Tuesday, December 4, 2012

Smart People + Smart Leadership = Happy Customers? [Lucy Freedman]




Smart People + Smart Leadership = Happy Customers? 
Interpersonal Intelligence for Technical Organizations

By Lucy Freedman, developer of the SYNTAX of Influence, co-author of Smart Work (second edition soon to be released).

When I first started my business, a mentor quizzed me about what it meant to have a business. Does coming up with a great idea make it a business? Clearly no. Does having a product make it a business? What about an office, employees, marketing? No, no, and no, he said. You have a business when you have a customer.  Aha.

In the world of technology, we can get so focused on the product or process that the relationship part of the business receives a minimal amount of mindshare. Sure, when we need to make a funding pitch, attract a key executive, or give a customer presentation, we put attention into those relationships. Even then, it’s typical of technologists to be mostly content-oriented and not so focused on tuning into the interests of their audience.  There’s room for growth.

While the ability to relate well with funders , talent, and customers is important for business success, the internal communication in a company is equally important. What customers and VC’s really want is for the product to work and meet their needs in a timely and cost-effective way.  For that to happen, managers and teams need to be able to get on the same page and come up with solutions and answers. Knowledge needs to be mobilized. Deadlines need to be met. Problems need to be solved. All this takes communication that is both focused and flexible.

The Challenge
The kinds of interpersonal intelligence that allow people and teams to collaborate well tend to be underdeveloped in engineering organizations for three main reasons.
·         Engineers are generally not drawn to learning “soft skills”
·         Engineering leadership is mostly made up of engineers
·         Most interpersonal skills training is oriented more toward personal growth than practical business interactions.

As a result, efficiency, accurate and relevant sharing of knowledge, and delivery to the customer are often hampered by turf battles, planning disconnects, and just plain miscommunication.

Is this just a depressing downer, condemning engineering organizations and their customers to clunky communication, relieved only by those special high-tech + high-touch individuals who can navigate well both technically and interpersonally? Although many are resigned to this state of affairs, there are lights flickering here and there.

Bright Lights and Good Books
In fact, at the November ElSig meeting, Ron Lichty presented a “Crash Course” based on his new book with co-author Mickey W. Mantle, Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams  (Addison-Wesley, www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net ). They address important considerations for people who move up the technical ladder from writing code to managing people.

Another new and highly recommended book on this subject is Team Geek: A Software Developer’s Guide to Working Well with Others by Brian W. Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman (O’Reilly Media, 2012). It’s very entertaining reading and addresses expanding circles of influence, from your own team to the organization to the user community.

A few years back,  Michael Lopp wrote the insightful and humorous book, Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager (Apress, 2007).  Michael gives practical advice for many of the situations that recur in software development. He names some of the types of people you’ll run across – such as Mr. Irrelevant, Laptop Larry, Curveball Kurt, the Snake, and Free Electrons. Cleverly written, full of useful homilies.

What all of these books have in common is the practical experience of the authors, who have lived what they are writing about.  They share illustrative stories that those who follow in their footsteps will easily relate to.

De-coding How People Work
As an outsider who can’t code my way out of a paper bag, I have been taking a different approach for the past few decades of working as a consultant, coach, and facilitator for high tech companies.  Programmers understand the structure, or syntax, that is required for code to work. I have studied the structure, or syntax, that is required for human communication to work.

What I have discovered is that the smart people who know how to code have an easier time learning interpersonal skills when they have access to the proper syntax for communicating. Hundreds of engineers have experienced and applied the SYNTAX model to their workplaces. People who considered themselves non-people-oriented have shown that with several relatively small changes in their communication, they can achieve great improvements in their working relationships.

This is not about sentence structure or grammar. If you consider that people are pretty systematic in how we organize our perceptions and our behavior, it makes sense that you can detect each person’s syntax, and hence, get more predictable results with them.  There’s also a structure, a syntax derived from studying outstanding performers, that makes communication work better. Our model, SYNTAX, represents that architecture so that people can easily learn it.

It’s explained in detail in the book Smart Work, which I co-authored with Lisa Marshall.
The second edition will be coming out in a few months. I hope to share some of the most helpful aspects of SYNTAX at one of the upcoming ElSig meetings. In the meantime, if you are interested in getting an advance look at it, or even writing a review, please contact me at syntaxoffice@syntx.com and I will gladly share it with you now.

Smart Leadership
When leaders in an organization start practicing SYNTAX principles, or some of the other excellent suggestions in the books listed above, they create a climate where it is much more natural for others to collaborate productively as well. It’s a matter of good design of human systems – whether writing effective, clean code for applications that will benefit people, or holding effective, clean meetings where work gets done and agreements are solid, it’s about designing intelligent human systems. 

