Agility

Every new system we build is by definition new, therefore not clearly defined, therefore subject to change.

During many years trying to develop massive princely systems, I always believed there was a more agile way.

From the agile manifesto, my personal top five:
1. Released development is the measure of progress.
2. Welcome changing requirements - even late in development.
3. The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
4. Promote sustainable development - should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
5. Simplicity - minimizing the amount of work done.

And to prove this is the right approach - wherever a group is relatively free from red tape, as in some business units who happen to be independent of formal IT, this is how we develop.

Best Practice Management

Did a bit of management training last week.  Not for the first time, but it is always good to hear how each company spins it, the different focus of different focus of different organisations.

A first five five tips from my time on the course, though not necessarily from the actual course material:

1. You will got most benefit and best performance by concentrating on developing your strengths, not from compensating for your weaknesses.


2. Only you know your strengths. Other people may know and advise about what you are good at, but that is not the same thing.

3. Even if they ask for specific help and advice, don't provide specific help and advice for your team members.  Instead encourage them to find the answers themselves.

4. Being a manager, developing team members, that is just as important as leading the team, providing them direction.

5. An organisation, however large, only needs one leader, but it may require plenty of managers.

So those are teachings, will see if they become learnings.   

Not Meeting Project Deadlines

A few days ago I mentioned a top five ways of working to achieve project deadlines. They were all fairly common sense, all fairly predictable, all fairly practical, but not actually the most common ways suggested. Usually we hear:

1. You only need to work smarter, not harder.

2. Have you thought of ways of improving the process to achieve the same result?

3. Have you got a plan to achieve it?

4. That is the deadline, I don't need to know any more information or hear any more excuses.

5. Just F'ing Do It

But you know what, that's all bullshit. It is bullshit because it is all blatantly obvious, there is not a single practical suggestion to help achieve the deadline. If the manager only picks up and restates deadline dates, then the manager is an administrator not a leader. It's no good saying improve the process, it's only good to actually improve the process. If people working for a manager cannot achieve their deadlines, then the manager needs to make a decision. Priorities need to be altered or new directions given - then it is leadership not administration.

Meeting Project Deadlines

Following a comment on my note yesterday.

There are no panaceas, only checks and balances and choices, while we hope that management has enough experience and insight to choose appropriately. By the way, insight and lateral thinking to me are just the identification of hidden variables, but that's another subject.

Anyway, no miracles, but these are five genuine ways to achieve deadlines, all that I have actually experienced.

1. Have everyone work ridiculous hours. Not just long hours, stupid hours. Say 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. actually in the office every day. Including weekends. And not just at launch time, but for month after month after month. But it was Wall Street.

2. Rent more equipment. At the same office as above, the client had a splendid approach to hardware issues. PC not working or running too slowly? Phone IT support pointing out that you are losing thousands of dollars in productivity and potential lost trades … and within an hour you could get a completely brand new one set up and running at your desk.

3. Recruit more short term staff. In the early 1990's I worked on a big government project, and the deadline was completely immovable because of legislative commitments. But because the wider economy was struggling, no shortage of skilled resource elsewhere, so a constantly growing team.

4. Shiftwork. At a utility company, where it was hard to persuade people and unions to work extended hours, and there was not enough flexibility to hire more PCs and desks. So we had one set of developers working 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. and another working from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. Deliberately an hour of overlap for "handover" but that hour was chaos, remember not enough PCs and desks.

5. Compromise quality. I deliberately wrote that to sound harsh, but it is inevitable. Where you cannot grow the team or squeeze more out of the team or extend the deadline or change the specified deliverable, then "something" can usually be delivered on time, but that something will not match all of the prior expectations. Tough.

Big Decisions

Thoughts of a colleague who is a mid-level manager at the client:

Despite earning those huge salaries for doing so, despite the oft-quoted pretence that it is tough at the top, actually it is easy to drastically reduce losses and consequently earn big bonuses. You simply close the loss making operations. It might require a degree of heartlessness and loss of popularity with those whose jobs you remove, there are obviously short term transaction costs that need to be written off, but basically it is still "easy".

