May 2008

I just finished reading The Strategic Project Leader: Mastering Service-Based Project Leadership by Jack Ferraro….not a bad book.

In section two of his book, Mr. Ferraro writes:

In project management, leadership is desperately needed; leadership that is adaptable, perceptive, timely, meaningful, authentic, and unselfish.

This one sentence sums up the core of The Strategic Project Leader’s message: Project leaders, not project processes, are the future for project management. As the first section carefully lays out, the codification and standardization of project management knowledge has created a commoditized service that can be bought and sold like any other product. However, project managers can resist the force of commoditization by adding personal value to their organizations through leadership.

Ferraro defines a new role for the project manager seeking to be the spearhead of change – the service-based project leader. As the book points out, this role of ‘Project Leader’ is an area of untapped potential in project management. This kind of leadership requires a project manager to provide service not only to a sponsor but to all the project’s stakeholders. By truly serving the needs of organizations and individuals, project leaders find themselves doing meaningful work, a factor that is linked to personal growth and great job satisfaction. Due to the highly personal and individual nature of leadership, it cannot be codified and standardized into a ‘methodology.’

The first section of the book is devoted to this idea of leadership in project management and provides guidance as to how to step up into a leadership role. However, Ferraro also introduces several critical topics not usually found in project management books. He discusses the importance of establishing trust-based relationships with clients, and putting the needs of the client first, ideas that are central to high-level project leadership.

The second section of the book provides more concrete information in the form of a ˜leadership competency framework” that is comprised of five ˜core competencies”. This competency framework is presented in the form of a pyramid:

• Project & Program Management Knowledge, Skill & Experience
• Subject Matter Expertise
• Trust-based Relationships
• Consultative Leadership
• Courage

While knowledge of project management processes is necessary as the base of this pyramid, project leaders must move beyond this to become true consultative leaders.

The third section helps the reader create practical self-development plans – a step-by-step guide to improving leadership skills. The final section, written by Roberta Hill, provides a detailed overview of a variety of assessment methods.

Smoothly written and easy to read, The Strategic Project Leader is an indispensable guide to anyone looking to be a leader among project managers.

NOTE: This book was provided by the publisher as a review copy.

Interesting study released by McKinsey has just been released titled “How companies respond to competitors: A McKinsey Global Survey.”

The study, which is surprisingly concise, has some interesting information, but as all things McKinsey, there is a sales pitch involved.  The main ‘abstract’ of this report says:

Management theory suggests that companies facing serious competitive threats should extensively analyze how to fight back. Actual managers, however, say they are satisfied with the results of a less active approach, according to a McKinsey survey. Companies that understand how their competitors really react may be able to gain an edge.

The results of this research suggests that:

On the whole, as companies determine how to respond to a competitor’s moves, they generally assess three or fewer options and don’t look forward more than two years. About half don’t examine more than one round of countermoves by any competitor. A significant number rely on intuition to determine a response. And companies most frequently respond with whatever counteraction is most obvious in the moment—answering a price cut, for example, with a cut of their own, which often doesn’t hit the market until at least one or two sales cycles after the competitor’s move.

As I mentioned, the report has some good info, but there is an underlying ’sales pitch’ that says the following:

• most companies don’t have a clue what they are doing
• Hire McKinsey and we’ll perform ongoing exhaustive analysis for you and help you make better decisions.

Now…personally, I think McKinsey has some good folks and they offer some excellent services, but I think this particular research report does more harm than good.  Why?

It makes it very obvious that organizations are clueless and that in order to make the ‘right’ decision, an organization should hire McKinsey so they can make those decisions for you.

What I’d like to see is another report from McKinsey that outlines what value their decision making process on competitive moves brings to an organization.  Can they guarantee better results than can be had by assessing ‘three or four options’ and/or using intuition?  Perhaps…but would those results make more economic sense? If i have to pay them a million bucks for them to give me two more options to choose from, does that really help me?   If the option generates multiple millions of dollars in savings and/revenue, yes…but if not, then perhaps no.

I’d recommend reading the article regardless of what the size of your organization.  If you take anything away from it, have it be this:

When thinking about your competition, take the straightforward route and follow your instinct.  Create options for how you can out-maneuver your competitors…and when you think you’ve thought through the options, take a step back and think again.  Try another angle…see if you can come up with other options.  At the end of the day, your intuition has to lead you through whatever decision you make…if it feels right, then it probably is.

If you didn’t believe my ramblings in “Common Sense and Technology Selection“, I’ve got a nice anecdotal (and funny) story that backs up my assertion that common sense is lacking in the technology selection process in most organizations.

Jump over to The Daily WTF and read this story….I’ll wait for you. Go.

Did you read it? It’s funny…but sad. And true. And this type of approach (selection via buzzwords) costs companies’ millions of dollars a year (if not billions).

If you didn’t read my “Common Sense and Technology Selection” article (shame on you!), here’s the process that many companies use today for selecting technology (the one that doesn’t use common sense):

1. Hear about the “latest technology” and/or hear a buzzword.
2. Think “yes…we need that….that will make everything better!”
3. Talk to a few vendors.
4. See a demo.
5. Buy the platform
6. Throw it over the wall to the technology group to implement.
7. Go look for your next buzzword.

