Target Users

Angelina: Consumes, reviews and provides feedback on information. Initiator of both low-level requests and high-level organizational goals and overall direction.

Eli: Conduit and manager of logistical information for Angelina

Helen: Gathers, Cross-pollinates, Synthesizes and Produces information that is ultimately pushed to Angelina

The 3 personas conveniently interact with each other, so as a whole they form an ecosystem of personas as illustrated by the drawings below.

Angelina

The Angelina persona is at the center of a relatively flat but complex structure of overlapping hubs and spokes. Of anyone in the organization, Angelina interacts with the largest number and widest range of people. Her calendar is packed on a daily basis with meetings and travel. However, the people she interacts with a daily basis are her personal assistant, Eli and direct reports. Angelina is responsible for the overall success of several long-term medium to large-scale projects. Additionally, she is always juggling one or more ephemeral, small-scale, personal projects such as speaking engagements, writing articles, blogging et cetera.

Information flows mostly INbound to Angelina. In that sense,s he is primarily a CONSUMER of information. When it flows outbound, it is usually intended for a large-scale audience (ie. Staff meeting updates, organization-wide strategy, lectures and speechs, blog entries, published articles) and the content is expository and /or didactic. Very rarely does Angelina prepare material to be reviewed by somebody else. In that sense, most of the outbound material Angelina puts together is for the benefit of the wider organization as a whole.

Angelina is not a conduit of information. The information she consumes is for her own ends. Instead, Angelina synthesizes the information she consumes and re-fertilizes the organization with feedback, requests and most importantly Initative (with a capital I), steering the organization as a whole and defining new goals to pursue.

Angelina is also not really an information gatherer. Unlike Helen, who spends a good deal of her time going after and ferreting out information, Angelina depends on her direct reports to gather relevant information. There are signficant exceptions to this, but as a rule information is pushed to Angelina, rather than pulled.

From her position in the center of the organizational structure, she depends on a handful of people who report directly to her to provide her with the cross-organizational view she needs to:

1. Define organizational goals 2. Come up with high level strategic plans to ensure that the organization meets its goals 3. Make sure the organization is moving in harmony towards the stated common goal 4. Identify and head-off potential areas of conflict and Raise cross-organizational issues 5. Look for ways different parts of the organization can leverage each other and work more synergistically

Eli

Eli is Angelina's assistant. He is Angelina's primary conduit and manager of logistical information. Through Eli, Angelina deals with a wide range of people and organizations from scheduling meetings with people inside the organization to dealing with office logistics, travel plans, speaking engagements and board meetings.

Angelina is where Eli gets most of his requests for tasks, feedback for the work he's currently working and initiative and direction for future projects. Eli also receives requests from other people, usually to set up meeting times with Angelina.

Eli does not really coordinate all the people he interacts with. He is not responsible for their productivity and success. Rather he is tasked with completing discrete projects with clearly defined end-goals and needs to interact with many different people, oftentimes from many different organizations in order to complete her tasks.

The overwhelming majority of tasks are primarily for Angelina where Eli is acting as a proxy for Angelina. This requires a lot of communication with Angelina and review by Angelina of what Eli has done.

Helen

As the Program Manager, Helen is responsible for making sure that all the various pieces of the Chandler project are inline with each other and aligned with higher level organizational goals.

This coordination work spans across all areas of the project and requires Helen to interact with almost everyone in the organization.

Some common scenarios for Helen:

1. More often than not, project information doesn't just flow to Helen and she has to first figure out what it is and then second, run after it to collect it. In other words, not only is she responsible for finding answers, she oftentimes has to first figure out what the question is.

2. More often than not, things aren't aligned. As a result, Helen needs to understand individual parts of the project well enough to identify where things don't fit together well and then negotiate with the owners of each project piece to figure out the most effective and least disruptive way to achieve seemless integration.

3. Interacting with one person in one area of the project, will often raise issues that Helen needs to follow-up on with other people in other areas of the project.

As a result, Helen has an across-the-project view but is also close to the details of each project area and digs in deeper on an as needed basis. She is the best person in the organization to understand the subtle ways in which different parts of the project interact and depend on each other and keeps an eye out for potential collisions and mishaps. Helen has become the central gatekeeper of information for the project. If all information flows to Helen, then Helen can make sure that all information flows to the right people, at the right time to make sure things happen in relative harmony.

Helen is also responsible for making sure that day-to-day progress on Chandler is consistent with the mid and long term goals of the project. This involves working closely with her manager and Lisa and Sheila, who have shared responsibility for project planning to set goals and requirements.

In addition to her coordination work, Helen is also responsible for coming up with written proposals for a number of projects. Helen's projects tend to leverage her role as Project Architecture Coordinator. ie. Come up with a plan for making Chandler the Platform easily extensible by outside developers.

In the end, the sum total of Helen's work is reviewed on a weekly basis by her manager. These weekly review and discussion sessions is a project in and of itself, requiring preparation time and space in Helen's information management system where she can synthesize and put into perspective the work she's done across all of her other projects.

-- MimiYin - 20 Apr 2006 Angelina

Eli

Helen