Finding a Business Connection

Robert Bogue May 5, 2012 No Comments

In my blog post, “The Nine Keys to SharePoint Success” I called out Business Connection as the number two key to success. In this blog post we’ll delve into what makes a business connection – and how to create it.

Bustling Business

How hard could it be to solve a business problem? A walk through the break room will provide snippets of the latest frustrations of your coworkers. Getting into your car of an evening will reveal more challenges as someone is on their cell phone desperately trying to get home – and address some urgent business problem at the same time. It seems like business problems wash over us without any effort to try to find them.

The challenge is that these problems may not be the most pressing problems that the business has, so how do you find the business problems that matter? There are a few key ways to sniff them out – and to solve them with SharePoint.

Application Backlog

If your organization is very large you’ll have a team of software developers – or several teams – working diligently against a never ending list of applications that the business wants. The pressure to complete their work is managed through the application backlog. That is the list of applications that the business wants but there aren’t resources to get them done – yet.

The application backlog is very formal in some organizations, having to be pruned, tweaked, and reconfigured every quarter, every year, or for each reorganization. In other organizations the application backlog is written on the development manager’s whiteboard. Whatever the process to keep the backlog, it’s a gold mine for key business problems. These are the visible problems that the organization believes are the most important. Cherry picking a few items off the backlog that might be able to be solved – or mostly solved – with SharePoint can help to ensure that you’ve got a real business connection to what you’re doing.

Help Me Help Desk

If you can’t cherry pick from the application backlog – or you can’t figure out how it’s managed in your organization – you aren’t out of options. Another key source for business problems – in this case undiscovered ones – is the help desk. The help desk answers calls when systems are having problems and also when internal customers need help knowing how to solve problems.

Systems with disproportionally high numbers of calls or calls with long resolution times might be candidates for retirement. In fact, these solutions are often on their “last legs” just waiting for things to break completely so that someone will try to find a solution for the problem that they solve. So, why not preempt the process and try to find a SharePoint solution to the problem before the old system fails completely?

Requests for help are useful to as they tend to indicate areas of solutions where the business is exceeding the design criteria. Sure you can use Excel to close the financials for a global organization – but that may not be the best approach. Searching through the service requests can often expose key needs for the organization that aren’t being addressed in the best way.

Ask for Directions

Perhaps asking for directions from management is too obvious, however, often I find that folks are timid when approaching a business person to ask what challenges they’re facing. Sure you can infer the business problem by looking at the application backlog or the help desk call report – but wouldn’t it be easier to ask about the business challenges?

The Business Doesn’t Know What They Want

Occasionally I hear an objection from a well-meaning CIO or IT director who admonishes their staff for wanting to – gasp – talk to the users about what they need. The argument is that IT knows better what the business needs than they do. This is positively dangerous thinking.

On the one hand, I can agree that the business doesn’t know the solution that they need – that’s not their world. On the other hand, they know the business problems, challenges, and opportunities they are facing better than anyone in IT will ever be able to know. It takes both the intimate knowledge of the problem that the business brings and the technical skills of the IT team to propose and explore solutions which may fit the problem.

The best solutions come from listening to the problems that the business is struggling with and proposing solutions which may solve those problems – or at least part of the problems. One of the reasons that the classic waterfall model of solution development doesn’t work and why agile approaches are so in vogue right now is because waterfall doesn’t encourage the same single-team mentality that agile approaches do.

Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon

One of the challenges that SharePoint projects often face is that the problem that the solution solves isn’t directly a problem that the business is having – at least not tangibly. One of my favorite conversations is “Why are you using SharePoint?” The answers are often “To collaborate” or “To share” — which is fine, but it doesn’t really tell me much about the real business need that SharePoint is solving.

Usually when I press on this point I hear “we have to collaborate better.” Of course, no business needs to collaborate better just to collaborate better. There’s an implied with collaborating better. It could be improved efficiency, reduced cycle times, or fewer mistakes. The problem is that we need to get to the real reasons for the SharePoint platform. If we can’t get to the real reasons for SharePoint – beyond the platitudes of efficiency and better service – then we don’t really know what problem we’re solving.