What is "difficult" is to use all your existing resources and to increase their value. To provide leadership and direction to get more from the team. It's another way to increase profit, but it's much harder.

But what gets the big promotion and big salary and big bonus in the quickest time? Obvious really.

Not my words, but I wouldn't write it here unless I at least partially agree.

Enjoying Your Work

After a long day trying to clear the paperwork and a long evening trying to clear the drains, I read this article on the BBC site. It veers from banal observations to fairly random quotes, but there were also a whole load of good lines. A top five, slightly paraphrased:

1. As noted by the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, there are three paths to meaning - work, love and suffering.

2. Meaning is a bit like happiness - the more you go out looking for it the less you find.

3. However menial your daily tasks, do them well. According to Richard Sennett's new book, The Craftsman, this ability to master a skill and then practice it well satisfies a basic human need.

4. Managing is one of the most thankless jobs in the world. What managers are mainly trying to do is to get other people to do things that they don't want to.

5. Petty bureaucracy is what destroys pleasure at work. The meetings, the second guessing, the pointless duplication, the politics, we all moan. Just let us do the damned job.

More Time Management

Not your time, other people's …

Despite the implicit oxymoron in the phrase, there is very little that a direct manager can do to directly manage, at least in terms of positive feedback. Of course in the longer term there is pay and bonus and opportunity for advancement, but within typical large corporations those are often more directly influenced by much higher levels of management, by personnel departments, by collective bargaining agreements and by other external influences. And there are softer factors; recognition and praise and general mentoring and guidance and leadership. But in terms of specific positive incentives, there is little that can be done during day-to-day operations.

However, in order to meet the flexible requirements of the flexible workplace, the least that a manager should do is show more flexibility. However junior her staff, she should allow them headroom and discretion. For example in a typical operation with an eight hour workday, there is no way that every day has exactly eight hours of work within it. There are some days when it is essential to do more than eight to meet immediate business deadlines. The obvious corollary is that there are times when it does not affect the business if particular staff work for less than eight.

Despite that, I'm not a believer in the old cliché of "she gets the job done, hours don't matter at all". That's wrong. Time counts too. Nobody can foresee and estimate everything required by "the job" in advance, so there is sometimes a requirement to just "be there". Contingency. Bums on seats. So the total should add up to (at least) those contracted. However a manager must be able to move hours, even if she is not permitted to create hours. It is impossible to manage normal business fluctuations without this discretion.

Supporting Your Team (part two)

Of course a manager needs to be a leader, a guide, an enforcer. But a manager also needs to be a supporter. And I mean that in every sense.

I do not just mean in the obvious usage of cheerleading or defending her team from criticism, though both those attributes are critical too. But I also mean support as in assistance to help do their jobs. When someone gets stuck in their work, when they cannot resolve a problem, it is the manager's responsibility to clear that blockage. And that takes knowledge, of the problem specifics and if necessary of the appropriate additional resources required to resolve it.

Clearly not every manager is going to know more of the detail of the individual jobs and tasks than those who report to her. But if she does, then I say that is unquestionably a good thing. Knowledge is definitely a positive attribute. Narrow-minded thinking and prejudice are clearly bad qualities, they may be positively correlated with experience; energy and enthusiasm are clearly good qualities, they may be negatively correlated with experience; but again, knowledge itself is a good thing.

That is not taking away all the other qualities necessary for leadership, basic human qualities still preside. But I could not write a post called "supporting your team", as I did yesterday, without stressing this particular one.

Death of a Salesman

The main "point" of yesterday's post was derision at the pathetic BBC attempts to maintain "balance" by bringing in prejudiced self-interested salesmanship, but there was casual personal line thrown in at the end. So perhaps a little aside about the nature of salesmanship. It's personal again, look away now if you are not interested, or if you are easily sickened by shameless self-promotion.

