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Community Problem Solving

This post is to spitball some ideas I have had over the last year that I would like to see come to fruition in 2025.

I have been involved in many organisations, communities, and groups over the years, and there has always been a need common to all of them.

To solve problems that matter, better and faster.

This project will focus on kickstarting a community driven program of problem solving immediate community needs that embraces complexity and systems thinking.

The objective is to link people with problems to a more diverse community of problem solvers.

The focus will be to share an appreciation of emergent rather than reductive processes for problem solving while delivering community needs by connecting community groups with complex problem solvers from industry, academic and innovation backgrounds as a service.

The goal is to move the project quickly to a sustainable model funded by industry with the need to engage with a more diverse community than would normally be available to their organisation.

ISO15288 SysEngineering Hybrid

Way back in 2008, something was really bothering me about the state of quality management. Mostly inspired by some pretty woeful projects, I was sure there should be some better approaches. My initial thoughts focused on better technical delivery using PSP/TSP as demonstrated by NavAir. This led me to the Carnegie Mellon SEI Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI) and various other interpretations of assessing organisational process maturity. But this beggared the obvious question, “What comes after Maturity ?”

My approach at that time (2015) was the idea of rapid prototyping within a managed sandbox environment with manage interfaces to formal business as usual (BAU) systems. As you can see from my post, I was already looking to tie the differing standard based approaches to project management into some sort of hybrid.

In 2012 ISO started to make similar improvements to their approach to management standards by using Annex SL to standardise the from and structure of ISO Management System Standards (see a list of the standards that have been updated to Annex SL).

You will note that Annex SL approach has features that I think would seem familiar to almost anyone who has worked in management over the last 50 years (if not forever!). To me I see the best of all current favourite management philosophies. You have;

The obvious similarities to 6σ (DMIAC) & design for 6σ (DMADV).
The clearly review points and interfaces between stages of Prince2.
The clear separation of leadership/project management functions from technical delivery of ISO 15288 and Prince2.
And yes … even an Agile/Lean approach if you take the above figure as an single iteration rather then an overall upfront approach.

ISO 15288 has not been updated to the ISO SL Annex form of Management Standards but it does have a clear separation of management processes from technical processes. It is my preferred standard that I shoe horn in to what ever collaborations I am involved. What is it missing are some more rigorous methods to manage interfaces. These I have identified my preferred approaches to;

Community/stakeholder strategic engagement through Future Inquiry (Blewett, Shaw, 2018).
Eliciting user stories to identify stakeholder/user requirements using a consultative process inspired by the UTS U.Lab BikeTank project’s 5×5 design thinking method (see the book pg 88) and then formalising resulting stories by documenting them using Gherkin /plain language test cases for Behaviour Driven Design.
Managing risk through the application of the EN 50126 model based approach of the demonstration of system performance in terms of expected levels of Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety.
An ITIL inspired Change Management process.
And ultimately, the interfacing of system operations to ITIL inspired Service Agreements/Catalogues.

This is my approach thus far. I cannot recommend draw.io enough to produce these diagrams!

Sentiment Analysis

Inspired by a very poorly presented Survey, I stared to delve into how to better present the data as a pitch for that potential client. As per usual, this raised more questions then it answered and I started to look at the detailed workflow to process survey results and present them.

What quickly became obvious was there was a need to augment the survey outcome data by tying it back to the original quest for knowledge/insight, participants reasons (dare I say motivation)
for engagement in this quest and other sources of data to better elicit knowledge/insight.

Not so quickly came my own insight into this process, that there are three main drivers for this engagement;

Directed engagement through pushed information such as advertising, survey questions, news, etc. (Coloured YELLOW)
Organic engagement through spontaneous peer to peer, or peer to named entity interactions (coloured GREEN) which are related to the knowledge through relevant metadata. As an aside, other data sources are similarly related to the research via metadata.
(Gap) My concept for TragectoRate. No social media captures peoples intentions, aspiration, values, thoughts, blue sky ideas. (Colour BLUE)

The worklow consists of;

Cleanse and Aggregate data sources to a publishable raw data set.
Process data to extract features for presentation.
Presentation layer that is relatable to the initial inquiry.

Hello world! KS Back Again

Welcome to WordPress. This is your 1st . Edit/delete it, then start writing!

This is useful as it recorded when the site came back up again. I have manually added the older posts from the Wayback Machine and going through my thought process to find my original theme.

I eventually remembered it was a numbered theme, then I think it was a default theme … luckily WordPress picks a default theme yearly and I fluked onto starting this blog on a year which I liked the default theme!

Welcome to KS Themed Twenty-Fifteen Mark 2.

Half Time … Change Sides – or Monthly Planning

Well not only is it the middle of the Olympics but its the middle of my Month too. I has someone ask me what I did at the weekend earlier in the month, to which I replied some what guiltily that I just hung out at home and quickly added I did hit a gig at The Commons on Friday night.

This did prompt the thought of what actually have I been doing with my time and what about the rest of the month. To this end, I hit my schedule view of my calendar and manually made a weekly visualisation that tickled my fancy at the time. A more object oriented version I guess.

Once I did this to not only alleviate my guilt factor of having a weekend off, I soon realised I don’t have very much free time. In fact, barely enough to take advantage of my co-working space.

