Sharing at Work

Friday morning I attended an entertaining project management summit between a few folks from my IT solutions group and two business-related teams.  We discovered that each team has a different set of paperwork that they’re accustomed to filling out.  There were a few versioning errors (i.e. two different versions of the same handout floating around the meeting) and a lot of “we’ll update that and send it back to you”.  Everyone in the meeting was intelligent and motivated but as usual I can’t help but worry that we’re hurting ourselves by exchanging MS Office documents in a convoluted Reply All workflow. 

E-mail continues to shape my workflow

I attended the meeting as a junior member / technical consult for the IT team.  When the PMs on the business side start updating their functionals and sending them back to my team are they going to remember to include me on the mail?  Will the documents be stored in a place where I can see them?  Are they going to be indexed and searchable?  If three years of history are any indication, we’ll have our documents stored in the respective teams’ network file folders without a strong link between them.

I spent a lot of the meeting mulling the idea of interrupting with an “HEY LETS PUT ALL OF THIS ON SHAREPOINT!  I’LL PUT THE SPECS ON A FORUM OR WIKI AND EMAIL YOU ALL THE LINK!” outburst.  I chickened out because I’m relatively new to this team and I’ve never met most of the people in that meeting.  I just don’t have the political capital to push something like that right now.  The good news is that most of the supervisors in my department are on board the SharePoint train.  I wouldn’t say anyone’s as enthusiastic about it as I am but things are surely moving in the right direction.

I’ll continue taking .doc files out of my inbox and putting them on SharePoint, but I’m not going to shove it down anyone’s throats this year.

Image by Chris Rasmussen via Wikinomics

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