Jivespace: Message List - How do you select your pilot groups?

Re: How do you select your pilot groups?

communities@jivesoftware.com — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 11:39:06 GMT

In every pilot IT, HR, Legal and Communications should be involved. The next step is much more difficult. Include people who do the 'work' and that's different for every company. The people you want to inlcude should be a complete organizational unit, so if they want to collaborate different on projects you have to be able to include the whole projectgroup (mostly being within an organisational unit).

Re: How do you select your pilot groups?

communities@jivesoftware.com — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 20:04:36 GMT

We selected a small group of collaborators who were feeling the most pain from trying to survive with a byzantine network filefolder hierarchy. We had to involve remote people, collect research, and have discussions in order to provide the ringleader with enough input to do his work.

We also engaged our technical/development team in order to work on some innovation projects & capture some tacit knowledge as we moved from silo teams to a more cross-trained technical team.

We'd also been wrestling with the idea of a better communication platform for about a year, and we changed our "solve everyone's problems" approach to a "solve a few important problems immediately, and let it grow from there" approach.

It was a combination of "Just Do It" & "Necessity is the mother of invention." I guess pain is a good motivator, too.

Re: How do you select your pilot groups?

communities@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 10:18:27 GMT

Our pilot membership was determined through the following highly scientific process:

1) Ask people we had to include

2) Ask people we wanted to include

3) People that found us.

This turned out to pretty much break out in the following manner

1) IT, Legal, HR, Communications

2) Anyone with a penchant for bucking the system, starting self-initiated IT projects, or possessing the unique mix of charisma and vision for open collaboration. This last group also had to prove it, not just say it. As in if they didn't actively participate, they were marginalized.

3) Other rogues hoping for a change.

For us, it worked to keep the pilot "underground". Once we had our core folks lined up, we didn't turn anyone away and provided no direction on who to invite. We had no messaging, no marketing, no official backing. The viral approach took longer but eventually with 1/4 of the company still in the underground pilot, deploying "officially" was much easier.

Re: How do you select your pilot groups?

gia.lyons@jivesoftware.com — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 17:35:10 GMT

This is excellent, thanks for sharing! I know many out there can struggle to figure out which groups to target.

Anyone else?

Re: How do you select your pilot groups?

smith_carl@hotmail.com — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 16:25:28 GMT

We selected by:

1) Teams currently using an open source wiki tool. (Know the process & value; remove rouge software from company)

2) Teams that publish to large, but contained to a single department, email lists. (Process in place for writing frequent, quality content; focus is giving the readers a small, safe read-only introduction to community)

3) Teams with heavy document collaboration needs -- especially if team was globally dispersed. (Development)

4) Teams with a strong, passionate, voluteer leaders.

How do you select your pilot groups?

gia.lyons@jivesoftware.com — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 22:24:10 GMT

Depending on who you talk to, the selection of your pilot group(s) can be critical, or no big deal. What group will prove the value of social media/computing/software in the biggest way? Who's content will make the environment enticing to others? Etcetera and so on. In my experience, it sometimes comes down to corporate politics.

But, you have to choose someone. So, what criteria do you use to choose?