Poker and Project Management

These two are at the opposite end of the spectrum. PM is about planning, critical paths and resource allocation. It is logical, analytical and linear. Poker is about intuition, betting big when opportunity’s ripe, reading situations and constantly readjusting.

Knowing how to do both is critical. Poker shows you a lot about someone. How they manage their emotions, act when the cards fall their way, act when they’re back is up against a wall. In PM parlance, how they manage risk and success.

More importantly, you see how people react under pressure, inside and outside their circles of competence. Intuition benefits you within your circle of competence. In friendly games, dealing and calling the game circulates. You can’t always play your game, but you can pick which games, which situations and how much you bet.

If you really only know five-card stud, you’re best off betting conservatively in Omaha or Pirate’s Booty, but then going big when the situation is right in five-card stud. Sticking with what you know gives your intuition its edge.

You’ll never win if you don’t play, but you won’t win consistently if you don’t play smart. Poker compresses all of life’s lessons into a brief, pressure packed situation. Is there a better way to learn about people?

How many PMs play poker with the team? Isn’t that what you’re doing on a project?

Photo credit: Wiseacre_Photo

Should You Manage People or the Environment?

Fish do not notice the water in which they swim.

Every company has a culture. There are myths and stories that are told which reflect the company culture. Its hard to define, its difficult to see and it affects every decision, project and action a company takes.

Is it easier for a fish to swim with the current or against it? Does the pounding rain, rocking waves and conflicting currents lead to curious and creative fish or small, protectionist and defensive fish?

Should you try and manage the fish or will you do better managing the environment?


Photo Credit: Olive Eyel

Aligning People or Letting them Align Part IV

Bill Miller and I have been talking about whether it is better to align people or let them align. You can read the other three parts here, here and here. Its been a great discussion, to make it clearer, I'd like to reframe my response. I always hate it when girlfriends do this to me, so I'm apologizing up front. [Editor: No need to apologize, I've been suggesting girls do that to you for years and it's benefited me tremendously.]

A little background on business
To get some insight to this, let's think about why businesses were really founded. The modern corporation came into being in Britain in the early seventeenth century, when some very intelligent and presumably humble nobleman noticed that there’s no correlation between intelligence and wealth. In fact, there may even be an inverse correlation, but I’ll resist the urge to rant about Paris Hilton and spare you my other Hilton-esque urges. [Editor: Please do.]

What these noblemen realized was that if they gave up a portion of their capital and entrusted it to an organized group of intelligent, motivated and hungry workers selected from the masses, they could make themselves much wealthier. A side benefit to this was the incredible improvement in the standard of living for those working for them. This is the genesis of the modern corporation.

Why is this important? What these noblemen and now women realized was that they had to set up the appropriate structures so the intelligent, motivated and hungry workers had proper direction and incentives to make the business successful and them wealthier.

Project Structures
Should teams self-organize? Absolutely. As a project goes along, the team needs the freedom to realign itself to meet the demands of the project. What an effective manager does is define the structures within which to project will operate to deliver what the business needs. If the project team has the correct direction and incentives, they will align themselves and the project has a better chance of success.

Does this make sense?

Photo Credit: Eric Lafforgue

Project Management Excuse List Part II

Welcome to our new and revised excuse list. People suggested many excellent excuses, some of which even I haven't used. The idea of this list, is that rather than long winded excuses being given in meetings, people can simply give numbers.

Project Manager 1: "We're working hard, but we've got 2 and 19 holding us up."
Project Manager 2: "We are in good shape, but we're being hurt by 8, 22 and 30."

You get the point. Suggestions are always welcome.