Much of this blog is inevitably a sales pitch for myself. Somehow I claim genuine expertise and experience in a strange combination of data analysis, customer insight, problem solving, financial transaction processing, project management, data modelling, systems architecture, information warehouse, application design, direct marketing, internet technology, marketing infrastructure, campaign management, etc. But even more strangely, I genuinely like it too.

But, and this is not good for the personal sales pitch, I do not like sales work, at least the low level petty transactions such as those of weekly Apprentice tasks. One reason I've mentioned, that short term tasks encourage dishonesty. But a second reason - it comes down to percentages. In our line of work, most of the time we must succeed, otherwise we'd be sacked. Most of our interactions with other people have a positive outcome, they keep the operations flowing or move the project forward. By contrast, in most sales jobs, most of your individual interactions do not have a "successful" outcome, if you judge "success" as most sales managers seem to. We can look at the bigger picture of building up brand image, but only a small percentage of salesman interactions result in an immediate sale.

So basically we all like to win, and we choose the environments where we are most likely to win.

Alan Sugar Gregory House

There are big issues in the real world, not everybody can afford the property that they would like, not everybody can afford the food that they would like, but let's retreat briefly to the unreal world of television. There are not many shows that I watch, at the moment only two with any regularity - I've mentioned both before, but have just realised that they are basically the same.

House Series Four. Apprentice Series Three. A gruff autocratic leader, maverick methods, terse gravelly put-downs, needs a shave. Character is defined as cold and rational and ruthless, only the results count. Has undoubted ability, a worldwide reputation, but only two confidants who really trust him, one man and one woman. A dozen candidates on an extended on-the-job interview. Evaluation tasks seem fairly random and unrelated to the desired criteria. Apparently decent candidates seem to lose out due to no fault of their own. Petty personal squabbles in the team seem a source of amusement. Attitude: the world is tough, there is no other, deal with it.

But one key difference. House is usually right.

Estimating Project Delivery Time

I have spent a lot of my working life doing IT Project Estimation and IT Project Proposals, it is not the most interesting subject in the world, but it is important, and I touched upon it in an earlier post.

I could throw in a few key words used to manage the estimation, words like originality, uncertainty, statistics, experience, reductionism, but it would need thick volumes to explain them properly. What is interesting is why people keep getting their estimates wrong.

It is obvious that people tend to over-estimate their own abilities. That is such basic human nature and so well-documented that we may as well just call it fact.

But many people, even educated ones, seem to have trouble with simple extrapolation, even for things as commonplace as car journeys. The British Psychology Society just published a simple study that asked:

for both pairs, just make an intuitive judgement about which jump in speed will make the largest difference to your time of arrival (i.e. save the most time):

a)Travelling at 50km/h instead of 40km/h.
b)Travelling at 130km/h instead of 80km/h.

a)Travelling at 50km/h instead of 30km/h.
b)Travelling at 130km/h instead of 60km/h.

If you're like most of the participants in Svenson's study, you will have assumed that option (b) in both pairs is the most time saving.

That guess is simply wrong. In each case, option (a) saves more time. However far the journey.

Animal Management

A few days, in an oblique reference to our overcrowded island, I thanked the author of The Human Zoo. He was born eighty years ago today. As a populariser of science, someone who brought the immense timescale of evolution down to simple schoolboy comprehension, Desmond Morris was a giant of the twentieth century.

He has immense detailed knowledge and scientific qualifications, he even studied under the genius Niko Tinbergen and published nearly fifty scientific papers. However in his popular books he sometimes oversimplified his arguments with the broad brush strokes of a trained artist. Some of those arguments have been refined and adopted into today's acknowledged facts, others are still contentious to this day. But his single basic point was blindingly obvious yet fundamentally enlightening - if we accept that human beings are animals, then much is explained.

