Evolving Web

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.

Microenterprises and the Enterprise 2.0 Trajectory

PAY NO ATTENTION TO THE MAN BEHIND THE CURTAIN!

What is the curtain? 

The enterprise is the curtain.

In concurrent posts, SocialText’s Michael Idinopulos discusses killing pilot projects and the true nature of Enterprise 2.0. He explains:

Enterprise social software isn't one application. It's a range of collaborative modes that includes blogs, wikis, micromessaging, personal dashboards, collaborative spreadsheeting, and social bookmarking.

When Michael discusses killing pilot projects (small rollouts as proofs of concept), he is spot-on in saying that the real value inherent to those types of projects is borne of network effects, not in the efficacy of the technology. So pilot projects = proving the tech and not realizing the business value.  It would be like if I told you I wanted to know what University life was like, and you suggested I speak  to a professor for a day to “try it out.”

Today, Dion Hinchcliffe compiled a list of Web OS trends.  His first one is perhaps the most important:

Innovation is one of the easiest and least risky areas that can be tapped by most organizations.

Michael and Dion's quotations complement each other beautifully, and can be restated as:

Enterprise social software isn’t one application. It’s the realization that innovation has become the easiest and least risky way to solve problems within an organization.

Perhaps most important here is the word "enterprise." I submit that the term has fundamentally shifted from a consolidated model to a distributed one.  The enterprise is no longer a central node with dependent groups hanging off of it. Rather, it has evolved into a network with greater nodal autonomy, faster communication, and improved decision making power.

This nodal structure was there all along. We see it in the human circulatory system, we see it in the layout of ant colonies, we see it in flora and fauna.

The hierarchic enterprise is the curtain. We have been fooled into believing that there is, or even should be, one central corporate OZ qualified to make all decisions. Over time, centralization has created costly information and decision making bottlenecks. Does this mean hierarchy is dead?  Obviously not.

Enterprise 2.0 is not a panacea, it is a tool to allow corporate structures - congested by unnecessary bottlenecks - become leaner organizations. By redistributing information and decision making, companies limit waste, reduce costs, and are afforded the freedom to innovate. Microenterprises joined as nodes to a larger enterprise have the simultaneous ability to function both independently and as part of a cohesive whole.

What this means for Enterprise 2.0 is not that it becomes the next ERP, but that it becomes a host of spot-applications or, as Michael says, collaborative modes that allow us to realize Dion’s inexpensive and relatively painless innovations.

P.S. I really appreciate Michael’s “collaborative modes” – it re-orients the conversation from one of techno-miracles to one of business process. Not what are we going to use, but what are we going do?

Blogged at Ebeneezer’s Coffee House in Washington DC.

Photo by Tonianne

Have My People Tweet Your People

“You don’t give your Twitter duties to an intern” – Morgan Johnston from Jet Blue at #140TC

 

Business is lazy.  If business doesn’t understand something, it quickly assigns it, outsources it or otherwise gets it off the to-do list.  At the Twitter Conference #140TC in Mountain View this wee, Morgan Johnston talked about how important it was to have someone in the company with authority interacting on social media.

He had several stories about directly helping customers because Morgan had full penetration into the organization.  To the extent that he held the door open on a plane for two extra minutes so a family running from one delayed flight (on another airline) to that flight could make it.  The family had a member who was tweeting his pain while they ran.

Outsourcing your social media activities to an intern or a consultant means you stand a pretty good chance of working with someone who may well know how to use Twitter, but knows nothing about your business.  Don’t get me wrong, I know some people who are free lance community managers, have more than one client and do a great job.  But these people make it a priority to know their client’s business and ensure that they can quickly get to people capable of acting on a customer request.

If you must outsource your social media interaction, make sure that the person you are hiring cares, that you take the time to train them in whatever they need, and that you give them access to resources.

If you can’t do this, then don’t outsource.  Do it in-house – which you probably should be doing anyway.

Technorati Tags: social media,twitter,social media outsourcing,outsourcing,lazy,jet blue,morgan johnston

Dreams Deferred

Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Langston Hughes

Years ago, I was sitting in a very posh restaurant in San Francisco’s Mission District with a friend of mine.  He was a very wealthy programmer, working for an incredibly prestigious financial company.  We were talking, eating, laughing and having a wonderful evening overall.

He looked up at me and told me he was going to go back on drugs.  About 7 years previous, he had kicked heroin.  He’d gone from shooting up in dirty houses to having a comfortable townhome in Noe Valley.  He’d built a lot in a very short period of time.