Whether through the stories and rules of the road derived from experience, or through applying a systematic, structured approach to interpersonal behavior, everyone benefits when a technical organization develops its conscious competence at communicating.

Engineering is about solving real-world problems and creating innovations that make a difference.  It takes smart people working well together to do this successfully. With smart people, smart leadership, and outstanding communication, you get happy customers. That, plus your satisfaction at meeting your own high standards, makes it worthwhile to master the softer skills.
 ______________________________________________________

Lucy Freedman is the president of SYNTAX and works with technology companies so that their engineers are as good with people as they are with technology. She coaches leaders and teams and most enjoys helping to design practices and cultures where people exceed their own and others’ expectations.  Lucy has trained and certified several dozen consultants who have implemented SYNTAX programs in companies  such as Agilent, HP, Sun, Oracle, EDS, Adaptec, Tokyo Electron, Intel, National Semiconductor, and Cisco Systems.  The second edition of her book, Smart Work: The SYNTAX Guide to Influence, has just gone to print.  Contact syntaxoffice@syntx.com, or syntaxcommunication.com  View explanatory videos and sign up there for the SYNTAX Messenger, which comes out twice a month with insights and helpful tips for positive influence in high tech organizations.

Saturday, October 27, 2012

"PM"s [Ron Lichty]

I am repeatedly in conversations with someone who says, "Oh, PMs blah blah blah." 

And I have to figure out which kind of PM they're talking about. 

(It happened again yesterday afternoon. The person speaking was a product manager, which made it likely that the "PMs" to which he referred were other product managers, not project managers. Then this morning, I got an email with the subject line,  "The Evolving PM". Again I had to think. The sender was a project management association, making it likely that the "PMs" to which it referred were other project managers, not product managers.)

I'm not a PM. I'm not a PM of any kind. I'm not a Project Manager, I'm not a Product Manager, I'm not a Program Manager, I'm not a Publication Manager (engagement last year: Stanford subsidiary HighWire, which hosts web sites for 1400 of the world's most prestigious academic and scholarly journals from 150 publishers worldwide, and when I arrived, had 14 "PMs" for me to manage - who were account managers!).

I'm an interim VP Engineering. And a consulting CTO. And an Agile trainer and coach of Agile transformations. And an author of the Addison Wesley book (just published!):
   Managing the Unmanageable: Rules, Tools, and Insights for Managing Software People and Teams 
   www.ManagingTheUnmanageable.net  

The common abbreviation terminology I've been pushing for, in my engagements:
PjM == Project Manager
PdM == Product Manager
PgM == Program Manager
They're all self-clarifying.

I give talks on Transforming Chaos to Clarity.

Project Managers and Product Managers and Program Managers are, to a one, charged with clarifying software development, not adding to the chaos.

"PM" adds to the chaos. 

I wish that were…

'nuff said.
 __________________________________________________________________
Ron Lichty is the co-author of Managing the Unmanageable, and blogs at ronlichty.blogspot.com, where this post originally appeared.  Check out his web site at www.ronlichty.com.

Sunday, September 30, 2012

Which Dog Will You Feed? Choosing Our “Reality” [Kimberly Wiefling]

In 1995 I decided to embrace optimism as a strategy for creating possibilities. It wasn’t a rational choice, it was an intuitive leap of faith. My many years of education as a physicist had taught me to ignore my intuition, but logic was insufficient to overcome my exuberance. You see I’d just had my eyes opened by a truly gifted coach who’d helped me discover that the person holding me back my entire life had been myself. Once I recovered from the shock of that revelation I made a decision to use my enormous power to shape reality to create a more hospitable environment, starting with my own attitude.

Immediately I encountered resistance from those who had benefited from my negativity in the past – namely everyone. My being negative was a comfort to others who were convinced of the darkness in the world. It confirmed their own belief system. And, of course, they were loathe to believe that I’d truly changed. After all, I’d been thoroughly convincing as a naysayer, so they rightly assumed that I was just shining them on, and would return to my old patterns of behavior momentarily.

But I didn’t. Instead I changed jobs, took classes, got a coach, practiced tarot card reading, took meditation classes, and joined a mastermind group, and simultaneously embraced numerous paths to enlightenment. Honestly, writing this I think “What a nutcase I must have seemed!” (Remember, I am a physicist by education, and do have an abiding respect for logic and rational thinking.) All of this was one grand experiment to me, the result of which I couldn’t possibly have guessed at the outset – the power to create so-called “reality”.

