What is Work? 3 Levels of Work

Physics defines:

Work = (Force or Energy) * (Distance)

In the work world, it means we must apply energy to something and move it in the direction the business needs it to go.  If we take the simple example of building a building, hopefully I can articulate my three levels clearly.

3 Levels of Work

1. Work - This is energy applied to building the building.  For example: digging foundations, putting up girders, building walls etc.
2. Support Work - This is energy applied to things which are necessary to build the building, but they do not infact help building the building.  For exmple: buying insurance, filing government paperwork, corporate negotiations, buying office supplies etc.
3. Make Believe - This is energy applied to things that are not involved in building the building or in support of building the building.  People might make believe this is necessary to building buildings, but infact it is not necessary.  

How can you tell if what you're doing is work, support work or make believe?

Imagine there's a dail that measures how complete the building is.  Before the building starts and before anything happens, the dial is at zero.  When the building is completed and ready for people to walk in the door, the dial is at one hundred.  You measure the amount of work you actually do by how much you move that dial from zero to one hundred.

If, no matter how much energy you apply, you are not moving the dial or supporting someone moving the dial, then you are doing make believe.  

If the energy you apply moves the dial, then you are doing work.

If the energy you apply supports or enables someone to do work, then you are doing support work.

Are you moving the dial and working or supporting or are you make believing?

Not Going to Davos

In keeping the austerity of our times, I also sent in my apologies saying that I didn't think it would be appropriate for me to go to Davos.

Questions a Change Agent Ought to Ask

Susan Cramm of Harvard presents interesting questions from the new HBR article "How Project Leaders Can Overcome the Crisis of Silence."  We are all familar with the type of statistics persented, that 70% of IT-enabled business initiatives fail or fall short of expectations.  The authors try to get project leaders to engage in five conversations to gain greater insight into whether a project is going in the wrong direction:

1. How often do you plan projects around how you would like the business to operate rather than the way it really operates?  How often are estimates and deadlines set using the PDOOMA methodology (PDOOMA - Pulled Directly Out Of My Ass)
   
2. How often is the Project Sponsor drafted, un willing or uninterested?  I've written on this before "Project Manager: Right Person, Wrong Title" and unless the Project Sponsor is fully committed and powerful enough, there is no amount of project leadership, management or funds to make a project succeed.
   
3. Are we faithful the the approval process?  How often do we follow a process when it's beneficial only to leave it when it's more expedient to cut corners?
   
4. Are we honestly assessing our progress and risks?  How often do we put in work arounds, short cuts or make desperate efforts to complete a deadline knowing things have been left out?  How do we communicate the issue after it has happened?
   
5. Are team members pulling their weight?  What can we do about it if someone isn't?
   

These are all discussions the project leadership should have.  Not only to gain insight into them, but also to find effective ways leaders can confess if the pressures of deadlines have forced them to take short cuts they would rather not have taken.

Firms Urged to Try and Keep Staff

This story from the BBC should give everyone cause to pause.  While it came out a couple weeks ago, it only recently came up as part of discussions with UK personal.  While the idea is well meaning, the reality is that firms have to operate within budgets.  If they are not generating enough revenue, they cannot carry staff.  While no one enjoys laying people off, if cash-flow cannot cover expenses, choices must be made.  Even if they are driven by short-term thinking, if you cannot meet obligations, there is not long term.

Redundancies should be a "last resort" as firms trim costs in the economic downturn, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) says.  Planning for recovery by keeping staff is a better approach, it added, saying an average redundancy costs employers £16,375 before any savings are made. 

The CIPD has put together a formula to estimate the financial cost of redundancy:
(n × r) + (x × h) + (x × t) + ny (h + t) + wz (p - n)
n = number of people made redundant
r = redundancy payments
x = number of people subsequently hired
h = hiring costs
y = percentage quitting post redundancy
t = induction/training cost
y = percentage quitting post redundancy
w= average monthly staff salary
z = percentage reduction in output per worker caused by lower morale
p = number of people employed prior to redundancies

Source: CIPD

Layoffs should be the last resort, but however compelling the equation is in theory, it doesn't change the difficult reality many firms face.  No one like making these types of decisions, but the decisions must be made.

Classifications of Knowledge

Pawel Brodzinski got me thinking more. [Editor: How can it be more, it's a first] The question is  what is taught or can be taught by PM organizations and what is learned.  Long before I can remember understanding it, someone beat into my head that there are four classifications of what we encounter:

1. Data - This is everything available from what day it is, to footbal score to manuals skimmed through.
   
2. Information - This is data that is relevant, for example that PMI stands from Project Management Institute and what can be taught about methodologies.
   
