The Nimble PM

I got asked a question about the impact of budget cuts on PPM efforts and through my usual circuitous thought process I ended up wondering if anyone was seeing a significant reduction in the largely unnecessary SOX compliance process that IT has been laboring under.

Obviously the above statement is one that some people will disagree with BUT I’ve actually read the official SOX material and I am a finance person by training and profession so I believe I understand what it means to show control over Financial Reporting (the answer lies in the Foreign Corrupt Pactices Act). I also know that I watched IT departments unnecessarily increase the cost of all of their projects to comply with a ruling that didn’t need to be applied across the board.

Obviously this is a bit of a rant, but as a finance person at heart I simply go nuts at companies wasting hard eared money for no reason except fear of non-compliance. On a postive note I do know of one company that reduced their SOX control-points from 32 to 3 and another company that went from 23 to 11. Since I’m quoting from a cocktail party conversation I don’t have details on what they cut and what they kept but I’m guessing that somewhere between 3 and 11 control-points is much closer to whta’s appropriate than 20 to 30. So I’m curious whether or not anyone is changing anything. I think it’s a great way to save money without breaking anything but politics and fear can be powerful deterents and I’m not sure which way the prevailing winds are blowing. Comments from anyone?

I had a discussion a while ago about whether or not setting a goal to move from a level one maturity to level three in two years was a good idea.  We generally tell clients that level three is a good level to aim for, where everything begins to work well enough to get things done.  So the question isn’t whether or not it makes sense to get to level three — the question is does it make sense to try and do it in a fixed time frame and a short one at that?

Given that my mantra is “anything worth doing is worth doing quickly”, you’d think that I’d be advocating that a rapid move up the maturity curve makes sense but I have to say I’m not so sure.  I’ve simply talked to too many companies where the PMO tried to dictate the the organization mature before it was actually ready and in almost all the cases the disconnect became unpleasant for all concerned.

Of course, my feelings may just be because no one has shared a story with me where the outcome of a rapid push to mature was successful.  I’d love to hear what others think.  Can you really drive an organization to maturity or is it better to take a little more time and let the evolution occur naturally?

I love speaking with clients.  Every conversation reminds me of something i might tend to forget or teaches me something completely new  Today’s learning was that there the can be too much of a good thing.  i’m a huge believer in organizational flexibility.  i have run organizations myself where it was a source of pride that we could, when required, turn on a dime and move in another direction.  But like everything in life it’s possible to be too flexible.  Stephen Covey talk’s about this as falling into the trap of doing the urgrent over the important.  When an organization talks about being able to change the focus of the work they do on a daily basis, it’s clear that it’s an organization that has lost sight of the important and is seeking only to complete the urgent.

I was writing a review at Amazon a while ago and I noticed that a book review I had written a couple of months ago had been listed as unhelpful.  The book is good, I said it was good and yet someone didn’t like what I said.  Ok, I can live with that. Since I have strong opinions, which I express at the drop of a hat, I’m used to people disagreeing.  The problem with this situation was that there was something that struck me as being slightly off.  After investigaging further it turned out that a single unhelpful vote had been logged against every review of the book.  

I was looking for something on the web.  I think it was tips on how to be better organized if you’re right brained and think stack technology refers to the tower of papers on your desk.  Anyway I ultimately ended up somewhere else entirely and saw something I actually thought might be useful to my fellow program managers.  Foamee (http://foamee.com/ ) is a twitter app that lets you send somebody a tweet to say “thanks and I owe you a beer or a coffee”.  While I normally wouldn’t recommend saying thank you in a twitter, what appealed to me about the app is that it will remind you to pay up. The web site keeps a record of who you owe and you actually have to put in a note that you paid off to clear the “debt”

Whether or not this is the right technology, I have to say I found the fact that I could send a project team member an atta boy or atta girl and then actually make sure that I took the time to take them out for coffee, rather appealing.  In my experience the personal attention of a busy program manager can mean more to a team member than the more common $25 gift certificate.