Nearly 20 years later I find that I’m not so impressed with myself. It turns out that my journey is a familiar one – many more famous and articulate people than me have “discovered” that we have the ability to choose our attitude in any circumstance, and thus shift our perception of that which we call “reality”. Since then I’ve been practicing using optimism as a strategy for creating a better future, and I’m very grateful that I had this epiphany while there was still time for myself and others to benefit from it. I’ve been able to start my own business helping organizations transform into more life-affirming work environments where individuals can contribute their highest and best, and coach many people to have the courage to define, pursue, and achieve their dreams. Along the way there have been many times when I thought “This truly is impossible, and what a crazy waste of time to even pursue it!” – not just about my own ridiculous fantasies, but about those of the people I’ve helped. But I’ve staunchly refused to judge anything “impossible”, preferring to think of outrageous goals as “merely difficult” puzzles that have yet to be solved.

Unfortunately my commitment to optimism has been tested repeatedly in the past several years. Of course there are always incidents that test ones faith in a better future – greedy business people, corrupt government officials, individual acts of hatred.  The primary attack on my optimistic outlook has come from the news media, which is notorious for reporting bad news far out of proportion to good. Why do I bother to watch the news, read the news, follow the news? It’s been proven that people who follow the news are more depressed than those who abstain. Well, for one thing, BBC is the only English channel I can easily get during my frequent business travel to Japan, and sometimes I just can’t resist some native English dialogue, especially with an exotic (to my ears) British accent. But the most insidious threat to my peace of mind has been the conspiracy theorists among my family and friends.

What conspiracy? You name it! Limitless free power would be available to us if only the power companies didn’t purposely squash access to breakthrough inventions. The ultra-rich control most of the wealth in the world, and democratic governments are merely a front for a well-concealed elite determined to profit from us the way farmers profit from raising diary cows. Five families have purposely enslaved the human race through monetary policies implemented through the world’s banks. And, yes, JFK was murdered by his own people, and the 9/11 attacks occurred with the full cooperation of the US government. Stop the world, I want to get off!

Honestly, I don’t know whether any or all of these purported heinous allegations are true. How could I possibly know? Some of the people who hold these beliefs seem very well educated and have an army of evidence to back up their claims. But I do know that living under such a cloud of cynicism and skepticism does nothing but sap my will to make a positive difference in this world. Suppose the worst of it all is true? Then what? I seem to be pretty much powerless to do anything about it besides add my voice to the masses via social media or decrying it all loudly at my local pub. What’s a sensible person determined to make a positive difference on Planet Earth to do?

A story that has given me guidance goes like this: “There are two dogs inside of me – one loving and one cynical. Which one will grow? The one that I feed.”  I’m not stupid. I know that there are terrible people in the world. I realize that terrible things happen, both as a result of human beings and natural disasters. AND . . . I choose to focus my attention and energy on hope, possibility, and what I can do to move courageously in the direction of a better future. I don’t judge the negative people in my life. They’re mostly attempting to avoid the disappointment that inevitably comes with optimism. I just wish they’d stop trying to protect me from disappointment by shattering my own hopes and dreams for the future. Disappointment? I can handle that. What I can’t handle is the feeling that there is no hope – that there is nothing I can do that matters. Even though my logical mind tells me that this is most probably true in the long run, every day I make it a practice to do something that lights a candle in the darkness for at least one person. Sometimes that’s by facilitating a conversation for possibilities with a group of future business leaders, and other times it’s as simple as being friendly and patient when waiting in line at the airport. Whether or not I change the course of history isn’t the point. I change my own reality by daily contributions to making the world a better place.

Daily Practice: Pretend who you are and what you do and say matters in this world. Act accordingly.

There are two dogs inside of each of us. Which dog will you feed? I’m determined to keep the cynical one on a starvation diet.

_____________________________________________________________
Kimberly Wiefling is the author of Scrappy Project Management, which attained the #1 ranking on Amazon Kindle US in Total Quality Management. She splits her work time between the US and Japan.

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Mark Morgan, "From Startup to Sustainability" [John van Heteren]

On Thursday, September 20, Mark Morgan gave an outstanding talk about how to make a successful transition from a start-up to a sustaining organization.


Introducing Mark Morgan:

- Cal Poly bachelor’s degree in Engineering

- Golden Gate Univ MBA

- Stanford Certified SCPM - Advanced Project Mgmnt

- PMI cert

- Mark had been teaching at Stanford Advanced Project Management Program this week


Corporate Strategy originated from:

- Founders of Boston Consulting Group, Bain and McKinsey developed some Strategic fundamentals in 1960s

- Mark is involved with turning Strategy into Reality - actually executing on the strategy. The perspectives differ between Startups and Established firms.


