Frank Michael Kraft's Blog

I promised to explain more about my solution for Workstreams, that I implemented in the Cloud, using Microsoft Windows Azure.

First of all I have Workstreams and Workitems that are part of the Workstreams. These can be decomposed into finer ones. Each Workitem has a status and an estimate about the remaining effort. This way I can aggregate the remaining effort for a complete Workstream.

I will explain in Webinars how I work with these. I have encountered several patterns of knowledge work, using these. I found it quite practical to define bigger goals and then to decompose these later into concrete steps. But I have encountered many more patterns of daily knowledge work than this one. I will also give a preview of the Software in the Webinars.

To each Workitem I can attach documents, pictures and notes. Thus I have all information available once I work with the Workitem. Or if I have information (e.g. an email) I ask myself: To which Workitem / Workstream does it belong to? Then I would attach it to the Workitem / Workstream and keep my email inbox clean. If I can’t attach it to a Workitem, then the email is not so important anyway. Or – of course if it is, then I would create a new Workitem first, belonging to a given Workstream.

But this was not enough. I wanted to keep under control until when I would have to complete what. Instead of maintaining a completion date for all 2.000+ Workitems (which would be out of date very soon) I defined Sprints – i.e. milestones with a predefined date. I assigned Workitems to these Sprints as I found feasible. This way I am able to see the remaining work for each Sprint. This is the only kind of “order” I give to my Workitems. Other than this, they are not ordered – so I don’t have to maintain too much unnecessary information as with other project tools that I know. This lets me be flexible and agile.

You might ask how I aggregate the remaining work for Sprints, if hierarchical Workitems are assigned to different Sprints. Well – I have solved this.

Then I was able to create Analytics for the progress of my work. I am able to visualize the remaining work of my Sprints as time progresses. This is my Burndown Diagram.

As time progresses I see how much I still have to do, and how successful I was to burn down the remaining work for the next Sprints and in whole. Of course, new work is added as well. Sometimes existing work is moved to another Sprint or a new Sprint is created and existing Work is assigned.

Do I feel I have my work under control? Yes. Is it flexible enough to adapt the plan to unplanned events? Sure. Is the could implementation an advantage or a disadvantage? I found it to be an advantage. I have access to the information wherever I am where there is a Computer or with my iPhone. Think of the famous new iPad – it fits perfectly.

Until today I am using this Workstream Platform all on my own. Later this year I am planning to use it as a collaboration platform, inviting others to work with me. Then the cloud implementation will play out its full strength.

Already in November the Wall Street Journal posted an article It’s a Free Country… …So why can’t I pick the technology I use in the office? that made me ponder.

I have come to the conclusion in the meanwhile, that the appearance of IT will change.

As noted in the article, there is a sense of IT limitation in the offices at the one hand and the reluctance to change in the IT departments. “Never touch a running system.” – an old proverb that contains much wisdom. Of course the problem is cost of change.

As noted in the article, everybody installs one or some forbidden tools on his office computer, much to the discontent of the IT departments. We can’t help – in the end we have to have the best tools for our work.

In the end the article shortly touches on cloud software, but does not elaborate its potential. But when I think of it, it overcomes many of the difficulties mentioned. There is nothing to install on the office computer. Just use the browser. Neither does it disrupt existing systems. There is no big change project. Just use it. Ok – if there is a project group or department they need to decide which one they would want to use and how they organize it.

I expect IT’s role to change over time. Instead of being responsible for making the systems run, they become the central point of governance which services are good to use and which they will veto against. They will have quality criteria that they will apply. This will relieve the IT department of much of today’s burden and let them concentrate on their core competency. Also it will release budget for interesting forward looking projects.

That’s not only, because individuals want to use the best tools possible. It’s also because other forms of work are strongly emerging, among which I want to emphasize Knowledge Work and Collaboration between organizational entities. More and more project groups emerge that work cross enterprises and organizations in non-standard – i.e. in unpredictable or only partially predictable processes and collaborations. Why is (was?) there such a hype about Google Wave? Isn’t that the reason? Google Wave is just a small forerunner of the tide to come. Completely new forms of applications will emerge that will offer functionality for organizing these new kind of processes. Multi-Enterprise Business Applications may be a good name for them.

