veritec

Presenter: Matthew Ryantwitter: @matthewvryan

au.linkedin.com/in/matthewryanveritec/

BUILDING A BEST PLACE TO WORK THROUGH SOCIAL COLLABORATION

Who we are

• Technology products and services firm with a strong professional services heritage

• Established Dec 2013 as a result of a corporate

• 70 staff and 30 contractors

• Disconnected consulting workforce

• Spread across clients and locations

• Teams range in size from 1 to 20

• Engagements range in duration from 2 weeks to 2+ years

• Average age 38. Spread 18 to 60 years old

Our Systems

• Confluence: project collaboration, documentation, structured knowledge

• JIRA: issues, risks, change requests, EPICs, Storeys, tasks, bugs

• Email: External Meessages, Broadcasts

• TIBBR: Conversations, decision making, feedback, polls

• Office 365: Document Libraries

• Changepoint: Professional Service Automation

Our key problems

• Too much email!

• Inefficient decision making

• Mailing List Maintenance

• Many different

groups/communities

• Knowledge lost in email

• Practice Group Collaboration

• No CRM

• No way to monitor activity with

clients

Tibbr to the rescue

Mr Incredible is a Pixar Character, unsure of his position on tibbr.

Email Jumble/Too Much Noise

Sorted!

Decision Making

Effectiveness & Efficiency

0 3 6 9 12 15 18 21 24 27 30 33

Meetings, Synchronous

TIBBR, Asynch

Email, Asynch

Good for shouting!

Good for building relationships onlyEffectiveness drops dramatically as numbers rise.

Decision Making – Effectiveness Curve

Good for conversations, Decisions. Scales well with more people

People in the conversation

Community Building -Consensus

Practice Development

Explicit

Tacit

Example of Social

Go Karting or Gardening and Steam

Community of Practice Development

Accessing tacit knowledge

Too Many Mailing Lists

Minimum Lists Now

Subject Structure

Example of Social

Go Karting or Gardening and Steam

Social Use Case

Sales Effectiveness Sales Effectiveness Example

Following Business Events

Any Questions?

Our Implementation• Was not perfect• We made mistakes with early adoption• We did control the information architecture• We did use specific business use cases

Our Adoption• 20% active contributors, 50% comment and like, 30%

read only• Now an essential part of our organisation• Rubber hits the road when habits are formed to visit tibbr

like emaiil or voicemail and staff turn off email notifications

The email problem• Impossible to sort the important from the not important• Impossible to sort the urgent from the not urgent• Unable to unsubscribe from the “reply all” hell• Email is growing exponentially• Productivity falling as a result of more email• Email apathy! The important messages get lost in the

noise.• Email is a poor medium to host a conversation• Email is a push mechanismEmail post tibbr• Evidenced by less email• Conversations are better in social• Staff can control how information comes to them• Can un-follow a subject if loose interest• Can change digest for less important subjects to less

frequent• Can follow important subjects• Conversations are structured by subject and

conversations grow over time stay in that structure

Executive Decision Making Problem• More Executive we have the harder it is to

get them in the same room to discuss an issue and make a decision

• Email just a poor mechanism to have a conversation

• No formal way to record the outcome in a way that could be passed to staff for implementation.

• Tried survey tool to capture the vote on an issue but many times more information was required by the executive or points needed to be discussed or expanded.

• Survey tool did not allow an executive to change their position as more information was exposed.

Executive Decision Making Post Tibbr• Quicker with a better outcome• Poll feature allows us to pose the question• Conversation is free to occur about the

question being asked • Executive can elaborate on their simple

poll response if they feel the need• Organising events becomes much easier

Building Engagement (which beer)• This sort of thing would do the rounds via

email, usually to a group email list that you could not unsubscribe from.

• Noise to some, Important to others• Supportive of our culture• Transparent and engaging

Talking Points

Knowledge Sharing Problem• Had no way for communities of practice to have

conversations about IP development• Had no way for communities to come together other

than through email• No way for communities to form and unform• No way to persist those conversations• Email is point to point• Relies on sender knowing who should be in the

address block, which means you either miss the opportunity to have the right people contribute.

• Or the sender sends the request for knowledge to a mailing list or worse everyone@veritec.com.au

• Replies to knowledge requests do not persist• Not accessible by others• 80% of knowledge is Tacit. It is in the heads of our

people and is never codified or captured as formal artefacts.

Knowledge Sharing Post Tibbr• Supports access to Tacit knowledge• Helps organise information into subjects• Consultants follow the subjects they are interested in• Does not rely on someone knowing to talk to• More productive workforce

Wbat’s Next• Following business events in our line of business

systems• Contract about to exceed its $$ • Birthday of a staff member• Invoice issued to a client• Receivables now 90 days for an invoice

Too many mailing list problem• Too many lists• No idea who is on them• Staff did not know how to subscribe to the

them• Did not know how to unsubscribe to them• Reply All still applied• Too much email noise with no control over how

to receive message from mailing lists• Overhead for the support team in keeping the

lists up to dateead for ICT team in keeping the lists up to date

Mailing list post tibbr• Single list for important announcements

everyone@veritiec.com.au• External facing email aliases which go into

structured systems

The CRM problem• No CRM• I did not think people would use it even if we

had one • Wanted to see if we could use tibbr to capture

intelligence about our clientsThe CRM solution• We still don’t have a formal CRM• We use our practice system for structured data• Tibbr has become the place where client care,

client intelligence and client needs are posted and discussed.

• Simple to do• Highly accessible• Low barriers to adoption

Talking Points