After a few years of engineering, I studied economics and management at college. And I still remember sitting in lectures about management theory, some of it based on serious psychology experiments, some of it based on solid economic statistics, and some of it just the buzzword bullspeak that still resounds today. Normally I read the recommended books and did the recommended work. But one time, and it was just the once, in a graded essay about the definition of an organisation, where I was expected to discuss leadership concepts of "common goals and shared consciousness" (I can't believe I even vaguely remember that), I dropped in a line that said that we should also explore how some ideas from the Naked Ape could help to define and explain organisational behaviour.

That line got a big red question mark next to it. My university was fairly unusual in facilitating cross-disciplinary migration, we were encouraged to drop into lectures in totally different departments if we found interest there, but my idea did not come from any lecture. To credit my tutor, he did not completely rule out my suggestion, but he strongly emphasised that if I wanted to make such points in future then I should back them up with proper academic references instead of popular paperbacks.

But I stuck to books from the management library for the rest of the course, and indeed through my career. Meanwhile Dr Morris has continued to educate and entertain on the page and on the screen while I see his ideas validated everywhere. Happy birthday Desmond.

Swings and Systems

It is not easy to find a stable solution. In the efforts to get things right, many processes swing too far one way then the other. In the theoretical world of control theory from college days, there are mathematical equations for this, and consequently the optimal solutions can be calculated. In the real world, we tend to swing well past the ideal point before we realise that we have passed it.

When choosing the England football manager after the honest long-ball bluntness of Graham Taylor, we got the urbane christmas trees of Terry Venables. After the enthusing Kevin Keegan, we got the suave Sven Goran Ericsson. After the smooth Swede, back to anyone English, even if under-qualified. Then back to experienced foreigner.

It is the same when developing any major new projects. Wherever you start, you will not spiral in towards perfection, instead you will oscillate. If you start with an outdated homegrown development that is becoming too complex, you will buy in a simple standard product. When that product becomes too inflexible for business requirements, then you will go back to big global development. When the global solution becomes too remote for individual market needs, then you will develop something local. When you have too many locally developed solutions, then you will go back to a central universal product.

Those principles apply everywhere. Not because any of the global corporations where I have worked have taken fundamentally wrong decisions, but because there is an inevitable evolution of business requirement and technological capability.

Wait long enough, your best decision will look odd enough.

The Spin

Not tabloid lies, a different type of spin.

The Sri Lankan offspinner Muttiah Muralitharan just claimed the world record number of test wickets from the legendary Shane Warne.

Unfortunately, there have been some in the media, including some well-known ex-cricketers, who have sounded less than gracious. There is continual insinuation about his action, that he should be banned for throwing rather than bowling. I accept that he is a freak of nature, but a rubber-wristed double-jointed glorious freak whose action has been certified by the ICC and who lights up the ground.

However, unless we are talking about English wicketkeepers, there is always a catch. The number of test wickets is not a measure that is proportional to greatness. Unlike the number of runs scored, taking wickets is a zero-sum game. If you take more wickets, then your bowling colleagues have probably taken less.

Most of you are paid to work in corporations not in sporting teams. But I suggest you support a team that is stronger in batting than in bowling.

Promotions

I am not referring to promotions in the sense of variable marketing offers, I maintain that those are basically worthless.

However the other sense of the word refers to the improvement in responsibility and salary that appears to be the periodic objective of the typical manager in a large corporation.

There is usually significant competition for promotions within the management tiers of the organisation. I have no comment on specific cases, but these are eventually resolved by some combination of past performance results and future performance potential, external directive laws and internal directive guidelines, justified personal loyalties and unjustified personal prejudices.

As a consultant running my own business, the whole concept is irrelevant to me. A good performance may result in a new contract for a new piece of work. A poor performance means no pay. That's it.

The Bleeding Edge

There are plenty of people who are critical of academics and futurologists and towers of ivory. Despite what you may believe, I would support that criticism. The writers that I most respect have backed up their words with actions. George Orwell really did spend time down and out in Paris and London.