And the processes they cover will differ from those processes that we know today and that are commodity. As I already stressed those processes will be agile, adaptive, unpredictable, partially predictable, collaborative, creative, knowledge oriented. I hesitate to call them processes, because “process” implies: First do that, then this. That is not the kind I am speaking of. A Knowledge Worker complies with such a process only in rare cases. Neither is it desireable. The Knowledge Worker needs enabling for the goal he wants to achieve and the he or she best knows how to achieve – and to have the freedom to try, to fail, to retry and to succeed. So we might call the new work pattern Workstream instead of Process.

So which IT department would be responsible for such a Multi-Enterprise Business Application? The natural answer is: It will be served as “Software as a Service” by an independent provider and the individual Enterprise will purchase users. That is another strong reason, why the IT will change – because there is practically no other way to address this emerging demand.

I wanted to continue the discussion about my goals management that I started in salesforce.com. The problem was that the data structure did not fit my needs so well and that I wanted to implement business functionality – i.e. aggregation of remaining effort, but I did not want to invest too much into learning APEX, the salesforce.com proprietary programming language. I could, but I thought why live with the limitations of the platform, if I could try to build my own cloud platform? Maybe later I come back to salesforce.com, but for now I want to try Microsoft Windows Azure.

To quickly wrap it up: It was a good decision. I have built 9 Business Objects in the meanwhile of which the first one was the most difficult obviously. The others quite naturally follow. These are as of now: Workitem, Sprint, Book, Attachment, Note, Payment, Regular Payment, Statement, Transaction. Furthermore I have added Analytical Objects for the purpose of analyzing the Business Objects. I will explain by and by what they do. I will not explain the programming model and architecture of Microsoft Windows Azure in detail. You can inform yourself in public sources, if you want. The UI is HTML – so it’s not worse than salesforce.com. Plus I have added some diagrams in Microsoft Silverlight.

I was able to quickly implement the business logic, that I wanted to have. The programming language I use is C#, which I like. After implementation you press a button (ok, three, four) and then the application is running live in the cloud. It’s just so easy, lean and clean.

So the first Business Object I implemented is the Workitem. In salesforce.com I called it Goal – I am still a little bit indecisive how to call it. I can say so far that it is different from all other Workitems or Tasks that I happen to know. I asked myself what I need for my daily work. My work is that of a Knowledge Worker. It is in good part unpredictable, but not unrelated. Also it is not unplanned. And it has clear goals and a clear purpose. So for this requirement I tailored this Business Object Workitem and I worked with it for many weeks now. I have worked now with at least 3000 instances of it and I am more happy with it than with any other task or project tool that I used so far. I have my work under control now, notwithstanding the fact that many unpredicted events occurred and adaptations of the plan were either necessary or chosen by me.

And: It is served in the cloud. Obviously this means that I can access it from every computer with a browser, which I regularly do. Recently I was in a shop and wanted to buy a memory extension. I did not remember the model. So I asked, if I could quickly use the computer, logged into my Platform and looked it up. Just as easy. In other instances I just pulled out my iPhone, logged into my Platform – using the standard browser, and edited some workitems. I did not even have to write an iPhone App for this. Although I might in the future.

What did I do with the old workitems/goal instances that I had already created in salesforce.com including attachments and notes? Within two days I migrated them completely into my Azure Workstream Platform. How? Salesforce.com offers web services to read the content. So I pulled out the Web Service Description (WSDL) from my salesforce application – which as we remember were custom objects – into Microsoft Visual Studio, generated WebService Proxies for that, mapped them into my Business Object Structure and then pulled the content over. That’s it. From that point on I as productive in my own Azure Workstream Platform. And I am until today.

I will explain more about the functionality of the Business Objects, that I created, soon.