In the press release I stated:

“We see the nGage toolset bringing value to many of our SharePoint projects especially nGage Intelligence – the behavioural analytics piece. We believe in metrics and measurable business outcomes.  Using nGage Intelligence to crystallise the current state and then track forward progress -is very compelling for us and our clients.”

Download the PDF Press release.

Some people don’t like the term to eat your own dog food, thinking it unappealing and something you wouldn’t want to do.  I’ve heard an alternative used a few times in the public sector – ‘Drinking your own champagne!’.  This sounds a little grand to me especially in these times of austerity – although I believe it was a little tongue in cheek.

At 21apps we are using more visualisation techniques and serious games to help our clients with break through thinking, goal alignment and generally changing the way they work for the better. The challenge is that you can’t just read a blog post or book and suddenly become an expert, you need to practice and you need to refine your skills.

2011 was a massive learning curve for us at 21apps, 2012 looks like being the same and we will continue to learn and refine our techniques and skills to help you deliver value from your projects.

Here an example of the things we did this week at 21apps HQ

Pros and Cons – what we do well and what can improve

We reviewed 2011 listing all the good things we did on the right and all the things that made us sad on the left.  This helped us get a shared view on things we wanted to do more of and things we needed to change or stop doing.

Often this technique is used during project retrospectives, its a way to reflect on the project and identify areas for improvement. I tend to use dot voting techniques to select the top items to address before/during the next project.

20:20 Vision

We took all of the elements we wanted to take forward to 2012, good things we wanted to make even better and bad things we wanted to change.  Using Innovation Games® we ranked these using 20:20 Vision.  This was a really interesting exercise as it allowed us to talk about the priorities but also how these aligned to the culture of the company – even to the point of saying ‘I know if I was still working here this would be much higher’.

Again the value of the visualisation helped with a shared vision for the company and where we saw our priorities.

Business Model Canvas

This technique is something we have used to help understand how 21apps works, where the relationships are with partners and customers, the value proposition we bring and the costs and revenue sources.  It’s a fantastic visual framework to allow you to explore your business model – so much so we have created a SharePoint related one that you will see a lot more of over the coming months.

For our review we modelled the AS-IS business at the end of 2011 and then explored the changes we would make and how the stack ranked challenges impacted on this and our vision for 2012.  Again using simple visual marker like increased/decreased font sizes to show more/less of a specific item – green text to show new and red text to show removed.

Big Hairy Audacious Goal

We created our BHAG looking at where we want to be in 2014 and beyond, everything we did in our 2011 reflection and 2012 planning always mapped back to the BHAG.

2012 looks promising for 21apps, we know where we are going and if we manage to achieve everything we set out to achieve we will have worked hard but enjoyed every minute of it .

The circular design was deliberate, adding value is an iterative process, the ability to examine the vision to reflect on where you were going and through the identity stage to map progress and organisational maturity to which we believe the Rightshifting principles hold true.

What the 21Shift model diagram doesn’t communicate well is the assumption that often the loop through the Identity and Vision stages is swift with only a check that things are moving in the right direction and a restating of the vision before the set of outcomes are explored.   Whilst other times there was a need to alter the vision, to reflect on the changes and the impact these had made before moving forward.

Recently our knowledge has been expanded, and some terminology introduced, in this area through the work of Eric Ries and the Lean Startup. This has led us to add more rigor to the Identity and Vision stages.  Here we specifically talk about the ideas of Pivot or Preserve and the use of Innovation Accounting as a way to measure the benefits in the realisation phase.

The lean startup is very much focused on product development as can been seen from the feedback loop Eric defines, and Eric puts great emphasis on reducing the time through the Build-Measure-Learn loop.

Our thinking has always been influenced by Systems Thinking and the work of W. Edwards Deming as he really did change the way people worked, and is still inspiring people to do just that. And then through the power of twitter I happened upon a great post by @marksweep – Double Loop Learning and the Lean Startup – where Mark looks back at the 90′s when the Learning Organisation was a hot buzzword and traces the ideas of Double Loop Learning and how these ideas expand on the work of Deming, which focus on Efficiency – which is great when you know your doing the right thing,  to Efficacy where you are able to produce the desired effect by questioning your assumptions.

