Category — Collaboration

Link for feedreaders:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrlSkU0TFLs

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http://improveverywhere.com/2008/03/09/food-court-musical/

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I think Ed Lee hit the nail when he recently blogged about the Annual Review keeping the FH Bloggers from, well blogging. I’m told to spend no more than a few hours on preparing my self assessment, anything more is too much. I think in total, I’ve worked on/thought about my self assessment for at least 15 or more hours. I just turned it in last night but am still thinking about it and probably will continue to for the next few weeks.

I think it’s an annual process that shouldn’t be taken lightly. You’re reflecting on an entire year and forecasting out an entire year. I think that takes a lot more then just a few hours. It can be draining and daunting but is imperative to determining your next move. I conduct a SWOT on myself and a Situation Analysis on me within the company and my group every year at this time. It’s defined as:

A strategic planning tool used to evaluate the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats involved in a project or in a business venture or in any other situation of an organization or individual requiring a decision in pursuit of an objective.

I think it’s an eye opening habit that is vital. Taking inventory of strengths and weaknesses is necessary when determining your SWOT, and your Situation Analysis is important in determining if you can accomplish your goals. (Must be all of those years in Marketing speaking.) After you’re done you can feel great about the situation you’re in and where you see yourself going. However, the opposite can be said as well. It can be devastating to see on paper the situation you’ve allowed yourself to get in.

I think a good source for tips and ideas is David Maister’s blog. Here’s one of my favorite pieces he’s done on you and your career.

Annual reviews can be draining, and I think it’s important to take them seriously, and spend more then just a few hours on them. After the next few weeks I plan to see FH’ers blogging more. Hopefully we all come out of our annual reviews feeling charged and ready to accomplish our goals.

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I get asked a lot about how del.icio.us can be used for teams in companies. I worked with my boss Beth Ward, to come up with some good uses for collaboration in teams using del.icio.us as well as looked in the blogosphere for some good use cases. Here is what we came up with:

To make this work for your team set up an account for say Marketing Communications. Each member of the team can add new links to the account, using a shared set of tags. This account will then be viewed by others at http://del.icio.us/Marketing

Reasons for using:

• Use social bookmarking and tags to create an ongoing “library” for your email (or RSS) newsletter readers. You will be creating a valuable growing resource for your team – and they can also contribute to the “mind share’ by adding relevant resources.
• Use tags to gather and organize resources for your team. These can be public or private tags, but this makes it incredibly easy to organize and share reports, articles, whitepapers, data sheets, industry research, etc. that may be stored all over the web by simply tagging appropriate web pages. Link to the social tag from your web site, intranet, or extranet.
• Create special tags for your presentations or training sessions. Gather all the resources discussed. such as web sites, studies, tools, etc. into one easy place for your team to reference post-event. Team members can also add resources they know of or find later.
• Use tags for your personal bookmarks and research. Because tags are so much more flexible than browser-based bookmarks, it makes it easy to find relevant resources you might otherwise “lose” in your “Favorites” lists. You can tag them with more than one tag, allowing you to find content evoked by differing circumstances or needs. Plus, because they are stored on the web rather than your own computer, you can get to them from anywhere – including mobile devices or someone else’s computer.

Let me know if you have any other good ideas. I couldn’t find a lot on this in the blogosphere.

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