The Project-Ninja!®

One of the hardest things for a business to do is change; change their methods & procedures, change long established habits, change their customers or suppliers… But the hardest thing for a business to do is change their thinking.

In a nutshell, this is what drives project managers crazy. Dealing with project stakeholders that have their own ‘unique’ needs and who are frequently at odds with each other.  Attempting to obtain buy-in for a project when the project’s stakeholders are at each others throats will, to put it mildly, make a horses head in your bed look like a Mother’s Day brunch (apologies to The Godfather…) .

We are dealing with OCM – organizational change management. Try to  get a team or an organization that has been doing the same thing for 20 years to change when they don’t understand that the market just moved their cheese… Good luck. Any change that is proposed is met with FUD – fear, uncertainty, and doubt – even when you can prove that the change will yield enormously positive results.  Why?  Because the change represents an unknown, and all things being equal, people would rather deal with their current pain (a known quantity)  than deal with an unknown quantity (which could be more painful). So, what happens when OCM meets FUD?

To put in the most approachable terms, this Venn diagram will make it obvious:

OCM + FUD = OCD. Your organization has OCD; Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.  The behavior is typified by the tendency to continue obsessive behavior in spite of the fact that surrounding conditions have changed.  What is usually heard that identifies the behavior is; ” Well, that’s our company’s culture“  or ” Those are great ideas, but that’s not the way things work around here…”

I’ve seen businesses go out of business because of OCD factors.  Here are some indicators of organizational OCD:

• Your health insurance company just purchased a very robust system to replace their poorly functioning legacy system that was built on late 1970′s technology. The claims administrators and their teams refuse to adopt the new system because it requires a marked departure from how they currently process claims. They hire assembly language programmers, at enormous cost, to reduce the robust, multitiered architecture to a flat file system that mirrors what they do now…
• Your company recently purchased a project management methodology that is supposed to ‘cover all the bases’ for the business. As the methodology is implemented, it becomes clear that the methodology requires more work than the actual work… Project managers in the organization are heard saying, “I used to have a job, but now my job is ‘Method X’…” Productivity just took a nosedive, but management refuses to make any adjustments in the method. (It will look bad for the senior managers that recommended the purchase of ‘Method X’).

What to do? Most businesses think they have to fix everything at once. The sheer, monumentally daunting aspect of this approach is that it seems impossible. (It is…) Better: find the one thing that, if you fix it, will bring you the largest possible return for your effort. It doesn’t fix everything, but it addresses your biggest issue quickly. This is an approach used in the Six Sigma process with great effectiveness.

Or, you can call your sister. (Huh???)

It’s an old joke, but oddly appropriate here:

A new train dispatcher is taking his final, oral exam. He is presented with a scenario where 2 trains are headed for each other on the same track. Each time he responds to the examiner with a solution, he is told that there is equipment failure and that the solution will not work. After exhausting all the options, it looks like the 2 trains will have a head-on collision . The examiner asks, “what will you do now?”

The young dispatcher ponders for a moment and then states, “Well, I would call my sister…”

“Your sister?!” the examiner exclaims, “What could she possibly do to help?”

“Nothing”, replies the young dispatcher, “She just loves to watch train wrecks…”

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There is always the possibility that your organization is beyond help. In that case, get ready for a train-wreck. I’ll buy the popcorn.

Domo arrigato gozaimas!  本当にありがとうございます

With profound respect – The Project Ninja

©Richard Perrin 2010. All Rights Reserved.

* Target Vomiting Methodology

In the fourth edition of the PMBOK®, PMI makes a concerted effort to describe processes that are designed to collect the ‘voice of the customer’. This is because one of the definitions of a successful project is one in which the customer is satisfied with the result. Yet many businesses pay lip service to the idea that they are a ‘customer focused’ organization. They only say this because it makes them look good to say so. In reality, they look at customers as some kind of entitlement and you, the customer, are just some annoying gadfly buzzing around their heads making their lives difficult.

Here’s a typical scenario: You call an airline to make an unavoidable last minute change to your flight arrangements and are put through what I call “IVR[1] Torture”. You don’t talk to a human being; you are initially connected to a computer that has been programmed to respond ‘intelligently’ to your requests (lol).