Mark ends with the view that we have come full circle..  I would suggest perhaps that some organisation managed to Rightshift and become synergistic or even chaordic whilst the majority ended up left drifting.  Even though great ideas and theories where developed they got lost in the sea of analytic organisations that held on to the principles of command and control and unquestioning belief in Taylorism.  Perhaps this time, over 100 years since management as we commonly know it, there will be a significant shift and people will change the way they work.

Making your working day better for you, your colleagues, your organisation and customers!

Of course there’s still SharePoint stuff, but we’re evolving as an organisation, so we can now offer a greater breadth of services to you like “Serious Games”, “Innovation Consultancy” and SharePoint focussed personal development!

We’ve updated our “What we Do” page, go and check-it out for a greater insight to the awesome services we can now offer you!

Take a look below at an overview of what services we can now offer you, and get in touch with us to discuss how we can help change the way you work, bring innovation to the workplace and make your business life much easier!

Innovation Services:

• Serious Games Consultancy & Facilitation
  The seriously fun way to do serious work – seriously..!
  Let 21apps (The UK’s only Qualified Innovation Games® Instructors) work with your organisation to bring Serious Games such as Gamestorming, Innovation Games® and other innovative techniques into your business and get the leading edge on your competitors. Serious Games can help you be successful in delivering your projects, innovating, engaging stakeholders, prioritisation, identifying requirements, gaining customer feedback, product development, market research, workplace development and more..
  Find out more on the 21apps website
• Technology Innovation Consultancy
  Work with 21apps to deliver innovation into your organisation, team, projects and technology platforms including Microsoft SharePoint, Spigit, social media and more.
  We can help you with technology change management, business and stakeholder engagement, technology platform choices and project delivery.
  Give us a call to find out more.

SharePoint Rescue Missions:

• Emergency!
  Our “Emergency! “ offering is a full-on, targeted, sort-us-out service, designed to help you resolve your most pertinent, “I need help now!” SharePoint problems, whether its technology, business, governance, IA, infrastructure or user adoption issues you’re having.
  We will leave you with a pragmatic action plan and a huge sigh of relief!
  Find out more on the 21apps website
• SharePoint Governance Kick-Start
  We’ll review your current Governance and work with you to take action to start your SharePoint Governance on the right foot.
  Find out more on the 21apps website
• SharePoint Business Analysis Kick-Start
  We’ll work with you to bring your BA’s up to speed in the world of SharePoint, think facilitation not analysis and a whole lot more.
  Give us a call to find out more.

Be Awesome:

• SharePoint Team Awesome
  We’ll work on-site with you or remote-mentor your SharePoint team to become truly awesome in all aspects of delivering SharePoint Business Value.
  Give us a call to find out more.
• SharePoint Sensei
  We’ll work one-on-one on-site or remote-mentor your ‘Wannabe SharePoint Sensei’s” and train them like Ninjas in the craft of delivering SharePoint projects.
  Find out more on the 21apps website
• SharePoint Awesome++
  “SharePoint Awesome++” parachutes someone from 21apps into your organisation to work directly with you and mentor you in the most advanced concepts to ensure that your SharePoint capability rocks from both a business and technology perspective! Not for the feint hearted!
  Give us a call to find out more.

Training Services:

• Innovation Games® Training Services (www.InnovationGames.com)
  21apps are the UK’s only Qualified Instructors!
  Let us show you how “Serious Games = Serious Fun” and how these collaborative play techniques can help your organisation innovate, engage stakeholders, prioritise, identify requirements, gain customer feedback and more..
  Give us a call to find out more.
• SharePoint Innovation Games® Training Services
  We offer SharePoint specific Innovation Games® Training or Facilitation Services designed to help you be successful in delivering your SharePoint projects, realising business value and getting the leading edge on your competitors.
  Give us a call to find out more.
• 21apps SharePoint Delivery Workshop
  1 day workshop based on our proven method for delivering high quality, business value focussed SharePoint Solutions (www.21apps.com/ourmodel)
  Give us a call to find out more.
• SharePoint Governance and IA Master Class (www.spgovia.com)
  Run as either public (See www.spiauk.Eventbrite.com) or private courses (Contact us).
  Let us show you how to view the SharePoint world through a different lens. This Master Class pinpoints the critical success factors for SharePoint governance and Information Architecture and rectifies this blind spot with great tools and techniques

Just a Resource:

Subject to availability, we can deliver awesome SharePoint  resources and guru’s from a range of other disciplines from within 21apps and our trusted friends across the globe for your project whether you need someone for pre-sales, a client workshop, onsite consultancy or project delivery…
Find out more on the 21apps website

————————————-

We hope you like what you see here and hope that you’ll give us a call today to discuss how we can help you make a difference in your organisation!

