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The Design Phase is where things really start to get fun. ?As the functional teams work with end users to determine how to translate the requirements gathered during the Analyze Phase into useable system functionality, it’s time for the Change Management team to ramp up. ?If you’ve been a team of one up until now, Design Phase is an excellent time to bring on another team member.

Practical Design Phase Activities

Once again, the activities in this phase can be broken down by which team you partner with. ?This time around, we’ll add another team: Human Resources.

Activities Conducted by Change Management

Executive Change Readiness Assessment (ECRA):? The ECRA is designed for top-level Executives. ?This will typically include your Sponsors, the Directors and/or Vice Presidents of impacted business units, and, depending on the organization, C-level Executives. ?The focus of this assessment isn’t whether the Executives are ready to change, but whether they are ready to direct and support?the change. ?You should plan on conducting this assessment multiple times throughout the project, depending on the project’s length. ?Use the first assessment during the Design Phase as a baseline against which to measure future iterations.

Change Readiness Assessment (CRA):? The CRA is designed for the future system end users. ?Unlike the ECRA, the CRA does focus on whether end users are ready to adopt the change. ?The assessment asks end users whether they feel they are receiving enough communications, adequate training, and sufficient management support. ?Once again, plan on conducting the assessment multiple times during the project. ?And remember that this first one is a baseline…your results will not be good, and that is to be expected. ?You haven’t rolled out any training, yet. ?How can they give it high marks?

Super User/Change Agent Network:? There are many different names for this type of network, and many different uses. ?Essentially, it is a group of future end users who are not full-time members of the project, but who are asked to participate in project activities. ?Their role may be to act as Super Users who know the system better than your average end user and are expected to eventually serve as trainers and front-line support. ?They may simply be Change Agents who are asked to vocally support the change among their peers and help others embrace the new way of doing things. ?Or they may be some combination of the two. ?Whatever their role, they are an integral part of helping the change be adopted throughout the organization, and should be selected with care. ?Once you’ve created the network, manage them with care, show them lots of love, and you will see great returns on your investment.

Communications:? There still isn’t a lot to communicate to the general end user population at this point, but you should be actively communicating with your Change Agent Network and Sponsors.

Training:?The functional teams will likely be holding a large number of design workshops during this phase. ?If at all possible, you should have your training developers attend as many of these workshops as possible. ?This will help them develop a solid understanding of the system design that will help them build the training in future phases.

Partnering with the Functional Teams: If you have more than one person on the Change Management team, I recommend assigning each person to one or more functional teams. ?This does two things. ?First, this provides one point of contact for each functional team. ?This way, they don’t need to try to guess who on the Change team to contact when they have questions. ?It also reduces the number of e-mails and phone calls the Change lead has to deal with each day. ?Second, it helps ensure at least one person on the Change team will have a deep understanding of each functional area, which will come in very handy for developing communications and training.

Design Feedback Workshops:?If the functional teams haven’t planned these on their own, recommend they be added to the plan. ?If they have planned these, volunteer to help. ?Design Feedback Workshops are conducted with the end users who provided input into the system design. ?Once the functional teams have incorporated these design suggestions into the system, hold a workshop where you show the completed design to the end users. ?This gives them an opportunity to tell the team if the design meets their expectations. ?You may also find that once they see the design, it helps them better understand the system and helps them identify new or better refined design points.


Partnering with Project Management
Phase Kick-off/Lessons Learned: In the Analyze Phase, I talked about the need for a project kick-off. ?As the project continues, it’s important to conduct phase kick-offs, as well. ?These help ensure that everyone on the project team understands the timeline, objectives, and activities for the upcoming phase. ?The kick-off is also a good time to conduct a lessons learned session. ?For more details on connecting an effective lessons learned session, read this earlier post.

Sponsorship:? How involved Project Management wants to be in Sponsorship is something you’ll need to work out on each project. ?I have typically found, however, that working with the Sponsors tends to be a joint effort. ?If your Sponsors haven’t been overly involved up to this point, now is the time to help them become active. ?Work with the Sponsors to determine how much direction they want/need, their expectations of their role as a Sponsor, and the project’s expectations of their role. ?It is important for them to understand that their commitment to providing active, visible sponsorship directly impacts the success of the project.

Partnering with Human Resources: Throughout the project, there will be activities that are best completed in partnership with Human Resources (HR). ?These are activities that impact people’s job descriptions, compensation, or team structures. ?If you are ever in doubt, it’s a wise idea to find out who is the project’s HR representative and have a quick chat with them.

Rewards and Recognition:? If there are people on the project team who are not consultants, chances are that being on the project is requiring them to learn new skills, work longer hours, and take on additional responsibilities. ?These are things that should be recognized and rewarded. ?Work with HR to determine how the project team can do this within the appropriate guidelines of the organization. ?I’ve seen programs as simple as a Thank You Box, and as complex as a new bonus structure. ?Whichever path you take, make sure that you are rewarding behaviors you want to perpetuate, and providing rewards that are meaningful to the recipients and in-line with company policy.