The further we are away from the real tangible problem we’re solving for the business the harder it will be to get resources, to get users engaged, and to make the platform successful. It’s difficult to take a platform and really connect it to business problems – unless you recognize that you deploy the platform and then engage the business with the specific examples of how you’ve improved processing by leveraging the platform

Throughout this process struggle to get to the real answers on how the business is benefitting. Maybe it’s a reduced response time to a RFP by a day. Maybe it’s improving the closure rate of proposals through better quality deliverables. Maybe it’s something else. Whatever it is try to get your numbers as close to the actual business impact as possible. You may have heard of SMARTer as a framework for getting things done. It’s a way to make things concrete so they can be effectively measured.

You don’t want the business problems you’re solving to be six degrees of Kevin Bacon away from the problems the business wants to solve.

Return on Investment

In most cases a request for an ROI is a barrier because the person asking for it doesn’t “see” the benefits of the solution. At some level this will be the case at higher levels of the organization – but often the ROI is a smokescreen barrier that’s inserted to force folks to clarify their thinking around the real value to the organization.

As I said in the SharePoint UnROI, the real goal of an ROI isn’t the bottom line numbers. The goal is the clarification of the plan for how the business will be successful with the solution. In the case of selling SharePoint’s ROI, it might be that you have to bundle a few solutions that you intend to deploy immediately and compare the cost to deliver on SharePoint as compared with the cost to deploy a solution without SharePoint.

ROIs are notoriously bad at showing the impact to the organization for platforms and tooling like SharePoint. It’s difficult to get valid assumptions about how much time is wasted each day because of poor information, the number of sales lost due to late, incomplete, or unprofessional responses, or how improved communication would help to transform the organization’s productivity. Because the assumptions are hard to make, the problem turns into the Drake Equation. It’s an interesting exercise but the confidence in the answer is pretty low.

If you approach the ROI as an opportunity to clarify your thinking and to reduce the uncertainty of the outcome – then it’s a good process. The ultimate output of the ROI may not be anything like the real return on investment but at least you’ve improved your understanding of the business impact.

Rational or Emotional Decision

The final point to consider when delivering a business connection is to realize that as much as we really want to believe we make rational decisions, we actually make emotional decisions and then rationalize them. If you don’t believe me, try to cost-justify the purchase of a hybrid vehicle. For most of us it can’t be done. I took list prices for a Toyota Highlander and a Highlander hybrid and then planned a fictional 6,000 miles of highway driving and 6,000 miles of city driving and gas at $4 per gallon to determine that the hybrid would pay for itself in 23 years. The life of the vehicle isn’t even that long. And yet folks buy hybrid vehicles and flaunt their gas savings.

We’ve discovered that the lowest cost bid for contracts isn’t always the best deal. The intangibles are often weighted such that a higher priced big can win – for good but emotional reasons.

If you’re looking at creating a business connection and believe that it’s as simple as an ROI, you might need to take a step back and remember that the root of politics in your organization is emotion.

Action

If you’re looking to better understand the nine keys to success or how to deliver a business connection, take a look at our DVD.

Creating Shared Vision

Robert Bogue April 29, 2012 No Comments

In my blog post, “The Nine Keys to SharePoint Success” I called out Shared Vision as the first key activity – in part because it’s one of the first things in the process and in part because it’s so often missed. In this blog post we’ll delve into what shared vision is, why it’s critical, and some techniques for how to build it.

Defining Shared Vision

We all like to believe we’re going to build the same solution but invariably there will be a conversation where your understanding and the understanding of someone else on the team differ. Clearly they’re wrong – or are they? One of the most difficult things we do is to reach a shared understanding with humans that have completely different experiences, desires, and ways of thinking than we do.

Our communication is based on notoriously bad language where words don’t have the same meaning for two people – and in some cases the words can have opposite meanings depending on their use. Consider the word dust. As a verb it can mean to cover with fine particles – as in dusting a donut with powdered sugar. It can also mean to remove fine particles (dust) from a surface.

A little closer to home I often hear people say that they’re using SharePoint for collaboration but when I press them as to what that means I’m often presented with blank stares. When I suggest that one definition is “to conspire with the enemy” I am shown shock – right before the awareness sets in that they don’t understand what they mean by collaboration and should get details.

Why Shared Vision?

At some level we’ve come to expect that we won’t understand exactly what someone else is talking about. However, we fail to recognize how much energy is wasted by the lack of alignment. Alignment is what happens when we’re pulling in exactly the same direction. Alignment can only be had when we know and agree to the same goal.

