Are we falling or flying … and will we ever know?

Life, the universe, technology, project management, and why change management is so incredibly hard.

Posts Tagged ‘Work’

Other People’s Tales from the Work Zone…

August 26th, 2009

I’m very lucky to have some great friends, who are smart, hard working, and ethical – and at the end of the day, want to keep customers happy while still doing the right thing.

For now, several are in challlenging jobs – where the biggest work challenge of all is both realizing and accepting the enemy is not a competitor, it is within.

I understand their frustration; best captured in this email recently sent to me:

“So, things are not going terribly well at present for the current director of our office.

Apparently, by not listening to requests the client has made and not addressing key issues raised by our client, as well as failiing to deliver on the fundamental value-add principles our organization was supposed to deliver to the client, the client is getting upset and has created a task force to look into the behavior of our organization and determine if requiring a change in leadership is necessary.

While this has been building for months, he’s somehow been oblivious to it and it has only come to his attention this morning – far too late for him to stop the momentum.

Could be an interesting next couple of weeks.

Despite all this, his actions have been showing some questionable priorities and decisions remain baffling.

1. He’s invested in some Ikea office furniture and is thrilled. Thrilled! The desks have glass-tops, but our organization does not have any mouse pads…our guests will look very professional using our their mice on spare cardboard and sheets of paper over their new-ish Ikea desks:

spiffy ikea glass desk

The question of monitors, keyboards, and mice for the present staff remains outstanding and apparently held back by countless layers of red tape (in our 14-person organization, no less)

2. Recently, the director really questioned printing charges for color sales presentation materials (for an imminent global business bid). We recently had to change our copying supplier since we had a dozen color copies of a (now obsolete) thousand-page training manual prepared and bound for us at the local copy shop – which we then did not pick up once the director realized the charges for this were approximately $700.

Now we drive to other areas of the city for business printing needs.

Still, he’s concerned over the charges of printing up & binding 8 color copies of a 40 page document that are part of a bid to earn millions of dollars.

3. The director recently did a presentation about the need for us to do computer backups (apparently it’s our responsibility to do so), but will not provide a portable hard drive, back-up server, USB key, or even a stack of blank DVDs that we could back things up to.

I hope my friend hangs in there; I’m pretty sure the best part of this still developing story is yet to come.

“A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools.”

- Douglas Adams (1952 – 2001), Mostly Harmless

Systems Thinking in the Real World

July 12th, 2009

The more I read about Steve Jobs, the more I want to work for Apple; except for the work | life balance, he really, really gets it, and on so many levels – about people and about products.

The good and bad of thinking in terms of systems is not many people view the world that way, even though the world is a very large system; if/when one component changes, that change will influence other components within the system. Innovation does parse a leader from a follower. Not enough people value quality, are not used to an environment where excellence is expected, and then don’t try.

I thought I could change the world by helping hiring managers hire A+ players; and to some extent, the world did change, and in a good way; “the journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step.”

This year I began the journey to move into a technical project management role. Now I’m learning and integrating many new business rules, best practices, processes, methodologies, and tools to enable me to GTD on a more global scale, and from the business side.

I earned my PMP certification in June; now I’m heavily focused on improving my requirements engineering skills; becoming a certified scrum master (CSM); and refreshing my knowledge of SQL and XML (which needs to be a seperate blog posting; watch for the upcoming “Getting By With a Lot of Help From My (new and old) Friends”).

Last week I was fortunate to learn requirements engineering from Earl Beede of Construx Software; and highly recommend Earl, Construx Software, and its Requirements Bootcamp. I learned a lot from Earl: best practices; new methodologies; and tools and techniques. Equally valuable was his insights and advice for implementation and change management; including the heuristic “it’s not a technology problem, it’s a people problem.”

I think Steve Jobs best captured this key to project success:

“Hiring the best is your most important task.

No major work that I have been involved with has been work that can be done by a single person or two people, or even three or four people. Some people can do one thing magnificently, like Michelangelo, and others make things like semiconductors or build 747 airplanes — that type of work requires legions of people. In order to do things well, that can’t be done by one person, you must find extraordinary people.

In most things in life, the dynamic range between average quality and the best quality is, at most, two-to-one. For example, if you were in New York and compared the best taxi to an average taxi, you might get there 20 percent faster. In terms of computers, the best PC is perhaps 30 percent better than the average PC. There is not that much difference in magnitude. Rarely you find a difference of two-to-one.

I noticed that the dynamic range between what an average person could accomplish and what the best person could accomplish was 50 or 100 to 1. Go after the cream of the cream. You can then build a team that pursues the A+ players. A small team of A+ players can run circles around a giant team of B and C players.

After recruiting, it’s building an environment that makes people feel they are surrounded by equally talented people and their work is bigger than they are. The feeling that the work will have tremendous influence and is part of a strong, clear vision — all those things.

Recruiting usually requires more than you alone can do, so I’ve found that collaborative recruiting and having a culture that recruits the A players is the best way. Any interviewee will speak with at least a dozen people in several areas of this company, not just those in the area that he would work in.

When you’re in a startup, the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not. Each is 10 percent of the company. So why wouldn’t you take as much time as necessary to find all the A players? If three were not so great, why would you want a company where 30 percent of your people are not so great? A small company depends on great people much more than a big company does.”

I really, really want to spend an afternoon with Steve one day, do a Vulcan mind-meld, then integrate and build upon his really great ideas.

In the meantime, I just ordered Leander Kahany’s book “Inside Steve’s Brain.” But don’t worry, I promise never to wear a black turtleneck.