Numbered Excuse List

1. We've got scope creep. I don't know where it came from, but have you seen this cool little widget we've added...
2. How come we never have enough money? Honest, if I could just get this one other tool...
3. The requirements weren't defined. Why do I have to keep going to all these meetings, I mean, I've already started coding...
4. The requirements keep changing. Every time I talk to someone, they want something different. It's not worth writing them down...
5. There's a bug in the (Pick one or more: vendors, downstream app, upstream app, operating system, monitoring system, security... our software)
6. The new software we bought doesn't work the way we want. It looked so easy when the sales...
7. We haven't heard back from the software vendor, we filed the report (Pick one: weeks ago, months ago, yesterday... 5 minutes before coming to this meeting)
8. The project manager from company XXX isn't here today, all the problems are with XXX...
9. Testing found something we hadn't expected, it will (Pick one: double, triple...)
10. There's a holiday in XXX's country. They won't be back before Monday. There's nothing we can do until...
11. We couldn't reach Betty-the-business-analyst or (insert name here), we're stuck until...
12. The Development, Testing, QA, Production environments aren't the same, the sysadmins are looking at it, they should be done...
13. Management doesn't understand the problem, if they would just take more time...
14. Management is too involved, why won't they just let us do our job...
15. The project sponsor isn't helping us. We sent them an email two weeks or 5 minutes ago and haven't heard anything...
16. The project sponsor keeps meddling in what we're doing. Every time we turn around, they're asking us questions
17. Huh? That was due today?
18. There's a huge boa constrictor in the garage. Looks like there's no way we can get the car out.
19. My laptop caught a virus, and I lost (fill in the appropriate amount) of work.
20. The time and location differences between the work group members can still cause some delay problems but the work quality is outstanding with our new collaboration systems.
21. Sorry, I just got bogged down with my being too busy on too many projects.
22. You mean it's not there already, let me have my assistant call Fedex and see where the papers are.
23. We are having email problems, can you resend all emails you sent me for the last 3 months?
    
24. The aliens came back and took me away. [Editor: I wish they'd take you.]
25. The dog at my car.
26. I am on my way. [Actually I have not yet left home/office].
27. My cell battery went off, and I was delayed while charging it.
28. It took longer to sleep than anticipated.
29. xxx (someone high up) asked me to work on xxx.
30. I am checking one last time to make sure it is perfect.
31. xxx (reviewer) needs to see it one more time.
32. I'm in jail, can you bail me out so I won't be late?
33. It was more work than I thought
34. Don't pay the ransom, I've escaped.
35. Sorry, I accidentally killed the Lead last night.

Photo Credit: Mike Willis

Aligning People or Letting them Align Part III

Bill Miller, confound him, asked an excellent question. Normally I avoid people asking excellent questions, but as he paid me the compliment of commenting on what I wrote, [Editor: and I made sound intelligent] I felt obligated to respond. And it is an excellent question.

What is the essence of self organization as opposed to their being organized?
The crucial question is responsibility. If a group organizes itself, the group is responsible for the outcome. If someone else organizes the group, the organizer is responsible the outcome.

If ten kids get together to play basketball, then they choose teams, call plays and evaluate the results. If a coach organizes a team, schedules the practices and calls the plays, then the coach is responsible.

Accepting Responsibility Versus Diffusing It
If three people get together and start a company to implement a new idea for running projects, they are responsible for developing the products, the methodologies and finding the customers. If their products and services work, customers continue working with them and the company grows. If their approach doesn't work, the company goes out of business. Those three people and the others who join them are responsible. (This is how CAP was born)

If a company decides that it wants to implement a new program, it picks three people and tells them to implement it. The first thing those people do (if their smart) is ask for more money, more people and more time. In this situation, it is in the three peoples' best interest to make the program as large, as expensive and as time consuming as possible. If they are smart, they diffuse responsibility, but accept credit.

What Advantage do Entrepreneurs Have?
An entrepreneur and the people starting a company take responsibility for making it succeed. People taking a job are responsible to do what someone else organized for them to do.

Are both important? Absolutely.
Which one is likely to effectively produce defined products and services?
Which one is likely to produce innovative products and services?
Which one are you looking for?

Does Technology Create Transparency or Mirages?

