Evolving Web

Preparing for a whole lot of Kaizen

The last few weeks have been busy. We’ve launched Kaizen Camp which is bustling with activity. We have three Kaizen Camps scheduled for New York, Los Angeles, and Boulder – with more on the way in Tel Aviv, Sydney, Melbourne, and Ho Chi Minh City.

We started Kaizen Camp here in Seattle in 2011, now we’ve held three and the requests to host these worldwide are like a flood.

A Kaizen Camp discusses continuous improvement – at the office, at home, and anywhere else. No matter which way we approach our work (from process, from waste reduction, from psychology, from economics) the fact is that we create better product when we can improve our processes and enjoy our work.

Past Kaizen Camp topics can be found in this lengthy list. The low-down on Kaizen Camp is also interesting, but deep.

Right now, I’m just looking forward to some great conversations, deep problems to solve, and to meet people actively improving, creating, and innovating.

Portfolio Careers / Portfolio Lives

My friend and microbusiness partner Jeremy is a well-rounded guy. He has a few consulting clients that give him the income he needs to get by and maybe a little more. But that doesn't take up all his time. In his spare time he's also dancer, and with his wife and a few friends is opening a Montessori school. But that doesn't take up all his time, so he worked with two other guys and myself to create iKan, the Personal Kanban iPhone app. But that doesn't take up all his time either, so he got together with a bunch of other guys and created Crowdmap an awesome shared mind mapping tool for the iPad.

So Jeremy is, as I said, my microbusiness partner. iKan is a microbusiness. The application has helped many people take their Personal Kanban with them when they are away from their home or office. But it's also only $4.99. With four partners, it would take a very long time for any of us to become wealthy from it.

But what I'm noticing is this: The new entrepeneurs the media  keeps touting are not out building companies with just sweat equity. That is nothing new and completely misses the point of the transformation that is taking place.

The previous career models of "I'm going to get a stable job and go to the office every day" or "I'm going to launch a startup and we're going to become huge and make millions" are increasingly viewed as the self-defeating, zero-sum games that they are. People are recognizing that full time-work is fleeting; that at-will employment means you have no job security. And hopping from job to job is stressful and forces you to give up all self-control.

Instead, people are collecting portfolio projects with residuals that, over time, will result in reliable income streams. This is a vital distinction, because when you have a huge time-sucking job with no hope of residuals, every hour you spend working is worth a set amount – regardless of how much effort you put in or how much value you create. 

This means that trade-offs between the rest of your life and work will always fall in favor of work. If your boss tells you to work until midnight during your daughter’s recital, you need to work. If you don’t, the zero-sum game means you lose disproportionately to the cost of the action. Going to the recital will always lose to not having a job and health insurance. But the action that night at work compared to your daughter’s recital? That individual trade off was likely in favor of your daughter.

Building a portfolio of microbusinesses with an underpinning of paid project work means you are building both good short and long term income opportunities. For a portfolio holder, the option of working that evening or spending quality time with your daughter will, appropriately, come down on the side of the daughter – and if it doesn’t, it will be because the trade-off was really worth it.

So Jeremy and others I know are placing themselves in a position where they can exercise life’s options with the least amount of external costs. This allows them to build not only a portfolio of projects they have worked on, but also greatly expands the portfolio of projects they can work on. In doing this, Jeremy and others have bought themselves a great deal of freedom.

The next time you think about work/life balance, consider this: have I placed myself in a position where I pay a penalty for choosing activities outside of work? Have I placed a tariff on my own happiness? Have I left myself unable to work on projects that will make me money, expand my capabilities, and provide an interesting challenge? How many of my options have I closed off?

The original image can be found here by TheAlieness GiselaGiardino²³

Working with the United Nations

Over the last six months, Modus Cooperandi has had the good fortune to participate in three United Nations projects. The UN's missions lend themselves well not only to collaborative management, but to lean and social media, too. While the UN will be quick to admit they aren't early adopters of the last two methods, they are nevertheless appreciative of the power of lean and social media, and are ready to begin implementing them in earnest. It's been exciting and rewarding to watch, and we feel privileged to be a part of this work.

Our three projects so far have been:

Collaboration eLearning Packages

UN Food and Agricultural Organization - Rome, Italy

Modus Cooperandi worked with a team of 20+ authors, editors, and eLearning specialists to build a comprehensive set of lessons around collaboration, community, and team building. Jim and Tonianne helped devise a group writing system using a variety of online tools to facilitate communication and collaboration. Additionally, we were principle authors on three sections of the eLearning package itself. Once complete, the system will be translated into six languages, and made available to UN staff and those interested worldwide.