Of course forgetting who you owe a coffee or a beer to might only be a problem for those of us who are right brained but since that was how I found the link in the first place it just seemed rather serendipitous.

There’s something seductively attractive about the concept of a strange attractor, that force that causes a random, unpredictable system to stay within observable boundaries without becoming either nonrandom or predictable.  Margret Wheatley, in her book Leadership and the New Science, talks about the fact that strange attractors reveal the order that is inherent in certain kinds of chaotic systems.  This order only appears over a long process of observation, looking at the system on a moment to moment basis will only show chaos.

When I read LNS this concept was the one that I was most fascinated with because it has an almost instinctive resonance with the observable phenomenon in corporations. Something holds these crazy dysfunctional organizations together.  Something unobservable even allows them to thrive (based on employment growth and stock market valuation).  Wheatley postulates that the strange attractor present in corporations is a sense of SELF.  It’s the authentically shared vision of what the corporation is and why it exists rather than the words printed in the company’s vision statement.

Concepts like Senge’s Shared Vision (from a 5^th Discipline) take on concrete importance when looked at through the lens of the science that Wheatley holds out to us.  Our vision is what holds us together, it’s what we live every day in our corporations and it is only at the level of SELF that we can change who were are and how we interact with the world.

My blog entry All Project Portfolio Management Prioritization is Subjective has generated some interesting comments off-line.  There was one underlying thread in the discussion that I thought needed to be brought to the top. Steve Romero (with CA) was concerned that my challenge to the “objectiveness” (where objective is defined as fact based) of most portfolio analytics would lead people to believe they didn’t really need to invest in project management. Since I view portfolio management as a very separate discipline from that of project management I was having trouble connecting the dots and then I realized that Steve really was on to something.  It is possible to do portfolio management and NOT do organizational imposed project management, but the circumstances under which this approach works successfully makes it easier for most companies to simply implement organizational project management.

So here’s a true story:

A long time ago, in a glittering Valley of Silicon, I worked for a company where our project management practices were at early level one but our portfolio management practices were at level four.  Business cases got written and scrutinized with a microscope by people actually qualified to do the scrutiny.  And the portfolio was reviewed and prioritized during an annual three day meeting which included the founders and every GM and Controller in the company.  Once the annual portfolio was approved, the projects got kicked off and it was completely up to the project manager and the sponsor how the project got managed, just so long as the results came in when they were expected to come in.

 This approach was successful in this company for one reason and one reason only.  The company culture was date driven in the extreme (anything worth doing is worth doing quickly) and demanded results (which meant it was highly disciplined).  The company was also filled with people who happily said “how high?” to a request to jump and “yes, ma’am!” to a request to take a distant hill.  Essentially while a manager assigned a project might have skipped a lot of the more formulaic project management practices he or she managed the project and lead the team knowing full well their career was on the line it they either didn’t succeed or didn’t acknowledge failure early.

What was the secret this company used to beat the results of some level three companies?  The answer is that it turns out there is such a thing as a project culture (a topic I presented on at last year’s symposium).  It also turns out that the company I described above and a few other companies I know about have these cultures and as such can extend the period of time they can stay at level one with regard to project management.  For everyone else, Steve’s right.  It’s a whole heck of a lot easier to just implement formal project management as soon as possible.

“IT pros always and without fail, quietly self-organize around those who make the work easier, while shunning those who make the work harder, independent of the organizational chart.”

Found this quote in a computerworld article a friend sent me (http://tinyurl.com/lm9yb7).  While the entire article is well worth reading this one sentence seemed to pertain to the essence of what Project and Program management of software projects is all about, especially since it so perfectly encapsulates the concept of servant leadership.

It occured to me that I write about servant leadership and yet it seems I haven’t really defined it.  From my perspective the concept of servant leadership begins with accepting that it is the team or the group or the society that creates the outcome.  The role of the leader then is to effectively empower or give “permission” to the “team”  to make the change and to remove as many roadblocks as possible so that they (the team) can be successful. And the secret to empowering the team is to respect them as the creative, valuable, talented people that they are.