Many companies implement huge IT packages to get better visibility into what's happening and to (presumably) get more control, but this begs the question, does technology give you better transparency? Theoretically, it should and even could. Practically, technology may create mirages more effectively than a desert.

Why Does Technology Create Mirages?
Transparency comes from corporate strategies that value transparency. Technology effectively supports that approach if it exists or it obfuscates if one is not careful. If the departments and groups implementing the technology want people to know what they are doing, then you'll get a lot of transparency. If the departments and groups do not think it is in their best interest to have people know what they are doing, technology will not help; in fact, it will probably show you a corporate mirage. [Editor: Sort of like I help you look intelligent.]

Just like in the picture above, the peaceful and attractive house with bushes around it reflected in the lake is a mirage, sophisticated managers can manipulate technology to show whatever it most benefits them to present. Technology is not a magical elixir.

How can Technology Provide Transparency and Control?
If there is:

• Clear thinking about the business objectives
• Products and services that customers value
• Business models that support the required infrastructure to deliver those products and services and create reasonable profit margins
• Appropriate incentives to motivate employees to deliver those products and services

If those things exist, there will be transparency and control will not be a problem. Technology enhances the processes and systems a business uses to do its work. So, will adding technology enhance your transparency or create corporate mirages?

Photo Credit: mbz

Project Management Excuse List

Have you ever sat in a status meeting and thought, "I've heard that excuse before, and that one and that one too..."? Normally I'm very patient, calm and thoughtful. [Editor: Huh???] But this is it. Enough with the excuses. If you have to reuse the same excuses, in the name of efficiency, can we please just use numbers instead of long winded explanations?

In the interests of status reporting efficiency, please use the following list of excuses when you've said you'll have no problem completing something, which will now be late.

I've ordered the list according to how much I'd like to strangle the person giving them to me. You'll notice that I've grouped some of them that are inverse of each other, this is because if you hear one excuse, you'll often hear the other just a little later.

If you have additions, please let me know. As a public service, I'm offering this as a way to improve status meetings. Instead of long winded excuses, they can just say, "I've got 2, 9 and 11" and then the next [Editor: the remainder of the sentence was deleted in the interests of professionalism.]

Numbered Excuse List

1. We've got scope creep. I don't know where it came from, but have you seen this cool little widget we've added...
2. How come we never have enough money? Honest, if I could just get this one other tool...
3. The requirements weren't defined. Why do I have to keep going to all these meetings, I mean, I've already started coding...
4. The requirements keep changing. Every time I talk to someone, they want something different. It's not worth writing them down...
5. There's a bug in the (Pick one or more: vendors, downstream app, upstream app, operating system, monitoring system, security... our software)
6. The new software we bought doesn't work the way we want. It looked so easy when the sales...
7. We haven't heard back from the software vendor, we filed the report (Pick one: weeks ago, months ago, yesterday... 5 minutes before coming to this meeting)
8. The project manager from company XXX isn't here today, all the problems are with XXX...
9. Testing found something we hadn't expected, it will (Pick one: double, triple...)
10. There's a holiday in XXX's country. They won't be back before Monday. There's nothing we can do until...
11. We couldn't reach Betty-the-business-analyst or (insert name here), we're stuck until...
12. The Development, Testing, QA, Production environments aren't the same, the sysadmins are looking at it, they should be done...
13. Management doesn't understand the problem, if they would just take more time...
14. Management is too involved, why won't they just let us do our job...
15. The project sponsor isn't helping us. We sent them an email two weeks or 5 minutes ago and haven't heard anything...
16. The project sponsor keeps meddling in what we're doing. Every time we turn around, they're asking us questions...

In the interests of project managers everywhere, if you have other well worn excuses, please let me know and I'll add it to the list. [Editor: I have one. Number 17. Brainless author]

Aligning People or Letting them Align Part II

Bill Miller made an interesting suggestion about self organizing teams. As kids playing baseball, the first decision was often who would be the two team captains. Those captains then picked the teams. Sometimes they were the two best players or more often the two players most able to help their team win. As kids, we knew what was important to win.

