From Captain America to Thor - My Review of The Avengers 2012

To those who have not seen The Avengers, please do not read further as I do not want to be responsible to spoil the movie for you.

I love the movie! It is the best Marvel movie ever! I love the action part of the movie - how the Avengers fight with the fleets of Chitauri in the middle of New York City!  Now, it's always New York City, right?  The city has been through so much and even Marvel likes to use this city as the location of Stark HQ.  Those one-liners are cheeky, although yeah. some are corny ;p  Oh ya, I laughed so much when Hulk hit Loki again and again on the floor - that was so funny!  Check out the YouTube video below:

One thing that I could not help but notice is the similarities between this movie's Dr Banner and the TV-series' Dr Banner.

Don't you guys think that Bill Bixby and Mark Ruffalo have some resemblance?

And how hot is Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow / Agent Natasha Romanoff?  Taken from this site - where she confesses that she wasn't wearing anything underneath that unitard!

I don't mind watching this movie again!  It is just done so brilliantly!  A definite 5 out of 5!

Email: Good or Evil?

This blog entry has been sitting in my draft folder for ages! Been trying to finish it but work just got in the way.  Last night when I was monitoring the stocktake processing, I manage to finish this off!

So, enjoy my "Email: Good or Evil?" posting!

This was the logo used by Digital Trends in their article "Europe's Largest IT Company Bans Email".  Cool eh?

Here's the thing - if we ask any professionals nowadays on what is the most important thing to have for their work, many would say, "Email is critical for my work".  Actually, what they really mean is that "Communication is critical for my work" and the most used tool to communicate is the email system.

Now, let's put it this way.  In a day, we have 24 hours of 60 minutes each - so, in a day, we have 24 x 60 = 1440 minutes.  I receive around 1500 emails daily and 90% of the emails are internal - I am managing 3 projects with various vendors so 10% of the emails come from them.  Thanks to the well-managed spam filter by our data centre team, junk email is rare.  With the large number of received emails, it is hard to do your work and keep up with the incoming emails.  I try to spend each and every free minutes to clear my inbox so that I don't have massive backlog on my email.  If I use half-a-min for an email, that will take, like 12.5 hours already! Wow! A lot more can be accomplished if the 12 hours are spent on proper work.  Gosh, once we start to quantify things, perspective would change drastically!

Most of the internal emails I received, are of type "for-info-only" but they are cluttering my inbox, making it difficult for me to filter the urgent emails out of the "for-info-only".  Some senders just want to loop you in, just in case ;p  Honestly, I am also guilty of these so-called "for-info-only" emails.  I would write an email TO a particular set of people for them to action on the content but I would CC those who just need to know that the task has been delegated and will be followed up.  I also need most things to be done via email because I use it as my personal tracking system.  Having verbal communication is great but people tend to forget so, usually, I will put down the discussion into an email to ensure that I do not forget anything and that I can refer to the email for future references.

Catch 22 situation eh? To email or not to email?  For me, the "for-info-only" emails are good to read when you have enough time in your hands so can they be channelled through other tools other than email?  I think that taking email tool out of an organization like what Atos did would require a lot of effort to educate and change people on how to use an alternative communication tool like Yammer or Podio.  But if it could take away even half of my incoming emails daily, I would want to give it a chance!

Verdict of Email: Good or Evil? You decide!

Till my next post, peace and adios!

Hammer the Yammer

Nailing Yammer into our organization!

"The first step is the hardest" - I do believe in this proverb.  It is always difficult to adopt something new or to impose change.  Those who have read the book, "Who moved my cheese?" will be able to relate to the process of changing people's mindsets.

My objective, at the end of the day, is to reduce internal emails by using Yammer to be our collaborative tool but since this is the beginning of a long journey, I can already see some challenges at hand.

Firstly, Yammer vs Email.  Email is very personal.  You can control who to address it to and therefore, you can write it with those intended audience in mind.  Language and email mannerism can be tailored accordingly.  Social networking, on the other hand, is opened to a wider audience thus, making it a bit more complicated for an email-person to adapt to.  How does one write things in social network channel as compared to writing an email?  This is where Yammer groups can be used to assist those users - when writing to a particular group, you imagine as if you are presenting in front of them so your updates in Yammer can still be tailored to a particular group of people.  Now, when you write an update in "All Company", you just have to imagine that you are presenting in front of the entire company so you, in one way or another, automatically tailor your updates as if you have your colleagues from same and other departments as well as your bosses present in front of you.

Next, Yammer vs Facebook (FB). Well, it does not help that Yammer does look like Facebook.  Therefore, the young users in our company tend to use Yammer as if it is their FB page.  They identify themselves as someone who we don't know of - using nicknames that are not familiar in our working environment.  Talking about profile picture, some are not bothered to put up their photos at all while some, put their kids' pics as their profile pics. I mean, I'm sure that you want to show how your kids are etc, but just ensure that you put up your pic as well.  No one knows who you are if your kids' photo is your profile pic and your name is put as 'Lady Gaga', right?  For this cases, just to remind them that this is a professional network and not personal social network.  Once professional is mentioned, then people will change their names and pictures to be more professional.  Save those glamorous nicknames and nice photos for your FB page, ya?