OzonAction's 2010 Social Media Plan

United Nations Environmental Programme, OzonAction Unit - Paris, France

OzonAction is the UNEP's group which, with the ambitious goal date of 2010, helped phase out the manufacturing of ozone depleting substances (ODS) such as chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Now, in its second phase, two additional ozone-depleting chemicals are on the chopping block: hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) and MethylBromide. While OzonAction could certainly use their existing and successful methods to meet their deadline for the removal of these two compounds, they've chosen to incorporate social media to eradicate them ahead of schedule. Their success in the past has not made them complacent, and Modus Cooperandi is helping to create a social media plan that will provide the organization with actionable steps that won't overtax their budget or their staff. The goal here is to provide the maximum benefit for OzonAction without getting caught up in the fads or hype of the social media movement.  OzonAction's goals are serious, and so their use of social media should be directed in a way to reflect that sense of gravitas.

2010 Human Development Report for Vietnam

United Nations Development Programme - Hanoi, Vietnam

Over the past two decades, with the rise of globalization, Vietnam has experienced unprecedented economic growth. With one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, Vietnam has graduated to a mid-tier economic power. For this nation in transition, the current global economic downturn has left Vietnam with both options and opportunities. Countries in the United Nations need to provide a Human Development Report (HDR) to guide policy and funding both internally and externally. In many cases, the HDR can be several years between issues, and Vietnam is no different. For this project, UNDP and the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences (VASS) have gathered researchers and scientists from several different agencies within and outside Vietnam to create the HDR. The goal of this project is to have a full-fledge HDR, with detailed and directed recommendations, ready for the Vietnamese General Congress in October. Modus Cooperandi is facilitating this effort by implementing a collaborative management system, coaching researchers on collaboration as the document is authored. Rather than merely having a document constructed of distinct sections authored by independent researchers, the goal here is to bring all the researchers together and inform the sections with one voice, and in real-time. This should result in an end-product that makes consistent points throughout, as opposed to individual points in each section. Recommendations will then be bolstered by coherent arguments threaded throughout the entire document.

Personal Kanban Discussed on the Business 901 Podcast

In late March, I had the good fortune to be on Joe Dager's Business 901 Podcast.  The topic, of course, was Personal Kanban. Joe edited the conversation into two parts which can be found below:

Part 1

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Part 2

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Social Media, Lean and the CIA

At the end of March, I spoke at Social Media Breakfast, Seattle (See their recap) at the Waggener Edstrom offices in Bellevue. They were live streaming the talk, but had some technical problems – so the video is in two parts. If you want to see what the audience saw on the screen, there’s also the Prezi I spoke from here.

This talk is covering the challenges that organizations have with collaboration, both internal and external. Social Media and Lean need to be applied together to provide both a set of principles and a collaborative foundation. I also talk about being a punk rocker.  So, if you want to know how punk rock, twitter and the CIA all mean the same thing … take a look!

Part 1 Part 2

My Enterprise 2.0 Toolkit – Q1 2010

Lately I've received several requests for my most current Enterprise 2.0 toolkit.  I've hesitated writing it down because it really does seem to change from month to month. But now I'm thinking that having a placeholder for future posts is a good idea. So I'll try to revisit this every quarter or so, to see what tools endure and which are just flashes in the pan. The applications listed here are my core, I use them several times a day.

Gmail - I know some people fear Google and their penchant for searching our information. But there is only one email tool ever created that comes even remotely close to the utility of Gmail - and that is Evolution. But Evolution is Linux only and not on-line. Always having your email available via your phone or other device and having it totally searchable is reason enough for me to consider Gmail unparalleled.

Google Docs - Google Docs is pure magic. More than any other tool, it has hands down, increased my productivity, my ability to collaborate, and my overall satisfaction with life in general. Does it have some major limitations? Absolutely. Does it format documents as if it is intoxicated? Sure does. But does it allow me and 16 other people globally collaborate on and edit a  document in real-time seamlessly? Yes. Does it care if people are in Kenya on a netbook or that they don't have the most recent version of the latest software installed? No.

Zen - Our Personal Kanban has been given life by Zen. Zen is an online Kanban tool that gives us the ability to visualize our backlog, our workflow, and our work styles - greatly increasing our productivity, effectiveness, and (again) satisfaction. With a functional yet elegant interface,  Zen lets my entire team know who is doing what, when they are doing it, and what problems they are having. We can help each other get past sticky points, we prioritize better, and we now understand our business better. 