Consider the idea of a bon fire that can light up 30 feet – maybe. Now consider a lighthouse beacon that can be seen for 30 nautical miles (~35 miles) – with roughly the same amount of light energy. Taking the light analogy to the extreme, a laser (which is simply focused light) can be seen bouncing back from the moon – slightly more than 35 miles.

There is not a small percentage of better results that are realized through alignment – the differences are spectacular.

Building Shared Vision

Shared Vision may be hard to generate and important to get – but creating a shared vision seems particularly challenging in SharePoint. SharePoint’s flexibility is – in this case – its curse. Because you can do so much with SharePoint – and in so many different ways, it’s difficult to get everyone to agree on the same objectives – solved in the same way. However, it’s not impossible. It can be done if you focus on three things: Personas, Use Cases, and Visual Design.

Personas

If you’ve not been close to marketing you may not have heard of a persona, it’s a description of a class or type of user. Marketing folks use a persona to get a clear understanding of the people they’re targeting their efforts to – you can use a set of personas to understand the different types of users that you’re supporting. Personas should be created with a name (like Sally Sales, Sam Shipping, etc.), a picture, and a backstory. The photo (some stock photo that you acquire) and the backstory are easy to skip over but they’re important to help fill out the character of this person to make them less fictional and more “real” – Yes, create more fiction to make the person seem more real. Creating shared vision is layers. You must clearly understand the needs of the people that you’re serving to clearly articulate the goals of the solution. The backstory should include how many kids they have, their pets, and their hobbies. Again, the goal is to create the sense that this is a real person that you’re working with – not just some convenient label.

In most cases creating a handful of personas won’t be that hard for a group with experience in the organization. The biggest challenge will most frequently be filtering to the important personas and deciding when two or more personas can be merged. Ideally you won’t have more than 4 – 6 personas, any more than that and you may have a hard time balancing too many competing personas.

Use Cases

Once you know the “who” of the solution, you’ll want to figure out the “what.” Use cases are what the users will – and won’t be able to do with the system. The most popular cases should be mapped out – and those which the key stakeholders believe are important. If you don’t document it as a use case, it’s not something guaranteed to be in the final solution.

It’s not just the “happy path” use cases that should be considered, it’s important to create “negative” use cases where items are supposed to fail due to business rules, technical limitations, or security. Having the negative use cases makes it easier for people to completely conceptualize what they’re doing. Research has proven that having folks actively try to identify potential areas of failure improves the probable success rate for a project – so don’t be stingy with the time to understand the negative cases.

Visual Design

Visual design is the one area of Shared Vision that most organizations believe they’ve got down. The organization may create wireframes to discuss the placeholders for content. Typically mockups are created to get the basic look and feel, however, one area that most organizations fall down is in the development of prototypes.

Mockups are good at showing the pages that they depict but all too often organizations only do mockups for a handful of pages – way too few to be able to articulate the way that users will navigate the system – and complete their use cases. By leveraging prototypes it’s possible to demonstrate the actual system behavior that will happen for different use cases. By demonstrating the actual use it becomes easier to identify misunderstandings and to coalesce around a single understanding.

Bringing Vision into Focus

Reaching a shared vision is difficult – but it’s just a process of taking the right steps to drive understanding. The better you execute a set of simple steps the more you’ll end up with the same shared vision. If you want to learn more about Shared Vision or the other 8 keys to success check out the DVD.

Book Review-The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption

Robert Bogue April 11, 2012 2 Comments

Most of the time when I read a book that I have problems with – or that I don’t like most of it – I simply don’t write a review of it. I generally think that there’s little value in telling people what not to buy – it’s a habit I picked up from my days of writing magazine reviews. However, the book The Information Diet is a bit different – because there’s some things that I agree with strongly and a few things that I vehemently disagree with.

I’m going to let you in on a secret that many of my closest friends know. I’m quirky. Yep. I admit it. I do things that make little sense from the surface. One of my quirks is that I almost never turn on a TV at a hotel while I’m traveling. If I’m in the breakfast room I won’t go over and turn it off – I’m not rude. However, I don’t turn the TV on in my room. This has led to some interesting conversations about how great the TV or the channel selection is where I have to respond with “Um, yea. Sure.” The heart of this quirk is the heart of The Information Diet book. That is, you should be choosy about your information diet just like you should be with your physical diet.

