First Initiative: You Have To Lead The Revolution

For years I have remain quiet working in different companies, whining and complaining how disappointed I am with the company's culture and management's attitude. Either I am too afraid to voice out my discontent, or I think the management doesn't care about what a worker-ant like me think. I found out most of the colleague and some junior manager agrees with me, but they just shoke their head signalling nothing can be done about this situtation.

A few years passed by, and I slowly began to take some small steps to make my working life more interesting. If the company is not going to provide the infrastructure and support to make my working environment better, then I shall do it myself. I want more collaboration to take place in my work :)

First of all, a Software House do require a central bulletion board to post about Software Update, Knowledge Base, Technical Support Material, etc. Such infrastructure have the following benefit:

• Record down important update/information, so that such information is not lost when the staff leave
• Provide a central Knowledge Base to share knowledge
• Provide FAQ for technical trouble-shooting deployment of your own product
• Update other people in your company about the project you are undertaking (maybe someone is interested to join your team or provide feedback)

As such, I have chosen phpBB (a pretty good php-based forum) to implement a forum system in my own department. At first, I start off by posting my recent work at hand: "Webtra J2EE V6 Migration". I get my team member to join the forum in order to give comment on how we should enhance our existing application: Webtra. The response is a bit cold at first, then it picked up and slowed down again. About 10 people join the forum, only 1 active poster and 2 casual posters. In order to encorage others non-member to join the form, I created a Social Corner for chatting and discuss about our department weekend getaway activity.

To be frank, the response is not very encouraging. People still find email is more convinient to plan social events, as it always has been in our department. So, the non-team member no longer join the forum after 2 weeks. As for my team member, most of them are not very keen to post on the forum as well. Maybe the projects didn't interest them (although they'll most probably be involved at a later stage). Maybe there is no sense of participation. I am eager to participate because the forum is implemented by me. To them, it is just another system in place which they don't care about, or not interested nor have the sense of participation in it. How to I raise the participation level among my passive team member? I haven't found out yet until now. I do found out the following:

• People stop posting when there are very busy into the projects. (Actually they should post more as they encounter more issues).
• Some people are very "shy" in nature, thus will only read and never post.
• Some people adopt the "don't care" attitude, thus will forget about the URL of the forum.
• If you appoint him as Admin, you can increase his participation level (sense of ownership).
• Posting is a habbit. Once you start the posting spree, it never stop. If you seldom post, you'll eventually stop.
• It is easier to cultivate the Posting culture on new staff. They are more receptive with less resistance.
  

Eventually, I embarked on the next project, "OASIS using ASP.NET", where a new team is formed. In the beginning, the posting rate increased dramatically, focusing on the design document/update/source documentation of the project. The postings slowed down after 2 weeks and eventually stopped after 1 month. By then, I created the "Knowledge Base" section which I post all my new findings regarding ASP.NET (It was my first project using ASP.NET). I was the only poster as of this moment, but I find this section very useful as I always refer to it. I believe the "shy" member does read it, just that no one contribute.

At the same time, I also manage to convince a Technical Support guy to use the Forum to record down all possible complication which is frequently faced during deployment of our software. Thus, "Technical Support FAQ" is born.

Though the participation level is not very encouraging, but I think the forum is very useful, especially to myself (like my notebook to scribble important findings). I didn't took me more than 30 minutes to setup the forum; and it's fun administering the forum. Maybe the forum will pick up again when more new staff join our department (they are more enthusiate to participate and prove themselves; yet not polluted by the "non-posting" culture yet). BTW, my posting is immortalised on the server for the future generations of staff to view; unless the server crashed and the harddisk get formatted.

So, take some time to implement some useful system in the office. It'll actually make you a bit happier with your new minor achievement.