I applied colours by week obviously. Rectangle to keep track of when I planned to attend my co-working space and rounded rectangles when out and about elsewhere. Thicker boarders for when I am in Sydney.

Initially, I limited the visualisation to the working week and the calendar month but then soon extended to five full 7 day weeks. (well it will when I finish organising Sept).

What I like about this over a conventional calendar monthly view is the structure and additional information I am drawing upon through colour and shape. The big take how is how much of my time I am spending on networking, the return on that investment and balance of productive work I should be pursing.

In addition to this, I did get a post from my Jawbone Move that I am still amazingly getting enough if somewhat irregular sleep.

FreeMind Mind Maps

I have used FreeMind for years to gets some of the clutter in my mind into a bit more structured form on paper for consumption of others.

While I have always loved doing this on the desktop and it is actually the easiest way to work, what I have missed is some mobile access to tweak or view mind maps. However I have come across two iOS apps to help in this regard.

FREEMINDLITE (VIEWER)

This app is a very basic FreeMind viewer. FreeMind files are uploaded to the iphone view a web interface from your desktop.

MINDGO 2 (EDITOR)

This is a text heirachical view of the mind map that allows you to add and edit nodes. It can transfer files via Dropbox or the iTunes File Manager. Not visual but you can fiddle a brain storm on the train going home.Now neither of these mobile solutions offer an easy or synchronous experience but both are useful for quick views and small tweaks.

re:Design Thinking #7

I attended an event at ThoughtWorks in Sydney for the Sydney Design Thinking Meetup group re:Design. The speaker, Alvaro Márquez (Head of Service Design, Experience Strategy, R&D at Australian Broadcasting Corporation) was more of an interviewer trying to elicit a conversation on what Design Thinking means to each of the 70+ people attending personally.

Well as personally as you can get in a group that large!

To that end I have put up a survey to get some more input from the group. All results are public and available to be viewed upon completion of the survey (make sure to bookmark the link or contact me with any problems).

I made the following notes during the talk on Asus VivoTab 8 using Microsoft OneNote 2016 on Windows 8.1 (a story for another time);

WHO ARE YOU?

Hybrid designer. Expert at 1 thing & pretty good at a lot of things
Solving bigger problems

WHAT KEEPS YOU AT NIGHT?

The future. Regret about past. Anxious about the future.
Drives you crazy by solving a lot of complex shit for other people. Compromising you own well being.
Walk in any direction. Cooking for friends. Thinking about the experience.

WHAT DO YOU LOOK FORWARD TO WAKING UP IN THE MORNING?

Commute/walk/ride to work to get into right head space. Me time.
Do more then design. Fill in the missing dots. Diversity.

HOW MUCH NON DESIGN WORK ARE YOU WILLING TO DO TO SOLVE A DESIGN PROBLEM?

Admin to have good environment for team
Communication of value of design process. Evangelising. Engaging in process.
Mundane tasks are meditative for design problem solving.
Emotional intelligence support as team therapist.

DO YOU THINK EVERY PROBLEM IS A DESIGN PROBLEM THAT CAN BE SOLVED?

Design is the manifestation of intent. Not all solutions are designed.
Is a design approach fit for purpose. ROI. Efficiency.
Human centred design or no human participation in solution.
Complex environments is cause by previous designs & exacerbating/solving the wrong solutions.

WHAT NEW MISTAKES DID YOU DO LAST YEAR?

Presenting a complete solution kills the design process.
Assume communication has occurred.
Scaling design before its required

WHO IS REALLY IN CHARGE AND HOW MUCH YOU ARE WORTH?

What value do you bring to an organisation. Measurable outcomes.
Organisation issue.
Create the design environment & the business comfortable with design decisions

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU EXPERIENCED FLOW AT WORK?

Balance + multitasking
Human genome run project on flow. Based on extreme athlete programs. Chemical brain performance dopamine. Rise of Supermen.
Challenge verses achievable. Gamafication.

HOW DO YOU CHOSE WHAT PROBLEMS TO FOCUS ON & WHERE YOU PUT YOUR ENERGY?

Rob peter to pay Paul. Bargain a commercial allowance to do fun problems.
Ethical decisions. No harm/negative filter to rationalise

WHAT DOES COMPETITIVE SALARY AND DYNAMIC ENVIRONMENT REALLY MEAN?

Its a privileged position to live in. Stage of life.

HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH FAILURE & CONFLICT?

Timing. Embrace the failure and working a way forward. Doesn’t remove the judgement. Your body knows before your brain does? Excuses rather then admitting its a failure. Part of the human condition. Fail in new ways

WHAT ARE YOU LOOKING FOR IN A MENTOR?

Same values. Two way conversation. Challenges you with questions.

WHAT’S THE RIGHT WAY TO GET FIRED?

Plan it. Inevitable. Make it east for your boss.
Became a personal when they didn’t agree.
Most managers cant fire. New hatchet man.
There are different ways to solve problems by upsetting people or a single cause

Lucas Mara spoke about his and his family’s life experiences at the end of discussion and what I took home was that;

Most people tend to always want things you don’t have overlooking what you have.
Community support is always there just waiting to be tapped and rise to the forefront during times of crisis and challenge.

KS is Back

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