Now…go read this passage from the the story on The Daily WTF:

The next time I met him, a scant 6 months later, he was backing into my loading dock with a truck full of brand new desktop PCs, older servers, and all manner of fancy Cisco 10/100 and Gigabit gear. “The CEO read a pamphlet about the lower total cost of ownership of thin clients. We’re rolling them out branch-by-branch now. The server and network upgrades are killing us. All these shiny new desktops are going to be coming your way now.”

In the story that is related on The Daily WTF, this particular company my 5 or 6 trips to ‘recycle’ their computer equipment. How much money do you think this cost the company? Had to be an enormous amount.

Interesting analysis today over on Jeffrey Phillips’ Thinking Faster Blog in an article titled “Productivity Barriers“.

In the article, Phillips discusses a recent newsletter from IFS (an ERP software vendor) that discussed the issues of usability of ERP systems. In the newsletter, IFS relates survey results that tried to, in Phillips’ words, understand:

…how much of a barrier the enterprise software most of us use everyday presents to becoming more productive

The research that IFS presented is quite interesting (click here to read the results on CIO.com). In addition to looking at usability, the research looked at productivity and asked questions around what factors caused a loss in productivity in the organization. The results aren’t surprising…results included things like (not in any order):

• too many emails
• too much work
• lack of clear priorities
• poor IT optimization
• too many meetings

The survey respondents were than asked to supply factors that effected their own productivity and, again, the results aren’t really that surprising…results included things such as unclear objectives, not enough resources, too many meetings, etc etc.

What I found most interesting was Phillips’ take on the root causes of the above issue. He writes:

Unclear objectives/priorities - poor management strategic direction and communication

Too many meetings - poor management skills and time management

Too much work/Lack of resources - downsizing and “doing more with less”

IT not optimized/doesn’t work the way the company works - inflexible technology supporting a business that is required to be flexible and change

So, in my simple analysis, many of the issues related to productivity have to do with clear management direction and communication, and the ability to communicate what’s important. Additionally, in today’s market, flexibility and adaptability are just as important as established processes and operational excellence, but our technology, systems and processes aren’t designed that way.

Jeffrey Phillips’ hits it on the head.

Most problems with productivity today can be traced to a few factors (at least in my experience). These are:

1. Poor Alignment of Information Technology and/or IT Process to the Business goals - If your organization needs to be flexible, don’t put in an inflexible IT system and/or IT process.
2. Reliance on formal IT process - Process is good. Process is necessary. Create process to allow for flexibility, speed and change. Most processes today in the IT world do not follow this mantra. They are created and then their creators expect people to follow them closely with no deviation and no room for change.
3. Poor Communication - Managers need to understand that in order to get the most of their teams, they need to clearly outline the responsibilities and expectations of the people in their teams. Without this clear communications, people will spend time trying to determine what they should be doing and/or who should be doing it.
4. Poor Leadership - with good leadership, an organization can overcome many things. Excellent leaders will overcome poor process (by changing the process), poor alignment (by aligning IT and business), and poor communication (by ensuring communication improves).

Phillips’ analysis of the results of the IFS study were right on the mark….or at least they match up with my own thougths

Mike Schaffner posted an interesting article titled “Hiring the Right / Wrong IT People to Achieve Alignment” in which he pointed at a recent article by Dr. George E. Strouse titled “Are You Hiring the Wrong IT Staff to Achieve Your Alignment Goals?” that appeared on CIO.com. Check both articles out.

An excerpt from Dr. Strouse’s article sum’s the topic up nicely:

The real problem underlying the IT business alignment conundrum is that we’re not hiring the right people in IT. The right people need strong backgrounds in both business and technology. Most IT hiring managers place too much emphasis on strong technology backgrounds.

As regular readers may know, I’ve written about this topic a few times (see here, here and here for a few samples).

I’ve spent a good portion of my career working with organization’s trying to align their business strategy with their technology. I’ve found is that the difference between success and failure in this activity is found within the people that the organization has hired.

The majority of these organizations who were successful had employees within the IT organization that could ’speak’ to the business side of the company. The IT group wasn’t strictly technologists…they were technologists with business backgrounds. Those organizations that struggled with aligning their technology with their business goals were the ones that placed an emphasis on technology knowledge over business knowledge.

Mike Schaffner relates an interesting antecdote on this topic:

I once had a CEO tell me that one of the things she wanted in IT was people that “talk like us” meaning they understand business issues and can explain things in business terms rather than just business terms.

I’ve had similar conversations with CxO’s as well. They are tired of hearing acronyms and technology buzzwords…many just want to understand how technology can help the business achieve it’s goals.

Interesting things to think about…as are the Related Articles below. Enjoy!

Employee engagement has been seen as a ‘buzzword’ for some time but also been touted as something that every organization should focus on. It appears that there is some progress toward engaging employees (see the “Further Reading” below) but of course, many organization’s just don’t “get it”.