By email: Ant Clay (Ant@21apps.com) / Andrew Woodward (Andrew@21apps.com)

Or phone: Ant Clay +44 7887 553551 / Andrew Woodward +44 7970 126829

Or on Twitter: @21apps / @Soulsailor / @AndrewWoody

We’re back from our business trip to the USA!

Our first time in the San Francisco bay area, great place and great people! In case you hadn’t realised we’d gone (or why), we were over there (myself and Andrew) being formally trained by Luke Hohmann of The Innovation Games Company in a fantastic “serious games” technique called Innovation Games® which you can use to help your organisation:

• Innovate
• Engage stakeholders
• Identify and prioritise requirements
• Gain customer feedback
• Market research
• Product development
• and more..

The technique can be used face-to-face or using their on-line platform.

Luke wrote an awesome book on the technique, and we have been using the techniques listed for a while now to great effect.

The Training Course in Mountain View

The training course was a fantastic experience for both myself and Andrew, with over 20 attendees from Cisco, Thoughtworks and lots of other awesome companies and none other than SharePoint MVP Michal Pisarek.

We spent two very very intensive days in Mountain View learning about the rationale behind innovation Games®, understanding the planning process, learning in great detail about each game (through serious play of course!), understanding how to process the and action results and exploring opportunities, scenarios and ways in which these Innovation Games® can be played in real world situations. I learnt a heap more about the technique itself but also about facilitation, human behaviour, product development and lots more, really well worth the trip to the US to take the course.

Reading the book is great, actually playing the games helps you improve and develop, but spending two days really digging into the details helps you fully understand the real value in serious games.

Here’s some of the action from the 2 days of training, it was unbelievable insightful, challenging and absolutely relevant to what we at 21apps are striving for:

What did we bring back on the plane?

Hint: It wasn’t wine or beer (although we did bring back shoes, chocolate, mini-surfboards, clothes, a baseball and a Hello Kitty doll)

Yep, 21apps, have been using the techniques for a while now, but are proud to be bringing Innovation Games® from the States  into the UK offically and even more excited that we are the only UK Qualified Innovation Games® Instructors!

What does Innovation Games® and 21apps actually mean to you?

We can give you advice and guidance about whether Innovation Games® is right for you.

We can deliver Training:

21apps are proud to be Gold sponsors of the forthcoming UK SharePoint Saturday being held in Nottingham on the 12th November.

The event promises to be pretty awesome with a packed schedule, great speakers and lots of opportunities for networking.

We’re lucky to be both exhibiting and running a couple of sessions through the day. On our stand we’re looking to do something a little different to the normal ‘Hello, would you like a brochure Sir’, but I won’t give away what were going to do yet!

We’re delivering two sessions, the first is:
Measuring the Intagible, SharePoint Social ROI
Your organisations Executive Board is going to want to see some kind of ROI and measurable business outcomes in your SharePoint ‘Social Computing’ business case, don’t disappoint them!

In this session we explore the dilemma of measuring the often perceived intangible benefits of SharePoint’s Social features and give practical examples and guidance as to how the benefits of ‘social’ can be very substantial and are absolutely quantifiable, although not always down to a simple ‘pounds and pence’ figure.

The second session will be a little different from the normal and will be in the “Ask the Experts Stream”. We’re going to run a 1 hour introductory workshop to Innovation Games:

SharePoint ‘Innovation Games’ Workshop
You can find out more about the concept at www.innovationgames.com or our website.

21apps have been using gaming techniques and Innovation Games ™ to help people roll out SharePoint and ensure it aligns to their business goals and aspirations. Even the most successful agile teams using techniques like Scrum fall down when it comes to getting a Shared Understanding and the rationale behind their requirements, so how can we expect our SharePoint deployment to do any better?

We look at why using Innovation Games ™ helps us clarify exactly what the business needs and does not need to achieve its goals, how through gaming facilitation techniques we can allow the business to engage with other business users in defining what it is they need from the platform – without being constrained by the traditional IT bias.

