I feel fortunate to have had opportunities in 2010 to work on interesting and important efforts.  Reflecting on the year, it seems the primary theme of my work in 2010 was around leveraging technology and innovation in support of sales efforts as well as IBM’s CIO organization.  

All this innovation and exploration sounds good but what does it translate into in terms of business value for my organization and for IBM.  The value of innovation and trying new approaches can have financial and traceable measurements…. BUT I believe the largest value comes from the intangibles and difficult to measure elements of innovation.  How should I communicate or quantify the value of my personal contributions into something meaningful for my management?

Here’s my attempt to capture a few important dimensions of value and key questions for each that hopefully span both the tangible and intangible with respect to the work I’ve done:

• Hard benefits – Did my efforts lead to new revenue, increased sales, cost savings (such as sunsets)?
• Soft benefits – How did my efforts lead to productivity improvements and cost avoidance?  Are the calculations and underlying assumptions around quantifying these ‘soft’ benefits reasonable?
• Brand building –  How did my actions contribute to IBM’s brand image in the marketplace?
  • Knowledge sharing – Did I share details on some of the efforts and lessons learned both internally and externally so as to help others achieve value faster in the future?
  • Corporate Social Responsibility – Did any of my work contribute to improving our world and communities we operate in?
• Intangibles – What other strategic dimensions of my work were important?
  • Innovation – How did my efforts lead to creative and new approaches to business challenges?
  • Influence – Did my efforts demonstrate thought leadership and help to influence the strategies and efforts of other teams? 
  • Collaboration – Are there examples where I worked to collaborate with other teams to find reuse opportunities and develop win-win situations?

What about you?  What are your favorite ways to communicate business value beyond traditional financial measurements?

http://www.planningpoker.com/detail.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_poker

What is the goal of planning poker?

• The goal in planning poker is to arrive at a shared & understood estimate for desired capabilities in a short and inexpensive manner.??
• It provides a comparative view of the technical complexity of delivering desired capabilities.
• It is not to derive an estimate that will withstand all future scrutiny.
• Sprint & Iteration planning then uses these estimates coupled with the business priorities in order to select scope.

How does planning poker work?

• An overview of a given user story (or capability / feature) is provided. The team is given an opportunity to ask questions and discuss to clarify assumptions and risks.
• Each individual lays a card face down representing their estimate.

• Estimates should cover the full technical scope including design, discovery, development, and unit testing.
• Units used vary – they can be days duration, ideal days or story points.

• Everyone calls their cards simultaneously by turning them over.
• People with high estimates and low estimates are given a 'soap box' to offer their justification for their estimate and then discussion continues.
• After the soap box discussion, we repeat the estimation process (another round of poker) until a consensus is reached.
• In many cases, the estimates will already converge by the second round. But if they have not, continue to repeat the process. The goal is for the estimators to converge on a single estimate that can be used for the story.?? Again, the point is not absolute precision but reasonableness.

Why Planning Poker?

• Planning poker brings together multiple expert opinions to do the estimating.
• A lively dialogue ensues during planning poker, and estimators are called upon by their peers to justify their estimates.
• Studies have shown that averaging individual estimates leads to better results as do group discussions of estimates.

http://tinyurl.com/yaqerbr

Ross Mayfield’s Weblog: :

It’s hard to believe it was less than a week ago when I first started focusing on a concept I called Butterfly in preparation for HackDay at IBM.  Now we are less than a week in and we have a working prototype in its third iteration, a project wiki, some reasonable documentation, and lots of ideas on how to go farther….  all thanks to an ad-hoc team of seven collaborators in six different time zones around the world.  It’s been beautiful.  We are hoping to find some more collaborators to help out.

Here’s how the story unfolded (so far)….
I was recently trying out the StumbleUpon toolbar and found it really interesting and fun.  And it showed me stuff I would have never come upon.  And it occurred to me we have the same challenge / opportunity inside the enterprise.