Odds: The odds are higher at playing Blackjack vs Executing Strategy.  So, if you had $1M, what would you do with it? Play Blackjack? Or Execute Strategy?

- Blackjack has a 2-point spread advantage for the house (49 to 51). In the long term, Blackjack players will eventually lose.

- Strategic Execution: In the long term, there is no guarantee of loss. Some companies do fine for a while.


Conventional Wisdom has often failed, as demonstrated by a number of business book titles…

- "Good to Great" - doesn't stay that way.

- "Built to Last" - hasn't.

- "In Search of Excellence" - didn't.


Einstein told us that "Significant problems can't be solved using the same level of thinking that we used when we created the problem." (or something like that)


Levels of Thinking: Need to use a different level of thinking to solve problems.

- example of understanding the desert trails in South America that turn into drawings of animals when viewed from an airplane.


How do you Turn Strategy into Operational Reality?
- Operational Reality is where the money is actually earned.

- A Strategy needs to be converted into a Portfolio of Projects & Programs.

- A Strategy only stands a chance of working when it is aligned with the rest of what makes up the company DNA


- How you deploy your assets (Portfolio) is where Execution meets the road.


- Example: The Six-Sigma strategy should not be applied to everything. It works great in Operations, but does not work great in Innovation. Six-Sigma is Fine on the factory floor, poor on the R&D department where variation should be maximized, not minimized.


Alignment:

- Strategy must be aligned with Culture and Structure.

- Strategy must be also be aligned with Goals and Metrics.

·        Startups often have a limited set of Goals & Metrics, so alignment is often assumed. At a later point in time, if the Startup has grown, they often realize they should have formally planned that alignment all along.

·        Startups often don't bother with Portfolio planning, but if they don't, and they later grow. they'll run into problems because their organization has not been prepared to scale


- Corporate Culture can arise from knowing its Identity.

- Identity & Long-Range Intention inter-relate with each other.

- The corporate Purpose (Vision) drives Identity and Long-range intention.


Ultimately, everything originates from Purpose:

Purpose => Identity => Culture

Purpose => Long-Range Intention => Goal

Identity <=> Long-Range Intention

Triangle: Culture <=> Structure,  Structure <=> Strategy,   Strategy <=> Culture

Triangle: Goal <=> Metrics, Metrics <=> Strategy, Strategy <=> Goal

Strategy => Portfolio

Upper Triangle: Portfolio <=> Program, Program <=> Project, Project <=> Portfolio

Lower Triangle: Program <=> Project, Project <=> Operations, Operations <=> Program


Example: How does Mozilla organize 150 employees and 10,000 unpaid volunteers?

It does not use "Shareholder Value" as a Purpose (there are no Shareholders; there is no intent to be a profit making company). The non-profit culture leads to people acting a certain way.


Improving the alignment between Purpose, Identity & Culture does not need extra resources. A better alignment often leads to better profits.


Some businesses have a culture/exit-strategy of: Get acquired.  This is an OK strategy, but does not fall into the domain of sustainable enterprise.  A weakness of this approach is that there may not be a fallback position if the only offer is too low.

If the company has the purpose to grow (instead of being acquired), then the company preserves both options: to grow or to be acquired.


Strategic Positioning: Where do you want to play?

- a product provider?  How to differentiate the product? Features? Cost?

- a solution provider?  What items/How to bundle?  Many product providers find themselves pushed into becoming a solution provider.

- a system/platform provider? 


Examples:

Walmart = mix of System & Product

Bose = mainly product provider

Southwest Air = mainly product provider

IBM = mix between solution & system

Microsoft, Google, Intel, eBay = mainly System/Platform Apple iTunes/iPhone/Apps = mostly System, partly product


Strategy: How do you want to win?  Rivalry between players is affected by...

- threat of new entrants

- customer power in negotiation

- threat of substitutes or alternatives

- supplier negotiating power


Strategy: How much room for growth is there?

- Some startups appear as 1-trick ponies. No room to grow after first release.

- Are there limits of differentiation?

- Are there limits of market saturation?


Strategy: What are your next 3 moves?

- Running a startup is not like Tennis (thinking 1 move ahead), but more like Chess (3 moves ahead)

- What is the level of integration? (chips vs data centers)

- What is the level of customization?  (off the shelf vs one-of-a-kind)

- How does your "Capability Required by Strategy" match against the planned level of integration & customization?  If the capability does not match the levels after 3-ish moves, it will be difficult to survive.


