Bottom up management is a way of coping with the increasing gap between the information neccessary to manage knowledge workers and the ability of managers to aquire and apply this information. In order to efficiently manage a software developer, the manager needs software development know-how. In order to manage a designer, the manager needs design know-how, in order to manage an analyst,...
In an interdisciplinary team it is hard for managers to be experts in each of the diciplines and in management itself, which makes it hard to apply traditional fine-grained top-down management techniques.
Bottom-up management means that managers communicate goals and value, e.g. through milestone planning and that the individual knowledge workers have to develop todo list with the steps neccessary to reach the milestones on their own.
From this point on, the manager can control the completion of tasks on the todo list, keep the team communication going and provide a creative working environment, but the individual knowledge workers still have the freedom and responsibility to find the way to the next milestone.
Brainstorming is a collective idea-generating method that is used to activate the creative potential of team members by giving them input in form of raw ideas created by other team members just an instant before. In order to achive a high amount of creative cross pollination, brainstorming sessions are often conducted according to a set of rules like:
As described in the blog entry Why brainstorming is a bad idea by Eugene Kuleshov, there are research results that suggest that brainstorming might have a negative effect on the number of ideas created in a session compared to separated knowledge workers who collect ideas separately.
Cross pollination means bringing together different mind sets from different people in order to allow new perspectives on their work by reflecting on their own ideas using somebody else's perspective. This can lead to new ideas on both sides.
Typical scenarios for cross pollination are connecting people from different organizational units of one company, from different professions and from different companies and industries with each other. A prerequisite for successful creative cross-pollination is mutual respect and openess for new ideas.
Cross pollination is a typical effect of brain storming sessions.
Getting things done is a personal productivity technique invented and popularized by David Allen. According to the official definition Getting things done is based on the idea of freeing one's mind from tasks by keeping them somewhere, for example on a todo list. As a result, one does not have to remember everything that needs to be done and leads to higher concentration when performing the tasks.
The popularity of techniques like Getting Things Done (GTD) shows the importance of self-management for knowledge workers. The ability of self-management is a requirement for bottom-up management.
"Getting Things Done" and "GTD" are registered trademarks of David Allen & Co.
Milestone planning is a collaboration technique that is often used in conjunction with bottom-up management and gannt charts. The idea is to set a number of milestones for a knowledge project that define a state of completeness of the project.
These milestones serve as synchronization points for tasks that have strong interdependencies and as an indicator for project health.
It is not advisable to have too many milestones in a project, because milestones must be part of the common understanding of the team members and lists of more than seven items are hard to memorize in a world of overflowing information.
Mind mapping is a creativity technique that creates graphical networks of knowledge items. It is often used in conjunction with brainstorming.
Apart from the possibility to create mind maps with pen on paper or in conjunction with whiteboarding, there is software for creating mind maps. Among the most popular for knowledge workers are
Rapid prototyping is a collaborative productivity technique that fosters team work by creating early-stage prototypes of the informational artifact to be created. In software development prototypes are often user interface mockups, in authoring an exposé can be seen as a prototype.
The advantage of rapid prototyping is giving the team members and all stakeholders in a project an early and concrete understanding of the informational artifact to be created in the course of the project.
Tagging is a collaborative, lightweight meta-data based technique for categorization of information. The basic concept of tagging is that team members assign tags as meta-data annotations to informational artifacts like web site addresses, wiki pages, shared files or tasks.
These tags can be seen as categories, but unlike classical categories there is no fixed vocabulary of tags the team members can choose from and tags are not hierarchical. As a result, a web page might be tagged more than one time with very similar tags that denote the same concept, e.g. "opensource", "open source", "open_source" and "oss".
Most tagging systems provide users visible feedback about what tags are already popular for a specific informational artifact or for a specific user group, so that users can in doubt decide for the most "powerful" tag for a certain item.
The power of tagging is that it provides a meta-data scheme that goes beyond simple full-text indexing, allows more than one view of information organization unlike classical directory structures and has a very low barrier of entry unlike classical meta-data-based approaches found in many knowledge bases.
The technique of team synchronization means providing technical and organizational means of synchronizing the team member's regarding
In order to achive team synchronization following social software tools are frequently used:
Unmanaging goes a step beyond bottom-up management. The philosophy of unmanaging is that all it takes to create a creative, innovative and productive organization are common goals, a common culture of values and the freedom for each member of the organization to act as a self-responsible being that can act autonomously in its field and collaborate with other members of the organization to reach the common goals.
Whiteboarding is a graphical collaboration technique that uses a shared drawing area that can be accessed by all members taking part in the whiteboarding session. The whiteboard can be a physical wall-mounted whiteboard or a virtual whiteboard integrated in some collaboration software.
Whiteboarding combines two aspects: Collaboration and graphical expression. Graphical expression of concepts can help fostering common understanding by the way of finding metaphors and abstractions.
A special kind of graphical notations for collected information items is the mind map.
Freeform Collaboration is a new trend in collaboration, closely connected to the increasing importance of creativity in the workplace and self-managed, self-responsible knowledge workers that are the key employees of companies of the information age.
These highly creative and independent knowledge workers work best when left alone. This means:
The ability of a company to attract highly productive knowledge workers depends to a large share on the possibility of allowing and supporting freeform collaboration.