The Regenerate Web

"I know planning is important, but I have so much to do today," Lauren explained, hoping I would let her off the hook.

I nodded my head. "I know you have a lot to do, today. How much of what you do today will be effective?" I asked.

"What do you mean? I have phone calls to return, emails to answer, meetings to go to. I have a couple of employees I have to speak to about things they were supposed to take care. I have two projects that are behind schedule. A lot of things piled up over the past week."

"How much of what you do today will be effective?" I repeated.

"Well." Lauren stopped. "I know some things are more important than other things."

"And, how do you make that decision? How do you know what you do is effective? How do you know what you do is important?" Lauren's posture shifted. She backed off the table between us. She was listening. "I will venture that 80 percent of what you do today will be wasted time and only 20 percent of what you do will be effective. How will you know you are working on the 20 percent?"

A recent post at PM Hut describes the process of capturing 3-Point estimates for schedule. This is an example of Yogi's quote in action

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra

While it may be appropriate in the classroom to teach about the 3 point estimate process - minimum, most likely, and maximum - it is not appropriate in practice. This does not mean there are not gobs of people out there doing this. It doesn't matter how many people teach this, how often it is said, it's simply not good practice.

Here's why:

• If you ask someone to estimate how long something will take by having them think about the Most Likely duration, they will for the most part actually think about the "average" duration. The most likely duration is the value that appears most often if you were to ask a group of people the same question. The Most Likely is the Mode of the samples of that question. It is the value that occurs most often.
• Now when you ask someone the estimate what the least value the duration might be. Or ask them what the most value the duration might be, you'll get statistically significant different values, depending on the order you ask that question. This understanding has been developed by many organizations ranging from the US Navy to petroleum engineers estimating the contents of gas reserves.

So What's the Point Here?

Do not, I repeat Do Not ask for 3 point estimates of duration and cost. Instead as for "variances" of the probability distribution around the Most Likely number. Worse case ask for variances around the Mean (the average). But care must be taken for the measure of the Mean. Since the mean is a value formed by adding all the possible measures, it itself is subject to variance. Most Likely - the Mode - is a simple counting of the most recurring observed value - it is ordinal.

Why Is This Important?

When you ask for the Most Likely, High and Low, you can get up to 27% estimating bias on the estimates. This bias can be favorable or unfavorable. No matter, it is a bias.

The way to do this for duration and cost is to construct a variance ranking processes. Here's a sample table.

Now there are several important things about this table:

• The risk level classification is not a number, it is a letter. This avoids the natural tendency to do arithmetic on the risk ranking. This is a common failure mode for anyone using the PMI style risk management. Take the probability of occurrence and multiply it by the consequential outcome to get a risk rank. NOT.

Both the probability of occurrence and the consequential outcomes are probability distributions, represented by integral equations. Multiplication is not an operator on integral equations - except in their Laplace Transform representations.

• The descriptions of the risk classification represent the operational aspects of the project for a specific technology or process. This means that the words in the classification column can change depending on the problem domain. For manned space flight a Risk Classification D, may have different words, and certai9ntly have different variance ranges than a risk variance D for an Oracle ERP system roll out.

What we need is a table like this for every major risk category.

A similar table can be built for the consequential outcomes. Then and ONLY then can the risk matrix be constructed.

The final advise is risk ranking in terms of variance should be geometric.

The reason you want to do this is that the separation of differences is not linear, it needs to be geometric. The scale 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 means that the difference between 1 and 2 is 100%. The difference between 4 and 5, is 20%.

Here's a Live Example

Connecting the dots - from NOT doing three point estimates - to doing probabilist impacts for the probability of occurrence and the consequential outcomes is shown in the picture below.

So:

• No three point measures asked to the engineers - only variance estimates for each class of risk
• No arithmetic between occurrence and impact
• Narratives of the measures (in the NASA example above they use numbers - not good - use letters)

I will be sending out the next edition of my newsletter, called Lead Well, this coming Monday. I try to make the content of the newsletter unique to what's on the blog because I know many of you subscribe to both. If you are not currently getting the newsletter, click here to sign up. We do not use your email to spam you, we just send the quarterly newsletter.