How to put content in the Gap between Strategy & Projects?
- Traceability: forward from goal to project, backward from project to outcome

- Sufficiency: will the project outputs fulfill the strategic needs?

- Capacity: can all the projects be done with known time & resources?


Strategy = vector sum of all projects.

- if the projects are poorly aligned, the vector sum will be zero

- if some projects are de-scoped (to meet limited resources), you have to remember to change the goals


Metaphor for capacity:

- Sliding tiles around on a board to align them. The tiles can only slide when there is an open hole.  The open hole represents "slack", or spare capacity.

- if all resources are tied-up, there is no slack, and no ability to change and transform the business.


Portfolio Balance is Critical - need to have people allocated to all 3 of these:

- Product development/operations – Working in the business

- Continuous product Improvement – Working on the business

- Continuous process Improvement / business change – working to transform the business


Strategy & Execution:

- Strategy - deciding what to do.   "Doing the right thing"  Yet, after a while, all successful unique products become commodity. So, the Right Thing must keep changing.

- Execution - how well the action is done.  "Doing the thing right"


Change must be orchestrated before the need arises.

- Without change, all successes will eventually fail.

- Initially successful companies often go through the phases of: Success -> Hubris -> Undisciplined spending (portfolio planning here) -> denial of risk -> search for silver bullet (look for acquirer) -> capitulation.


"To get something we have never had...  We must be willing to do something we have never done before."

____________________________________________________________________

John van Heteren has over 20 years of Engineering design and management experience. As Director of Hardware Engineering at Varian Medical Systems, his job is to encourage a group of Mechanical, Electrical, Firmware and System Engineers to design improved ways to treat cancer without appreciably raising the cost of the treatment devices. Over the years, he has shifted from developing products and patent applications to developing people and teams to deliver products and patent applications. John is always on the lookout for new ways to introduce tactics that encourage innovation in heavily regulated industries such as medical devices.

Saturday, September 15, 2012

A Tale of Two Interviews [Kimberly Wiefling]


Not long ago I was discussing job search with a colleague.  He told me about two interviews he had gone thru.  I asked him to write up both stories, as I felt they would be of interest to engineering leaders.  Here they are.  My colleague has asked to remain anonymous.

It was the best of interviews… It was the worst of interviews...

Well, not exactly, but here are two interview experiences that I’d like to share with you.  Both employers shall remain anonymous.

At Company A, the first interviewer asked me to describe how a search algorithm might be designed.  The interviewer emphasized that a complete design was not expected, but that he was interested in how I would address different requirements.  So far, so good.  However, everyone else who interviewed me challenged me with brainteasers – pirates, coconuts, monkeys, etc…  Now, brainteasers can clearly play a useful role.  They give the interviewer a chance to see how the candidate analyzes a problem.  And since the answer is rarely obvious, typically one’s first response is incorrect or misleading.  This gives the interviewer a chance to see how the candidate reacts to challenges when a real engineering problem does not work out as one might have initially expected, and also to see how the candidate works with others to solve a problem.  But at Company A, I got asked brainteaser after brainteaser – at least four or five.  After a while, I began to wonder whether they were looking for a software engineer or a televised game show contestant!

Company B is located outside the San Francisco Bay Area, so they put me through a rigorous phone screening process first.  Each interviewer posed one or more simple programming problems, easy enough to be solved on the spot, but with a twist or challenge requiring some kind of insight. I passed all of the phone screens and was invited to an in-person interview at corporate headquarters, all expenses paid, of course.

Two sessions at their headquarters left a strong impression on me.  The first session was a “panel interview” – two engineers were in the interview room, although only one asked a lot of questions.  They led me through a discussion of selected elements from the standard C++ Template Library, and asked my suggestions for how to implement items such as arrays, lists and queues.  I remember it as a very stimulating and enjoyable discussion of various design approaches.  The second session was lunch with the Director of Software, someone who supervised a fairly large team of about 50 engineers.  She took me to a local restaurant.  We were having a nice casual discussion when she suddenly asked me to describe a time when I had made a mistake.  It serves as a reminder that the job interview process is continuous, and getting taken out for lunch or dinner is just an extension of the process.

Although I did not join Company B, I felt respected and appreciated by everyone there throughout the interview process.  Each person approached me as a potential peer.  Their goal seemed always to be to find out how I would approach and solve problems, and their questions provided me the opportunity to best demonstrate my skills and experience for the job.

