XplanaZine

INTO UTOPIA: Low-Cost Business, Association, and Education Centers, Part 2
Planning and the Human Factor
Your integrated information system will not work without coordination and cooperation. I know you’re probably thinking, “But how obvious is that!!” Yes, you’re right. It’s a self-evident reality. But, you’d be surprised how many times even the most basic project management tenets are absolutely overlooked.
Your Information Project Management Steps to Success
Team-Building
-1- Identify Team Members or “Information Partners”. Define what it takes to be an information partner in your overall data scheme. Do you have regional offices? Field reps? A central location and information coordinator? Outside contributors?
-2- Define Partner Roles.
-3- Strengths of Partners. List strengths and develop information categories to take advantage of the strengths.
-4- Identify Categories. Assign information categories to each partner. Avoid overlap or excessive redundancy and/or repetition of tasks.
-5- Identify Coordinator. Designate a central person to administer databases and to keep the information partners in a coherent structure.
-6- Support system. There should be a clear understanding of the information expected of every person, and a way to share insights, etc. A weblog works, as does e-mail.
Vision-Building
-1- Develop a mission statement. Make sure that each partner understands his or her role within the mission and vision of the enterprise.
-2- Eliminating non-mission activities. Develop criteria. Don’t let yourself be side-tracked by non-mission activities.
-3- Create a template for building content, assure consistency, and avoid confusion
-4- Develop lists of anticipated outcomes and objectives that each person can customize. The generalized outcomes could serve as “meta-outcomes.”
-5- Develop a list of priorities, themes, categories
-6- Develop icons, color schemes, logos, theme statements, layout ideas to begin to work on brand image
Information Gathering and Sharing
-1- Create the criteria for what constitutes desirable information for this project
-2- Create a template for plugging in the information
-3- Identify key words for ease of search and for meta-tags
-4- Write an abstract for indexing uses
-5- Create a long title and a short title for indexing
-6- Register authors for consistency of name
-7- Decide on target number of articles per month
-8- Brief bio of each author
-9- Profile of each regional office
-10- Contacts and coordinates for more information
-11- Identify priorities, themes, and categories for indexing
Getting Started: As Free As You Can Be
-1- Free webspace
-2- Free weblog
-3- Free e-mail
-4- Free group space
-5- Shareware ftp program — WS-FTP
-6- Basic text editor — Boxer Text Editor 10.0
-7- Shareware html editor — CoffeeCup HTML Editor 9.5
-8- Shareware image editing — irfanview
-9- Shareware draw / graphics: Celedydraw 1.5
-10- CD creator program
Critical Path with Milestones and Timelines
-1- Develop a time-sensitive critical path, with lists of tasks and due dates
-2- Assign people to the tasks
-3- Assign coordinating tasks to the coordinator, create deadlines
-4- Develop a strategic plan for self-sufficiency (fund-raising, business ideas, etc.)
This will get the organization started. Of course, it helps to have a diagram, which is HIGHLY recommended. I would put the mission statement, team members, timelines, and a diagramatic chart information flows on the home page.
It wouldn’t hurt to laminate the chart and hang posters on every possible wall so that the message is burned into everyone’s consciousness.