The precept is that we’re consuming highly processed information that has embedded biases that we won’t be able to detect. Advertising sections with editorial content in a magazine is a really good example. Those Amish heaters which are purportedly Amish-made is another good example. The heat source isn’t Amish made… of course that makes sense if you spend time tearing apart the idea that they’re electrically driven heat sources – but who thinks that much about a space heater? (By the way, the Amish heater is my example, not the authors)

A key message is that you don’t have to consume information, any more than you have to consume a slice of pie placed in front of you. However, how many of us have the will power to resist a delicious slice of grandma’s apple pie that’s placed in front of us? We’re leading our elephant down the wrong path – and the rider is simply not strong enough to steer him back in place – for long. (See Switch and The Happiness Hypothesis) So it’s true that you don’t have to consume information but it’s also true that you’re wise to influence the information that you put in front of you. Unfortunately, the forces of commercialism are driving news outlets to seek to entertain and affirm us – because those are the things that keep us coming back. It’s sort of like the high fructose corn sugar and other sweeteners silently added to our foods to make them more appealing to us.

Before I talk about what bothers me about the book, I need to talk about another really important distinction that’s touched on lightly in the book. We tend to wire ourselves in one of two basic operating modes. Mode 1 is constantly connected, constantly distracted, and constantly confused as to what we’re doing. (I might be editorializing a bit.) In other words, we’re always looking for the next email popup, the next tweet, the next IM. We spend all day chasing one shiny object then the next. There are some jobs where these skills are absolutely essential. If you’re monitoring a chemical plant – I want you trying to take in every piece of information. So to be clear this isn’t a bad way of operating. It’s the way that our ancestors used to operate. They were constantly vigilant about the threat of a lion. However, they dealt with substantially less interruptions.

Mode 2 is completely focused. This is the cone of silence – although I actually find that having a cone of music is instantly more helpful. This is Flow. This is focused concentration leading to the ability to move a single thing forward. Peopleware talked about how it might take 15 minutes for a developer to regain the productivity they had after an interruption. (This is consistent w/ Csikszentmihalyi’s research.) Today we’re overwhelmed with interruptions. It’s not just email or twitter but a desk phone and a mobile phone. Text messages and knocks at the door.

The biggest issue I have with the book is that it advocates a 5 minute working, 1 minute break approach for helping folks deal with distractions. The concept is you have to focus for five minutes and then you can take a break and getup and stretch for a minute. Um. Wait. If it takes 15 minutes to get into flow … you’ll never get there. So the approach to the day that is recommended is awful from a productivity standpoint. The author admits that he extended these windows once he got discipline about staying focused. I appreciate the need to program yourself to be focused – to block out distractions – however, in this case I believe the medicine is worse than the disease.

I need a final word of criticism for the book before I encourage you to buy it. The author has some serious biases relative to his political background and spends an inordinate amount of time talking about political situations and information in that context. This was just annoying to me. This is coupled with the real undertone that the author was attempting to lose weight immediately before or during the writing of the book. As a result some of the analogies and ties are a bit too much for me. (Even as I’m trying to lose a few extra pounds myself.)

Still, understanding how the information you consume leads you to think differently, and how those thoughts can be a serious issue over time is an important thing. (We’ve all met the closed minded person.) If you’re interested in learning more about how your information forms you – you should read The Information Diet.

Announcing the Comedy for Professional Presenters Workshop

Robert Bogue April 9, 2012 2 Comments

I’m bearing down on two weeks from the first ever Comedy for Professional Presenters workshop – and I’m excited because it’s been a journey to find the right people, the right place, and the right time to help my fellow presenters learn how to integrate comedy into their work. You can find out more about the workshop at http://comedy4presenters.eventbrite.com but I’m getting a bit ahead of myself, let me first start with what I mean by professional presenters.

Professional Presenters

Sure, you can imagine Tony Robbins or former President Bill Clinton when I say professional presenter – but that’s a pretty narrow view. I view a professional presenter as anyone who has to present to any group of two or more people for their job. This definition includes sales people, marketing folks, and even those in full time ministry. It’s nearly everyone who works in a professional setting. Whether you present every week, once a month, or just once in a while, a professional presenter has to communicate with spoken word.

