cazh1

Help for the Newly Minted Project Manager

Jim MacLennan — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 02:25:45 +0000

Go-Live Day

Congratulations! Due to the recent [acquisition / divestiture, market expansion / contraction, organizational realignments, other] you have been identified as a Critical Resource for this particular bit of business process change. And, to help us implement these changes, you have been named the Project Manager for this effort.

So now you are a Project Manager (PM, for short); what does that mean?

You may be vaguely aware that people get certifications for this sort of thing, or that Microsoft sells some Fairly Expensive Yet Sophisticated Software that helps create Can’t charts (or something like that).

You may also have this slowly growing sense of unease, as it becomes apparent that Project work is something that many folks don’t like to do – because being part of a Project Team represents an interruption to their already fully scheduled lives, with Tasks that will [by definition] someday End (… and where will that leave me?)

Don’t Panic

Every day, people in Operational areas of their companies get appointed to be “project lead” or project manager, but have had little training in formal Project Management. More often than not, however, the Project in question is of reasonable size (maybe 2-3 months in duration, with < 10 people on the team, and goals and objectives that are achievable “with stretch” (’cause if it was a no-brainer, we wouldn’t need to name you Project Manager, n’est-ce pas?). So relax for a bit, and let’s go through a little “crash course” in some of the basics of Project Management.

You may note, by the way, that much of PM may seem like simple ideas and common sense; this is true, and that’s a good thing to note – you’re calming down already.

Over time, you will learn that these simple ideas can be decomposed in many intricate bits; I wasn’t kidding about all that Certification stuff – as projects add people, systems, time and budget constraints, and shifting requirements, and you will understand why people talk about training and skills and battle scars …

Sorry, didn’t mean to lapse into that same old line of intimidating line of thinking … let’s just start with the basics.

What are we working on, and why are we working on it?

The new PM can be surprisingly effective with some fairly basic bits of information – clarity and reasonable precision go a long way when guiding a new team through a set of tasks that they aren’t used to doing every single day.

Clearly state the objectives of the project – what are we trying to accomplish?
What are the specific requirements? What are we building / implementing to deliver the objectives?

Are there a specific set of features, functions, documents, new skills, new services, process addition/changes, etc. that need to be delivered?
Any expectation of quality? Can this be slap-dashed together or must it meet the building code?
Any time constraints? Is there any sort of must-have-by date, or can it slip a little bit (to get more features or better quality?

Capture the benefits – what are we getting for this?

Identify total costs (hard and soft, let’s not forget the time we are spending in addition to our regular jobs)

Define success – how will we know we are done?

Note that Objectives are different than Requirements. I am trying to “deliver better customer service by delivering more accurate information on the invoice” (my objective). I will do that by “adding information to the customer orders, and printing it on the hard-copy invoices” (my requirements).

How are we going to get this done?

This is the most important, yet most often overlooked bit of PM work – you need to lay out the steps that need to get done, and who will do the work. Be careful – this is where many newly minted PMs get lost in the minutiae or intimidated by the details and intricacies – and folks often make mistakes in two different directions …

Too much detail – bad, because the PM overhead becomes daunting, or the project work suffers from analysis paralysis and never gets started
Too little detail – bad, because team members don’t fully understand dependencies, skip over key requirements, or underestimate work time

Keep it simple to start – you don’t need any fancy software or tools – a simple notepad will do. Just lay out the tasks required to get the work done, in sufficient detail such that you can reasonably gauge the total time required, and see where each of the major requirements will get covered.

You will also want to identify resources – people – who will do the actual work. Don’t talk in terms of “roles” or any fancy euphemisms – put actual names against each and every task. In addition, you’ll need to estimate how much time it will take to get each tasks done – you’ll have to add it all up, to check that it can all get done by any date you may have targeted for completion (ok, so maybe a spreadsheet would be a better tool than a simple notepad …)

Should we be working on this at all?

After laying out the tasks, you may find yourself going back to the total costs and/or the original estimated schedule with updates – and don’t be surprised if the time and costs increase, most people seem to estimate projects optimistically in the early stages. However, as your understanding of the total cost to deliver these requirements improves, it’s always fair to go back and validate if you should be working on this project in the first place – does it still make sense to go after the stated benefits if I know it will cost this much now?

