is possible. We have found using a wiki to document projects is handy for its simplicity of use.

Read more here...

Too Much of a Good Thing?

In a study titled "How Intermittent Breaks in Interaction Improve Collective Intelligence", the authors use a standardized problem-solving test to measure the contrast between time spent in collaboration mode against the quality and quantity of problem solving results. The group with no interaction predictably had the highest options for solutions, but those solutions were of lower overall quality. The group with high interaction had higher quality solutions, but less variety and a lower likelihood to find the optimal solution. The intermittent collaboration groups found the desirable middle ground to balance out the pros/cons of the no interaction and high interaction groups, leading them to become the most successful problem solvers.

Use Kanban for Visual Project Management

With kanban boards, there is a visual approach available to manage tasks. With a simple post-it note system, you can see work in progress and understand complex processes, activity relationships, and you/your team’s impediments to completing work on schedule.

We humans are visually oriented — it is easier to process information with a visual aid. A kanban board helps teams to understand all aspects of a project. A visual management tool means your team doesn’t need to sift through email threads to find the piece of information regarding a specific task. You won’t have to decipher a massive spreadsheet to determine whether a task or project has been started or completed.

Of course, the beauty of kanban is simplicity. Get started with a kanban board by writing a sticky note and pasting it to a whiteboard — anyone can use them for just about any purpose. Even just leveraging the visual nature of kanban boards will help you keep track of your daily goals.

Every project manager can appreciate the effectiveness of the kanban board as a collaboration tool. You spend less time communicating status updates because the boards create transparency — it is literally on the wall! Team members working either on-site or remotely can see the status or a project in real time if you go the electronic route. Either way, kanban improves overall team efficiency, and can even be used by individuals to manage their own workload.

Software development -- not management friendly

While we might not all agree what methodology works best (waterfall, agile, some combination of X-treme, etc.), we all know that software projects can be painful.

But they don't have to be. Management and marketing teams generally have a difficult time understanding the mind of the creative types -- be they graphic designers or software developers.

There's a trick that I employ that has worked over the years: manage programmers the way beekeepers domesticate bees. With the right application of beer, flexible hours, and input into a project, I've been able to get excellent Java/Objectve-C programs to swarm in place. And then harvest the honey they produce (satisfyingly workable applications).

Having a group of programmers who get along, who enjoy a challenge, who work as a team means building a small group that has esprit-de-corps. One team I cultivated matched junior devs willing to challenge each another, and an expert coder that the rest (including gem) looked up up to. Not for pair programming, but as a mentor and a high-level problem solver.

If the team gets too big (or, even, too productive), management and sales will take a big interest in what is going on in the developer department. But these are not robots working on the line to churn out, well, lines of code. The suit-wearing business types find that developers are unpredictable, odd-hours-keeping and anti-social, to boot. Planning, attending in-person meetings, working on schedules, producing reports -- these are anathema to creatives.

Seeing developers struggle with the team aspect of productivity in an organization can be painful. I've worked with software experts who could easily figure out the most effective way to write an algorithm to fulfill the defined requirements. But he was out-of-pocket when the team needed to design a solution that would not negatively impact a downstream system -- if the problem wasn't in his code, he had no ownership of it. And solutions frequently were inefficient or a long time coming.

Ultimately, that developer moved on, but I learned a valuable lesson -- team building helps everyone understand how to leverage each other's strength. Instead of a waste of intellectual capital, teams can find synergy through mutual understanding and -- best of all -- cooperation.

High Tech Projects can have Serious Complexity Issues

Boeing is the leader in air craft manufacturing, and the Dreamliner is characterized as the most advanced, best performing and most comfortable passenger plane to date. The approach the company took in the design and building of the plane is just as revolutionary.

Boeing took a radical approach to working with many suppliers -- 787 development and production involved a large-scale collaboration with numerous suppliers around the world. The manufacturer assigned the global subcontractors to do as much assembly themselves as practical, and deliver completed subassemblies to Boeing for final construction. The intent was to have a leaner assembly line and lower inventory, with pre-installed systems reducing final assembly time by as much as three days.