A company’s reputation plays a big role in attracting candidates for jobs. People naturally share their experiences with their peers. Companies who want to continue to attract top quality potential employees should consider the impression their interview approach leaves on candidates. The ability to attract and retain the talented people required to succeed is a competitive advantage for any business. With the wealth of information available via social media, and websites like GlassDoor.com publicizing what employees think of their own company, it ‘s vital for business leaders to protect their reputations by assuring the interview process is conducted in a way that leaves a positive impression with interview candidates – regardless of whether or not they are offered a job.

____________________________________________________________________
Kimberly Wiefling is the author of Scrappy Project Management, one of the top-ranked project management books on Amazon in the US, published in Japanese, and growing in popularity around the world. She splits her work time between the US and Japan.

Monday, July 23, 2012

Strategic & Business Planning: a Project Manager’s Role [Matt Glei]

When your company does “strategic” planning or yearly budget planning, do they come to you and want you to estimate the expense budget, the capital budget, the headcount and schedule for one or more projects in a single day?  How do you do this quickly and but still come up with estimates that you can live with?

The first thing to remember is that this comes up on a yearly cycle, so if they came to you last November, they’ll be back again this November.  Remembering this might give you a little notice and time to do your homework.  Set a reminder in your calendar that November is “planning month.”

Another important item is to know how much detail your company wants as part of this planning.  For example, a larger business unit might want rough estimates for many projects so they can add them up and extrapolate resource levels (expenses, capital, headcount, etc.) in general for the business and worry less about the detail of each project.  If this is their desire, your job is a bit easier since you want reasonable Scientific Wild-Ass Guesses (SWAGs) rather than fully detailed project plans.  However, the emphasis is on “Scientific,” not the WAG.
 
On the other hand, if the company is asking for schedules that they will use as benchmarks on the projects yet to be started or even fully-scoped, then the problem is much more challenging.  Think of this case as “Extreme Project Planning.”  To do this well requires a solid methodology and some focused time from the business unit.

One way to do a reasonable SWAG is as follows (with a small, experienced team):

• Write up a brief scope of each project, describing the key features and goals.  Identify a first pass on any known-risk items.

• Imagine the team work roles (number and type of individual) that will be needed and likely availability given present projects already in motion.  Put this in a spreadsheet for the next year (or whatever the horizon is) per role, with a percentage of each person’s role spent in each month.

• Add it up.  The sum with be the FTE engineers needed in each month.  You can multiply this by the average cost per FTE engineer month based on present actuals (total expense dollars spent this year / total FTE).  This is a useful number to keep on hand for ballpark planning.

• Now you have staffing needs and rough schedule (don’t forget to use a most-likely schedule rather than best-case and take into account realistic hiring or staffing timeframes).  For capital, you can best use examples from projects similar to the ones proposed – tooling, NRE, etc.

• I then put the scope from above and the derived schedules, staffing needs, capital, etc. onto a one-page pro-forma data sheet and make sure that it is submitted with the rest of the material.  It documents the logic used to make the estimate and mentions any key risks or assumptions.

Later, when everyone has a different opinion about what was committed to, this documentation can be very useful.  The project may change and be re-scoped, but this snapshot details what the basis of the estimate submitted was.  Make sure it is dated and time-stamped.  Mark it confidential.  Review it with your marketing product manager or other key stakeholders.

For the Extreme Project Planning case, the SWAG steps outlined above still work, but you must also really dig into more detail on project goals, product features as well as staffing and technical risks.  Otherwise you will be held accountable without having done the due diligence needed.  You seldom have time to do a detailed project plan with WBS and complete PERT analysis.  Having good metrics from similar projects can help a lot, but only if they are comparable to the proposed project.

I found that the SWAG method could be used for planning multiple projects over multiple years, and then be updated as each budget cycle approached or the actual project start neared.  By then you often know more about the features, goals and risks, so an update and more detailed planning is appropriate.

At Hewlett Packard, beginning in the 1980s, they instituted a 10-step business planning process that allocated time throughout the year to do the homework (data gathering, analysis and so forth) in small discrete steps rather than take a month off at the most critical time of year to do all the work (often poorly).

Please comment with other or better approaches, especially for "Extreme Project Planning.".  There’s always a better way!

____________________________________________________________________
Matt Glei is a contributing blogger to the ProjectConnections' blog.  ProjectConnections is a corporate sponsor of the Engineering Leadership SIG.  This entry was reposted with the permission of Matt Glei.

Matt is also owner of Know-how Consulting in Honolulu, Hawaii.  This consultancy provides performance coaching in areas such as collaboration, knowledge management, intellectual property, virtual teams, program, project and risk management.