The Most Important Thing

By far, the most critical responsibility for the PM is communication – you’ll want to plan and execute all of your project updates and track all project information as comprehensively as possible.

Keep participants and sponsors aware of status – progress updates, major issues, coming milestones, etc.
Track “planned work” (tasks) and “unplanned work” (issues)
Capture knowledge – about new processes, assumptions, technical details, etc.

Remember, Rule Number One for project managers is Manage Expectations; most executives will tell you that they can handle disappointments when given enough lead time, but last-minute surprises are Bad, but magnified to Horrible with the lens of No Lead time To react.

A Nice Start – Now What?

Yes, you are right, there is much more detail to drill into on the Art and Science of Project Management. But let’s not forget that projects have been going on at your company for years – let’s not reinvent any wheels here …

Does your organization have any standards or precedents in the functional area that you are working in?
Is there a formal / informal, or traditional project methodology?
Are there any existing communication requirements / expectations / traditions?
Any available collaboration spaces, like SharePoint?
Any available tools – for PM, for Training, for Knowedge Capture?
Any available templates – for standardization, but also for short-cutting your work?

And remember, everyone else is happy they didn’t get picked to be Project Manager, so you don’t have to worry about competition …

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2011. | Permalink | One comment |
Post tags: benefit, budget, business benefits, cost, critical resource, Gantt, managing change, managing expectations, managing projects, MS Project, MS SharePoint, project charter, Project Management, project manager, project planning, Requirements

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Introducing Collaboration Tools? Three Required Personas for Success

Jim MacLennan — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 03:25:36 +0000

An early SharePoint cert test

When introducing collaboration tools to an organization – creating the corporate intranet, defining project sites in Sharepoint, etc. – there are multiple skills you must master – well, at least get better at. You need to capture the ideas and communicate the data such that your target reader understands what you are trying to convey – but you also have to help them locate it in the first place.

Three personas you’ll need to adopt, three sets of skills to master, if you want your stuff to be relevant and get read …

Librarian – Where to start with a big pile of information that needs to be captured and categorized? Consider the typical technical tome – when browsing at the bookstore, how do you pick the one you will buy? I will select the winner by browsing the table of contents, to see how the subject matter lays out – very important stuff. But how do you end up using it? More often than not, I keep going back to the index, to locate a specific word (topic) and find out where the author has stashed the details. The Librarian should know the vocabulary in the book and the surrounding / related areas of knowledge, and fill the index with the key words and phrases that folks keep coming to the information desk to ask about. Sure, most word processors will automate the pagination tasks, but there is some skill and art in choosing the right words – and making sure the document contains those words in all the right places.

Experienced authors who rely on the index to function as their “local Google” will go back to the text and place key words in all the right places. Savvy intranet content producers will anticipate the searcher’s keywords and make sure they are in the document and/or the metadata.

Marketer – There’s more to it then just anticipating the reader’s needs. It’s not enough to write effective prose – you need to create content that wants to be found. Attack the problem like an SEO expert; learn how the search engine indexes content, and what data and metadata gets scanned. The Marketer will understand the local lingo and style of describing things, and make sure to include those words and that style in the text. Be realistic and humble – the vast majority of the planet does not actually think exactly like you do. Think about how you search for stuff on the internet, but also work hard to observe and learn how other folks find and absorb new information.

Completing the document is not enough – success is only achieved when people are actually reading and understanding the material. And they have to find it before they can read it.

Coach – You can document and publish plenty of material, but unless you get folks to actually change their behavior and use the tools, it will sit their like those big fat binders from long-past meetings, lovingly put together for the big event but now gathering dust on the bookshelf in the corner. The key is to find the opinion leaders, the folks who set the standards for the group – and give them extra attention and detailed, task-oriented coaching to change their behavior. Target the experienced hand, the one that folks like to emulate, possibly the one who can dictate the team’s behavior – and get right on the keyboard with them, helping them learn how to use this stuff.

This approach clearly will not scale to a large, geographically dispersed team; but if you can Coach the team leader(s) – teach the right skills and set the right expectations – the rest will follow.