But I genuinely do work developing strange new mixtures of technology, statistics and psychology that together form the essence of this blog. I have been selling these ideas since my college thesis, and have been doing my best to implement them in real business applications ever since.

Even where I veer onto the more global and more controversial stuff, the really big issues that are destroying our world, I still sometimes stick my neck in where it hurts. Even if you are not a professional journalist, a broad subject does sometimes require unpleasant research.

So it is true that I did not volunteer to risk my life fighting in the Spanish Civil War. But I really have endured the Alpha Course. Sometimes we have to suffer for our art.

Patent 1863-326

So now, as this blog is holistic, time to bring the last few notes together.

Pepper's Ghost is an illusion. According to the specifics of the patent, it documents the precise angle of semi-reflective surface needed to create the false image for various customer locations, although the term later developed a more generic usage. I had thought that it was a commonplace expression now, but I suppose that not everybody reads books about the history of magic and deception.

So in marketing, I refer to Pepper's Ghost as the illusion of 1 to 1 communication. It is a derivation of the original CRM vision, so it honours the creator, but the personal relationship required for message customisation does not exist - except in the mind of the customer. The personalisation is only an illusion. The customer only needs to "believe" that the marketing has been tailored to her.

To achieve this effect, we are back at the intersection of science, technology, psychology and statistics. That is the core of this site. And that is how mass marketing must work in the real world of incomplete information.

The Peters Principle

To explain any ghost story, you need a little diversion into real life.

It is strange to think that only fifteen years ago there was no such thing as customer relationship marketing as we know it today. CRM was only practiced by the local grocer who genuinely knew each customer individually. Like all great ideas, and also maybe some of the ideas here, the advantages are blatantly obvious in retrospect. It just needed the technological and social environment to catch up. And it needed a champion.

I was very impressed when I met Don Peppers. As a real business leader, in search of excellence in terms of vision, commitment and eloquence, I can only compare him to Tom Peters. His ideas immediately seemed common sense to me - the measurability and statistics, the information requirements and rules engines, the technology and the simplicity, the implicit feedback loops and control theory - it fit me well.

So for the last decade of my working life, I have been explaining these principles to senior business managers, and also making them work in real world systems. I have not seen many people who seem to understand both the core message and also the IT enablers.

And in at least one little area, in terms of explaining and implementing the CRM vision, I think that I go further than those original 1 to 1 manuals. I needed a new phrase to summarise this idea, I called it Pepper's Ghost ...

Hmmm hmmm hmmm

Following the brief diversion around my ankle, now the third and last in this little series. A very simple summary.

Based not only on the personal experience of many years of management, but also the evidence of independent controlled studies:

Statistical Fact 1: After positive rewards for good results, subsequent performance tends to deteriorate.

Statistical Fact 2: After admonishment for poor results, subsequent performance tends to improve.

Statistical Fact 3: Positive rewards tend to work better than admonishment to improve performance.

I imagine that two days ago, for some people, those three may have seemed contradictory. Perhaps now, for some people, they may be common sense.

A pat on the back or a kick up the backside

Relating the note from yesterday.

As an office worker, in fact as any worker, you perform tasks every day as requested by managers and clients. Sometimes the same request is directed to you in many different guises. You will do some of those tasks well and some of them poorly.

There are broadly only two influences on the success of those tasks. One is the set of factors that you control and the second is "everything else". You would hope that a manager should only reward or punish for the effect of the first set. But in any one specific task, the infinite possibility of "everything else" means it will probably be the more significant influence. However if given enough time and enough tasks, then your own abilities become statistically valid.

So if you have done exceedingly well in one task, you are likely to also do well in the next one, but statistically not quite as well - even if you are praised. Whereas if you have done exceptionally badly, then, regardless of your punishment, you are still likely to do better next time.

That does not mean a manager has no effect, it means a manager must be aware of his own effect.