Posts from — July 2003

1. Risk management is not part of our vocabulary. We want people who are optimistic, not trying to find reasons why something will fail.


2. IT does not understand that the change that they are introducing is very disruptive. Of course, neither does management. IT projects normally have a great affect on the way that business gets done. People’s jobs are threatened. They have gotten used to a certain way of doing business.
   
3. Changes to the IT infrastructure are treated more like changes to a business’s plumbing rather than a reworking of how things get done.

Right person, wrong job
We all too often ask people with little talent for managing projects and clients to do just that. We see those who have a great technical vision and expect them to also have the skills that we in management think are so easy. Unfortunately, just because a developer can be an architect defining the technical vision of a development project, doesn’t mean that he can lead the team. All too often management believes that the best person to manage a project is the technical master. And if he is managing a project, how is he maintaining his technical expertise.

The Wrong Projects
Companies will choose a massive set of projects to undertake simultaneously. Most of the time, these projects must succeed; the officers are betting the future health of the organization on it. It’s a bad bet: 90% of all IT projects don’t succeed in the eyes of the sponsors and a good 30% don’t even make it to the end of the project schedule.

Or, why Johnny’s development project sucks.

• How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built. Stuart Brand. Penguin Books, 1995 [1994].
• Successful Software Development, 2nd Edition. Scott E. Donaldson & Stanley G. Siegel. Prentice Hall, 2001.
• Managing the Software Process. Watts Humphrey. Addison-Wesley, 1990.
• “CMM in uncertain environments”. Zhou Zhiying. Communications of the ACM. 46(8) [August 2003], pp. 115-119.
• “Why Good Projects Fail Anyway”. Nadim F. Matta & Ronald N. Ashkenas. Harvard Business Review. 81(9) [September 2003], pp. 109-114.

Brand interviewed Christopher Alexander, the creator of A Pattern Language and one of the movers in The Oregon Project.

‘Things that are good have a certain kind of structure,’ he told me. ‘You can’t get that structure except dynamically. Period. In nature you’ve got continuous very-small feedback-loop adaptation going on, which is why things get to be harmonious. That’s why they have the qualities that we value. If it wasn’t for the time dimension, it wouldn’t happen. Yet here we are playing the major role in creating the world, and we haven’t figured this out. That is a very serious matter.’ [pp. 21.]

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Ed Schein’s Process Consultation, Revisited

Humiliation is

being shown that one has much less value in a given situation than one had claimed for oneself. . . When others do not grant us what we claim or when we act in ways that show others that we claim very little for ourselves, we feel “humiliated” (“they made me feel foolish” or “I made a fool of myself”). — pp. 109

What I found interesting was how little I had read about this before — I’ll have to have a talk with Professor Kearl at Trinity University’s sociology department about that. Humiliation comes from both overstepping the value that others want to give you and not claiming enough value for yourself. I’ve been in both situations at INFOSEC. I was hired as a project manager and I understood that I was the one who had the end responsibility and accountability, so I acted that way. And I got cut down for claiming more value for myself than the corporation was believed I had.

What is more interesting is the result of claiming too little value. Schein continues later: “If I am feeling unsure of my status in a given group, I am more likely to remain silent, to ask genuine inquiry questions, and in other ways avoid the possibility of offending someone whose status relative to mine is initially unknown.” When I am uncertain of my value, I tend to not claim much value. My voice is one who is not confident. People don’t think that they have to listen to someone who is not confident about what they are saying.
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“People keep saying that we need to remove fear from the workplace. I ask them, ‘Then where are you going to put it?’” — Peter Block, at the Organizational Development Summit 2003 in Chicago.

We have spent a lot of energy trying to reduce fear in the workplace. Block, whom I’ve mentioned a lot in this blog, makes his point about workplace fear at length in this books and talks. The workplace has fear as a component of being in a marketplace. Some of this fear is gratuitous, such as a constant fear of being fired. I used to show up to INFOSEC every day thinking that I’d be called in and told that this was my last week. It wasn’t a good way to live. The company obviously didn’t want me around on a fulltime basis. They showed that in their enthusiasm when I finally raised the issue that they didn’t want my skills. The fear that I felt was a result of their poor management, that they would not come and confront the tough issues as bosses but instead waited for me to raise it.

The point is not to reduce fear but to increase hope. Hope will overcome fear naturally. Fear of the unknown falls away at the strength of hope, desire, joy, involvement.

Don’t reduce fear. Inject hope. Work on desires. Get the right people on the bus and in the right seats on it. Powerful positive emotions are what the workplace needs.

There’s a reason why wartime generals are remembered more than the successful peacetime generals. They have more room to succeed, more room to fail, more room to improvise.