An interesting circle of dependencies. The kids picked the captains and the captains picked the teams. Almost an implicit contract. The group gave the captain the right to organize the team, but if the team didn't win, but they had to win to be captain in the future.

Captains changed. Sometimes one person was a captain for one sport, but not for another. Sometimes frustration over past performances lead to minor mutinies. [Editor: That will be fine, thank you.] Sometimes new leaders emerged as time went on. What's important is that the process was self regulating. If the captain helped the team win, they continued as captain.

Can Business be Self Regulating?
There are obviously differences between ten year olds playing baseball and business, though I suspect there are not as many as one might hope. How different would it be if the workers picked the manager? If the people working on a project were responsible for identifying the person most likely to make the project succeed, who would they pick? And why?

Often times in business executives picks a manager or team lead and then charge that person with assembling a team. What if the team were selected first and that teams first responsibility was to pick the team lead?

Have you heard of people taking this approach? How did it work out?

Do You Align People or Let Them Align?

People are inherently self organizing. Who did you make friends with when you were a kid on the block? When you went to school, there were many kids in school, but there were a couple who became your friends. Why?

Are you organizing your teams so the become more efficient and effective, like the swimmer on the US relay team? Or are you hampering the very creativity needed for great advancement? Not sure? Think about how insurance or stock exchanges came about.

Why is it Called a Stock Exchange?
In 1680 Jonathan Mills opened a coffee house on Exchange Alley in London. It started attracting like-minded individual who would buy and sell stocks and commodities. By 1698, John Castaing had started posting prices. Taking the street name, Exchanges were born.

A Second Example, Lloyd's
Likewise, around 1688 Edward Lloyd opened his coffeehouse, Lloyd's. It attracted merchants and ship owners. By 1692 it moved to Lombard St and was later incorporated as a society, and insurance was born.

Why Organize the Self Organizing?
If kids can organize a football game all on their own, why inflict organization? Because organized teams beat sandlot teams. Companies are organized to clarify roles and responsibilities. Accounting and Finance are different from sales. Likewise project teams are organized to ensure the right people are in the right roles with the right responsibilities. [Editor: Can't my responsibility be to roll you under?]

In your company and projects', are you organizing to amplify peoples' abilities so the team succeeds and wins the gold?

What do you Pay Attention to? VED Analysis

If a surplus of information leads to a deficit of attention, how do you decide what to pay attention to? In the world of projects and corporate communications, consider using the benefits of VED Analysis to separate what is Vital from what is Essential from what is Desirable.

VED Analysis
VED analysis comes from the world of evaluating what medicines are stocked, especially where trade-off have to be made and lives are at stake. It is a system of setting priorities and drugs are classified according to their health impact.

In the world of projects, where there are limited resources and steering committees or project leadership teams need to evaluate alternate approaches, what about using VED Analysis to classify options by considering what their outcomes would be? If the suggestion out lead to an outcome that is vital, how should that be compared to an outcome that is essential or desirable?

Would changing your analysis simplify the evaluation process?

Photo credit: Joe Shlabotnik

How do You Engage People?

Gartner analyst Adam Sarner released a report and and published a Forbes article on what this means for marketers and businesses trying to engage customers. Jeremiah Owyang also had very insightful comments about engaging people in online communities.

If you are going to use Online Communities to improve your corporate productivity, its important to understand the ideas because some of the challenges are a little different as are some of the opportunities.

Gartner's The Four Levels of Engagement:

• Up to 3 percent of individuals will be creators, providing original content and can be advocates that promote your product and services.
  
• Between 3 percent and 10 percent of individuals will be contributors, essentially followers, who add to the conversation, but don't initiate it. They can recommend products and services as customers move through a buying process, looking for purchasing advice.
  
• Between 10 percent and 20 percent of individuals will be opportunists, who can further contributions regarding purchasing decisions. Opportunists can "add value" to a conversation that's taking place, while walking through a considered purchase.
  