Matt also has long experience in product development, project portfolios and strategic planning. Matt has also developed several Quality Systems, compliant with ISO and FDA guidelines.

Matt is certified as a Project Management Professional by PMI and is a  Certified Scrum Master.

Matt has spent his 30-year career in high technology and medical product development and operations.  His background includes significant periods in Research & Development, Operations as well as Marketing.  His career includes 5-person start-ups, all the way to 350 M$ high-volume businesses with thousands of employees.  As different as these company situations appear, the fundamental performance problems remain the same.

Sunday, July 8, 2012

June Meeting Notes - Shampa Banerjee on Thinking Strategically – A Survival Skill for Today’s Technical Leaders [Ravi Ganesan]


Shampa Banerjee spoke on the topic: Thinking Strategically – A Survival Skill for Today’s Technical Lenders to Engineering Leadership SIG, SVForum on 21st June.

She began by saying “Let’s have a conversation” and asked about what challenged Technical Leaders the most in their work place. The audience homed in on the intrinsic tussle between Engineering and Sales. Sales made promises about new product features and got the commissions while Engineering took on the responsibility to deliver those promised features and toiled for long hours, every day.

Then, Shampa mentioned her experience as a technical leader in several companies, from startups to the big ones. Matrix Management upon acquisition by a bigger company brought in successive changes. The changes began showing results when Product Management was eventually made to report to the Technology VP. This led to engineers questioning what they were developing, rather than developing to requirements: “Would I use what I am developing?

She highlighted a current trend. More than CIO’s or CTO’s, it is Sales and Marketing, who are introducing the use of relevant Social Networking tools in their companies. What then, is the role of Technical Leaders in a rapidly evolving landscape? How do they position themselves in the company’s business strategy of selling their products, services to customers?

The audience began to enunciate various scenarios that challenged them, adding what changes were needed to produce the desired results. Here are some instances shared by the audience:

  • Technology leader took control of the product roadmap. As a result, prioritizing and scheduling engineering effort to match promises made to customers became relatively easy.
  • In a Professional Services Group, the Account Manager and the Technical Expert were competent possessing excellent leadership skills. One of them was made a leader, though both were accountable for success. Their collaborative efforts brought success. As the business expanded, each was paired with a junior from the other side to facilitate succession. Ensuring the sharing of responsibility for success between the two functions was very instrumental in instilling collaboration.
  • In a medical devices company, it was necessary to get the Specifications Writer and the Specification Requirements Consumer to be synchronized. One Product Manager was assigned for every 10 engineers. Audience was polled for what might be a good ratio. The consensus was that independent of the ratio, Product Management and Engineering needed a tight collaboration, in tight alignment, for product success.
  • Writing requirements requires (pun unintended) the specification of requirements without mentioning implementation or solution. In a particular company, Product Management and the Development leader collaborated in analyzing the initial list of requirements and rewriting them independent of implementation. The list shrank to one third the initial size making it easier for Development to scope effort and timelines.
  • Even in some organizations that use iterative, rapid processes, a Business Analyst negotiates between Engineering and Customers. The success hinges solely in how well collaboration is ensured by executive management.
The audience resoundingly favored the need for Product Management to work closely with engineers. Challenges are the scale of work and time zone.

Shampa displayed a high level approximation of the traditional model of an Engineering Team as a two dimensional matrix based on skill sets. The horizontal axis denotes Technical Capabilities while the vertical axis denotes Process Orientation.
1.       Top Right Quadrant: Functions of VP, Engineering
2.       Bottom Right Quadrant: CTO, Chief Architect
3.       Top Left Quadrant: Program Managers
4.       Bottom Left Quadrant: Customers? (drew audience laughter)
Questions were raised about this model:
  • Where is innovation?
  • Where is business acumen?
The Audience commented that the above two should also be added as additional dimensions to the above model in today’s competitive market.
Shampa chimed in that Technology leaders need to be aware of this as they are not only responsible for the success of their technology but also for the success of the business. The Technology leader can provide inputs to the business and needs to be part of business decisions. Technology leaders need to be a partner with Sales and work together on decisions that impact engineering effort.
Success of a company is not just Technology. What else is required? Shampa presented a slide that compared “Where we are” and “Where we should be”.
These were presented as two adjacent lists, as follows:

WE ARE HERE                                                                    WE SHOULD BE HERE
Technology as a strategy                                            Business strategy (offer technology options)
Participate in Sales                                                     Partner with Sales (educate as required)
Partnership Discussions (due diligence stage)              Co-drive Partnership Decisions (take a stake)
Influence Product Roadmap                                       Co-Own the Product Roadmap
Fund Raising (not the driver)                                      Fund Raising: Lead  vs  tech discussions only
Build vs Buy Decisions                                               Build vs Buy: Help define business priorities

An example was provided of a large manufacturing company that asked for 15 different things. Engineering empowered Sales to negotiate with the customer. This resulted in 5 requirements only.

