quantmleap

I am often asked by colleagues and friends to explain my motivation behind writing this blog. Their argument is as follows: The blog seems to target topics that touch on project management, but only just. While other project management blogs focus on core issues like PMP Exams, Earned Value Management, Scope Management, etc., my blog could seem to an outside observer as being all over the place. I, too, write about core project management topics, but I also address areas of knowledge that are not necessarily unique to project management but can be applied to project management. Topics that fall into this grey area would include discussions about Social Media, Multi-tasking, Psychological aspects of decision-making, and others.

I had to give this some thought as the answer did not seem to present itself to me intuitively.

The conclusion I reached, which I am personally happy with, is as follows:

While a large number of authors out there write to project managers, I write to people who happen to be project managers. What do I mean in that? Writing a blog is a conversational journey. I want the messages I broadcast via my blog to be universal, as much as practically possible, such that they will appeal to the reader via their own individual personality and not because of their professional orientation. While other writers target the professional side of their readers, and without diminishing the value of their effort, I want to communicate at a personal level that is beyond the profession and therefore much more difficult to disseminate than dry project management functions.

Whether I do a good job or not is not for me to judge but I hope the above clarifies why I do what I do and how it is reflected in my writing.

Think about it!

I wrote before about the organizational and technological drive to increased complexity in organizational processes (see Related Posts section at the end of this post). I have speculated that one of the reasons for the increased complexity is the hope that by introducing ever more robust process the quality of our delivery products will increase.

I call the above process ‘the quality chase’. It is the vicious cycle that goes as follows:

1. Poor quality – results in…
2. Introduce more QA steps – results in…
3. Increased complexity – results in…
4. Still poor quality – results in…
5. Go to 2

The obvious observation, arising from the above, should be that increasing quality is not necessarily the result of more QA. If you want the process to deliver better results you’d better change the process itself. And change does not necessarily mean that the process needs to become more complex. It only means that the process should be adjusted to produce better, more targeted, results.

There is another reason why organizations introduce more processes. Organizations are made up on individuals and these individuals have varying degrees of responsibilities and accountabilities towards the delivery of various products. Most organizations exhibit an unforgiving attitude towards production mistakes. If you made a mistake and this mistake has caused a process to fail you will be named and shamed. The main attribute of any ‘name and shame’ campaign is that it judges people about decision that they should have made, given the benefit of an hindsight. And as observed by Daniel Kahneman in “Thinking, Fast and Slow“, “Because adherence to standard operating procedures is difficult to second-guess, decision makers who expect to have their decisions scrutinized with hindsight are driven to bureaucratic solutions—and to an extreme reluctance to take risks.”

The take from the above discussion is twofold:

1. Fixing a broken process does not necessarily require the introduction of even more process.
2. Increasing bureaucracy to address increased personal risk does not result in reduced process risk

Think about it!

As citizens of the world we have become accustomed to making a mental differentiation between personal, individual commitments to those made by organizations. It is not, I believe, because we expect less of organizations, it is rather that we have learned from bitter experience, that organizations are not subject to the same moral and ethical behaviour we would expect from our fellow-men and women. This is, in some respect, awkward as what is an organization if not a collection of individuals, all (more or less) like you and me – faceless individuals, but still people with families, belief systems and ethical values not different to ours.

There is a wonderful saying by Aldous Huxley that “One of the many reasons for the bewildering and tragic character of human existence is the fact that social organization is at once necessary and fatal. Men are forever creating such organizations for their own convenience and forever finding themselves the victims of their home-made monsters.”

There is a profound message behind this quote as it suggests that, on one hand we are (at least the majority of us) members of some organization, while on the other hand we are the victims of such organizations. Put differently, while our livelihood is dependent on our association with Organizaion A, our quality of life could be severely affected by the behaviour of Organization B. At the same time, should you be employed by Organization B, you might be personally affected by the behaviour and business dealings of Organizaiton A and thus I might be ethically responsible for any wrong doing propagated by my organization.

One of the ways in which organizations express their concern to their customers is a Customer Charter. It, usually, represents their value system within the context of their interaction with you, the customer. it outlines their commitment to serve you in the best possible way, outlining how your welfare is top on their priority list.

I have always thought there is something sinister about Customer Charters as they are inherently misleading and a priori incomplete. Commercial organizations are not about customer service as their raison d’être is to maximize share holders’ value. So when a customer charter makes performance and accessibility promises, what it really is saying is that the organization will honour it’s word on the condition that it will not negatively affect shareholders’ value.

The following commitment is made in the Customer Charter of an Australian Insurance company called AAMI:

“We will be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Simply call us on ….”