We look forward to seeing you all there, drop by our stand and we hope you’ll be able to attend at least one of our sessions!

Noun: the process of moving toward the more effective end of the 0-5 point Rightshifting Scale of Effectiveness. That is, the activity of improving one’s capability to achieve one’s chosen strategic goals and to deliver the outcome(s) desired by one’s customers by delivering exactly what is wanted, in the correct quantity, at the right place, when it is needed, for an acceptable price#

http://tagdef.com/rightshifting

Ant Clay, Chief Strategy Officer at 21apps, coined the phase ‘The Celery Effect‘ when he talked about the problems many technology projects encounter, where the cost of delivering the project is far higher than the benefit the organisation get from it.

Rightshifting is about improving an organisations capability to avoid ‘The Celery Effect’ by being focused on strategic goals and outcomes, delivering just enough technology and solutions at the right time and in the right place and for the right cost.

Ask any project stakeholder at the beginning of a project if they want to achieve their objectives and you’ll be hard pressed to find any that don’t.  However traditional ( here I’m referring to the Analytical approach ) methods rarely achieve these.  The challenge is always based on mindset and changing a mindset is not a simple activity.

What is the antidote?

At 21apps, we believe that you need to provide people with an approach, a way of getting started. People and Organisations don’t just start Rightshifting they need some encouragement, they need to be shown examples and sometimes they need a little faith.

‘The same is true for many seemingly counter intuitive processes, we need a little faith to try things that are at odds with our programmed analytical mindset’

The 21apps Organisational Shift Model is an approach that we have developed, based on experience and belief that there is a better way, that everyone and every company is capable of Rightshifting.

Identity – Where are you with respect to 21apps Organisational Shift Model?

Based upon the Marshall Model for Organisational Evolution (Rightshifting) we examine, assess and document your organisational maturity.

Vision – What is your organisational vision and strategy? Consolidating a shared understanding of where you are going and what you need to achieve.

Using a number of concepts and techniques including Hybrid Organisations, Vision Mapping, Cynefin, and Strategic Goal Alignment we seek to extract and articulate the organisational vision.

Outcomes – We facilitate the definition of value, outcomes and requirements you need to deliver for your organisation, business, customers, citizens or stakeholders.

The traditional practice of articulating project requirements is typically driven by functional capabilities. Our method elicits the business needs and value, linked to the organisational strategy and outcomes, through issue mapping, benefit aligned roadmaps, De Bono’s “Six Thinking Hats” and other industry proven techniques.

Solution – We help you define your organisation and solution architectures.

Combining Rightshifting and Hybrid Organisation concepts we help you identify the organisational and cultural change. Through Systems thinking and best practices, we work with business and IT stakeholders in defining the solutions needed to achieve the vision and outcomes. We underpin these with the deep technical knowledge and experience.

Delivery - Through governance and leadership we help deliver the organisational vision and value.

Working in synergy with your existing IT capability, and partners, we deliver organisational and technological leadership, troubleshooting, training and expert consultancy throughout the delivery and on-going support phases.

Realisation – Measuring the realisation of business outcomes, and looking forward through the re-iteration of the identity and vision stages.

Through long term relationships we provide leadership and develop your internal capabilities and experience to establish an organisational culture focused on strategic outcomes and continuous improvement.

What people have said about 21apps Org Shift Model

Unbelievably excellent documentation again from 21Apps. Very impressed! SharePoint Organisational Shift Model rocks!

@21apps are held in high regard within LeO. Integrity, Honesty and Experience are making a world of difference to our Organisation.

If you want to know more about the 21apps Org Shift Model, think you are experiencing ‘The Celery Effect’ or would like know how Rightshifting can help your organisation get in touch.

Andrew Woodward @AndrewWoody andrew@21apps.com

Ant Clay @Soulsailor ant@21apps.com

Over the last few years it’s become increasingly apparent that technology led SharePoint projects are like celery, they burn up lots of energy yet deliver limited or no real value.

In my experience, and that of my colleagues at 21apps, there are some fundamental traits or SharePoint project issues that we frequently come across:

• Solution delivery of projects based upon platitudes rather than shared understanding of business outcomes
• Technology deployment framing and guiding the functional requirements
• Lack of KPI’s and measurability of the project delivery. How do we know we have delivered the solution and met the business objectives
• Business Value versus Business Requirements – the dichotomy of business requirements.