This quarter's newsletter is focused on Organizational Agility. Articles will offer a way to look at what agility IS and IS NOT and how it differs from change management and change acceptance. I am shairng a list of questions you can use to assess your organization's agility - and how agile YOU are as an individual leader and manager. It is a meaty edition of Lead Well and I hope you sign up to receive it.

"Last week, you assigned this task to Dale, but you ended up doing it," I observed. I could tell Sondra was very pleased with the project result, but miffed that she spent the weekend working when Dale had all of last week to work on it.

"I thought about, what you said, being more explicit about my deadline. Next time, I will try to remember that," Sondra replied.

"More than that, the target completion time is essential to the task assignment. Dale gets all kinds of assignments. To complete them, he has to use his own discretion, primarily about pace and quality. Most of the decisions he makes are about pace and quality. Without a target completion time, he has no frame of reference in which to make his decisions. His ASAP will ALWAYS be different than your ASAP. ASAP is not a target completion time."

Sondra smiled. I took a look at her project. It was really very good. She will make her client meeting today and life will go on.

I have heard a few people assert that employees are not disengaged, they might just not be engaged in what we want. Under this scenario, the job for managers is to redirect the employee's engagement. And I think this is true for some employees and managers need to learn how to tap into their employees' engagement.

AND I also think that some employees are not engaged - not engaged in what we want, not engaged in work, not engaged in their families, not engaged in their community, not engaged in their health, not engaged period. This is a tougher management challenge because the root cause likely has nothing to do with you.

A few years back, I might have been in the "everyone is engaged" camp, but I have seen and met several folks who are not engaged in any aspect of their lives, and honestly, I have suffered a few temporary bouts of disengagement myself. It feels quite aweful.

What is a manager to do? The folks I have known have benefited from help getting their lives refocused. A few, however, were so disinterested that they did not want to make the effort to try. Does your company have resources to allow folks coaching? Have a conversation with your employees and discover if there is any way you can support them.

Health, wealth, and success - or lack of these things - can take a toll on folks and might be the cause of disengagement. As a forty-something woman, I have had suffered the usual middle age biochemical changes (lower hormones, low thyroid, sleep disturbances, vitamin D deficiency, and several other imbalances). Apparently my body thinks it is done and ready to be put out to pasture..... I share all this information not to drum up sympathy (cash and gifts are always welcome) but to highlight a common health cause of disengagement for "mature" professionals. There are other reasons and causes. And think about the toll the economy has taken on some people. And then there is seasonal depression. And, and, and.

As you know if you have read Two Weeks to a Breakthrough, I am a big supporter of taking ownership and turning things around. And even though I wrote the book about generating breakthroughs, I have sometimes struggled to get engaged - in anything.

The point of this post is to encourage managers to build the close relationships they will need to learn how they can help their employees do their best work. If you have employees who seem unengaged in most aspects of their lives, do what you can to help them get the support they need. 

Building an engaged team is worth the effort and I think it is more complex than, "they are engaged, but just not in what you want." And for those of you who question whether disengagement caused by outside factors should be of interest to managers, here is my take. The primary job of the manager is manage and lead so that their employees can, and choose to, do their best work.

What do you think? Am I full of it? Do you think all employees are engaged in something?

I was driving on the freeway today behind a van that had the word "voltage" in bold red letters across the back doors. I started thinking about voltage and decided it was a great term to describe energy in the workplace.

According to Wikipedia, voltage is:

The voltage between two points is a short name for the electrical force that would drive an electric current between those points. Specifically, voltage is equal to energy per unit charge. In the case of static electric fields, the voltage between two points is equal to the change in electrical potential difference between those points.

So the voltage in your workplace could be described as the amount of energy available to move between people. Cool. I am digging this concept of energy transfer. What's energy if it can't travel through the work, through people, and through the organization? Like a drag racing car at the starting line, burning rubber, but not going anywhere. I'll stop mixing metaphors, now.