What does this actually mean? Does it only mean that the company’s switch board will take my call 24 hours a day? What does it tell me about the call wait time, would they answer and respond to my call within 1 minute, 5 minutes, 10 minutes? And when I rang AAMI yesterday and was kept on hold for 65 minutes! – does this constitute availability of “24 hours a day, seven days a week“?

And what about the following commitment?

“we will contact you…during the course of the claim to keep you informed“

This is yet another empty commitment as in practice it does not specify what “during the course of the claim” actually means. Does it mean daily, weekly, once off only?

So, without elaborating on this point any further, it is clear that an organizational commitment to its customers is only as good as the contractual Service Level Agreement the organization is willing to commit to, including financial penalties should they not meet their prescribed obligations.

The lesson to me as a consumer is simple. Next time a service provider waves their customer charter in front of me, attempting to show their beautiful customer oriented culture and attitude, I’ll ask them the following two questions:

1. What is your SLA on these commitments? and,
2. What penalty would you pay should you not be able to meet them?

Think about it!

Today’s quote is dedicated to Christopher Hitchens who died yesterday, age 62.

Clearly not about project management but rather much more important thing:

 ”The gods that we’ve made are exactly the gods you’d expect to be made by a species that’s about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee”

Think about it!

One of the great innovations arising from the use of electronic mail is the ability to group people together into Distribution Lists (DLs). Every company that respects itself institute corporate and departmental distribution lists. There is a DL for the DBA’s and a DL for the Windows Administrators, and a DL for the project team, and a DL for the QA department, for the network engineers, for the various business areas, etc., etc., etc.

DL’s are a great tool when you want to convey information to teams of people. They take away the burden of remembering which individual belongs to which group and allow you to quickly address the many while referring to them as a single addressee.

But there is also a dark side to Distribution Lists. While using DL’s is productive when attempting to distribute information to a collection of individuals, they are less than productive when a call for action is required. Submitting requests to DL can result in a…silence. As no specific individual is asked to respond or take action it can (as quite often occurs) result in no one raising their hand to confirm they will take the responsibility to get the ‘thing’ done.

Although immensely annoying, this phenomenon is hardly surprising. Real time events, as well as psychological lab experiments (see for instance HERE) have clearly shown that individuals will relinquish their natural responsibility in circumstances where they were conscientiously aware that they are part of a group. In a DL scenario, the fact that an e-mail is distributed to a list of individuals, not signaling any one individual specifically, allows the individuals to incorrectly assume that someone else will pick up the call. As the research suggests, not raising one’s hand is not a result of carelessness of lack of motivation but more a psychological phenomenon that inhibits people’s behaviour in a group environment.

The concluding lesson is obvious. If you are required to communicate with teams via a Distribution List make sure your requests for action are directed as specific individuals.

If you don’t follow this rule you will be disappointed but you will have only yourself to blame.

Think about it!

Having thoroughly read (and immensely enjoyed) Daniel Kahneman’s latest book “Thinking, Fast and Slow“, I am beginning to look at things around me with a new set of spectacles. Adopting and being cognizant of some of the effects and biases discussed in his book is not an easy task. Being aware of these, however, is an eye opener as it allows one to ask questions and explore the motives behind perceptions that for a while seemed to be almost intuitive.

One of the effect which heavily influences our judgement is the Availability Effect. In a nutshell, the Availability Heuristic is that element of our decision-making process that gets biased towards information to which we had higher levels of exposure, regardless of whether this information is correct, true or even logical.

Let’s try to build up a hypothetical scenario and look at the impact this scenario can have on the manifestation of the Availability Heuristic, in the context of the discussion surrounding Projects’ Failure Rate.

A project with high public impact is having some sort of problems. These problems reach the public domain via a media publication and as a result get registered in the public awareness as an event worth noting. At this point in time it is only a single record stored in our collective consciousness awaiting to be retrieved should the circumstances require it.

If you are a consultant, project manager or blogger operating in this area you are more likely to make a mental note of the event. You are likely to bookmark the news record or make a note in your diary, marking this for a possible future use.

Sometime later, not much after the original news coverage, another project hits the news. Another project with a relative high public interest is in trouble. It doesn’t matter, for the sake of this discussion, whether the project is indeed in serious problems, whether they are temporary or terminal. Irrespective of the real story, as a new reader, as someone with interest in this industry or this domain, your senses are triggered to smell that something bigger is happening, that a trend is emerging.

If you are a consultant of blogger you are most likely going to embark on a series of analysis reports and blog posts analyzing the emerging trend of failed projects. You will more than likely base your analysis on recent media events and use your power of extrapolation to explain how a serious and worrying trend is emerging.

It is all slippery slope from here on.

The media, ever looking for such news breaks, is more than likely to quote the analysis papers and expand further on the worrying trend. If you are a consultant and blogger you are most likely going to embark on a further round of analysis, based now on recent media articles, dealing with this issue in an ever-growing frequency.