3. Knowledge - This is the ability to use information in a meaningful way and must be learned.  For example, when you need to expend the effort to do risk and contingency analysis.  Someone can teach you what risk analysis is, but you have to learn when to do it and how long to keep doing it before it ceases to add value.
   
4. Wisdom - This is the experience gained from executing projects where you should have done risk analysis and having suffered the consequences and also where you did risk analysis and it wasn't necessary.  Wisdom is the experience of having lived through the ramifications of knowledgeable decisions you made.
   

When I say there are limits to what you can get from PMI or any other framework or methodology, part of it is that you can only get data and information.  You must live through and experience projects to gain knowledge and be sufficiently tendorized to develop wisdom.

While it wasn't written about PM, anyone who has lived through the permutations and frustrations of projects can identify with the sentiment and understand of wisdom presented by William Blake (in 1796 or so) in The Wail of Enion from “THE FOUR ZOAS” 

I am made to sow the thistle for wheat, the nettle for a nourishing dainty:

I have planted a false oath in the earth, it has brought forth a Poison Tree:

I have chosen the serpent for a counsellor, and the dog for a schoolmaster to my children.

I have blotted out from light and living the dove and nightingale,

And I have causèd the earthworm to beg from door to door:

I have taught the thief a secret path into the house of the just:

I have taught pale Artifice to spread his nets upon the morning

My heavens are brass, my earth is iron, my moon a clod of clay,

My sun a pestilence burning at noon, and a vapour of death in night. 

What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song,

Or Wisdom for a dance in the street? No! it is bought with the price

Of all that a man hath -- his house, his wife, his children.

Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,

And in the wither'd field where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain. 

It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer's sun,

And in the vintage, and to sing on the wagon loaded with corn:

It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted,

To speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer,

To listen to the hungry raven's cry in wintry season,

When the red blood is fill'd with wine and with the marrow of lambs: 

It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements;

To hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughter-house moan;

To see a God on every wind and a blessing on every blast;

To hear sounds of Love in the thunderstorm that destroys our enemy's house;

To rejoice in the blight that covers his field, and the sickness that cuts off his children,

While our olive and vine sing and laugh round our door, and our children bring fruits and flowers. 

Then the groan and the dolour are quite forgotten, and the slave grinding at the mill, 

And the captive in chains, and the poor in the prison, 

and the soldier in the field when the shatter'd bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead:

It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity --

Thus would I sing and thus rejoice; but it is not so with me.

Concerns about Emphisis on Project Management Methodologies

Paul Ritchie at Crossderry Blog has pushed me to think more clearly about the structures and guidelines in various approaches to project management.  I'm not trying to downplay PMI or any other methodology. PM is an evolving discipline. The structures and guidelines put forth by PMI, CMMi, PRINCE2, ITIL etc are important and have personally helped me immensely. 

My concern is that the structures and guidelines of PM (Project Schedules, Risk Management etc.) are the easy parts. As so often happens, people focus the most attention on making the easy and quantifiable things easier. Often what is most important are the non-quantifiable things. For lack of a better word, judgment. Warren Bennis has a beautiful description of judgment, something like: 

Judgment is like the Yeti. You can see it's footprints, but you never see the Yeti. 

Fortunately or unfortunately, PM has been linked with technology.  For large IT implementations, it's indispensable. But I'm not sure that link is beneficial to its development as a management discipline. Talk to someone in the construction industry and they will tell you a totally different story about PM. Talk to a wheelman at a restaurant. The wheelman is the person who makes sure that everyone at a table gets their dinner at the same time and at the same temperature. Talk to someone in the movie industry about making a movie, and they will all tell very different stories about what is essentially project management. Wouldn't those insights do more to further the discipline of PM then the refinement and codification of the structures and guidelines of PM? 

Fortunately or unfortunately, the people who have the most interest in furthering the discipline of PM are the people who have based their careers around training, consulting and perfection of the mechanistic elements of PM. Those are all important skills, but they are skills that downplay the art and the judgment aspects of PM. From my experience, the more I see PM structures and guidelines, the fewer footprints I see from good judgment.

A perfect example of where structure and content are perfectly merged and judgement is totally missed is provided by America’s Finest News Source (The Onion) in Project Manager Leaves Suicide PowerPoint Presentation

Photo Credit: CG

How Do You Measure Time and Why?

The greeks measured time in two ways.  Chronos, the quantitative measure of seconds, minutes, hours and days and Kairos, the separation between two moments of important opportunity or discovery.

It’s easy to measure chronos, every project schedule does that with the help of every clock.  How many hours, days, weeks months will that task take?

Kairos moments of great advancement or great breakthroughs.  It’s no more possible to plan that then it is to plan when you’ll meet someone and fall in love.

Do we measure chronos and hope for kairos?