What can managers do to increase both voltage and energy transfer?

• Structure workplace communication so that time is set aside to share information.
• Reinforce collaboration.
• Create interdependent tasks, projects, and measures.
• Help employees build relationships - this may not happen on its own. Structure the work so that people get to know each other.
• Provide a challenge - give people something that gives them energy.

And of course, it is important to model energy and energy transfer. Give energy, receive energy, give it back again.

In Focus Like a Laser Beam, I wrote about how generating focus is a lot like shining a laser beam (the particles in lasers are super excited). Yes, that is another metaphor, but it's similar in a way...

Is your department high voltage? If not, what's your part in that?

I am guessing some of you might bring up the fact that high voltage can be deadly and perhaps voltage is not always a good thing. Same with teams. The voltage needs to be high enough to create the sparks of excellence, but not so high that the workplace becomes overwhelming, draining, and one big pit of drama. But I think that most workplaces are so far away from being too high in voltage that you don't need to worry about it too much.

Building the charter for the project does more than just gather everyone in the room for the "kick off" meeting. The charter starts with the definition of a team

A team is a group of people who hold each other mutually accountable for a common purpose to produce a specific outcome.

This is paraphrased from Katzenbach's The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-performance Organization. Harvard Business School, 1993. Each word is critical here.

• A group of people - these people may or may not be self selected. You might be "assigned" to a team, you might select the team members your self, you might not be able to make any of these choices.
• Mutually Accountable - is the critical success factor. No matter how the team was assembled, they - the team members - must come to agreement that they will hold each other mutually accountable for their actions and outcomes.
• Common Purpose - this is where the hard part starts. If you start the chartering process with the search for the needed "Capabilities," then the team is likely to come to concurrence on this common purpose.
• Specific Outcome - this is the deliverables from the common purpose. What does "done" look like for this team and the project (in this context) they are working on?

So here's a presentation that can start the chartering process. This is from a magazine article that I found useful, but it needed to have more details to be "actionable."

Maybe you have a job or two open. You’re reluctant to pay more than you have to for a given position. I understand that employers want to get the biggest bang for their employment buck.

I once consulted for an organization who had deliberately hired from the “bottom of the barrel.” (That was their phrase.) And, oh my goodness, they got less than what they paid for.

Getting to a release was a nightmare. And, because many of these folks were on H-1B visas, the people were desperate to keep their jobs. They would agree, as in say yes, to anything, because it meant they could stay here legally and keep working.

When the mix of work changed from commodity (keep the system going), to innovation (the market is changing, quick we need to change what we do), the technical staff was ill-prepared to deal with the changes.

Now, you don’t have to go outside the US to find not-highly-competent people. They exist here. We don’t need to import them. But the point is, the management in this organization had deliberately hired people they thought would be easily cowed, would be virtual slaves, and could do the minimum work for minimum pay.

Do a job analysis first, and know: what kind of hiring are you doing? Highly paid people can be competent for you–and they can be incompetent for you. You need to look at the environment in which people work, look at the problem, to find people who can learn the problem space and the solution space, and who can get along with others.

Don’t just look for the cheapest people. Look for the people who can do the work. Think about what you are hiring for, and pay for that expertise.

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I’ve been working with teams who want to move to agile. Some people on their teams are in another location, where the salaries are cheaper.

It’s difficult to get agile started with a geographically distributed team. If everyone’s distributed, it’s easier than if just some people–especially if they are all one function, such as developers or testers–are. Or, if the people on the team know what it’s like to work in a highly collaborative environment, it’s ok, but not as good as when everyone is all together in one location.

The problem is that many managers have confused wage cost with project labor cost. Wage cost is a part of run rate, what it costs to keep the project alive for a week at at time. Yes, cheaper salaries will reduce the project run rate.

The problem is: what happens if the geographically distributed project takes longer to deliver the project? My experience says that all the geographically distributed projects I’ve met take longer to complete. The lack of being all in one place made a particular team take longer to deliver running, tested features. Here’s an annotated value stream map that represents this organization’s delays:

Wage cost is certainly lower in some parts of the world. But the only measure of productivity is running, tested features. If your project team takes longer to complete features, then you have a larger project cost.