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2011. | Permalink | One comment |
Post tags: coach, Collaboration, collaboration environments, collaboration tools, Documentation, empathy, full text search, Google, intranet, Knowledge Management, librarian, marketer, SharePoint, table of contents, taxonomy, team leader, teams, workgroup

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How to Draw an Owl

Jim MacLennan — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 03:27:41 +0000

On Documentation

One recent afternoon I found myself in deep conversation with potential consulting partners, holding out for a difficult requirement: “Excellent Documentation”. That’s a tough one to quantify, let alone describe; why hold out for something at once critical and ineffable? Doesn’t every project talk about the importance of providing documentation, yet rarely deliver it? Don’t most people flip past the pages of detailed work process, going right to the keyboard to bang away, expecting tool tips and intuitive UI to guide them through? Aren’t most technical teams passive-aggressive on documentation, procrastinating until the final week, throwing something together that the project manager probably doesn’t have time to read and review?

Click on the picture to check it out in book form ...

Still, I will press on candidate firms that want to code/configure for me, to put their manual where there mouth is, and show samples of the documentation that truly allows me to become self-sufficient. Many will piously claim an ultimate goal; to walk away from the project and customer [me], leaving me fully trained and self-supporting – even though [he cynically observes] they are incented to maximize billable hours. (Yes, I know the real truth; consultants enjoy the “fun stuff” – coding from scratch / developing new. Maintenance, extensions, and bug fixing gets boring.)

Of course, the more thoughtful Business Development folks, having been through similar conceptual wringers, will point out the difficulty of quantifying “acceptable”. But it’s not difficult to visualize; like certain non-fiction books, the really well-written ones where structure and prose come together in a perfectly natural way. “It’s like God wrote that”, I like to say, “it couldn’t have been written any other way.” Sort of like the Potter Stewart Pornography Test – “you know it when you see it”.

On Books

This turned the conversation towards books in general – fiction or non-fiction, read for enjoyment only, without regard to platform (paper or plastic). In fact, this is a terrific interview question I like to spring on folks – What as the last good book you read? It’s interesting how often the technical folks respond with Kernighan and Ritchie or the Gang of Four (no no yes), but I really like to talk to folks who want to review the latest pulpy summer fiction, interesting history, or a real brain bender like Hofstadter or Kurzweil. This is a great way to get into how people really think – listen to someone get animated about arcane topics like how to measure things – really big things, conceptually impossible things. You can hear it in their voice, see it in their body language – and it’s this honesty and energy that you want working for you, on the project or the contract …

Back to the Documentation

… and that’s probably the best way to identify an excellent documentation writer – do they get excited and animated about the craft of good writing. Do they know it when they see it – and can they identify why it works for them?

In the end, I agree that this is my white whale, a recurring windmill against which I tilt. Why do people overcomplicate the pictures and the prose, and create confusion out of something straightforward? Is it lack of complete knowledge about the subject matter – or lack of ability to communicate complexity with simplicity?

No easy answers here, and we’re running out of our scheduled time. To help make my decision, I’ll ask for samples; I find the best way to request representative work is to ask for something that the candidate is “proud of”.

Epilogue

An excellent quote near the end of this conversation; “I don’t read manuals … I clunk, I’m a clunker … I Apple” [emphasis mine]. Fascinating how intuitive usability has made a verb out of a brand name and a design philosophy.

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2011. | Permalink | One comment |
Post tags: analogies, Apple, communication style, creating understanding, Devil in the White City, Documentation, Hofstadter, Kernighan, Kurzweil, process documentation, Ritchie

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Fragmentation of Social Sharing Environments

Jim MacLennan — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 22:06:47 +0000

Progress requires innovation, success spawns imitation, competition requires differentiation – and after 7+ years of “Web 2.0”, there are multiple sharing environments vying for our attention (and participation).

Content Creation

Blogging has morphed beyond it’s “personal diary” origins; Blogger, WordPress, and the various CMS platforms have moved to become a long-format publishing platforms that continue to evolve. My own experience with this blog (cazh1) and internal blogs at work has shown that “posts” are more essays, articles, documentation on what and how, status reports for projects or trips.

I’ve recently begin experimenting with a new (for me) type of blogging – I’ll call it short-format, and it hearkens back to the old-school, diarist model. This is a place to put short notes, observations, maybe sketches / photos for an Artist / Designer, code snips for a Engineer / Developer, or experimental prose for an Author / Poet. The format is exemplified by tumblr, a fast-growing platform that hosts some amazing content and is giving the old stalwarts some competition.

