Asleep at the wheel

I read a few weeks back that General Motors has acknowledged that they “may have been too internally focused” during a period that, near as I can tell, lasted 25 years or so. They “may have lost sight” of what the market was looking for in transportation and become too obsessed with internal performance and quality metrics.  The exact quote, I believe, is “”For the first time in a long time, we’re listening to our customers again,” he said. ‘The hard truth is that we haven’t always done a great job at this in recent years. Today, we’re listening well,’ Reuss said.”  I wish “duh” had more letters in it, because it seems too succinct a way to comment on that.

I think we can all imagine how this happens in a behemoth like GM. Heck, I saw a similar mentality when I worked at Xerox in their global services division. We desperately wanted to be relevant to our clients; to offer products and solutions that they would snap up like cheese curls at a Marijuana Growers Convention.   But in spite of that desire, we missed the boat.  I think it comes down to gravity. Well, really distance, but it’s all in the same formula, according to Newton or Einstein or whoever came up with the formula for the gravitational attraction between two bodies.

I won’t bore you with the actual formula, but suffice to say that the attraction between two bodies exponentially declines as they get farther apart. In other words, the pull between two bodies that are 10 feet apart is 4 times greater than when they are 20 feet apart and so on. As the distance increases, soon you don’t feel the pull of the other body at all.

So back to Xerox… or GM for that matter. In most large organizations, one effect that management hierarchies and bureaucracy has is that they increase the distance between what customers want and what the leaders deciding what they will offer in the market and where they will invest deliver.  That same hierarchy and bureacracy also distorts what their real reputation among their customers is.  Mix in some “internally focused metrics” that incent the wrong behaviors, a little politics and jostling among peers that can quickly degenerate into “if you look bad, I must look good” and you’ve got yourself a Pontiac Aztec…

But here’s the real question: In your ten employee company, your 15 person team, your 150 consultant division or your 15,000 person organization, are you following in the footsteps of those behemoths? Remember! Xerox and General Motors, to name just two iconic brands, had stellar reputations for quality and innovation. I could make an argument that Microsoft may be on its way into that group as well. And that journey may become more insidious than ever. Because now that all this social media is available so you can listen to your ‘groundswell’ you must be thinking “I am in lockstep with my customers. I see what they post on my fan page. I know what they want and expect from me and my organization.”   But do you really? Or are you just taking that market intelligence as gospel?

It took Domino’s too long to figure out what people thought of their pizza, though it seems they got it right in the end, at least according to my daughter, who knows pizza. The faster you find out and fix what’s broken, the easier it will be to stay relevant for as long as you like…

Rear View Mirror

Today, it seems everyone wants to be a “futurist.”  Or maybe that should be, TOMORROW everyone wants to be a futurist.  I never did get verb tenses very well.  In any case, I have decided that yesterday, I am a Pastist.  That’s the opposite of futurist, right?  I mean, it’s easy to prognosticate about what might happen in 5 or 10 years.  Even with Facebook making it so easy to find people you had the good fortune to lose touch with, who’s really gonna track you down to tell you how wrong you were?  But the past, that’s indisputable.  Much tougher!  That’s why there are so many futurists and so few pastists.  In fact, the annoying squiggles under the word itself tell me that Microsoft doesn’t even think it’s a word.  Clearly there’s no higher authority than that!

As a pastist, though, I want to point out three trends from the PAST 10 years  that I find particularly disturbing:

1) Outsourcing – who’s idea was that anyway?  My guess is some CFO under a lot of pressure to find the last semi-legal way to satisfy his or her ravenous shareholders and who had no respect for the real work that IT professionals do.  And more importantly, the irreplaceable intellectual capital (that’s right, as opposed to the “real” capital that the CFO cares so deeply about) that you just glibly shipped outside your company without realizing it’s the same as if you had shredded your precious financial documents from the past 3 filing years.  Oh wait, you did that too!

2) Client/Server – nothing says organization and synergy like taking your corporate data and chopping it up into little pieces, hiding it in all your departments, and then later spend literally millions of dollars trying to reassemble into something meaningful.  Seriously, that’s what most Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing projects are.   Sad attempts to glue back together your mom’s favorite china plate that you dropped on the tile floor.   But don’t worry, once all the pieces are reassembled, you can put them in “the cloud…”

3) SAP – I guess, in many ways, this was the best alternative to client/server.  Buy a single, all-encompassing and hopelessly complex, “best practice”-based combination business process/software/workflow, stop everything else you are doing for 5 years to try to implement it, and then wait for either the promised ROI to magically appear or the phone call to come to the CEO’s office and explain yourself before your exit interview…

What does all this have to do with being a better leader? 

