Consult Me | You Book

We are up and running… Ideas are flowing; a story is being constructed, characters have names and traits, conflicts are being designed, words are being written.

This writing of a fictional story business is new for both of us.  As I am writing this blog post, I am ignoring Grammarly telling me I am using passive voice.  It’s a blog post; I can relax a little.  To write this book we have several challenges to overcome, some are minor, some are annoying, and others are scary.  The highlights:

• Neither of us has written a fictional book.
• Both of us have read many books and have developed a kind of criticism only a consumer can muster, one that has no clue of what goes into writing a book.
• We are located on the opposite sides of the planet.   I am in Perth, Western Australia while Helen is in Santiago, Chile.
• We are trying to tell a story of how even the most traditional business relies on technology to stay competitive and have a viable future, without boring you to death.
• English is my second language and even though I’ve spoken it for longer then my native Croatian I will claim all the excuses I can.

Both of us grew up and work in the software and IT industry.  Our lingua franca is agile, leadership, kanban, continuous delivery and so on.   So we attacked our challenges the software way.  Here is our toolbox, I am sure it will change over time, but so far so good.

Keeping two busy people on track with Trello

While I am starting my new consulting venture Action Twelve in Perth, Helen is in Santiago being a Chief Digital Officer for LATAM airlines.  Coordinating work, tasks, writing and progress is a challenge. To help us we use Trello to construct and run our kanban board.

Our Kanban board is structured like so:

• Backlog – Upcoming work
• Research – Further concept development, requiring analysis
• Writing in Progress – Actual writing work in progress
• Crowdsource – Testing concepts with the outside world
• Ready for Edit – the bits/Chapters that are ready for formal editing
• Edit – Final editing
• Done – Good feelings…

We also separate our card types into management, research, narrative, character development and actual text for the book(s).   I am sure there will be future posts on our workflow, but for now, we are still experimenting with the structure and process.

Live collaboration across the globe with RealtimeBoard

This application has been a revelation to me.  It solves one of the must-haves when working on a creative and collaborative pursuit, whiteboard and sticky notes.  We use RealtimeBoard during our standups to capture thinking, discuss plot, characters and general story concepts.  I smile every time I use this software; it is brilliant.

We use it to track plot, characters and critical concepts we want the story to explain. Most of our standups are conducted on the RealtimeBoard.  The best feature is the ability to see each other’s cursors live on the screen.  We can also see each other’s edits and changes in real time.   These features make the user experience feel as though we are on the same whiteboard placing sticky notes and structuring our ideas.

But how do we have a meaningful conversation across the globe?

We are still discovering the best tool for talking between opposite sides of the globe.  So far we have used Skype, WhatsApp and Google Hangouts.  Every time we meet we find one of these is not working.   I think we need to start the “How many times did I open System Preferences”.  We both use Macs, so this is a strange thing for us.   I also find that using these apps on my mobile phone is better then going through the computer, even if I am sitting at one.

Improving writing with Grammarly

So far, Grammarly is the only paid software I use.   I have never written a novel or a fictional story for others to read, and so I need help.  Grammarly follows your writing and continuously makes suggestions regarding style, vocabulary, spelling and grammar.  It integrates nicely with many software packages including most web browsers which make the user experience seamless and intuitive.

I feel towards Grammarly like I did towards my high school English teacher.  It is continuously there adjusting and teaching, something it’s annoying, but most of the time it is right.   The incredible thing is that I can see the difference in my writing the more I use it.

Finally, we store all our content in Google Docs

There is not much to say about sharing content.  Each chapter of the book is a Google doc.  I am sure we will find more complicated ways to deal with content once we start proper editing, but for now, we are keeping it simple.   We also use WordPress to power this site, it may still prove useful in the future for work other than our blog.

That’s it for now… we have only just started, and I feel our toolbox, although inspired by our software roots will prove useful in the book authoring world…

For some time I’ve wanted to write a book in the style of The Phoenix Project or The Goal about organisation transformation.  I’ve worked as a consultant for more than thirty years, both with ThoughtWorks and others, supporting many different organisations on their transformation journeys.  Some were better than others.  And I wanted to encapsulate both the challenges that organisations face and the learnings that I’ve had about how to do this kind of endeavour gracefully and successfully in a narrative story.  

I’ve read no end of really good management books which talk about the What and the How To with graphs and case studies and matrices and checklists, which give great information. However, I believe that the story narrative, with fictional characters, is a) easier and more accessible to many of us and b) allows us to identify with the actual problems and challenges that we might experience.  The “How To” books, even those with good case studies, find it difficult to introduce the challenges and crises that make up much of the work of organisation change.

Then I met Edin through some work we were doing with his employer and hit it off.  At some point towards the end of last year Edin was leaving his job and in an idle conversation we both admitted to our pretensions to authorship and found that we had pretty common objectives in the book we wanted to write.  Thus was born our plan to co-author our first book together.

We had our first planning meeting in a little cafe in the delightful converted State Treasury building in Perth, an airy calm place for a nice cuppa and a meeting of minds.  We agreed to set up a trello wall, have biweekly stand-ups and commit to writing a certain amount each week.  This was all a bit complicated by the fact that Edin was just starting to set up his own new consulting business, Action Twelve and I was about to head back to Melbourne for a short break followed by picking up the CDO role at LATAM airlines in Chile.  We also immediately broke the first rule of Build-Measure-Learn and introduced scope creep by deciding that we probably had to write two books not one…