Click for the original ...

Content Sharing

But what about the Usual Suspects – Facebook and Google+? I don’t see these platforms as content creation engines as much as they are content sharing engines; ubiquitous Share This! links, the +1’s and Like buttons that give “social media” their differentiating characteristic; networks of contacts that are of a like mind, in your Circles or Smart Lists, add value and context to the original content.

I see Flickr and YouTube as hybrids. Flickr is driven by people adding pictures; you can see / browse / search, and it has a personal, sharing-my-photo-album quality. YouTube, in the other hand, is more like a new video broadcast network; lately, it seems like the number of personal videos is dwarfed by ad campaigns, political messages, and music / entertainment videos.

Antics with Semantics

Yes, I understand that you can Follow other tumblrs. Facebook pages and Google+ circles are creating content as profound and banal as the bloggers. And I’m glossing over professional networks like LinkedIn, which can be oversimplified as an electronic form of career networking. All of this has great value, is very relevant to the conversation – but all have subtle nuances, different use cases where they drive value.

Where does Twitter fit in? The best description to date seems to be micro-blogging; the 140-character limit forces a style and controls depth of meaning – Twitter is more of a broadcast medium, a virtual bulletin board or cocktail party, best understood by watching trending topics when events are breaking. Content is created, and RT’s and hash tags give weight to an ideas current mindshare.

An Excuse for Experimentation

Clearly, there is no one best answer when trying to figure out how social networks can drive a business. There are many platforms and technologies, all of which are evolving to deliver different messages and produce different results. There is no one best solution – and the only way to be able to glibly comment on how this might impact your business is by diving in, learning what these things can and cannot deliver. Or find someone who had done it, who is still doing it.

Just don’t go by what you read in airline magazines or see on TV – sound bites won’t cut it.

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2011. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: Blog, Blogger, business value, Facebook, Google, Google Plus, LinkedIn, networking, Social Media, Social Networks, Tumblr, Twitter, Web 2.0, WordPress, YouTube

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Change and the Crop Duster

Jim MacLennan — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 00:06:41 +0000

Drive south through the state of Indiana on I-65, and before you hit Indianapolis you will come across an impressively large array of wind turbines, the new vertical symbols of energy self-reliance and innovation. I remember not so long ago, when this section of the road was just miles of cornfields, as far as the eye could see. The tallest things out here were telephone poles and the occasional power line – but that was then, and this scene is now …

Click for the original ... (Chris Light at en.wikipedia)

Impressive, for sure, and the grid stretched to the horizon … Maybe every 50 yards or so, another flailing prop [of the] plain (sts). And then, as we passed a small airfield where a crop duster was coming in for a landing, I thought of the pilot’s new array of problems – and how truly shocking this change must have been.

Think of it; for years, crop dusters “owned the skies” – not just the soaring heights, but pretty much everything down to the treetops. What freedom they must have felt – seconds after takeoff, you have true aerial pwnership, with absolutely nothing in your way, all the way down to maybe 30-50 feet above deck.

360 degrees of freedom – literally – in the area that you need to operate, dropping whatever they are dusting with. This is a key point – it’s one thing to pursue an avocation (say, flying your private plane around each weekend on local hops), but when you need to really get down to business, relatively few of us have complete freedom to operate. Few fields remain (aiw) that allow performance of key tasks with whatever creativity and flair we might imagine.

But now, innovation and technological progress has introduced change, and a new reality sets in. There is more than one way to use the third dimension above their corn fields, and the farmers know it – they’ve implemented a private grid of wind turbines, generating power that cuts their costs, and an alternative source of income if they are able to sell back to the grid.

All good – except for our dashing crop duster. These interloping towers have fundamentally and completely changed the pilots’ universe, the rules of engagement, their degrees of freedoms. These windmills stand tall with flailing arms, right in the area where all the action takes place – the near-earth airspace above the corn, where planes must fly at treetop level to get their work done. The grid now defines the flight paths – zero degrees of freedom, your patterns fixed. Heck, I suppose one day they will have unmanned drones doing the dusting, humming through the skies like airborne Roombas, saving time and money- and taking a bit more magic out of life.

