Project Management Tweaked

Project management needs to be tweaked, particularly for large and lengthy projects. In project after project that I see, the same problems repeat themselves:

• Sponsors, especially money-managing sponsors, get too much weight in the evaluation of what's ultimately implemented
• Actual users of the system, whatever it might be, aren't consulted nearly enough or early enough and aren't given the voice they need to make it successful when they are engaged
• The lengthier the project, the less likely it is to meet the needs of the business because there's no agility - gotta stick to the requirements document, don't you know (which was older then and couldn't know what we know now)
• The project team, cobbled together from available resources, doesn't know each other typically and so many skills are squandered for the definitive roles in which they are cast

Sponsors, the money-managing ones, are necessary. I don't mean to belittle their importance, but they should never dictate what's implemented. They generally don't know the business at the level of implementation. Or if they do, they knew it when they worked at that level, and in most cases, business has changed since then. Their expertise, whatever it might be, should take a back seat to those in the trenches now.

What typically happens, though, is that the project plan is presented to the sponsor and then features are questioned and the project team is told, "You don't need that. What's that for?" And because it's the sponsor, it's thrown out. Users grouse. Off to a good start already.

Users - those in the trenches - generally aren't pulled in until later. "Gee, I wish I would have spoken with you / known about you earlier," someone on the project team will eventually say. It's not uncommon to have intermediaries between the users and those implementing, and those folks tend to inflate their own expertise. The point is: there is no substitute for direct meetings between the user and the implementer. Less is lost in translation, assumptions are driven out more quickly, and buy-in by the user base generates good will. All we need to do is listen. Where's the harm in that?

Budgets and schedules are generally based on the BRD, or the business requirements document. This document is built during the planning phase of the project. But instead of being the scaffolding it needs to be, it becomes the foundation. If changes are made, then they have to go back through the change request process which invites design by committee and sponsor-domination. I completely understand why there's a need for this process. Budgets and schedules matter, but here's where things go awry.

Rather than kick it back to the project team and the users to figure out how to rework things to meet budget and schedule, executive decisions are made and the project changes from the top-down, and not the other way around. There's no flexibility to design a solution with the elegance of better knowledge. Good design is, unfortunately, lost.

Part of the problem is that the project team is assembled from available parts. While I'm a big fan of the wisdom of crowds and I think that diversity is good for a team, research shows that surgeons who work at multiple hospitals are most effective in those hospitals where they have the most time with a surgical team. There is no truth to surgeon portability. Think about it: when you work with the same team over and over again, your efficiency goes up. Likewise for project teams. You know each other, and you know strengths and weaknesses for everyone. (I don't have a link to source the study, but I'll find that and post it later.)

Not all projects require a finely-honed team, but if it's a long-term or complicated project, adding newness of personalities and talents to the project only furthers the complication of the project. Not a great way to do business. (Which I think invites the question: is there really any efficiency gained by assigning people to multiple projects with people they've never met or barely know? Or is it better to have the same team work together, even if this leaves some space for additional allocation?)

My prescription: create core teams. Know the strengths of the team and let those in the team know each other well. Let them move together to resolve the problems that projects aim to solve. Involve users from the beginning and have the core team work with the users during the planning phase to arrive at the right design. All budget and scheduling should be okay'ed by financial sponsors, but feature / design / implementation decisions must be made by the core team after dialogue with the users to determine the ramifications of these decisions.

Yeah, a kick-off meeting can help alleviate the problem of newness, but c'mon... if I've worked with you closely for the last year, no single kick-off meeting can create that synergy. Spread that across a team and you only multiply the problem.

In part, this was prompted by a meeting that I had yesterday with a person who needed to see some web development that I had done. They'd never seen my development or this particular corprorate web site I'd built before. After seeing the work I'd done, they looked at me and said, "I had no idea you could do this." This is relevant because I worked on a project with this person for 4 months last year. Had they and the others on the team known this side of me, some of what I said on the project might have had more weight and might have allowed us to create a solution more quickly. But as it was, I wasn't as useful to the team as I could have been. Some of that is my fault - perhaps I should have pressed harder and demonstrated my chops, if you will. But the team had been together on this project for a while already and I was the new guy, so my opinions had less weight.