In the next ten years (or if you’re into New Year’s Resolutions, the next 3 months) buck a trend.  Do what your instincts tell you are right, instead of what “everyone else is doing.”  Focus on your customers or, God-forbid, your employees and ignore the folks whispering that if you just put your whole business on an iPhone app, build a Facebook fan page, and Twitter all day long you’re guaranteed to succeed…  Damn futurists…

You think you have it tough???

I am sure everyone has their own opinion about what a really tough job might be.  Cop, fireman, Shoe Disinfector at a bowling alley… Here’s mine:  How would you like to be responsible for making LeBron James a better basketball player?   And, oh yeah, what if you were a 38 year old former lawyer with a Russian dad and an Israeli mom?  And what if you never played competitive basketball or coached above the junior high level?  That’s a tough job.

And yet, that’s exactly what Idan Ravin does for a living.  A damn good living too, from what I can gather from Sports Illustrated (see, I do read other mags besides PM Network and Bowling Weekly…)  And how does he do it?  Among other things, he points out LeBron’s faults.  What???  Yup – he tells him he can’t dribble and makes him do drills to be better at it.  AND, LeBron pays him for this!!

So riddle me this…  Why is it so hard for managers to sit an employee down and find constructive ways to point out areas where they are weak and need to improve?  Is it because they haven’t earned the respect of the employee?  Is it because they’re afraid of “hurting the employees feelings?”  Or is it because they’re not trained to detect those weaknesses and see the connection to growth, productivity, effectiveness, or that company’s equivalent of winning an NBA championship??

Whatever the reasons, just recognize that you’re not doing yourself or your employee a favor by avoiding a conversati0n where you have to tell them they really don’t dribble very well.  It’s not easy.  It’s not fun.  But if Idan Ravin can do it to LeBron James, you can do it to your star player too…

The Invention of Lying

I went to see The Invention of Lying last weekend.  Clever little movie from Ricky Gervais who “discovers” that he is the only person, in a world otherwise just like ours, who is capable of not telling the truth.  As you can imagine, he proceeds down a slippery slope from some “whitish” lies to get some extra money and a few dates to some whoppers.

That got me thinking about a lot of things but two specifically come to mind.  The first is that it seems telling that our linguists have created so MANY words for that slippery slope.  Mistruth, misconstrue, exaggerate, embellish, fabricate, fiction…  I could go on.   And that’s without consulting a thesaurus!  The second is, unlike in Ricky’s world, how our human nature seems to lend itself quite readily to “modify the facts” when the stakes are high.  And ironically, when the stakes are high, the truth is often at its most valuable.

I have recently come across several “management dashboards” that use the standard Green, Yellow, Red symbols to indicate the “health” of a project.  You know, whether it’s ahead or behind schedule, whether it’s over or under budget, whether the scope is wildly out of control, etc.  And it seems that, for many managers, their objective is for everything to be green.  And when it is – you get a cookie.

Now add all this up…  A slippery slope that makes it easy to justify altering facts, compensation tied to “good” performance (aka lots of green dots = lots of cookies). the well-founded statistic that most projects fall behind and/or end up over budget, and pressure to present the most favorable possible status from your superiors.  Is it any wonder that it’s hard to get the real status of a project??

When I was managing lots of project managers, I toyed with the idea of rewarding them for telling me things were bad.  I never quite figured out how to do it effectively, but I always suspected that rewarding people to tell me everything was green was “bad form.”

So do yourself a favor.  Create a measurement system that encourages and rewards accurate reporting, and makes it more difficult to justify why something is green than why it’s red.  You’ll get some pretty funny looks, but you might also get some truth…

Gooooooooooaaaaaaallll !!!

I am an ugly American, in this instance defined as someone who, in spite all evidence and fan support to the contrary, will never really “get” soccer as the most popular sport on the planet.   Couple that with my lukewarm feelings about cycling as a spectator sport, throw in the cricket snooze factor and, well, you get the picture.