Can innovation ever be really lossless? Must we always lose a little in the transition to the future? Maybe – and yes, maybe the overall benefit really is there (else why would they invest all that capital!) – but change will always impact some in the population, and probably not 100% for the good. I’m clearly no Luddite, and there are multiple, obvious, and relevant benefits for most innovation projects. But don’t give short shrift to the cultural impact when implementing process and system change. Find ways to value the old ways, retain the science and maybe just a little of the magic.

Followup Notes: I originally wrote this note as a rambling thought exercise, taking a bit of poetic license without checking into the details. Turns out, a always, that the Whole Story is a bit more intricate …

This isn’t a wildly new observation – folks have been noting the potential impact of this change since 2009 (Can crop dusters and wind farms coexist?, from the Quad City Business Journal).
From another 2009 article (Windmills pose risk to crop dusters, from the Decatur Herald Review), a bit more detail on the dangers.
One solution to the problem, from the crop-dusters – charge farmer’s extra when wind towers come into play. Alas, that durn Law of Unintended Consequences – flyers are applying the surcharge when farmers’ fields are within 1.5 miles of turbines – even if there are no windmills directly on the property.

Ah, another instance where reality overcomplicates a poetic thought.

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2011. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: Change Management, degrees of freedom, Field of Dreams, innovation, pwn, wind turbines, windmills

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Google+ is Active, not Passive, Social Networking

Jim MacLennan — Mon, 04 Jul 2011 19:22:21 +0000

This past week saw the introduction of Google+, the search behemoth’s entry into the social networking fray. A slew of posts, articles, opinion pieces, etc. were sure to flow – and as I settled down with some time and a backlog of links to review, here are my initial thoughts on the service.

Do I need yet another social networking platform? Not really, I’ve got my personal (Facebook) and professional (LinkedIn) networks somewhat segregated, and I am falling a bit behind in regular tweets and blog entries – the value waxes and wanes over time. Still, I’ve been impressed with Google’s overall track record on innovative tools for the “personal cloud” (i.e. how can I run my own life / my start-up / my virtual business sans infrastructure?)

Ahem … Google Wave notwithstanding … but everyone gets a mulligan every once in a while, yes?
In the various reviews / blogs, many call out that Google+ will replace / obviate the need for Google Buzz. Funny, I barely registered that one … a finnegan?

First impression: the basic interface / layout seems unimpressive, just another “skin” over the basic LinkedIn / Facebook layout. The UI tricks in Circles (drag and drop into groups) is cute, and it’s the little “usability” things that get a fair chunk of the universe to salivate … but I’m looking for something insightful …

Sparks just looks like Yet Another take on aggregated, automated search. I can follow news topics in Google News or companies on LinkedIn, subscribe to Google Alerts in eMail or RSS feeds in my feed reader; Sparks is just the Google+ version of an in situ enabler for watching the world go by

Hangouts actually looks promising – a video chat room that allows groups to speak and see each other. The first-time install process was a typical, classy example of well designed, tech savvy, user-empathetic instructions that eludes corporate IT.

Ahem … looking for examples of why folks don’t like corporate IT? Or, suggestions for skill sets and training required in modern IT?

However – to be a real enterprise tool, it desperately needs the ability to screen-share. The majority of my collaborative, video-enabled meetings-at-a-distance typically revolve around a presentation or spreadsheet that we are reviewing.

Active vs Passive: I found that I was looking for ways to incorporate feeds from Twitter and this blog … but I noted what MC Siegler called out in his writeup. Content doesn’t make it into Google+ unless I specifically put it in there; if/when I build up an active, complex nesting of Circles, that editorial tweak has the potential to jack up the overall relevance score, and make Google+ an impactful tool for workgroups in a professional setting. Combine that with the readily-available face-to-face Hangout interaction – it’s a social networking platform that leans a bit more to Active, not Passive, connections. Marshall Kirkpatrick has some very insightful notes on this idea, expanding on the notion that communication needs contextual integrity (a reasonable expectation of the proper level of privacy in this context – or, freedom from worrying about who’s listening in).

At this point, however, it’s very tough to get real interactions going – I need to get folks that I know – and would actively participate – to join Google+. I got my invite through a Lifehacker forum last week, and the person that kindly sent me an invite hasn’t even completed their profile yet.

