Rona Epic
Epic can go two ways – epic good and epic bad. Today was the latter. Hmm, this week has been the latter.
work
Rona Office Politics
Although humanity has become gentler and more understanding during these Rona times, office politics has seemingly gone in the opposite direction. Maybe it’s the lack of proximity with coworkers or the lessened personal interaction, but teamwork feels like its on a downturn.
A Day of Working to Work
Sadly, today was a day of working in order to get work done. Instead of doing productive work, I had to do work that would eventually enable productive work. I completed a few mandatory online training sessions, and I filled out several justifications why I needed “non-standard” apps.
Why do I need Pixelmator instead of Photoshop? Well, to edit pictures, Pixelmator is good enough and the price is much more affordable. Why do I need SharePoint Designer? Well, at work we have this thing called SharePoint and sometimes, we need to design lists, workflows, and more for SharePoint. The best way to design these customizations is with this application called SharePoint Designer.
To make matters worse, I’m not convinced that anyone really looks at these forms and the information contained with them. Some of my justifications are sprinkled with creative reasons, yet I haven’t gotten any rejections or clarifications requested. It almost feels like the effort of filling out the form is sufficient justification that you need the app. Otherwise why would you bother? Of course, I’m sure that’s not how it works, right?
Overall, this day brought back a memory from years back when I was the admin for Windows NT workstations. When doing troublecalls and fixes, the users would inevitably ask what kind of computer I had at home since I knew how to fix Windows computers. I told them that I had a Mac and explained that I would rather get work done on my computer rather than work on my computer in order to get work done.
Anyways, enought complaining. Whatever.
That’s Not Winning
Well, that was unexpected. At work, I came across a list of recent award recipients and posted the list of names on our company’s SharePoint-based intranet (like I typically do). The reaction to this list of winners though was not expected. Instead of an overall congratulatory spirit for the winners, there were questions about the visibility and ordering of the names of the winners.
If you’ve used SharePoint’s Summary View for Announcements, you know that it, by default, truncates body entries. I never bothered to find the exact amount of characters displayed before being truncated, but I do know that SharePoint does not indicate that there’s more content to see. So because of this behavior, the list of award winners was truncated in the Summary View, and people took offense of being “omitted. When in fact, if they viewed the entire announcement then they would have seen the complete list of winners. And really, this Summary View has been in place for years. So you would have noticed this truncating behavior well before this one post.
Also, I copied and pasted the list of winners verbatim. I don’t know how the names were ordered nor did I care since really they all won awards, no one better than the next award winner. But I guess that’s not the perception since I asked to alphabetize the list of winners.
As a group of winners from our department, I simply care about who was acknowledged with an award. It doesn’t matter if you’re the first name on the list or the last name on the list. You did well and was duly recogized.
So what’s the underlying message here? Obviously, it’s not about representing our department as a winning team. If being the third name on the list or the tenth name matters then that’s not winning.
Confidence Is…
Since @abaggy is temporarily out of the loop, there’s no one to mancrush on. So instead, I’m turning my attention to someone else I’ll call Q-chi. What’s so great about Q-chi? It’s his confidence. He’s so confident that he leaves his classic iPod on his desk in plain sight even when he’s not around.
This shows that he’s confident with the security in the workplace, knowing no one will steal his prize. Or, he exudes confidence that no one will ridicule his use of this archaic iPod. But hey, who am I to talk? I still rock my old fat iPod Nano and Klondike!
Gotta Love My Coworkers
What a day at work today. The highlight had to have been a trail of email that went nowhere. You know that cliche on how Americans talk to non-English speaking foreigners? Speak loudly and slowly, and the English language miraculously becomes universally understood.
Yeah, the email trail was virtually like that. I got a denied request since a few things needed corrections per a linked instruction manual. My boss asked for assistance (to clarify what exactly was incorrect with my request). But the email response said that there was something wrong with my request and use the instruction manual to figure out what. Umm, yeah, that regurgitation of the original email was really helpful.
Gotta love my coworkers! 😐
Disenchanting Day at Work
Just a down day at work. Disenchanted with some things. The definition of insanity comes to mind. We do things the same way and expect results to be different.
If we don’t like the results or environment we’re currently in then why do we do the same things?
What to Do, What to Do?
Got to follow up some leads about possible new “projects” to join. The biggest decision is whether to stay “home-based” or go back out working at customer sites.
Just not sure what to do, but I can’t forget the reason why I came back to the office, to help our organization improve.
Fighting the Wrong Fight
Don’t you hate wasting time? At work, we’ve gotten caught up in fighting a fight that’s really the wrong fight. Whatever we do isn’t right because in reality, we’re not fighting the right fight. But at the same time, those picking the fight aren’t telling all involved what the right fight is, you follow?
Only after several losses can we sorta glean what the real fight/issue is. Only had we known that from the start, we could have been fighting the right fight and not wasting time.
Great Article on Implementing Web 2.0 in Your Organization
Wow, read a great and very pertinent article, “A Practical Guide to Implementing Web 2.0 (aka Social Networking Tools) in Your Organization” which hits very close to home. I’ve been experimenting and pushing the use of social networking tools at work and see lots of what is described in the article. And after attending a recent Knowledge Management Conference and meeting others working similar issues, the points of the article are driven deeper even more.
I have to blog more about this at work! But here are some interesting quotes from the article:
users have to resort to the dreaded search bar on the Intranet, too. Most people I speak to use this only as a last resort, and rarely find anything useful — they quickly give up and look for a real person to provide what they’re looking for
The final lemon in our trio is groupware (though the term, which is now disparaging, is rarely used). Groupware, of which the most notorious example is SharePoint, was designed to facilitate ‘communities of practice’ (CoPs)
Most groupware tools are so horrifically over-engineered and bloated with ‘features’ that they require full-time IT resources to manage, and to set up and ‘authorize’ new CoPs
From my experience, you should question the need for everything on the Intranet beyond directories and policies
Ah heck, there’s too much to list! Read the entire article for all it wisdom.