Just a note I should have added to other discussions earlier: As a retired worker bee at several large corporations, I continue to be amazed at the ambitiousness of your schedules.
My thirty-year corporate experience says a new budget item is obtained via the following schedule: Year 1, generate buzz on the grapevine by copying existing business, not technical, magazine articles to significant people, especially anything from the Harvard Business Review that may be remotely relevant. Note; the business magazines are already two to three years behind the technical magazines in noticing a new technique or tool. Talk it up at the watercooler also. Year 2, make presentations at lunchtime brown bag, informal presentations. Don't do more than two or you'll seem too eager to push the concept or seem overly-ambitious for your own career. Make sure the concept is presented from two orthoganol perspectives so you get a different audience for each, which will increase the buzz. Year 3, latch-on to a champion who came to you with his idea that is curiously what you have been getting out there and plan a further movement of the buzz-meter. Year 4, move the buzz-meter and watch out for Not-Invented-Here and We've-Never-Done-It-That-Way resistence. You need to be abe to legitiately compare the old way and your proposal. Ducks-in-a-row are critical. Year 5, plan to include it in the budget two years hence by getting the champion's superior's concurrence. Year 6, get it into the next year's budget. Year 7, spend the budget by executing a highly modified first phase pilot project. Plan some more budget. Year 8, spend the new budget making the progress necessary to cement the tool and technique in place. Try to get the tool into the next budget as a regular part of the cost-of-doing-business line items. Year 9 and following, maintain the tool and its community. Look out for other, potentially worthy, contenders, well pushed by excellent outside marketing representatives to the higher echelons of management. Co-opt the contenders or become part of the contenders' community. (Please don't become part of the resistence. You aren't the only one with good ideas.) Always remember you are probably involved in a cultural change if the tool or technique is REALLY worth adopting. CULTURAL CHANGE IS HARD. _______________________________________________ tos mailing list tos@teachingopensource.org http://teachingopensource.org/mailman/listinfo/tos