But here’s one thing I definitely DO get.   Soccer goals are hard to come by.  And when one is scored, the fans go berserk.  Literally. And so does the announcer.  [thus, the title of this blog] 

Here’s another thing I get.  Most of those fans had less to do with the scoring of that goal than most employees, even in a huge organization, have a direct hand in contributing to corporate goals.  But the soccer fans cheer and celebrate as if they kicked the ball in the net themselves!  And yet, when corporate (or even department) goals are achieved, assuming they were communicated in the first place, the reaction is typically and sadly far more muted.

What gives???

I heard today that US  worker productivity jumped 6.6 percent in the second quarter.  I imagine that increase was driven by a powerful desire for US workers to give it their all to achieve the organization’s well stated goals.  NOT…  It was driven by fear.  Fear of losing a job and not being able to find another one.  Fear that their families or others who depend on them and their income could suffer.  Yes, fear does motivate.  But it doesn’t celebrate.

Give your department or company’s goals the soccer test:

• Does everyone on your team and in the stands understand that your equivalent of kicking a ball past the opponent’s goalkeeper, and all the teamwork that leads up to that accomplish, is the real objective?
• Like a soccer goal, when one of your goals is achieved, will everyone know?
• Will they celebrate?
• Even if they’re deluding themselves at some level, will they feel like they scored the goal themselves?

If not, you might be just another ugly American…

Instructive yes, hypocrite no

It occurred to me that I left one rather important detail about my last post out.  And that would be the answer to the inevitable question:

Hey moron, if you estimate hours and do fixed price work, which is essentially inevitable in consulting, what’s your solution to this dilemma of hours and revenue management?

Not wanting to be a hypocrite or someone who points out challenges with no solution, here’s what I recommend:

For purposes of this discussion, I will assume there are three separate milestone payments in the contract. 

1)  Consider each milestone and its associated payment like a separate “mini-project.”  Estimate the hours for that mini-project and consider that the baseline.  Include planned payments and the average cost of your employees, including benefits, etc.  SHARE THAT NUMBER WITH THE WHOLE TEAM.  Repeat for all additional milestones.  You should end up with something like this:

Milestone	Estimated Hours	Fixed price payment due upon completion	Avg total cost of employees per hour	planned gross  profit
1	500	50000	51	24500
2	1000	100000	51	49000
3	500	50000	51	24500

2) start the project

3) keep track of actual hours

4) at the end of each milestone, add a column to the table and put the total hours expended to achieve the milestone.  SHARE WITH THE WHOLE TEAM.

5) calculate your ACTUAL Profit based on the actual hours worked to achieve that milestone.

6) start the next milestone.

7) at the end of the project, calculate your total profit.  SHARE WITH THE WHOLE TEAM.

8 ) review the estimates versus actuals with at least the project leadership team, evaluate where you did well and where you could have improved/been more efficient.

9) If you used less hours than what you estimated, celebrate!

10) If you used WAY more hours than you estimated, kick yourself for estimating poorly, not the project team.

11) take the word “overage” out of your vocabulary forever.  There’s no such thing…

Pushpins for everyone!

A trusted colleague of mine, who claims because he gave me this idea that I now owe him beer, and I were having an IM conversation this week about working remotely, etc. And that got me thinking…
So I looked up the definition of collaboration, specifically to find words that have the opposite meaning. And there were some good ones. Tops in my book were competition and coercion. Good job, WikiAnswers!! But they missed an important one, quite meaningful in these modern times. Cubicle.
Here’s what cubicle says to me, especially if:
a) not everyone has one
b) they vary in size depending on your alleged importance to an organization
c) location matters (like a window view, less traffic past it, etc.)
if you’re a manager, it says:
a) I only trust you if I can see you and potentially hear what you are doing
b) I can’t think of a better way to arrange our limited space
c) I need a door for the important work that I do, but you don’t
d) I will feel you are at your most productive, regardless of task, if I wall you off from your co-workers
if you’re a cubicle-ite, it says:
a) leave me alone, I am busy
b) if I can’t see you, maybe you don’t exist
c) every conversation we have, whether work related or not, is fodder for other listeners or to add to the perception that I am a slacker
d) I am valued based on real estate measured in very small square-foot increments
Don’t get me wrong – there may very well be valid reasons to arrange work space in a series of small, semi-personalized compartments. I can actually think of a few. But this post is targeted more toward consulting and software companies that spend lots of money in rent, furniture, and push pins. I would advise them, if at all possible, to leave the 90’s behind and recognize the following:
a) There are never enough conference rooms. Ever wonder why?? Because that’s where people collaborate – something they desperately want to do WHEN THEY ARE TOGETHER.
b) Almost everyone does their best non-collaborative work ALONE. That’s OK.
c) If you had the processes in place to genuinely measure the relative worth and productivity of your staff, you wouldn’t need to be able to see them working to believe that they are, in fact, working.
So to sum up – if you are thinking about working for a consulting company and they proudly parade you past their lines of cubicles, attempting to impress you with the size of their staff (please, no bad jokes here) run like the wind. Like Cheers and Seinfeld, they probably had a good run in the 90’s but eventually they too will be cancelled…