Before everyone gets so excited about bits and pieces of remote team members, ask yourself, “Are we building in delays that will cause us to take longer to complete running, tested features? What will those delays cost us?” Now you can start to look at wage and project cost and make decisions that will make sense for your team–whether that means moving to agile or not.

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"The point of the vacation exercise is not to pretend that every week is the week before vacation, but to look at the difference between that week and any other week," I explained.

"That's good news, because if I worked as hard every week as I do the week before vacation, I would go nuts. It's bad enough the way it is. Almost makes going on vacation not worth the all the trouble," Marissa replied.

"So, what is different about that week from any other week," I asked.

"Well, I have to get more stuff done, so I just do whatever it takes. Some days I work longer, but mostly I prioritize and delegate. And you are right, some things simply become unimportant, so they don't get done at all."

"So, you have just learned about Parkinson's Law. Work expands (or contracts) to the time allotted."

How many hours a day do you sit in front of a computer, responding to email?

In my father's day, it was called correspondence. He would receive letters, reports in large brown envelopes and he would dictate his response to a secretary. The secretary would type the response and leave it in his INBOX for signature. This was correspondence.

And I am certain that my father blocked off a portion each day for correspondence.

That word, correspondence, has been lost, but the activity, albeit electronic, is likely to consume more of your day than in my father's day.

So, how many hours a day, do you sit in front of a computer, responding to email? And in those hours, what strategies do you use to be more efficient? What strategies do you use to be more effective?

At  right, a picture of Taco, a ten-week-old siberian husky puppy who moved in with us last week!

Some of you may have seen my final column in Inc., in which I announce my retirement from blogging effective March 18th, the 10-year anniversary of Joel on Software.

Writing for Inc. was an enormous honor, but it was very different than writing on my own website. Every article I submitted was extensively rewritten in the house style by a very talented editor, Mike Hofman. When Mike got done with it, it was almost always better, but it never felt like my own words. I look back on those Inc. columns and they literally don’t feel like mine. It’s as if somebody kidnapped me and replaced me with an indistinguishable imposter who went to Columbia Journalism School. Or I slipped into an alternate universe where Joel Spolsky is left-handed and everything he does is subtlely different.

I’m not going to stop writing altogether.

What I am stopping is the traditional opinionated essay that has characterized Joel on Software for a decade. I’m not going to write Ten Ways to Get VCs to Salivate, I’m not going to write Why You Have To Buy a $10,000 Italian Espresso Machine for your Programmers, and I’m not going to write Python is For Aspergers Geeks or Ruby is for Tear-streaked Emo Teenagers. After a decade of this, the whole genre of Hacker News fodder is just too boring to me personally. It’s still a great format... the rest of you, knock yourselves out... I just can’t keep doing that particular thing.

There will still be some posts here—don’t unsubscribe. There will be announcements of new projects, stories of things that I’m doing, and links to other things I might write, like HgInit, the Mercurial tutorial.

Philip Greenspun and Dave Winer (with DaveNet, even before Scripting News) pioneered the Internet Pundit style of essay writing which has served so well for fifteen years. They started as lone voices in a new medium, but the genre spread like wildfire. It was perfectly prognosticated in the 1990 Christian Slater movie Pump Up The Volume. If you’ve already forgotten it, here’s what happens (not a spoiler): Slater plays a kid with a low-power radio station in his bedroom, broadcasting in the middle of the night to the other isolated, angsty kids in his high school. Interesting drama ensues. 102 minutes later, by the time the credits roll, high school kids everywhere are spouting their opinions on their own pirate radio stations. And that’s exactly what happened with blogging, until we got where we are today, with millions of people expressing themselves and using the exact same narrative techniques and stories and styles that the first bloggers pioneered.