Actually, it doesn’t matter whether you are calling an airline, a shipping service, an insurance company, a utility, or whatever. In almost every instance, when you need real customer service, you are first directed to a machine that, for all intents and purposes, is a delaying action that exists only to waste your time.  The customer (you) is catapulted through a maze of menu items and numbered selections designed to pinpoint your specific need or request. Then, just when you’re about to zero in on the problem, the IVR inserts the requisite ‘Tower of Babel’ algorithm. The IVR suddenly cannot understand a single word you’re saying and usually proffers a canned question, such as: “I’m sorry, did you say…” or “I didn’t get that: did you say ‘X’ or ‘F’…”. It is only after repeating the word ‘agent’ about 20 times in a row that the machine  will suddenly reset itself and say something like, “did you say, agent?…”

You have now been on the phone for 15 minutes and gotten nowhere, but you have given the machine a lot of information, e.g., a tracking number for a package, a flight identifier or number, a Social Security number, an account number, etc. etc. Of course, when the agent finally responds, they usually ask you for all the same information over again because the business has not figured out, or is not interested in, how to take the information captured by the IVR and display it to the customer service representative. Yet through it all, the IVR is telling you that you’re a valued customer. OMG!

Wouldn’t it be refreshing to hear: “Welcome to Fly-by-Night Airlines. If we really valued your business, we would immediately connect you with a live human being, but since we don’t, we have programmed a machine to speak with you instead.” Or stated a little differently, “We want your money, we just don’t want to talk to you. Please listen to all of our menu options, as they have recently changed. This, of course, is complete BS because we have been playing the same message for over 2 years – we only say this because we think you are stupid enough to miss the fact that we are simply wasting more of your time. Since we have off-shored most of our customer service work to people who can barely speak a coherent word of English, we find it much more convenient for us (and cheaper) to let the machine do the talking. As you may have surmised by this time, this process has been set up to make it convenient for us; we don’t care if it’s inconvenient for you.”

You’ll notice use of the term ‘inconvenient’ is used as a blanket excuse by the business for everything under the sun; from delaying tactics to out-and-out ineptitude.

It appears that all customer service representatives, whether they are ensconced in an IVR or a live human being, have been carefully schooled in how to respond to a mistake made by their business: “We are sorry that you have been inconvenienced…”

News Flash: This clarification goes out to the morons who train customer service representatives to respond to customers in this way; you first need to understand the meaning of the word ‘inconvenient’. Webster’s defines ‘inconvenient’ as “giving trouble or annoyance”, to wit:

An inconvenience is when I’m in the airport on an ‘up’ escalator with two heavy suitcases, and the escalator suddenly stops. That’s an inconvenience.

When I pay for overnight, expedited shipping of critical material to a customer who has a deadline, and your shipping company misdirects the package, or loses it, then, let me be blunt; it’s a whole lot more than inconvenient when your company’s incompetence has just cost me $50,000 in lost business.

I call this odious behavior, on the part of a business that has just screwed you over, their TVM or Target Vomiting Methodology. We are not talking about the occasional honest mistake or slipup, but a focused, calculated, dare I say, premeditated attempt at driving you, the customer, crazy. Peter Drucker, arguably the brightest business guru of the 20^th century, stated that the number one reason for business failures is not competition, product obsolescence, or excessive government regulation – it is managerial incompetence.  If the customer service sucks, it is most likely due to clueless management.

If you are fed up with companies that waste your time when you need customer service, go to www.gethuman.com. There you will find a list of Fortune 500 companies and more, arranged by industry, with instructions on how to bypass all of their TVM, IVRs and speak directly with a human being.

Got a favorite TVM you’d like to share with others? I’d love to hear from you.

With profound respect, the Project-Ninja.

®© Richard Perrin 2010.   All rights reserved.

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[1] Interactive Voice Response

or – Management for Morons

Many large companies engage in team-building activities. As project managers we are taught that one of our responsibilities is to promote team-building activities; we are told that it helps the team begin to function as a unified whole helps individuals to realize that they are part of something larger than just themselves…

What a crock.

How many of you have ever been engaged in some management sponsored, BS team-building activity?  I have asked this question in seminars for the last five years and after I ask the question, every hand in the room goes up.

I once worked for a company in which the VP decided that a great team-building activity would be to have all of the project managers and tech types use construction paper, glue, and markers to create ‘golf holes’ in their cubicles. When this was completed we were expected to ‘play the course’… In the VP’s mind, this was supposed to be fun and a constructive team-building activity. It was actually a total freaking waste of time and pretty insulting to boot.