The aircraft was designed to become the first production composite airliner, with its fuselage assembled in one-piece composite tubular sections instead of multiple aluminum sheets, the approach used on most modern aircraft. Its "fly-by-wire" approach is the most extensive implemented, outside of the U.S. military.

But, as with many complex technological undertakings, problems materialize, sometimes even after the project is stamped "done" by management. In fact, with the case of the Dreamliner, serious concerns have arisen regarding electrical problems. And, with an aircraft, such problems translate into the safety of passengers, crew and others. Human life is at stake when 200+ people are traveling at subsonic speeds. So, caution is always called for, as the recent grounding of All Nippon Airway's fleet of Dreamliners shows.

What can information technology professionals learn from this on-going story? In the past, all products were handmade, the work of artisans rather than manufacturers. Cars, clocks, and firearms, for example, started out as being made one at a time, and each iteration was subtly different than the one the craftsmen finished just the day before. Over time industry has learned the value of standardized, interchangeable parts, and ultimately, about mass production. Even "mass customization." Though the retro movement highlights handiwork, for most products, systematic production yields far better products at much lower costs.

This FastCompany article discusses how NASA makes their onboard shuttle software. Take a look at NASA's checklist (PDF) to see how 100% defect free is necessary when lives are on the line.

The 21st Century Employee Model - distributed workforce

Dan Pink chronicled the growing ranks of people who work for themselves in his 2001 book, Free Agent Nation. Many people may have started their own shops to become a part of the freelancer nation, even larger organizations can use freelance workers or others in alternative employment arrangements to help meet some of staffing needs.

In the multimedia/video/film world, experts come together to create, write, shoot, edit and distribute products. Such ad hoc teams form the basis of knowledge work that is creative, and profit-focused.

Such ad hoc project may involve work that requires less than a full complement of staff to complete and has immediate benefits. The work may involve frequent discussions between client (requester) and the team. One of the difficulties of having unaffiliated exerts work in groups on a project (software development, a video, a research paper, etc.) is that there are always a few who do not get fully involved in the project. This is an easy trap to fall into. Usually, one or two of the team members know much more about the topic, tools, or subject matter, and so end up putting the majority of the project, document, proposal, or whatever, together. Others are more adept at creativity, spreadsheets, running the software tools, etc., so these people end up doing a few specific tasks. Problems arise when one or two do all of the work. The rest of the group, with a lack of activities to keep them busy, often end up left out, underutilized, and even put off. Shortly, the stakeholders get frustrated with disorganization and the 80/20 rule kicks in: one or two people do the lion's share. For most, this lessens the benefit of such ad hoc cooperatives.

This can be easily avoided.

Staring out with a strong plan, and getting participant buy-in upfront makes the way forward clear. Providing an easy-to-understand project plan (perhaps with a GANTT or other visualization) and schedule keeps everyone focused on the goals. Assigning and tracking tasks, with everyones' input, results in measurable progress. If you have chosen your team members well, self-motivation will be evident.

It is not uncommon for many of us work regularly with colleagues based in different buildings, cities, countries, and even continents. Members of the work group may be in different time zones, speak different languages, and be of different cultures. Providing feedback and encouraging communication -- in real time or off-line via comments, discussion forums, email or even texting -- promotes bonding and ensures team members know they are valued.

Avoiding 'groupthink' -- decision making for teams

There are three main components to consider in consulting a group for decision making:

• Sharing knowledge and related content
• Discussing and overlaying knowledge on the data at hand
• Collectively deciding the best course of action from the choices that are presented.

There are several alternatives to consider:
 
• Should the leader make the decision?
• Should the leader delegate the decision to some other member of the group?
• Will the group make the decision through some form of majority vote?
• Should all decisions involving the group be made by consensus?
 
Even when a consensus approach is used, there is a danger that the decision may represent a false consensus.  A false consensus occurs when members of a group appear to accept a proposed course of action but actually have private reservations which, for whatever reason, they choose not to share with the other members of the group.

References:

http://www.infoq.com/articles/facilitators-guide-book-review
http://www.sal.tkk.fi/vanhat_sivut/Opinnot/Mat.../group_decision_making04.pdf
http://dssresources.com/history/dsshistory.html