Fear Not

Even with 20 years of public speaking there is still the odd occasion when I get a little anxious before I get up to speak. Sometimes it’s the size of the audience, sometimes the make-up of the audience, but honestly it’s mostly about what’s going on in my head. No matter what has me sideways, I know that a good laugh will fix it. We’ve heard that “laughter is the best medicine.” That applies to more than just physical ailments.

If you can convince an audience to laugh, you’ve created a connection that you can use to communicate your real message. Every good speaker, nervous or not, will seek out the laugh to help build that connection. We’ve heard the over simplified “start with a joke” advice which is a good start – but how do you get comfortable with the group with a single joke? You need to be able to weave it into the conversation so they know you’re there with them.

My Journey

As I said, I’ve been speaking professionally for more than 20 years. In that time I’ve spoken at dozens if not hundreds of conferences all over the world. So last year when I was trying to figure out how to take my presentation skills to the next level, well finding a place to start was a daunting task. Luckily I stumbled across an Introduction to Standup Comedy class at Morty’s Comedy Joint. The instructors, Chris Bowers and Todd McComas were intent on trying to help comedians be better. That’s great, except the kind of comedy that works in a club while folks are drinking and relaxing on a Saturday night isn’t exactly the same kind of comedy that’s appropriate for a professional environment.

During the Introduction to Standup Comedy course I started reading including: The New Comedy Writing Step by Step and Step by Step to Stand-up Comedy
which I blogged about. In short, I was trying to learn what I could about taking comedy and applying it to business – extracting the dark, blue content and reforming it into something that could be used professionally.

I followed this course up with an Improvisation course taught by Michael Malone. Improvisation is about knowing how to make a scene better – and how to be comfortable with being there.

Since late last year my comedy journey had been put on hold until I caught back up with Kate Thomas – one of my fellow students in the Introduction to Standup Comedy class.

Formation of the Workshop

I’ve got a ton of things on my plate right now – that’s pretty normal – but it means that I’m not able to really extend myself into creating a workshop on Comedy for Presenters – without help. When I ran into Kate Thomas at Morty’s one night, we started talking about the course, and what we each wanted to do with the skills. The result was a decision to build a workshop (and our ultimate goal of creating a DVD.) Kate would be the primary author for the content and I would commit to help during the production of the workshop. Kate, by the way, has taught students in the US, Europe, and Asia. There’s no real way to convey the confusion of hearing her say that she taught math to Asian students.

With Kate onboard, Bowers and McComas agreed to join us. That’s the instructors for the workshop – an educator with experience the world over, a 20 year veteran of public speaking, a comedian and educator for the state police, and a motivational speaker and comedian. There’s going to be a crazy amount of experience at educating, presenting, and at comedy assembled to teach the students how to integrate comedy into their presentations.

Registration

So on April 21^st at Morty’s Comedy Joint at 9AM we’ll start our six hour journey to share our experiences and to teach folks how to be professional presenters who’ve integrated comedy. The cost for the workshop is $99 and seats are limited. Go to http://comedy4presenters.eventbrite.com now to get your ticket – before they’re sold out.

Article: Top 10 Technical Mistakes in SharePoint

Robert Bogue April 5, 2012 1 Comment

I’ve seen plenty of technical mistakes when implementing SharePoint, particularly in larger environments when the risks of failure are higher. Here’s a countdown of my top ten “favorite” SharePoint mistakes:

Constructing Quality Software – All that is Old is New

Robert Bogue March 29, 2012 No Comments

It’s been years since I started focusing all my effort on SharePoint. Before that I was working on large scale development projects – and writing a lot about how to build quality software. I had gathered up my articles, organized them, edited them, and turned them into a small book I called Constructing Quality Software. I stumbled across it the other day and since some of the articles are no longer available in any other form I decided to publish it to Amazon’s Kindle. One of the key things that the book does is that it breaks down the roles in software development and what they should do. If you’re looking for classic software development information and approaches, I’d encourage you to take a look. The book is priced at $4.99.

Article: Playing Cards for Better [Learning] Catalog Organization

Robert Bogue March 23, 2012 No Comments

In the last article we worked on some core information architecture concepts and how they can and should be applied to your learning catalog. In this article we’re going to focus on specific techniques which are useful for organizing your catalog in a way that users will understand.