What we need now, I feel, is not another essay repeating No Silver Bullet for the 18,000th time. We need something that is more objective (based on measurable truth and falseness rather than just lists of anecdotes about successful projects and failed projects). We need something that reflects the best new ideas about what authorship means in 2010, not just electronic forms of 18th-century pamphlets. We need to stop rewriting the same things again and again (fail fast! NDAs are worthless! Execution matters, not ideas! Use the right tools for the job!). Instead we should start filling in the long tail of knowledge.

So that’s what I’m going to do with the next decade.

More details on my faux retirement:

• I’m drastically cutting back on speaking engagements. I already committed to speak at Business of Software 2010, in Boston in October, so that’s still on.
• This week’s StackOverflow Podcast will be the last in that format. Jeff and I are working on a new format and will come up with something exciting, new and different, so stay tuned for the details, but the current format is getting kind of tired.
• Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one sentence long. It’s a cacophony of people shouting their thoughts into the abyss without listening to what anyone else is saying. Logging on gives you a page full of little hand grenades: impossible-to-understand, context-free sentences that take five minutes of research to unravel and which then turn out to be stupid, irrelevant, or pertaining to the television series Battlestar Galactica. I would write an essay describing why Twitter gives me a headache and makes me fear for the future of humanity, but it doesn’t deserve more than 140 characters of explanation, and I’ve already spent 820.
• The Joel on Software discussion group, in long decline, will close. The Business of Software group will remain open.

Need to hire a really great programmer? Want a job that doesn't drive you crazy? Visit the Joel on Software Job Board: Great software jobs, great people.

If you are interested in coaching, check out this event (March 16th, it is coming up) hosted by Kevin Eikenberry with great guests like Marshall Goldsmith, Sally Hogshead, and Raj Setty - all of whom are respected pals and dynamic and smart professionals.

The idea of "being coached" reminds me of a post I did a few years ago about how to improve oyur coachability. Check it out here. And here is another post called Lessons on Coachability. check it out and learn what I mean by the phrase, "hang me from the vigas!"

Reading Jesse Fewell's description of a Scrum Gathering, I was stuck be a few things.

• The notion that Project Managers are "commanders." Too bad those using this concept haven't worked project were a "Real" PM was present.
• I'd be interested to hear how Tom Mellor - Project Leader at State Farm Insurance - connects the governance process of a regulated business with the "self organizing" processes of Scrum in the absence of some level of "Management."

I had the pleasure and privilege of speaking at the Executive Women in Government conference yesterday. There were about eight speakers - all powerful and inspiring leaders - and their messages seem to come together in a wonderful call to action. The post I did on Relevancy, Vibrancy, and Legacy shared the main points of my contribution. Here are a few of the more memorable bits of wisdom from the other speakers:

• We live in a new era of complexity and we need to face what we have to do. Our movements must change, too (referring to previous movements that catalyzed change).
• The importance of doing what you love. That we can all engage in unlocking the mysteries of the universe (or our communities, families, organizations).
• "The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." Eleanor Roosevelt
• We must all fight to reduce tunnel vision, fragmentation, and silo-ization in our organizations as this is what causes big problems and serious collapses.
• We need to consider the need to change the DNA of what we do on a daily basis.
• Veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas wowed me when she said she still stays up at night thinking about how to ask the questions that will "get them" to share what they don't want to. At over 90 years old, she is still more proactive than many of us!!
• Leaders need to reconnect people with their purpose.
• We need to learn how to package stories so that people can learn from them (communicate so that our message is received as intended).
• If we don't set the bar high, we won't go anywhere.
• The next generation is HERE and deserves our support, coaching, mentorship.
• If we provide people with different experiences, we can change their perspective.
• It is always easier to break something down than it is to build it up.

And overall, I was energize to hear about all the great thinking and passion going on in the federal government. Washington DC has several sides. Many people only know the side they see on CNN and other news channels - the politics, the divisiveness, the 1000 page bills weighed down with hundreds of unrelated pet projects and promises, the bickering and name calling. Underneath this loud layer of partisan elected officials is a large infrastructure of dedicated, smart, and hard working career public professionals who are passionate about making the U.S. a better country for everyone. They have to zig and zag with each administration and after major legislative changes - and most do it without losing their faith, hope, and drive. Partnering with them are thousands of non-profit organizations and consulting firms who know it is worth getting through the inevitable red-tape to work with the government on projects and initiatives that make a difference. This is the vibrant D.C. that I really enjoy working with and around.