The Design Phase is a busy one, but it’s also very satisfying. ?Don’t forget to evaluate how successful the Change program is in achieving its goals, and don’t be afraid to tweak the plan as you go to improve your results.

Let me know:? How many people have you typically had on the Change Management team during the Design Phase?

Source: http://practicalchangemanagement.blogspot.com/2012/02/change-management-in-project-lifecycle_22.html

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ScienceDaily (Jan. 30, 2012) ? Oceanographers have identified a series of ocean hotspots around the world generated by strengthening wind systems that have driven oceanic currents, including the East Australian Current, polewards beyond their known boundaries.

The hotspots have formed alongside ocean currents that wash the east coast of the major continents and their warming proceeds at a rate far exceeding the average rate of ocean surface warming, according to an international science team whose work was recently published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Paper co-author, CSIRO’s Dr Wenju Cai, said that while the finding has local ecological implications in the region surrounding the hotspots, the major influence is upon the ocean’s ability to take up heat and carbon from the atmosphere.

In Australia’s case, scientists report intensifying east-west winds at high latitudes (45?-55?S) pushing southward and speeding up the gyre or swirl of currents circulating in the South Pacific, extending from South America to the Australian coast. The resulting changes in ocean circulation patterns have pushed the East Australian Current around 350 kilometres further south, with temperatures east of Tasmania as much as two degrees warmer than they were 60 years ago.

“We would expect natural change in the oceans over decades or centuries but change with such elevated sea surface temperatures in a growing number of locations and in a synchronised manner was definitely not expected,” said CSIRO’s Dr Wenju Cai.

“Detecting these changes has been hindered by limited observations but with a combination of multi-national ocean watch systems and computer simulations we have been able to reconstruct an ocean history in which warming over the past century is 2-3 times faster than the global average ocean warming rate,” says Dr Cai, a climate scientist at CSIRO’s Wealth from Oceans Research Flagship.

The changes are characterised by a combination of currents pushing nearer to the polar regions and intensify with systematic changes of wind over both hemispheres, attributed to increasing greenhouse gases.

Dr Cai said the increase of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has been the major driver of the surface warming of Earth over the 20th century. This is projected to continue.

He said the research points to the need for a long-term monitoring network of the western boundary currents. In March next year, Australian scientists plan to deploy a series of moored ocean sensors across the East Australian Current to observe change season-to-season and year-to-year.

Lead author of the paper was Dr Lixin Wu, of the Ocean University of China, with contributing authors from five countries, many of whom are members of the Pacific Ocean Panel working under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organisation.

The research was partly funded by a grant from the Australian Climate Change Science Program supported by the Australian Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by CSIRO Australia.

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Journal Reference:

1. Lixin Wu, Wenju Cai, Liping Zhang, Hisashi Nakamura, Axel Timmermann, Terry Joyce, Michael J. McPhaden, Michael Alexander, Bo Qiu, Martin Visbeck, Ping Chang, Benjamin Giese. Enhanced warming over the global subtropical western boundary currents. Nature Climate Change, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/nclimate1353

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/~3/XxLWLyjSk2Y/120130102538.htm

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Believe it or not, we just spent 45 minutes with two of Origin PC’s founders and weren’t treated to a gaming demo. Then again, the company isn’t here at CES to brag about 3DMark11 scores. Instead, it’s showing off its new freon-based Phase Change cooling technology, which enables the Genesis desktop to be overclocked to 5.7GHz, and which pushes that desktop’s starting price from $1,337 to $4,499. So how does that $3,000 feature work? In brief, it uses a compressor to send chilled vapor through insulated tubing, eventually hitting a cold plate running as low as -40 degrees Celsius. The Little Devil chassis used for the purpose of this demo has an LED screen displaying the operating temperature, but you won’t need it: the system automatically shuts down if it gets too cold, and it won’t boot into Windows until Phase Change is up and running. In addition to all this, the Genesis uses liquid cooling around the motherboard, and an air-based system on the video cards.

While we were there, we also checked out the EON15-S and EON17-S laptops, which will be available with an updated design sometime this quarter. Though the interior should look familiar to anyone who’s ever laid eyes on a Clevo, Origin remodeled the lid, adding a matte finish option and race car-inspired molding (to evoke the idea of speed, natch). As for specs, Origin’s founders directed us to the company’s website, which suggests the internals won’t change along with the design (certainly, the prices remain the same). Expect these to start at $1,539 for the 15-incher and $1,590 for the larger model — prices that now include 24/7 free lifetime support. Find some photos below and continue on past the break for a video where you can see (and hear) that Phase Change setup in action.

Continue reading A closer look at Origin PC’s Phase Change cooling system (and its new gaming laptops too)

A closer look at Origin PC’s Phase Change cooling system (and its new gaming laptops too) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 Jan 2012 18:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/7XZFegm24As/

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