While giving me his reasoned rationale for wanting to go back onto heavy drugs he said, “I’m just not happy now. With everything I’ve achieved I’m just never happy.  When I was using, I was happy for very short periods of time.  I want to be happy again.”  By the time I left him that night and went back to my hotel, he’d already scored and started his slide back to his previous life.  Within a few months, he lost everything he’d worked for.

Happiness is elusive. We chase it, we want it.  Life seemingly conspires against it.  We mask our need for it by watching sitcoms that make us smile for very short periods of time – the over-the-counter version of heroin.

Over the last few years, I’ve met a long string of people who have gone through the 80s and 90s and now almost all of the aughts and have come up empty.  Whether they have money or not, whether the recession is felt by them or not, there is a measurable exodus from lifestyles that fundamentally work at cross-purposes to happiness.

Thankfully, very few of them see drugs as an acceptable solution.

This isn’t drop-out happiness people are seeking.  No communes, no great-american-novels, no buy-a-wineries (well, okay, two people bought wineries)…. This movement to happiness is pragmatic.  People understand that they are better family members, they are healthier, they can help others more, they are more productive team members, etc. when they are happy.

So .. why not be happy?

The Infrastructure of Happiness

Happiness is a construct and a really ethereal one at that.  It is often confused with states it is very similar to like gratification, placation, contentment, etc.  Happiness can be self-serving or it can be effacing and humble.

As managers or business owners or team members, we ignore happiness at our peril. 

Why?  Because there appears to be a tacit assumption that work and happiness don’t go together.  Happiness comes later.  When I retire, when I can take vacation, when I’m … not .. at …work.

In his book Flow, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi discusses the tension between our individual drives and social pressures:

Submission to genetic programming can become quite dangerous because it leaves us helpless. A person who cannot override genetic instructions when necessary is always vulnerable. ….

A thoroughly socialized person is one who desires only the rewards that others around him have agreed he should long for – rewards often grafted onto genetically programmed desires.  He may encounter thousands of potentially fulfilling experiences, but he fails to notice them because they are not the things he desires.

Professional fulfillment is part of happiness.  It has to be.  We all know it.

So, if we’re setting up a team for a project, why not have happiness be a primary goal of the team’s infrastructure?  Maybe even THE goal.  Product second, remuneration third.  Happiness first.

After reading about our endless quest for happiness by neuroscientists, orchestra conductors, Buddhist monks, psychologists, philosophers, humorists, management theorists, and everyone in-between, I’ve come to one conclusion.

People are happy when they know what they’re doing and aren’t offended by it.

There are very few reasons why we would ever do something we were offended by or without cause.  At work, people feel obligated to do what their employer requests – even if they find it offensive, demeaning or perplexing.  Depending on their situations, they may feel that they have no choice but to do as requested – with even quitting being out of the question.

Unenlightened employers may feel this is a position of power and rejoice in the entrapment of such people.  However, if your goal is to have a business that grows and innovates – this mindset is not going to help you.

Business cultures that strike a balance between business and personal health should engender a happier workforce.  People worry a great deal about what happens at the office.  They take that stress home with them.  That stress can negatively impact home life.  This creates more stress, which is in turn brought back to the office.

In 2001, the Seattle Mariners won 116 games, tying the all time record for wins in a single season.  They were mostly the same team they were the year before and the next year when their records were nowhere close to 116.  In 2008, the Tampa Bay Rays went to the World Series after being dead last in 2007.  Again, with roughly the same line up.

There is an attitude of winning that can float or sink a team.  If your team is committed to being happy first, its chances of winning will be bolstered.  True commitment to a healthy culture creates momentum.

In The Art of Power, Thich Nhat Hanh describes this momentum in his monkly style:

In your professional life, there may be other people you have to be in touch with and work with.  You may be working as a team to make a film, design a produce, or complete another kind of project.  Each person on your team has his own difficulties , his own suffering.  but because you are open, happy, fresh, and concentrated, you can help all of them touch their freshness.  you don’t care only about their work performance, because the quality of their work depends on the peace and well-being inside each of them.  You come to the business as a friend, helping everyone transform, bringing peace, harmony and well-being into their lives at home and at work.

Yes, Master Hahn is a bit beyond what HR might be comfortable with.  The point, however, is that teams made up of happy and psychologically healthy individuals understand that they are working with other human beings.  We are working with people who have lives outside of work and that they are living inside work too.