Social Networking for the Enterprise: The really interesting notes come from folks like Dennis Howlett and R. “Ray” Wang, longtime commenters on the enterprise IT scene. Howlett’s writeup on Google+ in the Enterprise is a bit breathless, but I suspect this comes from years of wading through the so-called Enterprise 2.0 offerings from other quarters; he also notes the contextual power of Circles (when done right). Wang writes about the Google+ and the consumerization of IT – where I (above) call out the usability, he is stressing his five pillars of Consumer Tech and how Google’s approach lines up so nicely with what the consumer market has been trained to expect.

But don’t take my word for it – check out these writeups, my link list for the topic (hey, I even tagged and shared ‘em via Google Reader … and the

Whitson Gordon at Lifehacker gives a quick tour here – best place to go for the mildly curious
MC Siegler at TechCrunch captures his thoughts, including the seed of the Active vs. Passive idea
Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb on the intricacies of Circles – and an XKCD comic
A threat to Facebook? David Cohen at All Facebook weighs in with his alternaview
Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb writes on her “stress test” of Circles – and shares the findings of Florian Rohrweck on possible future offerings for Google+

At this time, Google+ is still invite only – last weekend, there was quite a rush of wannabe early adopters, so I am not in a position to give out invites – but if you are interested, let me know, and I will send out invites as soon as I am enabled!

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© Jim MacLennan for cazh1, 2011. | Permalink | No comment |
Post tags: collaboration environments, Dennis Howlett, effective design, Facebook, Google, Google Plus, Lifehacker, LinkedIn, personal cloud, R. "Ray" Wang, social networking, Wave, Web 2.0, YouTube

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A Nice Knock-Down Argument

Jim MacLennan — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 02:47:50 +0000

Sales and the Gantt

“Why exactly does he want to meet again?”

I could sense the exasperation in Karl’s voice, faintly; the sales manager wasn’t about to slip out of his professional demeanor over some perceived technical triviality. But for the fact that the request was coming from his newly-hired PMI maven, he probably would have found a convenient excuse to skip the invite.

“I just don’t understand why we need this meeting … the projects are moving forward, we are meeting regulary, the team is communicating status – what am I missing?”

Karl had called me in to his office to help decipher these requests, and I was searching for the analogy that would let me get to my next meeting. “Ah”, I explained, “you are using the terms ‘project’, ‘tasks’, and ‘communicating’ … somewhat colloquially”. The familiar roll of the eyes – I am talking in high concepts, pausing as I speak, trying to compose precise prose on the fly – never a good idea. Karl is checking his vibrating iPhone and wondering if he can make his own next meeting – but we both know there is a nugget of truth here, just have to find the right words.

“Your PM is looking for detailed tasks and dependencies, right? Like a recipe for building a road, constructing a house – a repeatable set of instructions, honed over time, that produce a predictable result. That model doesn’t fit this project; it’s assumes full knowledge of the path to the end … but that doesn’t really apply with a consumer-facing project like this …”. A glimmer of recognition …

When I make a word do a lot of work like that, I always pay it extra

“It’s like asking you for a detailed task plan when you are negotiating the big contract – there is a general path, for sure, but your team always has to find the way to close by navigating the relationships and complexities. Could you write down the steps for a trainee to follow? Of course not – and that’s how your team runs its projects. Not right or wrong – just different.”

And then the lights came on. “Thank You!”, said Karl, “that’s what I needed to hear, simply put, I understand now. I can deal with this meeting now, I’m good .. gotta go ..”

Engineering, Excel, and Expectations

“Why is my machine freezing up? Don’t you know anything about IT?”

I must admit, the 3D-spinning rendition of the button assembly was the kind of flashy technology that people like to stuff a CV/portfolio with – but who am I kidding? I can hack file formats and automate PDF renditions, but debugging drawing layers and block interference in a 2M, 15-page technical drawing?

“Look, we install this stuff, but we can’t run it for you. I put Excel on the desktops of everyone in Finance, but I don’t write their spreadsheets for them.”

Deadline tension has a way of stressing the plasticity of common sense, and Mike’s expectations were a little out of true here. He actually laughed at that one – but the machine was still poking along, so he returned to the Task Manager and his Google searches, a tad less grumpy.

Executives and the Blank Slate

“There has to be an easier way”, said Sandra, the impatient executive.

