Nothing changes the culture more than success

Today we celebrated the success of our first major all-staff effort on our content management system. The task was for all-staff to transfer their files into a new temporary file structure. This is necessary so that we can batch load these files into the system with metadata permeating down from the folder level. In the process of doing this we had people remove the ROT (redundant, outdated and trivial files). I don't have metrics on this, but after being in this organization for over 17 years, I removed between 50-75% of my files. Getting 45 people to spend up to a day cleaning up and reorganize their files is a reason to celebrate. Now since we can find documents, we don't even need the CMS (just kidding).

The celebration was quite simple, I made a small announcement at today's all staff meeting about what we are celebrating and then we an ice cream sundae party in the afternoon. In was just a 30 minute break in the afternoon, but people like to be acknowledged. The funniest thing was that one person who has been slow in transferring files was dragged into party. After some good natured ribbing, she walked out and immediately set to the task of moving her files. Another reason to celebrate.

For another form of celebration, I nominated one of my team chairs for an individual performance award. Coming into this project, she was identified as a stakeholder that could be a detractor if not involved. By putting her in charge of a team, not only did she steer the team into finishing a difficult task, she took it on herself to do the work for implementation (a herculean task). She also has ownership of the system and has become one of the systems biggest champions, let's party!!!!