We like to view our approach as an antidote to SharePoint projects that fail to deliver any measurable value. The 21apps fresh approach to the delivery of projects is based upon what the organisation is trying to achieve, in line with the higher level objectives, and not based on individuals wants or cool features that techies want to play with.

Oh and please stop calling it a “SharePoint project”, your end users and customers don’t care about the technology; I’ve told you this before, but your still doing it aren’t you?

We’ve spent the last few months distilling, reviewing, mulling over, collaborating, reading, thinking, tweeting, and generally pooling knowledge and experience to see if we could put things down on paper. Out of this we have built the foundations of the “21apps SharePoint Organisational Shift Model”; which we believe to be a more compelling approach to solving business problems with SharePoint and Office 365, and delivering more for less.

The model has the following stages:

1. Identity - Where are you with respect to 21apps SharePoint Organisational Shift Model?

2. Vision - What is your organisational vision and strategy? Consolidating a shared understanding of where you are going and what you need to achieve.

3. Outcomes - We facilitate the definition of value, outcomes and requirements you need to deliver for your organisation, business, customers, citizens or stakeholders.

4. Solution - We help you define your organisation and solution architectures, including IA and Governance.

5. Delivery - Through our governance models and leadership we help you deliver the organisational vision and value. Helping you understand the value of continuous delivery of solutions and services, and continuous improvement.

6. Realisation - Measuring the realisation of business outcomes, and looking forward through the re-iteration of the identity and vision stages.

We believe we have a new approach to delivering projects, to be honest the approach would work across any technology platform, but for us SharePoint and Office 365 is our primary focus and that’s where we can see the Model delivering real value.

Behind the Model there are numerous really interesting theory’s and bodies of knowledge, each having a massive amount of rigour and research, all looking to improve the way we work:

• Organisational Rightshifting
• Systems Thinking
• Hybrid Organisations
• Lean / Agile / Kanban

Each of these is pretty cool in isolation, but combined with our SharePoint, development, delivery, strategic experience and knowledge, they offer a compelling approach to delivering SharePoint business value.

What’s next for the 21apps SharePoint Organisational Shift Model?

• A suite of techniques, processes and methodologies to support the entire Model
• Workshops so we can educate our clients, and share our passion and experience to help others deliver SharePoint business value
• More blog posts
• Enhancing 21SCRUM to better support “shared understanding”
• Where appropriate developing new products
• And keep this to yourselves, we’re also gonna write a book!

There needs to be a seismic shift in the way things get delivered; it is an exciting time to be in business and to be part of this. We are passionate about what we are doing, our experience shows that this does work and we really can help you deliver more for less.

If anything in this post strikes a chord with you, or you want to find out more please talk to us. We would love to help you deliver SharePoint Business Value with SharePoint and Office 365!

Our accountants had us doing Excel based accounts, but we ditched them about 18 months ago and are now using the fantastic Freeagent.  (This was one of the best things we ever did!). We are growing our CRM capabilities with CapsuleCRM which is proving useful as we expand our customer base and grow.

One area that we kept on premise was our development build servers.  Which was strange as our source control has always been cloud based. We are using the brilliant Beakstalk Subversion hosting as it provides the backup and security we need, plus it allows us to create repositories that we can share with customers and partners with little effort. But, from memory it was almost certainly costs, our build servers ran on Virtual Machines on my development rig, which is plenty fast enough. 

The main problem with the on premise location of the build server was not the performance of the server, but the pitifully slow broadband connection that I get out here in the wilds of the Shropshire/Wales border. 

Well as of today, at around 21:00 pm, having moved the last of the build configurations up to our new hosted build servers (we are using Fasthosts virtual servers) I can finally say that

21apps are all in.

We no longer have any of our services running on premise. 

Sure we still have laptops, and I do have a dev rig, but none of these machines are part of the services used to run the company, we truly are a Hybrid Organisation, and it feels great!

What is Movember?

In simple terms

1) We donate our face for the month of November and grow a Moustache

2) You sponsor us for doing it

3) Money goes to prostate cancer charity to help save lives

For a more detailed description check out the Movember site.

I would post pictures here, but really its something thats better left on the Movember site and Twitter.

All I ask is that you take a moment to donate, even if it’s only a few pounds.  Every little helps.

If you really must see how great the Mo’s have been over the month then take a look