"What are you working on?" vs "What's on your mind?". Although in Yammer, it clearly asks for "What are you working on?", we still get updates like "I am hungry and lunchtime is still so far away" or "It's raining outside and I need Nescafe".  Yes, these are the typical facebook status updates.  Again, Yammer vs Facebook syndrome here.  So, just need to ensure that the users are guided accordingly on what are the suitable updates in Yammer.  Actually, you just have to remind them that the bosses are reading your updates in Yammer and then, the users will be more cautious before clicking on the Yammer update button :)

Novelists in our midst.  I think that there are times when we need to stress that updates should be limited to a few sentences or at most, a paragraph.  Some users tend to use the Update section to write 'novel'.  Other colleagues are reading Yammer to get quick updates on things that are relevant to their current task and if the updates are so long, the time spent on Yammer will be longer than what it should be hence, shorter time to perform the actual task.  I think that this is the hardest to implement - some people just cannot write simple updates and Yammer does not have the 140-character limitation.  It can also be discouraging when users post long updates and they get feedback that their updates are too lengthy - then, they may just stop sending updates in Yammer.  Personally, I am still thinking of how to address this one, so anyone who has an idea on how to help me here, please do send your comments.

Yeah! In short, 'pushing' Yammer to users is not that simple.  Our implementation is still in progress - as of today, we have 58.4% of our users online.  Just need to learn on how to 'hammer' this tool to see whether we can achieve the target of reducing our internal emails traffic.  It's normal that internal adoption/promotion is the hardest to do.

Till my next Yammer posting, let's hammer the Yammer!

Holy Week 2012

I have been blogging on my Geeks'tuff label these couple of weeks, so this Easter (while trying to stay up to monitor the stocktake processing in my laptop), I thought of just sharing something about the holy week.

Last Friday, 6th April, I had the opportunity to attend the last Way of the Cross and the students did a very good re-enactment of the stations of the Cross - unlike in other few countries, no one got seriously nailed on the Cross here ya!  I was so touched by the whole re-enactment that my tears just suddenly flow throughout the whole service.

It was very fortunate that I could sit in the main church where the re-enactment took place - to be able to imagine and feel such torture and suffering - I can't imagine how a person could go through that much.  Well, His love for us is so great that he is willing to show how he would suffer and bear the torture for us - I can't help myself from feeling so remorse after the whole thing.  Good Friday has always been a holiday for the East Malaysians and the mass is always at 3pm.  Since it is not a public holiday in West Malaysia, the mass is scheduled to be during lunch time and after office hours.  I'm glad that I went for the 7:30 pm mass because I don't have to rush back to office after that.  It also gave me time to reflect during the drive back home - John 3:16 says: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life"

Dad used to say that Easter should be a bigger celebration than Christmas.  I never thought about what he said seriously before.  Now, come to think of it, it does make sense for us to celebrate it more than Christmas.  The significance of Easter is more because it shows us the hope for salvation and redemption.  This is the time when we should be celebrating Easter with our family members.  This year, since we are quite busy with the stocktake and many other activities with the other projects, plus I was already away last week for a family event in Singapore, I've decided to spend the holy week in KL.  I don't know why but it is not the same - to have at least that Easter Sunday brunch with the family seems to make my Easter more complete.  It's like celebrating your birthday alone - you don't mind but it would be more meaningful to have family and friends around, that's all...

So, to my dearest family back home, have a wonderful Easter and I miss all of you so much!

Till my next posting, to all my readers, I wish you all a great weekend and to those who are celebrating Easter, have a blessed Easter! Peace!

Yammer-ing Away!

Yes, Yammer is live and the network community is increasing by the day.

While I am still in search of a better mechanism to introduce some steps / guidelines to our new Yammer users, I found some materials from the WWW that may be usable in our company.

My initial perception of Yammer was... an intranet 'facebook'? Hmm interesting and has potential...  This will definitely attract those Gen Ys and Gen Zs team members!!!

I like the idea of having our external IT consultants to be in Yammer where we can create our own network and collaborate.  This will definitely reduce spamming in our mailboxes.  One drawback is that everyone is so used to emails and therefore, Yammer notification is something new and not being looked at as frequent as emails.  At this point in time, I will NOT encourage any users to configure their notifications to receive real-time notification for every feeds in our Yammer network, that will just create a lot more traffic in our email server.

Nowadays, I prefer to ask general questions in Yammer rather than spamming a lot of people's mailboxes.  At least with Yammer, you can post your question to a particular group or network of people.  With that, unlike emails, my question is targetted to a selected set of people within my network without me forgetting who to include in the TO and CC mailing list.  If I were to ask a general question for the entire company, I will be able to do so and I can get feedbacks from various team members from other departments as well.

Another thing that I like about Yammer is that its support on mobile devices - which is a useful thing to have.  I am planning to get a group of people who usually are assigned to work out of the office to test this out.  Basically, get their mobiles installed with the Yammer app and then get them to send updates via Yammer in our group.  At least, less emails and they can freely update everyone involved while they are on the road too.  I think that they will be more receptive to use Yammer to send updates because it looks more casual than sending an email out.  If the response is good for this group of 'guinea pigs' then, what we can do is to encourage more out-of-office team members to do the same :)

That's all for now, will post some #Yams again soon! Till then, peace to all readers ;p