I distinctively remember the looks of surprise in everyone's faces when I first announced the upside-down organizational structure as the model we would be following as a company. This was in July 2010 in the closing presentation of the mid-year review in Salamanca. I wrote "operations must be at the core of our company's management focus and must be the engine of all continual improvement  efforts." A picture of a big BMW engine was used to assist me to spare a thousand more words.

This upside-down turn in the structure was graphically represented by flipping horizontally our organizational chart and making it resembling a tree full of leaves. The lower part of the trunk was the place where I have placed myself as CEO, the trunk being the board of directors, and each department a branch in the tree. The fact that operations were now placed at the top of management attention resulted in establishing a series of structurally fixed meetings (usually Friday) where anyone can take part so long as there is any issue to be addressed. These are called the weekly operational meetings and themes range from sales & backoffice to sales & marketing. In fact "sales" are really at the core of these meetings.

It was with this new structure well in place that the thought-provoking presentation about employee work time effectiveness as a key business advantage was made later in the year. I remember it immediately sparked a wide debate about the use of "time sheets" as a management support tool, most complaining it was a pure waste of time.

Since long, we had established a "time sheet" reporting system where every employee filed a hand written piece of paper for every work week. More recently with the adoption of Google Apps, every employee submits an electronic version of the original paper form, converted in a spreadsheet. Really the problem with that "paper-based" system is that it can gives us a view of where we are spending our time but it does not guarantees that the best possible use of time is being made. Anyone knows how to trick a "time-sheet" to cover hidden unproductive time, but that is not the point at all... For instances, when I Google-searched the Netviewer's white paper in our intranet to copy-paste the quote I used above, I have found our employees have spend a total of 12 hours, assisting to on-line conferences and sales demos that were offered by that provider during the last 6 months. If we average our hourly wage cost I guess that we have spend more money finding about this tool than its actual cost for one year. This is precisely the kind of information that any time-management system can offer, and it was clearly not what we needed.

The driving quest was how to make sure every hour of our collective work time is the most effectively spend possible in order to reach organizational excellence - the smooth riding of the BMW engine... Could the new web 2.0 tools assist us in that process? The results were not at all related with technology implementation although the groupware-enabled features of our Google Apps platform were really instrumental. Yet technology must always be seen as a "means" to accomplish the goal of "group collaboration", never the end in itself. The critical factor was really the learning process that transformed the management of the company in an "upside-down" hierarchical thinking. It was surprising for me to discover the new forms my role as a CEO was taking, becoming close to those of a "meeting architect". I had to establish the foundations of how group collaboration must overcome individual-based thinking and therefore to become a key driver for the decisions that make the employees work time to be used in the best possible way.

 

Key innovations were:

a) The upside turn in the company structure.

b) The implementation of web-based project management tool.

c) Finally,  Estabishing a new meeting methodolgy:  

The recipe is really to go ahead and start with a .0 version of whatever you envision could be the final solution. One should never be deterred by not having all the answers. What I did in July last year, was setting a framework where all the pieces of the puzzle would fit. The organization was conceived as up-side down with the focus on operations. Then I realized that we would had to find a way to proactively manage time and not just reporting how we spend it. And the "solution" was found with a popular web 2.0 project management tool - Manymoon. The essence is to think about work differently. Rather than considering work as series of interrelated independent actions, performed by separate individuals in the same department, Manymoon conceives any piece of work as the result of a project, where tasks can be assigned at given individual participants, regardless of their place in the company structure. This exposes group collaboration into a different wave length of practice. Colleagues from other department need to be specifically called upon projects with deadlines, and this is forcing each and one of us to have a much clearer view on work commitments and continually check the company's priorities.

Implementing a web 2.0 project management tool is not a simple task. Be careful. I am talking here about a small organization (50 people) that has since long lived with groupware tools, from Lotus Notes to Groove and currently to Google Apps. Yet, most of our employees still resist cautiously to start using a new groupware tool. There are several reasons for this, but one was clrearly identified. E-mail was still the most powerful and time consuming communication method in our organization. The solution, or at least a part of it, was to use my own example as a CEO. I suddenly realized that if I wanted to have Manymoon fully implemented and take advantage of its built-in time reporting features I really needed to start using the tool myself, which I did, painfully adapting myself to its plain web 2.0 format. However, after the first weeks with Manymoon I found out that I could be proactive in relation to e-mail for the first time in my life. I would start my day looking at all my projects and to comment on the tasks that I have been assigned or that I have assigned to others. Manymoon has a great option which is to e-mail comments, so anyone not yet using Manymoon on a daily basis will be receiving an e-mail with selected comments or tasks that were scheduled to happen. I have started to read e-mail less often and be always attentive to Manymoon social activity, therefore making sure anyone using the tool would have his or her CEO immediate attention, which is not the case for anyone sending me plain e-mail.

Yet the real challenge was still ahead. Manymoon requires a new management attitude to be successfully deployed organization wide. The key to collaborative work is to properly address the "problem solving" process that lies behind any work project. David Strauss' book "How to make collaboration work" was really instrumental here. It explained me the 5 principles of collaborative work, and if properly applied these can be instrumental in setting up the right dynamics for great project management with Manymoon, or whatever other management tool you would be choosing to use. However, I confess, we also made it without following any of the Strauss' principles, but the results are derived from pure instinct and I wanted to have an organization relying on a sounder principle than that. As Kurt Lewin once wrote "there is nothing as practical as a good theory".

Starting from an upside-down organization with a clear focus in operational excellence, we found that work time management was a key competing advantage. So, in order to proactively manage our work time, we implemented a project management tool only to discover that the secret of success is really how to make "collaborative work" work. That led us to our final discovery - our own internal meetings architecture.

Our company specializes in groupware technology and since a long time has been the distributor of SMART Technologies – a market leader in collaboration solutions. We are so used to use the SMART Board interactive whiteboard as a productive enhancement for our internal meetings that we never thought about the importance of having an established "meeting protocol" for our own internal meetings - a protocol that implements the Strauss principles of group collaboration. This was created and has been widely explained and accepted by everybody in the company. Once this protocol was implemented our meetings’ administration dramatically improved. More recently we are trying to improve our meeting processes and started to re-use a series of "meeting heursistics" or project templates published by The Grove Consulting, SF, CA. These meeting heuristics provide the anchors for designing group processes out of which the projects and associated tasks get created in Manymoon. So we are probably on version .3 of our "Organizing 2.0" and we will probably be evolving still further. Great new web 2.0 tools are being internally researched every day. Google Apps such as Mavenlink or MindMeister can greatly complement our internal meeting protocols. But it was the .0 version that mattered the most.

The entire team of groupVision needs to be credited for this story, but in particular, all the members of the consulting services business unit and the four volunteer facilitators in last Company Day. It was really a pleasure to start their training process which was a source of great new knowledge.

The book from David Strauss: "How to make collaboration work", BK Publishers, SF, CA - a great source of inspiration for our internal meetings protocol

The books from David Sibbet  "Team Perfomance Guides", published by The Grove Consultants International, SF, CA.

Manymoon - project management web 2.0 tool, recently acquired by Salesforce.com