HIGH AND MIGHTY

Before we get to the process of defining (or validating) a hierarchy to organize your courses into, it’s important to understand the goal of creating the structure and the reasonable expectations. First, the goal is to get the high-level structure right. This means that we’ll want to get the hierarchies we want to allow and their children for the first few levels nailed down. These are the levels where the wrong turns are the most critical and the most difficult to recover from, because you’ll have many steps to get back to these decisions. Each of the decisions at the lower levels will be so close to the final information that they’re likely to be more right and transparent and are inherently easier to navigate back from.

Second, our expectation should be that we’re trying to create a start. There will be new courses and courses that are retired from the catalog. We shouldn’t feel compelled to do the process below with every course. There will be plenty of changes that would quickly invalidate our testing if we decided we had to cover every course.

Book Review-Demand: Creating What People Love Before They Know They Want It

Robert Bogue March 23, 2012 No Comments

Working on the new DVDs (Psychology of SharePoint Adoption and Engagement, Nine Keys to SharePoint Success) and the SharePoint Tutor (SharePoint Shepherd’s Guide Corporate Edition) I’ve gotten quite curious about how demand is created and how some products sell well while others don’t. I’ve gotten a healthy appreciation for the value of marketing – if a consumer doesn’t know you exist they can’t buy you. However, I knew that something else was missing. The book Demand describes a set of keys that Adrian Slywotzky believes create products that will have great demand – from NetFlix to Amazon.com and beyond.

Slywotzky believes there are six things all demand creators do:

Make it Magnetic – Create an emotional connection to the product or service. Create a product that has some special, unique value.
Fix the Hassle Map – Life is filled with hassles. The more hassles that your product solves and the fewer that it creates the lower the friction between people and buying your product. The less friction the more purchasing.
Build a Complete Backstory –It’s not enough to have a product that’s not supported by the right back end systems. Consider the iPod. What’s the real value? The ability to manage and acquire music – and that’s the job of iTunes and the iTunes store. You can’t build one part of the solution without the other.
Find the Triggers – Triggers are what gets people to take action. They’re notoriously difficult to create. In consulting I say that I have no true competitors except inaction. I seriously don’t view any other SharePoint consultants as a real competitor. I really only compete with the client deciding not to do the project or to do it internally.
Build a Steep Trajectory – This is how the product improves over time. The greater the rate of improvement the greater the trajectory.
De-Average – Realize that everyone is unique and has their own needs, desires, and hassle maps. This is customization ala The One to One Future.

The book is sprinkled with helpful, and reassuring, nuggets. For instance, Demand speaks of how great demand creators imitate (copy) in places that aren’t strategic. For instance, NetFlix copying amazon’s web design. It’s a simple example on how something that was being done right could be copied and adapted to minimize investments in an area.

Incidentally, the book also speaks of the relentless testing that goes into refining other aspects. For instance, NetFlix’s obsession with creating a mailer that worked. So on the one hand it speaks of copying the non-critical items to business and absolutely creating the right solutions where it is critical to business. This in turn reminds me of Tom Peters’ (et all) book In Search of Excellence where there are numerous stories of how organizations obsessed about things that were non-obvious – for instance clean washrooms.

In some sense the obsession, or preoccupation if you prefer, with details that on the surface shouldn’t matter is a part of the genius of the book – and the demand creators. There are many things that are true but also counter intuitive. For instance, go to your favorite ecommerce site and start the checkout process – you’ll be more or less prevented from shopping the catalog and getting more items in your cart. Why? Because it turns out that if you have the opportunity to keep putting things in your cart you’re less likely to checkout. Truly good demand creators – the book asserts – will do the research to determine where things are counter intuitive and capitalize on those places to dramatically improve their demand.

If you’re struggling to sell a product, or trying to figure out why your service isn’t selling like it should – or if you’re even considering starting a business and are concerned with whether or not people will want to buy what you have to sell – Demand is a great book.

Article: Information Architecture for Your Learning Catalog

Robert Bogue March 18, 2012 No Comments

In the last article we talked about how users find information in your learning catalog. In this article, we’ll talk about what you can do to make your learning more findable. We’ll explore the underpinnings of findability in your learning catalog so that you can evaluate changes with a simple framework. In our next article we’ll cover a specific technique, card sorting, as a mechanism for generating catalog structures.

Article: Two Ways Students Find Training in Your Catalog