Opening the blinds

I was challenged by one of my devoted readers this week [and I am up to a whopping six of them…], let’s call him Blane Gordon, to come up with a name for serial nine-to-fivers. You know, people who go through the motions at work, spend way too much time looking at the clock and praying for lunch time or the “official” end of the work day or who just feel like every second above 40 hours (or apparently 22 if you live in France…) is somehow a gift they’re reluctantly giving to their ungrateful employers. Good challenge, Blane!

So, as usual, I started with the obvious. Dolly Partons, clock watchers, whatever. But that doesn’t really get at the root of the behavior and the problem, plus it’s completely lame. The problem, first of all, is a lack of one of Peter Senge’s Five Disciplines – Shared Vision. And I could argue that it is the most precious commodity any company over 10 people in size could have. Shared vision means that everyone in an organization can both articulate what everyone is REALLY working for, and even better, they believe in it!

It’s not extraordinarily difficult to have shared vision in a five person company. There’s a good chance there’s some ownership split and that all five had some part in crafting a vision in the first place. But as an organization grows, it’s very easy to have that original vision slowly watered down until you wake up one day and see a frighteningly large number of nine-to-fivers heading for the door at 4:57 PM.

Think about the last time you worked really hard on something with no regard for effort or time consumed in the pursuit. I built a deck with my son and some good friends not long after we moved into our house a few years back, and I worked on it three or four weekends in a row from dawn til dusk and never really thought about anything other than making progress ( and of course, not screwing it up too bad in places people could see – if you’ve seen me use power tools, you’d know why that’s such a big concern…) But I know folks who could spend 16 straight hours sanding a boat getting it ready for sailing, training endless hours for the Boston Marathon, or building a new web site. They have vision. Which I define, in this instance, as a clear objective that they can imagine in their minds and the determination to get there. If you can instill that feeling in yourself or your team at work, you are a great leader indeed!

The opposite of that, of course, is no vision. And so, Blane, I would recommend that when you’re looking for some other term for a nine-to-fiver, try Magoo…

Now what, Batman?

I watched the Dark Knight two weekends ago. What a great movie! Action-packed, with cool special effects and, as you’ve probably heard 1,000 times by now, an awesome performance and interpretation of the Joker by the late Heath Ledger. I certainly would not be giving the plot away by telling you that Batman, Commissioner Gordon, and the other “good guys” in the movie find themselves repeatedly in a predicament brought on by the many evildoers in the film. And once they see the fix they’re in, here’s what they say to reassure each other, – “I have a plan.” Inevitably, when the plan doesn’t seem to always work quite the way they hoped, one of the heroes will turn to the other and say, “Now what??”

I think that summarizes my view of technical project management pretty well. In technical projects, we only know a few things at the outset:

• We’re better off with a plan than without one.
• Not long after we get started, something is going to happen to make the original plan obsolete.
• How we handle things from that point on will likely determine the success or failure of the project.

And so, here are a few recommendations for making your projects go a bit smoother in the new year:

1. Before your project starts, have a plan and LET OTHERS KNOW you have one. If it’s in your head and nowhere else, some of those faithless cretins you work with won’t believe you have one and they certainly won’t be able to try to understand and follow it.

2. Expect it to change and decide how you want to deal with that. One of the ‘classic’ project management concepts is the idea of a Baseline. [for a quick sidebar definition, baselines are essentially snapshots frozen in time of the project, schedule, scope, budget or all of the above] I believe that most of the baselines created in MS Project and other tools are there for all the wrong reasons. Namely, to protect someone contractually, to play some dysfunctional game of “I told you so” or to bayonet the wounded at some point in the project.