We are still alive while we’re at work.  We aren’t purchased work-robots who have deferred our dreams to times of not-work.

We have goals and, more often than not, those goals are good for the company.  We want to complete projects.  We want to understand the flow of work.  We want to do what we can.

In Flow, Csikszentmihalyi’s description of what makes people feel happiness is very much in-line with understanding your company’s value-stream.  While there’s deeper issues at play, from a work perspective the value stream is vital.  Understanding the flow of work through your organization satisfies some basic needs to making your workforce happy.

Creating a lucid value stream and expressing people’s places in it gives workers a lot of power.  They can optimize their place in the value stream based on their current skills or skills they wish to acquire.  They can optimize the value stream itself by pointing out areas of improvement.  In short, the clarity provided by understanding what the heck is going on is instantly gratifying.

What is also interesting is, happiness as described by most of these authors is not a static state.  Happiness is, rather, an aesthetic or an amalgam.

In Stumbling on Happiness, Daniel Gilbert starts a long chapter about what happiness may or may not be with this point:

The word happiness is used to indicate at least three related things, which we might roughly call emotional happiness, moral happiness and judgmental happiness.

When all these authors get down to it, they end up describing self-rewarding systems that seem to result in rolling series of Maslovian peak experiences.

A-ha!

Business then, which is loathe to really get into matters of personal mental health, can actually do a few things here.

1. Make business explicit to those doing the work. 

The value stream, the fiscal health of the company, people’s roles in the organization, corporate ethics and goals – should all be made explicit so workers can choose to improve, innovate, and participate.

2. Decisions are free

Free your managers and you from top down decision making.  Give people the freedom to do their jobs.

3. Information Hoarding Will Not Be Tolerated

The fastest way to threaten anyone is to withhold information from them.  Want to kill productivity?  Keep secrets.

4. Make Work a Healthy Game

The goal of work is to create things. Rewarding people for creating things is a healthy game.  Avoid zero-sum games like promotions or winner-take-all prizes.  Incentivize your value stream and not end-goals.

--

Happiness is not fluff and it’s not a “nice to have”.  It’s a central component to a functional team.  Put a little thought into it and see what you come up with.

Technorati Tags: happiness,management,thich nhat hahn,daniel gilbert,abraham maslow,mihaly csikszentmihalyi,lean,langston hughes

Blogged at my house in Seattle, WA

Making the Twitter Backbone Usable - CoTweet

People keep talking about making Twitter work for business, but for me it was missing any way to include it into a company’s workflow.  At last, CoTweet allows people to form work groups (centered on a single account) and have permanence for tweets and actions.

Here we see a Tweet where @Sprezzatura has retweeted a question I asked.  I am able to assign that Tweet and annotate it for appropriate action.  This is an instant quantum leap in Twitter usability for business.  Saved Tweets then appear in a personal to-do list.

The personal to-do list, combined with annotation, provides both context for the action and the action itself.  Note that the bottom tweet was a DM, so the app shows regular and direct messages in the same UI – understanding that to me they are both information and the delivery mechanism is simply metadata.

Each tweet-task in the to do list can be DM’ed, replied to, Retweeted, reassigned, e-mailed, or marked done.

My longstanding complaint about using Twitter for any business purpose was simply that Tweets were inherently unmanageable. 

The CoTweet interface is very clean and usable.  Unbelievably so, in fact.  It may be one of the more beautiful interfaces I’ve seen.

The only thing that would make it blast into space and win the X Prize would be an AIR app.  They’re going mobile first which is a shame.  An AIR app gives you access to all users immediately.  Mobile, while necessary, is cumbersome for development and likely only going to benefit iPhone users.  I would have prioritized it differently.

In fact, the lack of an app will mean I will use CoTweet for the time being as a management tool and not as a tool to actually participate in Twitter in real-time.

That being said, I’m looking forward to getting my collaborators on CoTweet and using it to move tasks around and work better with the Modus Cooperandi account.

Technorati Tags: cotweet,twitter,microblogging,management

Blogged in the Alaska Air Board Room, Sea-Tac Airport

Voting With Our Feet – The Ethics of Sponsored Conversations

Today, Jeremiah Owyang posted “A running list of sponsored conversations”.  He has a laundry list of sites and products that engage in various forms of advertising and paid content. 

The article and its comments bring up the ethics of paying for supposed user-generated content.  With user-generated content, the assumption is that objectivity comes from personal experience unhindered by conflicts of interest.  If someone pays for a post, there is an immediate and obvious conflict of interest.  As a reader, you start to lose trust in the blogger and her content.