CoTweet - Robert Frost sort of once penned: I doubt that I shall ever meet, an app as lovely as CoTweet. Why? Because there is no wasted effort in CoTweet. It allows me and my colleagues to manage Twitter accounts together. It allows us to build permanent searches. It allows us to annotate who certain people are, why they are important, and how we can best engage them. In short, CoTweet squeezes the noise (the cacophony) of Twitter until just the signal remains.

Facebook - There is no escaping the fact that Facebook has become a major information conduit. In a hyper connected world, one has little choice but to participate in Facebook - it's the 800 pound social media site. But what I've come to  appreciate most about Facebook is that it has humanized the world of business. Perhaps unexpectedly, virtually gathering our business contacts, friends and family in one place shows - rather than tells - business contacts that there are real human beings behind that corporate logo. Perhaps now we can get rid of that awful notion that "Business is Business," that our lives should be bifurcated between work and play. For as messy as Facebook's interface can become with live feeds of Mafia War updates and Farmville announcements,  it has given us all insight into what really makes each of us tick.

Flickr - I write lots of blog posts, educational materials, white papers. Like A LOT of them. And they all require pictures. With an advanced search function that lets me select Creative Commons licensed images, Flickr is a godsend to me. I credit the original author and include a links back to them. I  also share many images with the Flickr community. Not nearly the quality as what I use in documents  - but Flickr is unique in its focus and its reach. Every organization should be using Flickr for its images.

Dropbox - Google Docs is excellent for first drafts or collaborative projects, but Tonianne and I still need to share a wide variety of other digital files. We use Dropbox to share files like PDFs, Adobe Illustrator, or print-ready Doc files that are formatted beyond Google's capabilities. With dropbox, we simply create shared folders that allow my PC and Tonianne's Mac to enjoy seamless, web accessible file sharing.

Honorable Mention

Zoho CRM - To be honest, I've fallen off the Zoho CRM wagon but I still maintain it is the best CRM I've found to date. It is not overweighted, it is customizable, and quite easy to use. I know that as Personal Kanban grows, I'll be returning to Zoho to manage our customers.

Things I Am Missing or Seldom Use

Feedreader - I have been using Twitter as my defacto aggregator, but it is proving to be less than optimal. There's a huge difference between tracking blogs and letting your network recommend posts to you. Over the next quarter I plan to find a more robust and appropriate feedreader, and get back into it.

Tagging Engine - While I have tried many, I still use Delicious more than any other social bookmarking site. I've yet to find one with its simplicity and utility.

Photo by bre pettis

Whitepaper: Enterprise Mashups Change Everything

Tonianne and I just completed a new whitepaper as part of our association with Hinchcliffe and Company. Profitability, Predictability and Performance through Enterprise Mashups is now available for download.

JackBe’s Chris Warner wrote about our EMML whitepaper on the JackBe blog.  In his post, Chris addresses one of the whitepaper's central points - that businesses today need the ability to rapidly respond to major changes within the business context. 

He quotes this section of the whitepaper:

"However, discussing such typical uses for mashups might be missing the point. The mashup's strength lies in discovering the atypical, in exploiting data in new ways. The fact is, any information your business needs can be analyzed with a mashup, often more quickly, with minimal effort, and at much lower expense than hiring consultants or using traditional and more time-consuming SOA approaches to do the same work. Rapid experimentation with data leads to invention."

And then he adds:

“In short, every specific enterprise mashup example misses the [perhaps more important] point that enterprise mashups are good for whatever use the users find. Mashups are genuinely applicable to areas as diverse as situation intelligence, real-time business intelligence, classic decision-support, and lightweight application integration, to name a few. Every day we get more great uses and examples from our partners, our customers, and our mashup developer community members. And I am sure we haven’t even begun to cover all the possibilities.”

You see, we are creating data at an exponential rate. This unprecedented growth is accompanied by the consumer's assumption that products will constantly improve and evolve. Time to market for new products and features has been greatly reduced. This data can be combined and analyzed (via mashups). As data becomes more accessible, products to create the mashups have become easier to use.

Increasingly, anyone can create sophisticated business intelligence, an act previously reserved for highly trained business analysts. In the end, mashups represent a fundamental shift in the way we can create value and test hypotheses. Enterprise mashups take this one step further by creating predictable datasets and useable interfaces.

