Changing the Metaphor of Work from Machines to Humans

I heard a great talk by Mark Morgan at the monthly meeting of the Northern California Chapter of the Association of Strategic Planning yesterday. He based his talk on the new book, Executing Your Strategy, by Mark, Dr. Raymond E. Levitt, and William A. Malek. Using the Strategic Execution Framework (SEF) diagram he pointed out the interconnections and dependencies between the different imperatives in a company.

He started by pointing out how we talk about the work that goes on in a company. The terms used in the books, classes, and consulting have their roots in the work by F. W. Taylor back in the 1900s. That was the Industrial Revolution. Company management process was put stuff into the machine, make the machine more effective and efficient, and sell the stuff coming out cheaper than the other company does. The major component of work today, especially in the United States, is people.

We can find a number of people that specialize in one or two of the different functional bubbles on the SEF diagram. They have studied, consulted, and written about their functional bubble. Where management at companies gets into trouble is that this is a dynamic continuous system, not a set of hierarchical points. The arrows connecting the bubbles on the SEF diagram, especially across what Mark refers to as the six imperatives, Ideation, Nature, Vision, Engagement, Synthesis, and Transition, often are overlooked. As any experienced software programmer will tell you, the interfaces are the critical problem areas.

The driving force behind activities in companies today, even manufacturing companies, are interactions between people, more than between machines. To succeed, all of the bubble functions have to be in alignment. Communications and actions have to work together. This view of the company as a system is what resonated with me. It is critical for everyone to look at the entire system, the ecosphere, inside the company and the alignment of each of the parts. Looking back, I can see that this was what drew me to get an MS in Systems Management, and to being a Project/Program Manager.

It also explains some of the problems I have encountered on engagements to create systems to move strategy through portfolio, programs, and into projects. Optimizing only one area will not improve the implementation of the strategy. If we do not align all of the parts, we will not move forward.


Technorati tags: project management; program management; management; business strategy;

Brand You World -2007 Teleseminars

Yesterday, in celebration of the 10th anniversary of Tom Peters’ thought provoking article on personal branding published in Fast Company, leading personal branding strategists held a unique event lasting 12 hours A Brand You World - Global TeleSummit . These talks were aimed at three different audiences: career professionals, HR professionals and business leaders, and for the business owners and solopreneurs.

For career professionals they provided advise on how to apply personal branding strategies to support their career success. For HR professionals and business leaders they talked about how to discover, attract, develop and retain talent. For the business owners and solopreneurs they provided tips on how to apply personal branding strategies to grow their business.


Jason Alba, founder of Jibber Jobber talked about using personal branding to improve your job search. His advice about blogging frequently, connecting with other bloggers around your areas of interest, and using your blog to prove information to back up your claims is valuable for everyone. I also found the talk by Phil Gerbyshak, The Relationship Geek on creating a personal branding strategy both entertaining and informative.

With two phone lines over the 12 hours, they provided twenty four different talks. They plan to have links to podcast versions of the talks. I am looking forward to using the information and going back to catch some of the calls I missed.


Technorati tags: management; branding;

Choosing Empowerment Instead of Control

A recent bad experience prompted me to reread Peter Block’s “The Empowered Manager”. While the stated audience for the book is the middle manger and the manger at the top of an organization, the advice and insight is very valuable for Project Managers and the people that work on our projects.

The focus of the book is for us to move away from bureaucratic organizations that value control, dependency and use fear. We need to value autonomy, service and contribution to our customers and the company, and create energized employees. This movement is actually easier for Project Mangers than for some functional mangers.

Most Project Managers work in a matrix organization where they do not have the control and ability to create fear in the people on the project. By the nature of the job, ownership of tasks, responsibility for the work, and accomplishing the goals reside with each of the team members. Energizing the people on the team to step up and accept this is critical for success.

To do this, we have to communicate our expectations. As Stewart Levine advises in his book, “Getting to Resolution”, both sides need to document and discuss these expectations. For the Project Manager, this means working with all the key stakeholders, including people on the team, to make sure all of the expectations are explicit instead of hidden.


As a Project Management consultant, this is critical. Both you and the hiring manager need to document and agree on the deliverables. Overtime you update the agreement as things change. This is a simple word document and not a heavy legal contract. Pulling this out periodically helps to keep both of you coordinated and ensures that the goals stay aligned.

As I rediscovered, it is also a very critical first step when you are a direct employee. This becomes even more critical when your boss is thousands of miles and several time zones away. As a Project Manager that has lead several teams with globally disbursed members, I know the value of communication. Being on the other end of the relationship, I discovered that I was not able to drive, influence, or create a communications path. As the saying goes, the tail cannot wag the dog.