• Approximately 80 percent of individuals will be lurkers (and all users start as such), essentially spectators, who reap the rewards of online community input, but only absorb what is being communicated. However, they can implicitly contribute and validate indirectly reporting the value from the rest of the community.

The Challenges
The biggest challenge is the number of people participating on internal online communities. If you have a potential customer community of tens-, hundreds of thousand or millions of customers, having 3% creators, 3 to 10% contributors, 10 to 20% opportunists is probably survivable. The large numbers of potentials mean that you'll get enough members contributing to make a difference.

If you have a team of 50 people who are distributed around the world and you want them to participate, 3% participation is pretty scary. [Editor: actually, it's your participation that's pretty scary.]

The Opportunity
The opportunity really lays in creating a way for the lurkers to participate. Prediction markets, polls, questions and answers must be aligned in ways that get meaningful input from a broader group without requiring large investments of time.

The goal of two to three minutes a week should be the first step in engaging lurkers. You must track when they have engaged and acknowledge it. The immediate recognition of a lurkers new engagement will be key to engaging them further. Their engagement must be meaningful and productive if companies are going to derive value from online communities.

People participate and engage in a community because they feel recognized and that they are a part of something larger than themselves. For businesses this offers a great advantage. Projects engage people in the business and intelligent use of online communities increase focus and productivity.

Photo credit: jeremiah_owyang

Scope: Less is More

Craig Brown and Kevin and Julian are having an intelligent and thoughtful discussion on product vs project scope. Never one to keep an opinion to myself, I couldn't help but offer my own. I have an opinion on everything, which is not necessarily beneficial. An ex-girlfriend claimed she dumped me because I'd argue with her about whether dirt is brown... [Editor: There were other reasons she dumped you, we decided that one hurt your ego the least.]

Scope
Scope is one of the great issues with corporate projects and one of the advantages a start-up has. I don't think the problem is a product or project perspective, but rather a WIMBY perspective.

Many people are familiar with George Carlin's NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard), but fewer are familiar with WIMBY (Wanted In My Back Yard).

In corporations, often times projects get funded because different executives/managers can get things they want included in the scope. The project is sold by inclusion, be it to the product or project scope. In either case, because funding can be expanded to meet additional requirements, which need to be added to get buy-in from key executives/managers, the project or product get too big. They suffer from WIMBY

Start-up Advantage
An entrepreneur can only build what they can pay for. I didn't recognize this benefit until I realized one of the advantage a start-up has is limited resources. I can't get more funding without selling what I already have and then doing what the customer wants. Because I have to pay for additions out of sales, my own pocket or consulting arrangements, what we develop has to be simple and clearly present the value we are offering.

Less is more.
[Editor: Your ex doesn't think so...]

Photo credit: Mingfong

How to Engage People

Dennis D. McDonald in his always educational blog, got me thinking again today. He is absolutely right when he says that blogs would greatly improve communications between distributed teams. The real difficulty is getting people to participate.

The Problem
It is fairly well understood that in most social type application, from youTube to blogs, that 2 to 3% of the people contribute 90% of the material. The question is, how do you get the other 97% to engage? [Editor: 97% of them are intelligent enough not to engage with you. I'm so jealous of them...]

The Solution
You have to offer a way to get feedback in a simple way that requires little effort and recognizes their input. That is why we give people the ability to answer questions (multiple choice, percentage, yes/no) and rank people based on the accuracy of their answers.

As a manager, you don't know what they answered, but you do know that Dennis is more involved and knowledgeable than Andy. [Editor: That's not saying much. The slowest third grader is more knowledgeable than you.]

If you make things entertaining and engaging, people will participate. If you set up a little competition that rewards their engagement, they will engage more.