This ethical question isn't a new one, to blogging or any other form of communication.  All writers and all media have found themselves dealing with this.

Pick up any magazine and there's a good chance you'll find an article that turns out to be an advertisement about half way through.  Other publications run press releases, slightly edited, as stories.

Watch the morning “news” and you’ll find your NBC news staff telling you about new NBC programming.

I agree, Jeremiah, this is growing - it is an obvious win for both marketers and bloggers.  The bloggers are the ones who have the questions to ask of themselves.  How far along the shill-line are you willing to walk?

This is a personal question. 

As readers ... do we wish to read these? If not, we'll vote with our links and our attention.

Update: Read Write Web has an excellent response to all this.

Marshall says:

We respectfully disagree with Forrester's recommendations on this topic. In fact, we think that paying bloggers to write about your company is a dangerous and unsavory path for new media and advertisers to go down. We recognize that it's a complicated question, but we don't feel convinced by Forrester's conclusions regarding those complications.

Defenders of the tactic argue that it doesn't differ substantially from traditional advertising, that it's effective for advertisers, that bloggers want to profit from their writing and that with proper disclosure there's no loss of credibility for either party.

Technorati Tags: Jeremiah Owyang,conflicts of interest,blogging,shilling,shills,spam,splogs

Blogged at Modus Cooperandi, in Seattle

The 10 Principles of Social Media for Education

After the 10 Principles of Social Media for Business came out, people began to engage us on different real-world applications.  One of these was the University of Lisbon who asked for a brief thought-exercise.  They wanted us to think of ways the 10 Principles would apply to education.

We applied the 10 Principles to educations’ need to:

• Broadcast Value
• Streamline Publication
• Increase Communication
• Increase Access to Information and Resources

Modus Cooperandi’s Paper on Social Media for Higher Education for the University of Lisbon can be downloaded from the Modus Cooperandi site.

Technorati Tags: University of Lisbon,social media principles,10 social media principles,social media for education,social media for higher education,Modus Cooperandi

Blogged at Modus Cooperandi in Seattle, WA

Applying the Principles of Agile to People other than Coders

Agile methods have been applied for the last decade or so to programming teams.  The goal with Agile was to take a group of people who were famous for poor communication, unrealistic expectations, and unpredictable deliverables and give them a structure that minimized these elements.

Agile primarily focuses on the following:

1. Acknowledging that change is part of any endeavor
2. Greatly increasing the frequency of discourse and review
3. Assumptions are the rope from which the noose of business is tied

Bill Anderson and I guest-hosted a Yi-Tan call covering how Agile was formed, what its central tenets are, and what it can teach the rest of business.

Listen to the recording of that call.

Technorati Tags: Yi-tan,Jerry michalski. Bill Anderson. Jim Benson,Agile principles

Blogged at Modus Cooperandi in Seattle, WA

Discussing Post-Agile on Yi-Tan on Monday Feb 16th

Monday February 16th at 10:30PST (1:30 EST) I will be doing my second talking-head stint on the Yi-Tan conference call.  This time with my good buddy Bill Anderson.  We’ll be talking about Agile methodologies and what might come next.

Corey Ladas will also be joining me on the line.  All are welcome.  Here’s the invite info from Jerry Michalski:

How might we use the precepts of agile programming in general (non-IT) business settings?

Agile programming has come a long way from its early incarnation as extreme programming on the first wiki. It's been influenced by lean manufacturing and spawned practices like Scrum.

Yet the agile community remains pretty insular. Only lately have people seriously explored how agile principles and practices might be used outside software development.

With agile practitioners Jim Benson and Bill Anderson, let's discuss:

• What does agile mean? What are its core practices?
• How do those practices and principles apply to general management?
• What virtues and new value can this bring?

As always, an IRC Chat will be available during the call, here. Let's continue tweeting, using #yitan. This page is on a wiki, here.

Date:    Monday, February 16, 2009
Time:    10:30 PST, 1:30 EST
Dial-in Number: 1-712-580-1100
Participant Access Code: 778778
Wiki goodness at www.yi-tan.com
Please feel free to forward this note to people you think would be interested in these calls. 

Hope to see you show up in the IRC and maybe hear you on the phone.

Technorati Tags: Yi-tan,agile,agile methods,corey ladas,bill anderson,jerry michalski

Blogged at My House in Seattle, WA