Technorati tags: project management; program management; management;

Remember, Quality is the Hidden Fourth Constraint

Every project manager has the three constraints drummed into them: time, budget, and resources. Experienced project managers understand that there is a forth part to the equation, quality. Everyone on the project has to know and agree on the minimum level of quality. The customer is the one that decides if the project is done, if they are satisfied with the results, and if the results are of usage. They will have some definition in their heads and unstated expectation of the quality of the deliverables which will change as the project progresses.

It is vital that the project manager work with the customer to get this definition stated in a clear and measurable way. That definition will impact the other three metric. The project manager and customer have to reach an agreement and an understanding on how this measurement relates to the other three. With this in hand, the project manager can make intelligent trade-offs and provide status reporting to the customer.
Everyone on the team also needs to understand the minimum level of quality and how that impacts their actions and deliverables. Any time that this is threaten, begins to impact the other three, or is impacted by the other three, this needs to be made visible to everyone. We are use to asking how each decision impacts time, costs, and resources. Everyone needs to also ask how the decision impacts quality.

Too many times the drivers on the project are to do it fast and cheap. That has resulted in large numbers of projects that fail or fail to satisfy the user. Budgets escalate and delivery dates stretch out as we get caught in the cycle of test, reject, and rework. The unfortunate fact for the project manager is that the same people that forced them down the road of fast and cheap will be the first to throw stones at them for missing deadlines, overrunning the budget and delivering something that is unusable.



Technorati tags: project management; program management;quality;

All Project Managers should be part of the Department Of Doing

I was reading a blog and found out about a New Zealand company called the Department of Doing. The founding partners created a Directives of Doing forming their code of conduct. Richard Hollingum set up the company because he saw that the world was full of ideas. Unfortunately, a large number of ideas do not happen, they became compromised or they do not turn out as planned. His company focuses on making them happen and generating ideas that will happen.

Many times people only define the Project Manager role around budgets, schedules and resources. While they are important, it is more important that the project deliver a usable solution aligned with the business need. When a project tends to stray from one of these measurements (admit it, they all will), instead of blindly stuffing it back onto the track, we need to use that as an opportunity to step back and take another look. This is the chance to pull the two hidden components, quality and usability, out into the light. Instead of blindly pushing to get back on schedule, on budget, or get more resources, let us ask if we are still on track to deliver a usable solution at the right level of quality.

In Jeff Pfeffer and Robert Sutton’s 1998 book, The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge Into Action, they pointed out that organizations and people can know the right thing to do but do not take the right actions to make it happen. Too many times talking about the problem or solutions are a substitute for taking right action. As a Project Manager, we see these at Lesson Learned meeting, status meetings, and project reviews.

As the Project Manager, everyone looks to us to “get it done”. Leading cross functional teams in a matrix environment, we must be vigilant. We need to make sure we are translating the ideas into a usable solution at the right level of quality. We must weed out and eradicate the tendency to substitute talk for action. At the end of the day, being able to say you were on time, within budget and did not need more resources does not win points if the deliverables do not match a strategic business need and are not usable.



Technorati tags: project management; program management;

Aligning Strategic Business Goals with Project Goals

I have been busy with a new gig creating a Project Management structure using Intuit's Quickbase web service. The project request form is set up as a set of gates that require more work and more information as the project moves through the process. This has helped the company to have a common process for projects, to track projects as they move through the approval process, and to track approved and active projects.

The tool allows you to easily create and modify the form, apply rules to the fields, and control access. We have the ability to store things on the Intuit server or to link to documents in our SharePoint within the firewall. I also set it up to limit edit permission for some fields based on the person's role. Over the five months that we have been using it, it has proven flexible enough to allow changing the entire form layout, adding the off shore development team and their managers, and shifting the information as we change the process flow.

There were a number of things driving the company to set this up and use it. The major reason was the failure to get projects done on time. As is the case in most growing companies, resource assignment and usage was not visible to management. With a number of business development people getting new customers the delivery dates overlapped and created too many urgent projects. These were starting to displace the important projects, and the negative impacts on the Engineering resources were not visible.

Creating the structure and process flow was the easy part. Changing behavior so that the tool is used, people enter the right information in a timely manner, and management shifts from wanting to do everything to limiting the work to what can get done at the right level of quality is the current challenge. Currently we are working through the issues around ranking and comparing marketing (Return on Investment (ROI) focused) projects, with Engineering (process improvement and quality focused) projects, and maintenance (adding and improving data, and implementing fixes focused) projects. All of these are important. The key is balancing all of these as we move forward.



Technorati tags: project management; program management; Intuit Quickbase;