Steven’s research project has been a study towards new ways of working for system architects. System architects are responsible for the architecture of complex systems, like printers, MRI-scanners or radar systems. A series of interviews has been conducted with system architects at Océ, Philips and Thales to discuss concepts and obtain insights. This resulted in Project Buzz Tracker, a tool that couples activity information to project and workflow planning. Persons frequently give an update on their actions, thus showing the Buzz in a project. By observing this overview, the system architect can see concentrations or a lack of Buzz. These can be indications of problematic issues. Project Buzz Tracker will further strengthen team cohesion, especially if distant workers are involved.

General Findings
Using interviews, it has been found out that system architects do not have specific communication needs. The communication needs that they have are generally applicable. The system architects do have unique information management needs, because they are the only ones in a project specifically interested in architecting information.
System architects (at least the ones that were interviewed) highly value face-to-face communication. Currently, they succeed in having these face-to-face communications with for example co-workers and customers. Nevertheless, assuming that workers become more and more dispersed, system architects have to find new means of communication too. The tools proposed in this research can play an important role in this respect. By doing a literature study, several aspects of the communication process were identified that deserve special attention, considering the area of system architecting.
When developing future concepts it is better to develop them by satisfying needs than by solving problems. Problems often have a short term nature, whereas needs will still exist in the future. A broad spectrum of solutions was created. By providing solutions for all identified needs, a large and relevant subset of solutions has been created. By combining these solutions into concepts, it is ensured that the concepts are relevant and solve the right issues. The concepts that have been elaborated aim at providing overview in various large data spaces.

Project Buzz Tracker
Because of limited time, only one concept was worked out. This concept is called Project Buzz Tracker. It makes innovative use of the upcoming phenomenon of social media. Project Buzz Tracker provides a clear, graphical overview on which persons are working on what tasks, something that is relevant in architecting. It shows small status updates (buzz) that are mapped on a project planning. The planning can be zoomed, revealing more detailed tasks. It may be less useful in small, closely located, project teams, but extremely useful in dispersed project teams, as there is less sense of what is happening in the project within these teams. Several filters can be applied, to find information more easily.

As this tool has to be used by a complete project team to be useful, it has been described how personal objections against using the tool can be taken away, and which benefits the tool holds for stakeholders. It is clear that the strongest focus must lie on making the tool suitable and beneficial for the whole project team. It is suggested that coupling this tool to to do software is a strong choice in this perspective. Also, providing incentives by integrating Project Buzz Tracker with already used tools should be pursued (i.e. integrate with Outlook). Thus, in further elaborations of Project Buzz Tracker, there should be a focus on making the tool useful for the complete project team.
Second, it has been noticed during various presentations of Project Buzz Tracker that the benefits of this tool were not emphasized enough. People who were presented with the concept, liked it, but failed to see the advantages. For each stakeholder group, a SWOT analysis was made which presents the advantages of the tool more clearly.

If you would like more information, the whole research report can be found here or you can contact Geke Ludden (Geke.Ludden@novay.nl).

In 2002 I was part of a group of researchers at the R&D department of Océ that got inspired by the book The Myth of the Paperless Office by Sellen & Harper. As a result, we started a project to study how paper supports knowledge workers in their task management. Today the project is a Ph.D. project carried out by Olha Bondarenko at the Eindhoven University of Technology, in close cooperation with Samuël Driessen from Océ and myself. Over the years we uncovered many mechanisms by which paper supports knowledge work, and we were able to learn valuable lessons for the design of digital document management systems.

Last Tuesday I was asked to present our research for a group of students at the University of Twente. It was a good reason to summarize six years of “desk research” in a presentation. The presentation is available here.

• Being less dependent on your own memory to remember things
• Deciding more quickly about what you’re going to do when
• Getting a better grip on your time

The booklet can be downloaded here (English) or here (Dutch).

How it works: a wizard analyzes your to do list (for actionable items) and your and your coworker’s agendas (for schedules and availability) to come up with an optimized schedule that requires fewer context switches.

For instance, it will group all activities that I need to do for the same project or with the same person(s) and plan these in one contiguous time slot.