The reason this doesn’t work is because management thinks it’s okay to treat its adult employees like children.  Let’s think about this for a second. The average employee has graduated college with a BA, BS, or Masters degree (in some cases a PhD), is in the process of paying off school loans, working in a full-time job, raising a family, paying a mortgage, and generally multitasking their brains out. And they do this, Mr. Manager, without any help or guidance from you.

Do yourself a favor: when comes to team-building activities, let the team tell you what they would like to do, and then help the team make it happen.

Got any delusional management, BS, team-building activities you’d like to share? Drop me a line – I’d love to hear about it.

With profound respect,
the Project-Ninja

©Richard Perrin 2010 all rights reserved

Capturing the Voice of the Customer

Richard Perrin PMP CSM MBB

One of the most important processes in any software project is to capture what the customer wants. This is usually called, ‘collecting requirements’, ‘defining scope’, or words to that effect.  It seems simple enough: sit around the table with the customer and have the customer define what it is that they want.  Then have your technical team go off and build it. In theory this works fine – however the reality is usually 180° opposite. This is the point in the project where the wheels immediately start coming off the wagon. There can be a number of reasons for this:

–The customer can only partially describe what it is they want, either verbally or in writing. What you usually hear from the customer is, “I’ll know it when I see it”. (How do you code to, “I’ll know it when I see it”…?)
–The customer has an agenda that is unseen to you. For whatever reason, they are holding their cards close to the vest and not telling you everything
–The customer is speaking a business language that your technical team doesn’t exactly understand. Words that sound like plain English to your technical team actually mean something very different in ‘biz-speak’
–The customer doesn’t actually believe you can deliver what you claim. Some uber senior manager with the customer signed a deal with your consulting company without considering input from his own employees
–The customer attempts to design the system right in front of the technical team i.e. telling you what to do and how to do it. This usually occurs when the customer’s team has an ex-IT resource that “knows how to get things done”, but hasn’t actually worked in IT for several years. At this point, a whole new set of tools and 4GL languages have been created that may have obsoleted anything the ex-IT resource formerly used to “get things done”

The above constitutes a partial list, but I’m sure by now you get the idea.  Why, when it is so obvious that clear plans are needed to construct house or a building, is it so difficult to create the same type of plans and requirements when building software? it is a question that is not too frequently asked and the one that needs to be answered if we are to understand that there is a fundamental difference between the two.

With construction projects, the result is tangible and the steps leading up to the final product are also equally tangible.  With the software project, the tangible result is on a computer screen. However, the steps leading up to a finished module or product that have been built with C++ code, Java code, Ruby on Rails, Perl or whatever, are an incomprehensible jumble to the customer. Experience tells the customer that something actually does happen with that incomprehensible mess on the screen and that it does get turned into something that they can use; however there is nothing intuitive in this process from the customer’s perspective. This breeds an enormous amount of mistrust; you’re asking the customer to take a lot on faith.

However the counter-intuitive surprise to most organizations about collecting requirements from the customer is this:

Customers don’t give you requirements – they give you ‘verbatims’.

A verbatim is simply something the customer said. It can come in the form of a statement of need, an idea, a want/desire, or a question. It is the job of the performing/development team to create the requirements.

So the ultimate questions become:

–How can developers really ascertain what the customer really wants?
–How can the development organization deliver what the customer really wants?
–How can the trust level between the business and the development organization be improved to make the process     more collaborative and drive the highest levels of customer satisfaction?

Enter QFD and Scrum

Quality Function Deployment (QFD) was the brainchild of professors Shigero Mazuno of the Tokyo Institute of Technology and Yoji Akao of Tamagawa University in the mid 1960’s. QFD is a powerful tool for implementing a customer-centric approach to product design, manufacture, and service, for building in customer-demanded quality, and for ensuring that products and organizations will succeed in the marketplace. It was first developed in the late 1960’s and has over a 40 year history of successful implementations on a global scale.

However, ask any IT or business managers why they are not using QFD to help define accurate requirements for their projects and they will usually respond with; “QF…what?” Given that QFD has been mentioned for the first time in the PMBOK®, 4^th edition, PMI finally recognizes the importance of QFD as a key method for capturing the VOC (Voice of the Customer). QFD has been used in the USA since 1984.

What does QFD actually entail?