Each of us has passions and talents that aren't known to those with whom we work. In my opinion, HR should bank every talent and passion we have and make it available in a database. A resume and skills inventory is not enough. I've written about that before. But it's better if we work side-by-side with a core team. Then we know how what we offer meshes with those on the team to produce the greatest results. That will help bring projects to a robust solution and completion.

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by Brett Rogers, 1/10/2007 11:22:41 AM
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Chad Blogs!

Must be a New Year's resolution... another friend of mine just opened his blog. World, meet Chad Holtz.

Goodness... with two friends in a week, who's next? I have several friends who should be blogging but aren't. Yet. They will though. They're too opinionated to remain quiet.

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by Brett Rogers, 1/9/2007 9:26:35 AM
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SecondLife Goes Open Source

I read in several blogs today that SecondLife is going open source.

Meaning all of us (yes, I’m looking at you) can now not just build things in the online virtual world but can actually change how the online world operates.

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by Brett Rogers, 1/9/2007 7:28:42 AM
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Kelly Blogs!

A good friend of mine and commenter here on BeatCanvas has turned himself over to the dark side. He's now a blogger. World, meet Kelly Steele.

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by Brett Rogers, 1/7/2007 1:46:35 PM
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Ivory Tower vs. Cowboy Entrepreneurialism

Bob Nardelli was the CEO of Home Depot, but left the company because there was too much clamor for him to leave. He wasn't beloved by anyone. So yeah, his severance package is worth sour discussion, but here's why he failed in his job:

Mr. Nardelli set out to stamp out the decentralized "cowboy culture" of the company. Home Depot's founders had allowed store managers to run their stores as autonomous fiefdoms with little regard for uniformity or efficiency. This entrepreneurial spirit had made Home Depot one of the hottest growth stocks ever, and its store count doubled nearly every four years. Its surging stock price made hundreds of early employees millionaires.

Mr. Nardelli's management style was a stark contrast to that of Home Depot's paternalistic founders, Bernard Marcus and Mr. Blank, who were treated like heroes during store tours and personally tutored employees on customer service. Mr. Nardelli often appeared uncomfortable donning the retailer's trademark orange apron and dealing with front-line employees one-on-one.

Aside from those who took the risk in starting a successful company in the first place, no one is worth a severance package of $220 million. A founder might have grown their company to earn that much, but then that's just the reward on their investment, and not a severance package.

So what are the founders of Home Depot doing these days? One of them is into philanthropy. Bernie Marcus gave a $15 million grant to Georgia Tech for nanotechnology research. But buried in the article is a great discussion of why Wal-Mart is great and why we shouldn't fear progress:

What about creative destruction and workforce displacement?

Progress does not displace people. Progress creates jobs. Every time. I remember when I first went to a supermarket and everyone cried out, "You are going to put the small grocer out of business." But then you had to look at the other side. The product got cheaper. As more people could afford it, the farmers produced more. Truckers had to ship more. Consumers had more options due to those efficiencies. The Home Depot hired hundreds of thousands of people and more products had to be sold and manufactured and shipped. As a result, a lot more people were employed because of big, efficient businesses than several fragmented, small businesses. And consumers are better off.

Everyone is always up in arms when a Wal-Mart opens, but when you offer them $4 prescriptions, they love it. Do you have any clue how much money that frees up and how much more money can go back into the economy? Think of the horse and carriage. Everyone took one, and the buggy whip business was a great business. Then along came the car and people stop using the horse and carriage and the buggy whip manufacturer eventually went out of business. Was that a bad thing? No. Consumers benefited because they could now go from New York to California in a few days as opposed to a month. Likewise, the airplane. It's constantly getting faster. It used to take three flights to get cross country. Now it takes five hours. In a few years it will probably take only an hour.

Nardelli's mistake was micromanagement. Politicians often do this with taxes and regulations. Bernie Marcus, wise man that he is, knows that people do best when allowed to find their own way and are rewarded for doing so, be it a store manager of Home Depot trying to solve problems for customers or Joe Lunchbox trying to find a job in this big marketplace.

Displacement is the way of progress, and progress these days happens mighty fast.

"If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less". - General Eric Shinseki

You have to trust the wisdom of the crowd to find its own way and not seek to manage it. Because you can't. No one can. Trust and reward - it's a better way.