Now the Availability Heuristic is in full motion and the cycle is well on its merry way, simultaneously feeding and being fed by anecdotal and self-serving information.

Throw into the above mix a number of other real or perceived failures and you have a fully self-contained and self-propelled media frenzy, analysing, elaborating and discussing the sorry state of affairs in project world, where most projects are likely to fail.

Fiction? I think not! 

Think about it!

p.s. Can you see a scenario where Agile discussions might be subject to the same effect?

Jerry Bishop from The Higher ED CIO published recently a post titled “Bad Behaviors Negate Good Leadership Traits” in which he discussed some observations having read “Why CEO’s Fail: The 11 Behaviors That Can Derail Your Climb to The Top”.

 Based on the book, Jerry summarises the 11 bad behaviors, as follows:

1. Arrogance: You’re right and everyone else is wrong
2. Melodrama: You always grab the center of attention
3. Volatility: Your mood shifts are sudden and unpredictable
4. Excessive Caution: The next decision you make may be your first
5. Habitual Distrust: You focus on the negative
6. aloofness: You disengage and disconnect
7. Mischievousness: You know that the rules are only suggestions
8. Eccentricity: It’s fun to be different just for the sake of it
9. Passive Resistance: Your silence is misinterpreted as agreement
10. Perfectionism: You get little things right while the big things go wrong
11. Eagerness to Please: You want to win any popularity contest

 What I liked the most about this post is Jerry’s observation that the above reasons of leadership failure are universal in their nature and apply to any leadership position, not just CEOs. It is therefore incumbent on anyone in a leadership role (and that includes Project Managers) to study these factors and take personal corrective or mitigating actions to prevent them from affecting their performance.

Think about it!

What Might Be Standing in the Way of…

• What might be standing in the way of efficient project delivery is the excessive reliance on checks and balances
• What might be standing in the way of maintainability and supportability of information systems is the introduction of ever more technologies
• What might be standing in the way of accountability and responsibility is the sole reliance on the stakeholder’s matrix
• What might be standing in the way of good design is the need to comply with long and over-engineered table-of-contents
• What might be standing in the way of proper ownership of problems is a RACI matrix
• What might be standing in the way of quick business solutions is the complex structure of the IT division
• What might be standing in the way of simplicity is the excessive reliance on bureaucracy
• What might be standing in the way of success is the adherence to processes
• What might be standing in the way of quality is the QA department
• What might be standing in the way of doing things quickly is adhering to SLA’s that allow things to be done slowly
• What might be standing in the way of quick communication is the use of electronic mail, delivered instantaneously but responded to very slowly
• What might be standing in the way of clarity is over-elaboration
• What might be standing in the way of collaboration is getting everyone involved
• What might be standing in the way of decision making is too many decision makers

That’s it, I’ve had enough!

There is something I quite can’t get my head around.

Having gravitated towards a profession that requires some form of elevated discipline I find myself quite often in situations that result in an innate desire to throw away all the procedural and bureaucratic obstacles and just get the job done.

• I know that following a process enforces a unifying and repeatable approach.
• I know that following a process provides an ability to introduce QA gates and a robust audit trail.
• I know that following a process allows decision makers to approve implementation based on the delivery of key process artefacts.
• I know that without process things might slide towards chaos with each doing their own way.
• I know that processes are the way organisations enforce law-and-order.

So why do I dislike it so much?

I suspect the issue can be summed up with one word – BUREAUCRACY.

In most organisations the need to follow a process is also coupled with the need to comply with bureaucratic requirements that manifest themselves in forms, spreadsheets, tables and paperwork. As a project manager I enjoy the functional aspects of my job but I loath some of the bureaucratic aspects that come with it.

Having been working with and amongst large organizations most of my professional life I suspect that the real reason behind the increased bureaucracy is bureaucrats’ “need to know”, their desire (based on fear) to ensure that the correct audit trail is maintained, ready to be retrieved and used in all earnest should any major issue happen to arise.

So this is my challenge to all you PMO managers out there. When you ask to be provided with data, please do so because it actually add value and is productively used as part of a useful reporting mechanism, not to be added to a data repository somewhere, where it will reside, waiting to be retrieved should doomsday occur. And I promise, if you tone down your “need to know” I will tone down my ‘what do you need this for”.

Have we got a deal?

When I see managers exercise excessive organisational power to enforce their view point I am reminded of the following quote:

You do not lead by hitting people over the head — that’s assault, not leadership.

— Dwight D. Eisenhower

I can’t think of any scenario where rudeness and abruptness are justifiable. The rule of thumb is: If it anti-social to behave in this way when you do your shopping at your local supermarket, it should not be exercised at work either.

Think about it!