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Contact List

SharePoint in Practice: SHARED CONTACT LIST

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A SharePoint Contact List is a one of the best “quick wins” for your intranet. As a collaboration tool, SharePoint has the word “share” built right into the name. Why not make it easy to for everyone to reach each other? And if you have an email and phone number for a suggested vendor or consultant,  why not allow the rest of my team to access that information easily. Let’s make contact information centrally available, always current, and persistent regardless of staff turnover.

I am a strong believer in “I don’t need to know everything, I just need to know people who know stuff”. With that thinking in mind, let’s set our teams up for success and make sure people can easily contact each other. A high-priority feature of our communication and collaboration intranet is a well-designed and well-promoted Contact list.

Business Problem

How can we centrally manage all contact information, share it among all staff, and easily search, update, and access it through Outlook?

Practical Solution

The contact list is another out-of-the-box SharePoint feature that is sometimes underutilized. With a few customizations and some education, it can do a lot.

The most obvious use is the “one source of truth” place to keep names, phone numbers and email addresses for all the people you might need to contact. This could include internal (managers and colleagues) and external (vendors, travel agents, media contacts, etc.). And then there are the less obvious uses, like listing committee membership, emergency contacts, and even generation an organization chart.

I suggest you download the hand-out to follow along with the video and refer to the details.

SpeakerSPFSeattle2017

SharePoint Fest Seattle August 8-11, 2017

I am very excited to have been accepted to speak again at SharePoint Fest this August. This will be my 3rd year attending and 2nd year speaking.

Yes, it’s an opportunity to enjoy the beautiful Seattle summer – but honest, that’s just part of it! This is a well-run conference with a mix of technical and end-user topics. Excellent value for money and of course Seattle is easy to get to from Victoria and Vancouver.

Please use the promo code BrimacombeSeattle100 for a $100 discount on your registration.

And feel free to contact me with any questions!

See you there!

Gerry

P.S. I will be announcing more details of my book “Practically SharePoint” and plan to have a sample chapter or two ready to go for conference participants.

Nuts about Productivity

Nuts About Productivity

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I’ve always been a little bit crazy – in our family we say “if you weren’t strange that would be weird”. I remember one summer when I was about 9, we were going swimming and I was riding up on my Uncle Dennis’ shoulders. When we got to the shore, Dennis just kept walking…shorts, sandals, Gerry and all… and dropped into the cool, refreshing lake water. A silly, fun move typical of our family.

Personally, I am nuts about productivity; about getting more done with less effort and/or lower cost. Whether it is in my personal life, with my family, doing admin work, or designing a solution for a client, I want to do it as fast and as cheaply as possible, without sacrificing quality. And I want to make sure the solution or process I come up with is the one that works best over time.

Of course from an innovation point of view, we know the simplest solutions are the easiest to build, and to maintain. I tend towards Occam’s Razor and the KISS Principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle) in all I do.

Here’s a short video with more on this topic.

This tendency towards efficiency is what’s got me so excited about my new business, Lightlever Systems. What’s in a name? Lightlever is all about inexpensively leveraging people and technology to build brighter, better operating businesses. The light represents positive energy, electricity, and great ideas. At Lightlever, I leverage SharePoint, Project Management and “being nuts about productivity” to help our my clients get more done with less.

And maybe the story about Uncle Dennis walking into the lake with me on his shoulders is an example of efficiency? We saved time and effort by not changing into our swim trunks…and we achieved our goal of cooling down faster…and hey! it was fun and exciting as well!

Be light and stay bright!

Gerry

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Project Management and SharePoint

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Several clients have asked me to set up Project Management solutions in SharePoint. I am, after all, “the SharePoint guy with PMP training”.

I was saying to someone this morning, “SharePoint and Project management are both arcane arts to most people, so trying to combine the two is a treacherous undertaking”. That said, if we can do a good job of leveraging SharePoint to support Project Management, it’s very powerful.

Here are some of my notes on the topic.