If you want to know more, email me: ameyer@go2incent.com

Ten Most Popular Posts

The ten most popular post on Inquiries Into Alignment according to Google Analytics:

1. Does PMI (Project Management Institute) Find Value in Project Management?
2. How to React when Thing Start Going Wrong on a Project
3. Tips for Project Management Success
4. Project Communications and the Terror of the Troubled Project
   
5. Warning Signs of Trouble on a Project
6. Steps to Take When Your Project is in the Tar Pits
7. Importance of Project Sponsors
8. Is Adding Value the Correct Question to Ask about Project Management?
9. Are Project Managers Marooned on an Island?
10. Why Change is so Difficult?
    

Photo credit: jeanricard.broek

Do Surpluses of Information Lead to Deficits of Attention?

There is so much information circulating around businesses and projects, how do you decipher what is critical from what is interesting from what is noise? If everyone is in the same office or building, maybe managers can develop a sense of this or discover critical information from serendipitous conversations, but if people are spread among multiple offices, maybe in multiple countries, how do you determine this?

Attention Economy
In 1985, Michael Goldharber, a theoretical physicist first wrote about the attention economy. If economies are about the distribution of scarce resources, if there is a surplus of information, attention is a scarce resource. How do you draw attention to what is critical and separate it from the noise?

The Purple Cow
In 2003, Seth Godin wrote The Purple Cow around the premise that the only thing that catchs your attention is something remarkable. By definition, something that is remarkable is worthy of a remark. Is the information that is critical in your corporation also remarkable?

How do you go about making what is critical, remarkable?

Project Communications and the Terror of the Trouble Project

This is the webinar I did for PMI last Tuesday on project communications. It covers four broad areas.

1. Nine questions to ask to see if your project might have trouble.
2. Communication tips to keep your project out of trouble.
3. Things to try when your project starts having trouble.
4. What to do when your project is stuck in the tar pits.



Many thanks Alex Brown, the host and to PMI and the Trouble Projects SIG. I would love to know what you thought.

Why Companies resist Change

Eric Brown has an interesting review of John P. Kotter's new book A Sense of Urgency. Now I have an immense respect for John Kotter and think Eric's pretty bright, but it seems to me something might be missing.

Eric summarizes Kotter saying that complacency and a misdirected sense of urgency are some of the main reasons organizational change efforts fail. I take a different view. I say powerful, mid-level managers in organizations, the ones who actually get the work of the business done, often times do not want to change. Change may well be necessary and beneficial for the organization as a whole, but that doesn't mean it's good for everyone in the organization.

Now, please note, I have not yet read Kotter's book, but if anyone takes a stand, the Irish blood I got from my mother compels me to take a different view, if only for the sake of the argument. (and I have a long list of ex-girlfriends to show how beneficial this is...)

Under the Tops and the Bottoms
If you're at the top of an organization, an executive or a board member, you look across the marketplace and see the different customer groups, their different requirements and the revenue benefits of meeting those new requirements. Its very easy to see the benefits for change and exciting to demonstrate your strategic ability to align your company with new markets to drive greater growth.

If you're new to an organization and looking for ways to advance, change presents opportunity. You welcome and embrace change. New markets, new processes, new systems and structures all present great ways to be more effective and be recognized by people at the top of the house.

These two groups are nicely aligned with wanting change.

What about the middles?
If you sit in the middle of an organization, you know the current customers. You know what they want and your job is satisfying their current needs. They are the people who pay the bills today. For all the potential that the tops see and which might even exist, you can't eat potential. Your current customers don't care about the new opportunities. Not to mention the fact that the executives may well be disconnected from the realities of the business or in some cases, from reality at all... [Editor: two paragraphs of vitriolic ranting were deleted to prevent lawsuits being filed.]

Why change fails
There are many reasons change fails: misguided executives, misalignment with current customer requirements, misalignment with current processes and structures etc. This is not a new phenomenon.

We trained hard, but it seemed that every time we were beginning to form up into teams, we would be reorganized. I was to learn later in life that we tend to meet any new situation by reorganizing; and a wonderful method it can be for creating the illusion of progress while producing confusion, inefficiency and demoralization.
- Petronius Arbiter, 210 B.C.

Photo credit: StarrGazr