If this sounds too touchy-feely for some of you let me assure you it’s not.  The flip slide to the coin of respect is demanding people live up to their potential.  Slackers get booted off the team.  Likewise destructive worms (no matter how brilliant and talented) get shown the door as well.  Committments are honored by everyone or “contracts” are renegoiated.  Everyone owns their own failure (no blame game allowed — EVER).

Now on to another one of my aha moments.  All of what it takes to manage this way seemed pretty instinctive to me when I started my career, but that was just youthful arrogance.  It was instinctive because I was surrounded by lots of great people who subtly reinforced me for doing the things described above and who boxed my ears every time I did something stupid (bad donna — 20 lashes with a wet noodle).  I recently had the opportunity to test some of this out myself with a very large team of Gen Ys and I can now safely say I appreciate how much work everyone put into me, especially when the trick to this form of mentoring is to make it look like benign neglect.

I’ve said to a lot of clients that I think they’ve hired poor project managers but the more I think on it the more I believe that poor choice of people is only half the problem.  The Gen Ys who worked for me had great raw potential.  Some of them would have made it to become great managers and leaders simply because they had good training from their parents.  Some of them will become good because of managers who helped them in their career, and some of them no matter what anyone does will fall by the wayside on their journey to become leaders.  My guess is that the born leaders number no more than 10% and all we need to do with them is leave them alone.  The ones who can be developed into leaders are probably the next 40%  and this is where we should be investing our time in order to keep our profession vibrant and valuable.

This might be considered the rant of a frequent traveler.  After all of these years of flying from one place or another I decided to take 2 days and stay in Paris and see the Louvre in November.  As luck would have it the new exhibit is Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese : Rivals in Renaissance Venice on loan from the MFA in Boston and guess who just saw it in Boston in June?  Now there will be more than enough to keep me busy at the Louvre and I might even enjoy ithe exhibit more the second time, but my mind boggles at the odds that during the one year when I decide that I’m art museum deprived, 2 of my chosen haunts have the same exhibit.

I was just reviewing a presentation for a client and the light bulb just went on.  The presentation discussed the common problem with having too many projects that don’t actually further the strategy and the presentation seemed to imply that this was a process compliance issue.  I can understand their perspective.  Layout the steps and any monkey will follow them.  The problem is the quality from this approach is TERRIBLE.  A much simpler approach which actually takes less time and is much more effective is to make sure that PEOPLE are involved in and committed to the fruition of the strategy.  This is a simple concept known as creating a shared vision.

Maybe there’s no room for that in companies any more, since we’ve created the cult of the celebrity CEO and the new aristocracy but it seems such a waste.  About 5 or 6 years ago I had the privilege of sharing a picnic bench with Ken Oshman, the original CEO and one of the founders of Rolm.  In reflecting on old times it was clear to me that Ken still had a vision of what the company should have been and where he would have headed the business if we hadn’t sold to IBM.   Ken had a Vision and he had no trouble sharing it.  I worked at Intel before that and it went without saying that Andy Grove had a vision.  I worked for Sun after I left Rolm and Scott McNealy was happy to share his vision for the company with me as we chatted in the hallway one morning.  The key of this story isn’t that I was in a position to rub elbows with these gentlemen – the key was that I could then carry these conversations back to my own team and make sure that the work we did supported where Ken or Andy or Scott wanted us to go.  I also don’t mean to imply that the transmission of vision needs to come directly from the CEO.  I’ve worked in companies where the CEO was so far away from me that he could have been on another planet, but I knew where we were heading because the EVP I worked for was the vision carrier.

Maybe I’ve been in unusual circumstances but I don’t think so.  A couple of months ago, someone reminded me of the story of President Johnson’s visit to the Kennedy space center.  It seems as he was touring the facility he stopped and talked with the custodian and asked him about what he did at the space center.  His answer was “Mr. President, I’m helping send a man to the moon.”  That to me is still the most classic example of a shared vision.

As PPM leaders we are natural vision carriers and vision is viral.  I think we should concentrate more on sharing it early and often to ensure it gets into our projects rather than on worrying about creating a Process for insuring compliance.