Think Practical over PMP
We all know and love the Project Management Institute and the PMP designation, but in setting up (for example) a document library to help support our projects, does it make sense to create folders (or even metadata) for Initiate, Plan, Execute, Control, and Close phases as per PMI? The short answer is “only if it makes sense to your users”. Most project team members won’t be PMP’s and we want to make sure everyone can and will use the site. If it’s confusing, people will avoid it

Use Lists rather than documents
Often we create Excel sheets or Word document to track project tasks, contacts, etc. Don’t forget SharePoint has standard Lists for Tasks, Calendars, Issues, and Contacts (see below). And Wikis are so easy to use once you get your head around them.

Contact Lists
Communication is critical to good Project Management. As such, the SharePoint contact list is worth stressing. Allow people to update or create their own contact information, and use “Connect to Outlook” to allow team members to drag-n-drop shared contacts into the list using Outlook.

Project Sites
I find it’s handy to have one SharePoint site for each project. This gives the project a home and makes it easier to manage permissions. Project team members can bookmark (or “favourite”) that page for quick access. (Note: for smaller, document-centric projects, we sometimes use a document library as the “home page”, or even a folder in a “very small projects” library.)

Project Site Templates
Further to the above, I am a strong believer in standardization. Many PMs manage multiple projects. And often team members contribute to multiple projects. Even if these aren’t simultaneous, it’s sure nice if the project SharePoint site is familiar. I always create a Project Site Template subsite, and work with the PMs to include everything they might need – Lists, Libraries, Views, and home page that makes sense. This site is then “saved as template”. Then, when a new project begins, the template is used and Project Site is standard. The PM (who is given Full Control and the training to support it) can remove the objects they don’t need, and maybe change the Look & Feel and logo of the site to personalize it a little.

Use Alerts and Emails
In this day and age we still use email a lot. By making the SharePoint project site “reactive” and sending emails, it will drive people to it and help them to get used to using it. So create Alerts for new announcements, Issues changes, and of course Tasks. Note that some lists (like Tasks) have a built in setting to “Email when ownership is assigned or changed”. This, unlike an Alert, cannot be turned off by contributors.

Project Codes
I like to create a custom SharePoint list of projects which includes unique project codes. Giving each project a short “handle” is very useful in general project communication and status reporting, as well as in SharePoint. For example, the project Always Be Chewing 12-3 may be coded as ABC123. That project code, ABC123, can be used as the URL for the project site, as a metadata lookup field to classify documents, as part of permission group name (ABC123 Members) or to associate timesheet records with this project. I usually include a URL field in the Project list, to capture the address of the project site or library, so this list can be used a shortcut as well as a status list.

I hope these tips help you! Please comment below with ideas I have missed and elaborations for others.

Gerry

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A Wave to the Rocketbook Wave

As you know, I’m always looking for more efficient ways to get stuff done. You may also know that I’m a prolific note-taker. Not only do I appreciate and value being able to look back on what was discussed, I find even the act of taking notes helps me remember. (And I’m a stickler for documented action items.)

When I bought my Microsoft Surface Pro 3, I wanted it to replace my paper notebooks. I was hoping to take notes directly in OneNote. However, the Surface hasn’t turned out to be the ideal note taking tool for me (for a few reasons mentioned in the video below). So when I saw this Indiegogo campaign for the Rocketbook, a kind of high-tech notebook that “integrates” in an interesting way with OneNote and DropBox and Google Drive, I thought I’d try it.

Is the Rocketbook the missing link I was looking for to take notes quickly and have them computer accessible? See the 6-minute video below.

And here is the Rocketbook website if you’re interested in more: http://getrocketbook.com.

Until soon!

Gerry Brimacombe

FightingOfficeFires

Fighting Fires vs. Good Forestry in the Office

We’ve all seen a lot of “fighting fires” as opposed to practicing “good forestry”.

What do I mean?

I’m saying we tend to react rather than pro-act in our work and our lives. I may be ranting here, but why do people delay a 5 minute task, even though putting it off means it will take an hour later? Or the delay may cause 5 people to run around (later) for 20 minutes each? Or it may cause pain and embarrassment? For example, if I am scheduling a meeting with you, and I send an email with “these are the days I have available, what works for you?”. When you see that email it may take you a few minutes to check your calendar and get back to me. But if you take a week to get back to me, then the days I had available probably are no longer (available that is). The time spent so far was wasted and we have to start again. And if there were other people waiting for me to confirm…well there’s that ripple effect, isn’t there?