So here’s a radical idea. Before you set a project baseline, establish a reason why you’re doing it, and get concurrence from all your stakeholders. Then, when the project changes ONLY refer back to the baseline for that reason. For everything else, use only the adjusted project plan and move on. You’ll have a mentally healthier project team, among other benefits.

3. Be aggressive in answering the inevitable question, “Now what?” By that, I mean don’t fall into the role of the convenient leader. Convenient leaders, by my definition, are happy to be designated as the Project Manager or some other fancy title of pseudo-importance until something goes wrong. Then they act as if the solution, like finding more funding, is the CFO’s problem, not theirs. Let’s take a relatively serious situation as an example:

You are the project leader of a complex, custom development project. Even with few scope changes to date, you start to realize 5 weeks into the code development phase that the estimates for the effort were too optimistic and that, if you’re lucky, the code will get written only 50% over the budget. Now what??

First, acknowledge the problem openly and do your best to quantify it.

Second, remember that this is SOMEBODY’S real money. It may not be yours, but you don’t want to get lumped in with all those fund managers at Wall Street brokerage firms.

Third, seek creative solutions from the team and any other trusted or involved sources. It’s your job to acknowledge that the problem exists and to communicate that, but not necessarily to solve it on your own. The folks closest to the problem, aka the development team, are also the most likely to come up with some options for how to proceed.

Lastly, don’t sulk. I suspect you deal with similar crises often enough in your personal life not to be shocked, like when the new suit you were going to buy ends up being a muffler on your eight year old car instead.

Just remember how stupid you’d look driving around in a noisy car

Fear and Loathing in Measurementville

I used to get frustrated when implementing project management systems (or really any systems) that explicitly measure the performance of a project, team or individual in an organization.  Resistance was imminent.  But now that I realize that suspicion of, and disdain for, measurement systems is pretty innate in human nature and goes far beyond just whether someone got a task done on time, I am more intrigued than anything else.

Have you ever noticed that, even with all our amazing societal technology advances, no one has really troubled to make one-way mirrors any better?  Any time I walk into a retail outlet and walk past that sort of glassy, out-of-place mirror-esque window, my first thought is, who’s the paranoid on the other side “watching me…?”  And why??  What did I do?  And what are they afraid of??  Clearly, the very fact that I am being [clandestinely] observed bothers me.  There’s even a term in quantum physics for this phenomenon – it’s called the Observer Effect.  The very fact that something (or someone) is being observed can change its behavior or properties.  Pretty amazing.

And so it should not surprise us that an equal amount of suspicion and disdain accompanies a typical project management system deployment (or again, potentially any Business Intelligence or Dashboard that measures your workers), especially if there had been no formal system to date.  And depending on your organization’s culture, this is likely to lead to one of two behaviors that you need to plan for:

1.  Passive resistance – this typically involves either ignoring the data entry needs of the system until it, hopefully, starves to death or blindly updating the information with only positive input (everything is on schedule, on budget, etc.)

2. Justification – this involves a relatively fervent effort to enter everything being worked on in an effort to “justify” the worker’s own existence, the project budget, how busy everyone is, etc.

If you suspect that one of the above behaviors is likely to manifest itself as you roll out your new PMO or other formal management tool, here are some things you can do to reduce or maybe even eliminate the resistance or justification effects.

Tell everyone what you plan to measure, who will be doing the measuring, and why. I don’t know about you, but when I walk into a store and there’s a sign that says, “Due to a recent uptick in shoplifting, we have installed security cameras to keep our prices low and protect our store” at least I don’t feel like I am being unfairly singled out

Get everyone to participate in the development of the metrics. First of all, you’ll end up with better metrics. Second, you may gain some insights into what your workers think is important. And don’t be surprised if it’s different from how you think your business and workers should be measured!

Get consensus around the measures’ objectivity. One reason why professional athletes don’t mind talking about their “stats” is because they believe they are well thought out, fair, and objective. A baseball pitcher’s Earned Run Average (ERA) or a football running back’s Yards Per Carry are both pretty sound indicators of how they are performing over time. And you know what, they know that too.

Celebrate positive results at least as often as you ding someone for a disappointing result. One of the reasons measurement systems get a bad rap is because there is a perception (which is often quite real) that only negative performance will be highlighted and get focus. That’s why I have never been a fan of MBE (Management by Exception); i.e., I will ignore you and your efforts until you screw up…

And as Jerry said to George after George poured his heart out to him about all his deepest fears and anxieties, “Good luck with all that…”