P.S. - I loved it when Cokey Roberts responded to a question about the challenge of finding balance and the downside of wanting to do it all. She basically blasted the notion that we can't try to be superwomen and supermen - and she invtied us all to get a bit tougher. Roberts writes about early women leaders in American history and says they had it much harder than we do now. She suggested we embrace "moments of balance." She also encouraged all leaders to do what it takes to make the workplace a more family friendly place. And these two ideas are NOT contradictory.

 Dr. Mike Clayton asks an important question "What is your appetite for risk?" His approach is different than we find in our domain. The inverse question needs to be asked

What is your appetite for delay, cost overrun or possible project failure?

Asking and answering this question is a measure of the organization maturity in the realm of risk management. Our risk management guidance starts with the DoD Model. At first glaince this appears to be overkill. It is not. The principles of risk management are independent of a domain. That's why they're called principles.

The implementation of these principles can be adjusted for the domain but if you skip one or more of the principles, you creating risk again.

In a report sponsored by INCOSE Risk Management Working Group; Project Management Institute Risk Management Specific Interest Group; UK Association for Project Management Risk Specific Interest Group, there are four (4) maturity levels for Risk Management (from Risk Management Maturity Model, April, 2002)

• Level 1 - Ad Hoc - Worship the Hero
• Level 2 - Initial - Try it out an see what happens
• Level 3 - Repeatable - Plan the Work, Work the Plan
• Level 4 - Managed - Measure the Work, Work The Measures

There are many definitions of Risk Management, one comes from PMBOK which defines Project Risk Management as

“the systematic process of identifying, analyzing, and responding to project risk.”

Successful projects have dealt effectively with all types of risk , maximizing benefits while minimizing uncertainty. Which brings up another quote from the "Universal Risk Management Final Report,"

If you can't afford to mitigate the risk now, be absolutely sure you can afford to resolve the problem later when it happens.

Instead of answering Mike's question "What's your appetite for risk?" ask "what's your appetite for paying the price for not dealing with risk now?"

From a Dr. David Hilson newsletter titled "Universal Laws of Risk Management,"

• Risk is uncertain
• Risk Matters
• Managing Risk is a Process
• Risk is Managed by People

This concludes our conversation with Jaynie Smith, author of Creating Competitive Advantage.

Tom:
As we move from the recession to recovery, and as we attempt to acquire new customers, gain market share, where do customer and client disconnects occur?

Jaynie:
Again, our research shows that 90% of companies have no internal agreement on what matters to customers. We always ask our clients to guess which three attributes came in 1, 2 and 3 in their customer research. Not only don’t they guess it right, they have no agreement amongst themselves. So how can the market-place receive what it values when the internal team is riding off in 25 different directions. The answer is simple: It can’t. We must have internal agreement based on the voice of the customer to know where to concentrate operationally and in alignment with our sales and marketing messaging.

You can find Jaynie's book Creating Competitive Advantage at Amazon.com.

This continues my conversation with Jaynie Smith, author of Creating Competitive Advantage.

Tom:
Can you talk about the necessity of integrating marketing elements with operational reality to drive new ideas into existing and emerging customer segments?

Jaynie:
Our research shows that 95% of companies are not focused on the things that matter most to their customers and so their resource allocation is not aligned operationally with delivering what matters most to their customers.

A tour operator spent lots of time and money chasing industry awards only to learn that it matters last on a list of 20 attributes to their clients. But would-be travelers wanted solid knowledge delivered by their destination specialists. This company invested in everyone who sold a “continent” to make sure they had traveled to the countries sold and had extensive ongoing training relative to the vendors used. Cross training, then became the next operational investment. This company is booking at a better rate than nearly all of their competition even in a down turn.

The conversation continues the rest of this week. You can find Jaynie's book Creating Competitive Advantage at Amazon.com.