So what just happened? Well, usually the slow or forgotten response in the above scenario is because people are run off their feet. And of course this little scenario can be applied of lots of different situations, but I believe the root cause is the same: we’re too busy to “get’er’done” and that busy-ness spills over to keep us too busy in the future as well. Being too busy today is causing us to be even busier tomorrow.

This is what I mean by fighting fires versus practicing good forestry. That’s dig into that analogy.

When a forest is burning, there’s no choice but to dive right in and work as long and as hard as it takes to get it under control. Take the risk, drop everything, grab a shovel and a hose, and get in there and fight that fire!

However, couldn’t the fire have been prevented?

Not always, of course, but what if during the months before we went through that forest and (making this up for the sake of the analogy) cleaned out dead branches, trained campers how to prevent fires, and had a fire prevention officer check frequently for risks. Well, first of all it’s important to note that everything I’ve just described takes time and money. But also consider what I’ve listed can be done in a more relaxed manner than all out “fire fighting”, with lower cost resources and equipment. (As soon as it’s a crisis, costs go up and mistakes happen.)

So what if all your resources (people, money) are busy fighting fires in the neighboring forest? You don’t have the time to pay attention to the prevention. You have no time, money, or energy to be proactive. So it starts to spill over to one forest to the other. Because you’re busy fighting the fire in forest A, you don’t have the ability to prevent a possible fire in forest B. So just when you get the forest A fire under control, forest B bursts into flames and requires your immediate and urgent attention. And you don’t have time to take a proactive stance in forest C. It’s a cycle.

Enough of the analogy. Let’s look back at my real world example.

Take the story above of “too busy to confirm a meeting date”. Maybe my email was buried in your inbox because you haven’t had the time to go through and “deal with” the 50 messages you get every day? So they keep building up. So we’re busy dealing with the current crisis because we didn’t deal with “that little thing last week”. Because you didn’t find 5 minutes to respond to my email, now (for example) we can’t meet in a timely manner, you don’t have the information you need, and you have to spend more time to scramble to organize the meeting or get the details together…thereby ignoring the other emails with the information you need or the requests for another meeting (from someone else)! ((breathe here)) (Side note: I once read that procrastinate has many of the same letters as “castrate”. I’m not sure about the relevance of this observation, but I am sure they both cause pain.)

 

So how do we break the cycle? How do we get ahead of it so we’re practicing good forestry rather than just waiting for the fires to erupt and then pouncing on them? I think the first step is to recognize what’s happening. Being too busy today is causing us to be busy tomorrow. What we put off now, comes back bigger later. The trick is to carve out time for little bit of planning; a little bit of getting ahead of yourself; and a little bit more organization, and that will gradually free time for more planning and organization.

Let’s look at the macro view for a second. I have taken courses and several read books on systemizing your business. Fascinating stuff, and one of my favorite topics. First and foundationally, we have to recognize the “tornado of day-to-day work”. Your staff have jobs to do, which takes all their time. How do you deal with the fact that everybody’s busy, all day every day, working on the job? With no resources available to implement time-saving and error-reducing systems, you are destined to keep operating the same way you have always operated…or are you?

What I always recommend is to select the most difficult, most complicated, or most painful business process, and implement that one first. Somehow get it done: work the weekend; hire a temp; delay another project… Whatever you need to do, get that first system in place. If you’ve chosen well, now you and your staff have fewer crises to deal with and more time freed up. Now with that new extra time and a whole lot of discipline, you can go ahead and implement additional systems that then save more time and reduce the number crises, and so on…

I believe the same approach can apply to our personal productivity. Force yourself, ask for help, whatever you need to do to break the cycle of “busy because you are too busy to get ahead of it”. Think about how much more relaxed you will be knowing, you are on top of things. (Okay, USUALLY!) And think about how much happier I will be when I email you for a meeting and you immediately reply with a meeting invitation, confirming one of the dates I’ve requested? Done and dusted, as they say! Now your brain (and mine) can move on to more important things…like when did I last test my smoke alarms?

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Collab365 Presentation [VIDEO]

I recently presented at a really cool 24-hour online Office365/SharePoint conference called Collab365. There was tons of great content.

Click the link below to see my particular talk. My live webcast was very well received, and the link below will get you the chat and a 1 hour recorded video. (Disclaimer: there’s a 45 second advert at the beginning.)