Unfortunately there wasn’t; like most mature ERP implementations, earlier software didn’t quite cover the requirements list, and a bit of customization gets added here, here, and here. And, as entropy reliably applies to business process and code repositories, that stuff gets complicated after 10 years – hence our suggestion to reimplement the base ERP for this latest strategic acquisition.

“Why can’t you just tweak it?”

I’ve come to despise that word – co-opted from the hardware hacker’s lexicon, it has become a common term used by the non-technical to minimize and rationalize a patch, exception, and/or other workaround to deliver results with the minimum amount of near term effort. And, since IT is woefully unable to glibly quantity TCO, the tweaks persist.

But not in this case; since we had the opportunity [acquisition budget / slush fund] to reimplement [... if I knew then what I know now ...], the suggested approach was to create a new instance, model the business in a clean system, then “convert” the existing data into the new instance. Manageable, simple, some time involved – completely understood. However, our “tough customer” wanted to understand why we would do it that way, as opposed to “fixing” the application in place.

“You can start with a clean sheet of paper, or you can keep erasing over the old one”.

What a reaction – silent stare, then “Wow, that’s perfect – concise, complete – I get it!”. The mood lightened noticeably; Sandra couldn’t believe I had come up with that one one my own.

The Vendor Rep Brings Me Down to Earth

My own Blackberry buzzes, snapping me out of a self-satisfied smile. And my drinking partner for the evening snaps me back to reality, out of the reverie these old war stories had brought on.

“Yes, Jim, that’s how we are taught to close the sale. Make the solution relevant to the decision maker, using examples and analogies from their own experience – makes it easier to get over the objections”.

“Gee thanks”, I griped, “thought I had stumbled upon a secret recipe there.”

But then our conversation turned to the creative application of styles and approaches from one discipline to another; mash-ups in the change management world, as we passed the time until the rush hour subsides.

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Post tags: abstraction, analogies, BlackBerry, business conversation, business savvy, CEO, creating understanding, elevator speech, euphemisms, Gantt, imagination, Project Management, project manager, short stories

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Idle Time is a Good Thing for IT

Jim MacLennan — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 01:28:22 +0000

... given the right circumstances ...

Lots of good conversations recently about managing IT, Finance, and other constrained resources for projects. We have implemented tools to model available time; when trying to understand what new work can get added to the pile, it helps immeasurably when you understand how much time you have available, plus what else has been committed.

This has become a powerful process for managing chronically constrained resources – but one side effect is that other folks on the team can find themselves less-than-fully-committed. Note that I don’t say available or loaded with free time – most will readily agree that there is always something to work on. The trick is finding the right thing to work on.

I am reminded of something I read about in Goldratt’s The Goal; among other things, it observes that when optimizing a production line, it’s entirely probable that we will be underutilizing one or more workstations. If we optimize every workstation (point optimization), we will be building up inventory, and generating waste. For people on our IT team, “building inventory” means working on stuff that is of low priority, or creating new projects or tasks that are on someone else’s To-Do list – things that they just can’t get to.

These folks must go on idle – they have some free time! Unfortunately, it’s very hard for most people to allow themselves to actually be idle, or even appear underutilized (… if I’m not working like crazy, they’ll think I’m not adding value …).

Of course, time is precious, and you don’t really want to be burning idle time. This “common sense” approach has a name – Productive Use of Free Time, or PUFT – and for enlightened IT teams, it’s an excellent opportunity to invest in themselves and their processes:

investing time learning new technologies (self-directed study)
structured cross-training to understand other technologies, especially for those areas that are constrained
root-cause analysis to stomp out nagging bugs
process automation to make those repetitive tasks a tad less monotonous
process documentation to capture and transfer knowledge, and make systems & processes easier to support

Caveat: Work generated to fill in this time can sometimes become a “priority” for folks, who feel they simply must finish things before they can get back to their high-priority project work. I think that some people just don’t like to leave things undone, work-in-process to come back to them later. This PUFT approach adds real value when you can leave things undone for a bit, and pick them up when you have time – it also teaches you to document things as you go, so you can effectively pick things back up again.