Instead of talking about how to engage employees (like I’ve done here and here), I wanted to take a second to address one simple little topic that any organization and/or person can implement that will help with employee engagement…or more importantly, help not to disengage employees.

What is the tiny & simple thing that you can avoid doing?

Don’t make your employees feel like under-appreciated (or worse unappreciated) drones.

Example

You bust your hump working overtime to bring a project in on time. You put in 50 to 60 hours and your team does the same. Each team member has demonstrated their abilities to get the job done many times over and morale is quite high.

After the project is complete and you’ve got some down-time, you have an opportunity to attend a seminar. The seminar is free and is directly related to your job and is being held at a local restaurant over lunch. You sign up for the seminar (hey…its free food an an interesting topic right?) and tell your boss that you plan on attending the seminar and then going home and plan to work from there the rest of the afternoon. Your bosses’ response:

Sure…go ahead..sounds interesting. But…I’m not sure I’m comfortable with you working from home…you’ll need to take a half-day off to do this.

Talk about pulling the wind of your sails….perfect way to disengage an employee.

Remember…if you want to get your employees more engaged, make sure they know they are appreciated. Pay attention to the small things…take an afternoon and go bowling with the team. Buy them a pizza occasionally. It’s usually these small things that will benefit you the most….and hurt the most if you don’t attend to them.

Further Reading:

• Employee engagement: What exactly is it?
• 12 Questions to Measure Employee Engagement
• The ten C’s of employee engagement
• Engage Me If You Can-It’s as Easy as A,B,C

Just an fyi to those that visit my site occasionally….I’ve just made a change on the ‘look and feel’ of the site. Hope you like it.

Changes:

• Moved to a cleaner layout and am now using the Thesis Theme
• Changes color schemes slightly…Orange and Black now (to reflect my love for all things Oklahoma State!)
• Added an ‘accordion’ menu using Accordion 2.0 from Stickmanlabs to run my dynamic menu.

Let me know what you think…and if there is any issues with the new site.

Interesting story in the Wall Street Journal’s Business Technology Section titled “Keeping it Simple Pays for a Champion Coder“.

The article points to the winner of a recent TopCoder Competition and points to his strategy for winning:

Roberts tells the Business Technology Blog that he spent the first hour reading through the project’s requirements and asking “at least 30 questions” of the person who wrote those requirements.

Once he understood exactly what was required, he set about designing a system that met those requirements – and nothing else. Competitors get extra points for bells and whistles, but Roberts knew that any time spent designing extra features would come at the expense of more basic functions. Instead, he focused on making sure his software worked and that he finished by the deadline, which he did – by three minutes.

This is a perfect example of the power of simplicity and software projects. It also points out how important it is to understand the requirements in your project.

Rather than just diving into the work and coding, Roberts took his time to understand the requirements in detail and got any clarifications that he felt he needed. He then set about delivering exactly what was asked for. Not More…not Less.

Roberts kept things simple while delivering a product that was of some value to the judges.

How often do we see projects fail because we try to stuff more complex requirements into a product/project? (hint: it happens a lot!).

Next time you kick off a project, think about Tim Roberts and his ‘keep it simple’ approach and see if it helps. I’m betting that it will.

It’s been a while since I’ve railed against bad customer service….namely because I’ve not been too upset with the various services that I’ve received.

But…that streak has been broken.

A new definition for poor customer service has been set by a company called “Blu Domain“, specifically by “Aundrea”. My wife and I purchased a website from them on April 25, 2008. They told us that the site would be ‘delivered’ within 24 to 48 hours. It is now May 14th and we have yet to see a working website.

Blu Domain purportedly provides turn-key websites and back-end management solutions for photographers. The web designs and functionality seem to be top-notch…but their client service is horrible (try googling ‘Blu Domain Service‘ or “BluDomain Service“).

It started out nicely with an email from “Aundrea” stating that she’d have the website delivered within 24 to 48 hours and that she never misses a deadline. She asked for information about our hosting platform and we responded within 30 minutes with all the required information. Funny note: in her email to us, it states “if you don’t hear from me within 3 days, contact me because i probably didn’t receive your email”. Now…why would anyone say that? Why is it on the shoulders of the customer to contact the service provider to check to see if they received our email??

3 days went by with no response so we contacted them again and Aundrea told us that she didn’t receive an email from us…we resent it. Another 3 days passed with nothing.

We emailed them again (3 times actually) prior to getting a response. The response asked for more information. We provided that information….and waited another 3 days with no response.

Finally, we threatened to call our credit card company for a refund if they didn’t respond. Funny how threatening them actually worked….but their response was to blame us for not giving them information…even though the information that they requested was contained the email that she replied to.

We’ve given them until the end of today to get the website up and running or the credit card company will take over this negotiation and we’ll go somewhere else.

I should have known better to use a company that doesn’t provide any means of communicating directly with them. They have no phone number, no email address nor any other contact method on their website (other than the ‘Contact us’ form).  Another learning opportunity I guess.

Seems as if we aren’t the only ones having this problem. Check out the following:

• Blu Domain !!!!!, Blu Domain hasn’t sent me a website after I paid..
• Keep away from BluDomain - disgusting service
• Update: A month later and still NOTHING.