Zero to 365 in One Hour: How To Efficiently Build a SharePoint Portal

You can create a SharePoint Team Site in 30 seconds, but is it useful? Do people use it? Is it maintainable? How does it get populated?

Join Gerry Brimacombe of Lightlever Systems as he entertain us with stories of building SharePoint portals. Gerry will present the challenges we all face and solutions he has developed through real world experience coupled with his unquenchable thirst for always making it a little better (or faster or easier). Gerry will present the processes he follows and show us the templates he has developed to design staff portals, migrate files, manage people change, and train users.

You will learn :

  1. How to engage a team to design a SharePoint Portal.
  2. How to design a manageable permissions structure, and implement it.
  3. Some useful templates for design and gaining shared understanding.
  4. Techniques for iterative development.
  5. Some “gotchas” for file migration, and workarounds we’ve found.
  6. A simple training approach that works.

Features Covered:

  • Site design
  • Team sites
  • Wikis
  • Custom lists
  • Document libraries and migrating files to them
  • Permissions
Suitable For :
Developer, End User, Power User
CLICK HERE FOR THE RECORDED VIDEO AND CHAT
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Change and the Human Factor

As David Bowie knows, change can be difficult.

“Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (Turn and face the strain)…”, etc. (feel free to sing along…)

I was talking to a friend recently who is in the middle of moving. She was very stressed david-bowie-changes-brightout. Granted, changing houses is a huge change. But I like moving and the possibilities it can bring. I also like – and even get excited by – change in general.

“Time may change me
But I can’t trace time...”

So let’s face it. We’re all different.

Some people embrace change and some people run away screaming, or at least grit their teeth and forge on. When I’m doing projects, for example a corporate intranet that affects every staff member, the change feels big for them. From my point of view, I see huge improvements and possibilities for increased efficiency. I get excited about how life can get better for these people. Not everyone sees it my way.

Good people change management and good communication must prevail. I am not going to get into those details here, but focus on the human factor of change.

We’re all different and as managers or developers we have to respect the challenges that different people face with the new system, boss, job, or house. I don’t know what you’re thinking or what you’re feeling, and sometimes you don’t even know why you feel what you do. (I know I don’t understand where a lot of my feelings come from).

So I try and gently bring people along to the place of comfort with the new system. Whenever possible, I get them involved early in helping to design the solution. My friend Peter McCoppin says that people embrace what they help create. I think that makes a lot of sense, and I’ve seen it work. (If you watch the (rather long) video in my 0 to 365 blog post, you’ll see a bunch of the techniques that I use to get people involved and engaged from the very beginning of the project.)

Let me tell a story to illustrate how different points of view and different ways of thinking can be challenging, and helpful.

My stepmother was a schoolteacher, and she told some background on the two math teachers at my school. We’ll call them Mr. A and Mr. B.

Mr. A was brilliant; math always came easy to him.
Mr. B was different. He struggled with math throughout school and really had to work at it.

Who do you think was the better math teacher in grade 10?

Mr. A saw every may problem with crystal clarity. To him the solution was obvious. He would lose patience quickly if we students didn’t understand the problem, and he didn’t always have the best way of explaining.

Mr. B, however, had struggled with math, and figured out ways of figuring it out. He had to explain it to himself and somehow make sense. As a result, he had two great things going for him: 1. He had a bag of tricks of different ways to teach math – analogies, metaphors, shortcuts and long cuts; and 2. (most importantly) he had compassion for his students, because he knew what it was like to “not get it”.

Most of the students preferred Mr. B to Mr. A, and learned more, even though Mr. A was smarter.

As a somewhat technical person, it can be hard for me to understand when people aren’t “getting it”.  As a consultant and project manager I always try to be more like Mr. B: patient, compassionate, and if someone doesn’t understand, I look for another way to explain it. They’re not stupid, we just haven’t found what clicks yet. This can actually be kind of fun. Especially when the lights come on in somebody eyes and you see that they really got it and they relax and start to accept the change as being good.

Let’s try to keep the human difference in mind as we drive forward to the results of a successful system, a project completed on time, or a passing grade. Not only will it be more enjoyable for you and your team, you will get better results in the end.