Download the whitepaper and keep the conversation going.

Thoughts on Conversation: Enterprise 2.0 Workshop at Somesso 09

Last week I had the good fortune to conduct a one-day seminar on Enterprise 2.0 for the Finance Industry in Zurich. I attended Somesso 09 as an instructor with Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 University. Somesso is an Enterprise 2.0 / business social media firm based in Switzerland. They host information-packed conferences directed at specific verticals. Whereas this conference focused on finance, Somesso brought in a range of highly relevant trend setters and trusted names in the industry.  

While I went armed with a well-stocked arsenal of slides describing every nuance of E20, my primary goal was to ensure attendees - a healthy mix of curious novices and experienced practitioners - left not only with a clear understanding of techniques and technologies, but also having had the opportunity to learn from the collected wisdom in the room.

The first half of the seminar focused on covering the nuts and bolts of E20 as quickly as possible. To be sure this is a challenge, given that E20 can be employed in nearly every aspect of a business to include business intelligence, customer support, production, advertising...the list goes on.

With the groundwork firmly established, the afternoon shifted towards conversation and workshopping. I was blessed to have people like Marilyn Pratt (SAP’s community evangelist), Anu Elmer (Swiss Re’s internal community manager) and David Terrar (CEO of Wordframe) in the group. Having them share their experience and expertise with the room meant that exploration could then be handled by means of a lively discussion – rather than by merely having just another question and answer exchange.

Through the course of the afternoon the conversation centered around two main issues: rewards and hosting communities.

Rewards: The group expressed interest in how to attract participation to internal or external E2 communities. Why would people participate? Why would they help manage?
We discussed how most communities are gameable systems, and the construction of the community (its rules, attributions, and rewards) would guide how people used the system. In most active communities  "super-users" often appear, helping to manage the community and (as it often works out) provide much of the content. Business management software provider SAP refers to these individuals as "ambassadors." Superusers tend to share copious amounts of information, proving to be invaluable resources subsequently gaining prestige and expanding their network. The larger one's network, the more opportunities result.

Hosting Communities: During our discussions, the power of communities for business became clear. When other organizations recognized Swiss Re and SAP's success in hosting their own communities, they wanted to host them too. This led to a lengthy discussion about the financial and opportunity costs of hosting a community, the staff it would necessitate, and the finesse that becomes indispensable when managing an open community.

Most interesting was seeing the realization that an organization didn’t necessarily need to "own" the community to derive value from it. From a marketing standpoint, the company's natural inclination was to "own" the community, to make it an extension of its brand. However, as our discussion of community progressed, some came to the realization that they may actually be better served working with existing communities elsewhere rather than trying to host their own. Some communities were already active elsewhere, and some felt that their customers were more comfortable being in an environment not specifically focused on their money. 
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Somesso hosted a lovely event at the Swiss Re Centre for Global Dialogue. The location overlooking Lake Zurich and the Alps was perfect for eliciting contemplation and provoking thoughtful conversation. My thanks to Arjen Stryker and Judith Koch for bringing me in to work with such fantastic people.

Personal Kanban at the World Bank: Modus Cooperandi Info Pak 1

Personal Kanban at the World Bank - Small Team Rapid Development

View more documents from ourfounder.

This is the first in a series of Modus Cooperandi's Info Paks. They are downloadable, and work like a narrative whitepaper. Think of them like graphic novels for business.

In Info Pak One: Personal Kanban at the World Bank, we discuss the experience we had leading a rapid development project at the World Bank, specifically, how visual controls work with small groups, and why they are preferable to traditional team management. 

This Info Pak is best read by clicking the “Full” button above. It’s also designed to be downloaded to distribute to others. Over the next few weeks, we will post more Info Paks on Personal Kanban. Please feel free to comment and let us know what you think.

Why Project Managers Fail

I’ve managed a lot of projects. I tried to count them – I can’t.  As I’ve progressed in my career, I’ve embraced a succession of methodologies that cumulatively represent a rather predictable evolution away from zero sum game management towards non-zero sum game management.

What does this mean?

As the science of project management  evolves, we are clearly learning that managing based on guess work is a recipe for consistent failure. Traditionally, we managed projects based on the trusted opinion of a project manager who estimated the length, scope, cost, and resources required for a project. These project managers have a natural tendency to underestimate, and their guesses are vetted through a process designed to save money, rather than arrive at an accurate estimate.