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by Brett Rogers, 1/4/2007 1:27:25 PM
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Po

This morning, as I'm browsing around on the various sites that I visit, I decide that I want to discover the blogs of some of my favorite authors. One of whom is Po Bronson, who wrote a very interesting book, What Should I Do With My Life? The book was not a self-help book, but instead a collection of stories about people in the midst of change and how they dealt with the changes they faced.

He's written a new book, Why Do I Love These People? It's a book about families.

Bronson's is an unromantic view of family life; its foundations, he believes, are not soul-mate bonding or dramatic emotional catharses, but steady habits of hard work and compromise, realistic expectations and the occasional willingness to sever a relationship that's beyond repair. But he also has an optimistic view of today's crazy-quilt of blended and unconventional families, reassuring commitment-shy young adults that "the golden era of family is not in our past, it's in our future."

It's not often that people have a chance to immerse themselves into the life of a stranger and explore them with a quick trust. I had an opportunity to do something like that when I washed windows for folks in the suburbs back in the 80's. I talk more about the experience in a previous post...

In the course of my travels with these people, I encountered many different types of families and styles of family. One family was two teachers in Philomath, Oregon, and their two kids. Right away, they apologized for the mess. That was common, no matter how clean it actually was. But they had the most 70's shag carpet I had ever seen in their home at the top of a large hill that overlooked the Willamette Valley toward the Cascades. As I went from window to window, each sill was decorated with some momento from previous students and from their kids. What I recall most is the mood of great ease, in how they lived and they spoke to each other. Anyone could be comfy there.

Contrast that with the very dolled-up woman who greeted me in Modesto, California, in her white stucco home surrounded by black iron fence. Elaborate Spanish tile, tight light-gray carpet that covered the spiral staircase to the upstairs, immaculate kids' rooms... and she was on the phone the whole time. The cleaners, the decorators, her mother, a friend. She would pop in and out of the room I was in to check on me, just looking, give a slight nod of approval, and then disappear into another part of the house.

People are all so different and fascinating to get to know. That's why I liked Po's first book and why I'll buy the second.

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by Brett Rogers, 1/3/2007 8:29:31 AM
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Conversation

The other day, I left a comment on Susan Willett Bird's blog, Bird's Eye View, which is an exceptional blog for its content. I first noticed the blog through Tom Peters' blogroll. Susan's company, Wf360, helps companies converse better, both within and without.

The comment was in response to a great definition of conversation that she gave, which was that

the great conversations are those that we start with a willingness to emerge a slightly different person. Conversations are true exchanges in which both parties are, in at least some small way, transformed.

I mentioned it to my friend, Mike Sansone, who then continued the discussion.

By listening with intent on finding discovery, lend a selfless ear. Sometimes the speaker grows more than the listener.

Sometimes, we don't know what we know - until we articulate it.

Conversation can take place everywhere - not just in person, but in blogs, comments, text messages, and email - if we only listen to what the other person will share with us. It goes beyond just the superficial. We sometimes use email and text messages to communicate, but not necessarily to converse.

"Don't forget to pick up the kids tonight at 5:30."
"My day's been crazy. How about u?"
"I'll bring the project documents to the meeting. Do you folks have a copier nearby?"

Not much depth there. In fact, the more busyness in our business, the less likely we are to have conversation that changes us. We're process at that point, and not outcome.

And yet the goal of all business is a win-win situation. The only way that we get there is by listening, which comes by asking questions.

And all of this dovetails with something I read about the silliness of conventional surveys, which ask the wrong questions by querying for demographics.

Does it matter which gender I am? Which age? The zip code in which I live? My income? By asking me these questions, you only want to know how to sell to me. Jeffrey Gitomer would be outraged at such a pathetic attempt, and yet that is the common practice of marketing today.

What if instead we asked questions in surveys to better know our customer and learn to meet their needs, instead of meeting our sales goals? What if survey questions actually asked questions that helped the surveyed to better know themselves?

Let's blow that out... what if we made the attempt to have every communication become conversation where we could explore the other person?

The limitation there? Time. And yet isn't time an investment into the lives of others that shows that we care about them?

From a blog post, a larger dialogue has emerged. It certainly has my wheels a-turnin'. Thanks to Susan and Mike for a great conversation.

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by Brett Rogers, 1/1/2007 5:21:19 PM
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