The Audience now offered their experience in how the two sides can engage the customer.
·         Have 2 lists: Can-Do and Cannot-Do maintained by Engineering and shared with Sales.
·         Engineering collaboration with Sales and vice versa can be ensured with suitable incentive structures that hold both responsible for success. The typical model of Sales being paid a commission upon Contract Signing and Engineering paid full time to deliver much later is rife with opportunity for misaligned goals.
·         Product Management, as a representative of Engineering, accompanies Sales to size up promised features. Before a deal is signed, the Product Manager needs to have a say. Externally customer facing and internally working closely with engineering the product manager is the liaison, a conduit to ensure that what is promised can be delivered (in scope, time and with allocated resources).
·         Startups don’t have the luxury of affording Product Managers. The CEO plays the role of Product Management. Sometimes, this role may not be the right fit. Executive training (retraining too) is recommended in such situations, as is done in larger and more mature companies.
·         Engineering Technology Leaders need to be honest and be vocal with Executive Management.
·         What can be done to pre-empt failures? Share everything with the people early-on. Schedule periodic meetings to track concerns and address issues quickly. Decisions are logged. If the road hasn’t changed the decision stays.
·         A comment made from a User Experience testing group drew laughter: Avoid listening only to the hippo (to the highest paid person). Ask if we are doing the hippo thing now.

Shampa summarized the audience feedback above  as follows: that outcomes really depend on personalities. Often a failure is due to the people and not due to the technology / technical solution. As an example, while the CEO decides what needs to be done, she recommends that a Technology Executive be part of the Executive Fundraising Team rather than just computing the cost, number of development hires, and delivery timelines.

What are the essential ingredients of a Technology Leader?
  • Need to be a great Communicator: not only in verbal and written skills but also in Body Language
  • Need to be approachable. If the leader is seemingly distant, people will be afraid to ask, discuss and share
  • Need to redefine / reframe the problem. Albert Einstein said: “You cannot solve a problem from the same consciousness that created it. You must learn to see the world anew”.
  • Need to be a community builder
  • Need to have an eye to anticipate (every one today is a visionary and can be)
It is paramount in current times for a Technology Leader to be an all-rounder; with 360 degree skills to be approached and accepted.

Kennedy said: “Some men (person) see things as they are and ask “why?”. I dream of things that never were and ask “why not?” The new technology leader rephrases “Biz is Business” with “Passion is Business”. This person needs to be in tune with breaking news, to retrain, to accept change by expanding and adapting oneself. Collaboration is a necessity; i.e. work with a common goal where each owns up for success. Note that Operations as a big team (that we knew) is gone now. It is only a handful of people.

Shampa emphasized the need for New Company Structures and Incentives that can ensure collaboration and sharing of responsibility for success in the business. Examples:
  • Large companies can work as several small fleets and behave like startups.
  • Have open discussions: Should everyone have a share in the sales commission? Do we incentivize the right behavior? Abolish hierarchy?
  • The book “In search of Excellence” was mentioned. Even in large companies, smaller teams were given big incentives and allowed to use the resources of the large company. Eg. Skunkworks.
The Audience responded how a very large company in our area worked as a large number of small teams as if each one was a startup. Two years ago, they found this strategy was not working favorably.
Shampa concluded that big or small, companies need to revise incentives and control structure in order to ensure that
  • Customer facing Sales&Marketing and Producing folks in Engineering Work together
  • Both own delivery (i.e. a well-defined common success is identified)
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Ravi Ganesan has over 20 years of experience in Product and Engineering Management. As General Manager of TIBCO India, he was responsible for all fiscal and operations planning. He hired dozens of engineers, coordinated with external organizations and set up processes and procedures for development, facilities, finance, IT, release, support, and travel. Similarly, as a Senior Director in Adapter Engineering, TIBCO he was responsible for product management and engineering execution for over 25 adapter product lines (about 15% of company revenue). He has proven himself to be highly effective at Program and Process Management. He was responsible for the day-to-day management of two off-shore contracting companies in India, with a total of close to 100 employees. Among the areas for which he was responsible: setting product requirements and specifications; on-time delivery; budget management; designing SLAs and performance metrics; and coordinating and communicating with other organizations (marketing, sales, alliance contracts, legal, release, etc.).