• What if we could provide a simple & fun way to help users explore the wealth of high-quality items tagged by staff?
• What if we could weld together several of the wonderful internal web 2.0 tools to provide value for users, communities, and tool owners?
• What if it was easy to create, easy to use, and got more powerful the more it was used?

Sure “stumbling” from site to site on the web is fun but it got me thinking about whether there was more value in the context of a business environment.  I’m pretty familiar with the challenges we all face when trying to find information, expertise, or new ideas.  There are lots of popular social tools being used inside my company.   Unfortunately, today its not very simple to converge my need to find high-quality content with all the tools that are available to assist me… there are too many options and they all have different learning curves.  Stumble lead me to think we could merge together my personal/professional interests with several internal data sources and incorporate some kind of rating/quality assessment based on social/community input.

But how to do it?  It seemed to me that we already had many of the puzzle peices available in the form of APIs.

• Content: We have multiple sources of tagged content
• Interests: Users can select from the Top 100 tags or enter their own keyword.
• Ratings: We have a ratings widget that allows users to give stars.
• Social networks: We have several “friending” applications
• Blogs: We have existing vehicles for users to be able to comment / blog on things.

Since I’m not an especially astute coder I needed some help to figure that part out. I posted a ‘help wanted’ entry on the Hackday blog. To the rescue comes a group of folks around the globe who were intrigued by the idea and willing to give it a try.  It wasn’t until 3pm ET on Friday (Hackday) that we had our first informal conference call…. with just a few of the interested parties.  Well, turns out having the call so late on a Friday was a blessing. With the weekend right around the corner and an interesting challenge, our more technical collaborators found some time to noodle around over the weekend.

By Monday afternoon, the first prototype was born…. our butterfly was now out of the cocoon!  The Butterfly toolbar was created and the main algorithm for randomizing pages (what we call ‘flutter’ for boucing from site to site) was working!  When I installed it and Fluttered for the first time it brought back some coffee sites…. because part of my ‘About me” in one of our profile systems said I was into coffee.  Not only was I getting bookmarked pages but my profile preferences were implicitly built from my one of my social profiles.   Now we are onto something.

Yesterday afternoon the team met for the second time and by then they had incorporated some ratings capabilities and stubbed out the other elements of the toolbar.  Ideas started swirling around about getting more sources of interesting content…. so now we want to see about pulling in user-tagged content from other repositories.  We are also working to evolve the UI and enable the other stubbed out features.

I recently attended a barcamp event. One of the interesting activities that started the event was just registering. Once at the event, we were all asked to ‘tag our tag’ and indicate who we were and add a few tags about why we were there. I found this to be really a good way to explicitly state my agenda and interests.

We were all there on a Saturday and the focus of the event was Africa (BarCampAfrica). What I ended up observing was that most people simply put their name and company. I found it strange that so many people chose to “tag” themselves with the company they work for.

I chatted with a few other attendees about this and we discussed it was pretty common for people to automatically associate themselves with their company. Sure… makes sense. But I sure hope the next time more people tag themselves with interests rather than corporate associations. We lost an opportunity to make it easier to connect with one another based on common interests.

Yesterday I had an incredibly stimulating day at BarCamp Africa. There were just so many positive elements to this event I first need to create a list. (Each item below deserves its own post)

1) Effective use of social networking & web 2.0 tools before, during, after the event.
2) Incredibly positive attitudes and smart, passionate people.
3) Panel discussions that were “intimate conversations” between 150 people.
4) Tagging your name tag; tagging Africa map before and after.
5) Strong engagement of attendees to really participate not just observe
6) Broad range of interesting break-out sessions
7) Energy radiated by the Google campus
8) One session I participated in that was absolutely beautiful in how it unfolded
9) Self learning about helping and collaborating
10) Feeling like a true global citizen, proud, changed
11) Inspiration for possible book/study and new collaboration session format
12) Incredibly practical innovations and inventions
13) …..

So much more. I’m still processing.