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Post tags: cross training, free time, Goldratt, point optimization, process documentation, resource management, resource optimization, resource scheduling, Theory of Constraints

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The Hegemony of Large Numbers – Ignoring Common Sense

Jim MacLennan — Tue, 01 Mar 2011 02:32:28 +0000

Ok, maybe I’m stretching the meaning there, but that’s a cool sounding title, and what I see as an interesting phenomenon. People get excited about Large Numbers, and think they have meaning and importance simply because they are Large Numbers.

The Law of Large Numbers ...

Big Errors

For example – years ago, when an application manager was whirling around the office in a minor uproar, worrying that that someone accidentally keyed in a $1B line item on an invoice.

That’s $1,000,000,000,000 – for the Unit Price.

Well, come on, that number is so ludicrously high, the error condition sticks out like a sore thumb. A single order like that is 1000 times our annual sales, for goodness sake – no one would let an error like that get all the way through to the month-end closing documents, or the daily sales report, or the AR reports. And no one would believe it if they saw it there.

So just calm down and reverse the error – maybe add a little data entry validation to prevent another such “catastrophic event”. (Note – this was in the days of the S/36 and the AS/400 – the user tabbed out of the data entry field, didn’t use field exit).

We should be more afraid of the small data errors – what if you mistakenly introduced a 10% error by transposing a few numbers – what happens then? Cranky customers, lots of backing out, and a difficult needle in the haystack to find.

Big Benefits

Projects these days need lots of business justification to prioritize above the many others vying for attention. But a benefits statement that claims $100M in costs aren’t getting allocated correctly? Where’s the real benefit here? Not $100M, but making the overall profitability of the products or customers in question more accurate. Not a lot of quantifiable benefit there – but $100,000,0000 looks so impressive.

Or maybe the classic “sales force automation” justifier. If I can make my sales reps just 1% more productive, and annual sales are $100M, then surely we can justify spending $1,000,000 on the Fancy Software System. The big numers make for compelling math – but will you get the sales force to commit to the incremental revenue? A difficult task, typically.

Common Sense Helps

Everyone is busy, everyone working hard and trying to make things happen – and unplanned interruptions or competition for scarce resources (including time!) can lead to interesting reactions to such Large Numbers. Unfortunately, most folks also do not have enough time to pause and reflect on the reality that those numbers are trying to express. Realistic? Rarely.

Just count to 10 … slowly …
(that’s not too large of a number …)

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Post tags: benefit, business savvy, errors

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Twitter and the First Amendment

Jim MacLennan — Tue, 22 Feb 2011 02:05:59 +0000

Here lies Dobby ...

Apparently, 2011 is the year when Twitter, Facebook, and smartphone videos are graduating from Social Networking toys to evolutionary, revolutionary Sociology tools. Can they be controlled by governments or big business? It’s been argued that any such controls might run afoul of Amendment No. 1 from our Bill of Rights … how amazing for a clever hack that originated in a daylong brainstorming session.

Freedom of Speech, Assembly, and the Press

What is a tweet? 140 characters – one or two sentences. (Feel the need to shout? Use capital letters)

What is a Twitter account but a three dimensional megaphone? Where Speech used to be spoken and printed, but ephemeral and land locked, we now have written and permanent, multi-lingual, globally available, and permanently, stubbornly, indeliby saved for repeated viewing.

And what is a twitter #hashtag but a thread to connect one or more people into a continuous stream of sentences. A conversation. A “flash mob”. An Assembly.

What happens when blog authors are accused of being less-than-professional journalists? Well, they’ve already been granted the title, now we’re negotiating …

WIIFM?

I don’t know, I just like noticing the arc of the storyline for these Internet innovations. Who would have thought that something starting out as a “short burst of inconsequential information” …

… would morph into a haven for publicity hounds and the traffic-obsessed

… and continue to evolve as a facilitator of planned group meetings

… to something that was an instigator and planner of, well, really big group meetings?

The framers would have loved Twitter and Facebook, and how they evolved into the new tools for political and social change. Thank goodness creative and imaginative folks started playing around with them.

So what interesting, different, and strange technology have you tried to apply to your business today? Hopefully something that you have no idea how it might possibly be applicable to the [business] world that you know.

You might find that it takes you in a direction you never thought possible.

(with thanks to Harry and the Whale …)

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Post tags: bill of rights, Facebook, freedom, group meetings, internet innovations, social networking, Twitter

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