While well-intentioned, agile methodologies  have not appreciably changed this process. In the end, agile projects still obtain their backlogs in bulk and gather up-front estimates prone to error. For all of agile’s intentions, agile projects seldom break out of this pattern, even if they are well managed at the team level.

The top five reasons I see projects fail are (1) No slack in the system (2) Managing for the knowns (3) Not limiting work-in-progress (4) Political promises and (5) Sloppy communication.  Let’s examine these:

1. No Slack

Every system requires slack in order to work correctly.  Old reel-to-reel tape recorders needed an extra bit of tape fed into the mechanics to ensure that the tape wouldn’t rip. Roadways operate best at 65 to 70% capacity – they bog down over 80 and are at a dead stop at 100.  In mills, grain is fed into the stones at about 70% capacity – anything over that gums up the works and makes the mill grind to a halt.

Why, then, is slack so foreign to project management?  Because we negotiate it away every time.  Why do we do this?  Because we estimate at the individual task and not at the project level.

It’s like saying “Yes, my Porsche can go 185 miles an hour” and estimating a 90 mile drive at 30 minutes.  Then we’re surprised when there are other cars on the freeway.

“Contingency” funds rarely work to abate this problem because contingency is not real. It is arbitrary and has no basis in reality.  It is a lie. Without understanding our throughput, we cannot adequately estimate a project. 

Successful project managers understand how long tasks usually take, what role variability plays, and what types of tasks slow their processes down.

2. Managing for Knowns

We manage for knowns.  When we estimate, we use our history to '”know” when the project will be completed. We manage for people doing what we know they will and when they know we will.

That’s not a good idea.

Human systems are complicated. Yes, we can finish that task in 3 days provided no one gets sick, there isn’t a power outage, there isn’t a blizzard.  Well, there are colds and blackouts and blizzards.

Successful project managers worry less about making sure their Gantt chart is religiously adhered to or if their two-week iteration goes unhindered and more about how to elegantly deal with the unexpected.

3. Not Limiting WIP

Again, people and teams have a capacity. If you exceed a certain percentage of that capacity, people become stressed, distracted, and increasingly ineffective.  If a Freeway at 100% capacity is at a stand-still, its throughput is 0%.  If your people are at 100% capacity, their throughput is likewise seriously impaired.

Limiting work-in-progress (WIP) is vital for maintaining throughput. Intentionally limiting WIP frees people to maximize their effectiveness by ensuring they work at an adequate percentage of their capacity. In turn, WIP is used to limit the number of features the organization can feed a team at a time. This helps the organization appreciate the true opportunitiy costs of new features. WIP limits communicate that employees are a limited resource and helps upper management understand the true cost of labor.

Successful project managers understand the capacity of the individuals working under them and can regulate the flow of work to optimize their throughput.

4. Political Promises

Politics are stressful and are often no-win situations. Project managers are often placed in political situations that force them to promise to produce more with less resources. (“Can’t you just add this one additional feature?”) Project managers cannot win these political situations because they don’t understand their true throughput. Project managers need to concretely show true productivity statistics to weather these confrontations.

Being able to say with firm evidence, “It takes us 21 days to release one new feature”  diffuses political pressures and opens the door to real discussions.

Armed with a firm understanding of their operations, successful project managers can avoid overpromising due to ignorance. 

5. Sloppy Communication

Teams run on information. In my experience, most delays and waste can be traced back to communications. Do people know why they are doing what they are doing? Does the team know what their co-workers are doing? Are recent developments rapidly disseminated so workers feel at-ease? Are the actions of the team being communicated up the management chain? Is the value of people’s actions understood by all? Are improvements to the development system being quickly discussed and acted upon? Is waste being spotted and dealt with?

Now that we have a multitude of tools to communicate with, poor communication simply can no longer be tolerated. The increasing commoditization of goods and services leaves profit margins too slim to tolerate that waste.

Successful project managers build social systems designed to rapidly disseminate information, keep team members informed, provide a pipeline to other areas of the enterprise, and improve operations.

Closing

Agile methodologies are great, I’ve been using them since 1997 when William Rowden and I first built our TreePro product. They went a long way to solving some of these tensions. Prior to that, as an urban planner, I managed multi-million dollar planning and engineering projects.  As we move forward into the 21st century we need to understand that all knowledge work (which includes both software development and urban planning) requires a more adept type of project manager: a project manager that manages for the unknown because they understand the knowns very well – and those knowns include what were previously unknown: variability, waste, and politics.

Disclaimer: This is a blog post. It is short. Food for thought. Just think about it.