There are a six steps prior to creating the matrix diagram – the ‘House of Quality’(HOQ)  – that most associate with the QFD process.  The HOQ is only one of several types of matrices that potentially can be created at the end of the process. Let’s briefly review the steps – the graphic below is reprinted from ‘Software QFD for Very Rapid Development’ by Richard E. Zultner:[i]

1.  Go to Gemba – Gemba loosely translates as ‘the real place’ or ‘where the action is’. Observe how the customer is actually using your product. See how people actually get their jobs done. This is a key principle of the Toyota Production System: “Go see for yourself”. The aim is to observe and understand what the customer does and why they do it
2.  Create the Customer Voice table –  This represents a significant departure from how most organizations collect requirements. Remember, customers don’t give you requirements; they give you ‘verbatims’. It’s the IT department’s job to analyze those verbatims in order to understand what they must do to satisfy the customer. The Customer Voice Table is used to analyze customer verbatims as well as gemba observations
3.  Structure Customer Needs – using an affinity diagram (also known as ‘KJ Method™’ created by Japanese cultural anthropologist Jjro Kawakita), a customer organizes their needs according to how they think about their own requirements.
4.  Analyze Customer Needs – using a simple hierarchy diagram, we analyze the structure of the needs to uncover customer’s unstated and implied needs.
5.  Prioritize Customer Needs – utilizing the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) developed by mathematician Thomas L. Saaty at Wharton in the 1970s,  the hierarchical structure of the AHP enables us to prioritize importance of the customer needs in a top-down fashion; from highest priority to lowest priority
6.  Deploy the Prioritize Customer Needs – after creating a list of prioritized customer needs we use a maximum value table (MVT) to establish the relationship between the highest level needs and the essential items needed to be developed.
7.  Analyze Important Relationships -  further detail can be developed through the use of a series of matrices – the traditional ‘house of quality’ (HOQ) is one of several matrices that can be use to further analyze the relationship between customer needs and potential solutions[ii]

For more information on QFD, visit the QFD Institute website at www.qfdi.org

Scrum

Scrum was invented by Jeff Sutherland PhD with Ken Schwaber at Easel Corp in 1993. In Dr. Sutherland’s Tech talk at Google in July of 2008, he expressed the following: The goal of Scrum is to achieve the “Toyota Effect”: deliver four times as much software with twelve times the quality within a series of short time boxes called ‘Sprints’ lasting 30 days or less.[iii] It is one of the oldest and most effective of the agile project methods.

Scrum and QFD are very similar in that they are both highly collaborative and focus on collecting the voice of the customer early in the process. What Scrum does differently is that it delivers an increment of the product within a two to four week timeframe. The key focus here is risk mitigation; the customer receives a product increment developed to production standards. The customer can offer feedback to the development team for the purpose of course correction and/or to verify that the product that has been built up to this point in time meets customer needs.

Companies that implement what Dr. Sutherland describes as ‘excellent Scrum’ see revenue increases of 400% in as short a time frame as a single year while delivering products at five to 10 times the speed of typical waterfall implementations at an order of magnitude higher in quality. Since 1993, thousands of Scrum projects have been successfully implemented.

The key difference between QFD and Scrum is that developers start work on requirements before all the requirements have completely solidified.  This may seem counterintuitive or at worst completely unworkable, but in reality promotes a very high level of collaboration between the development team and the customer. The requirements that will be developed three or four increments ahead are outlined at a high level only. The requirements for the immediate increment are elaborated in great detail.  As the work begins to roll out, feedback is sought from the customer to ascertain the ‘doneness’   criteria of the requirement.  This is especially useful for the development of criteria in which the customer is unsure of what they want, subject to changing competitive pressures, or is in a high uncertainty, high-risk situation i.e. ‘we don’t know what we don’t know’.

So instead of attempting to elaborate the project’s requirements in one ‘Big-Bang, one-shot deal’, which will usually result in anywhere from 50% to 100% rework (change requests resulting in a top-heavy change management process), we build a small increment of the product and almost immediately find out if it is what the customer thinks they asked for. If the customer got what they asked for, we continue to elaborate the process; if some adjustments are needed, we make those adjustments in the next iteration and continue developing the requirements, rolling out further increments of the product.

A high- level graphic representation of the Scrum process appears below:

Once the initial high level plan is outlined, the Scrum process continuously iterates, building product increments, until the project is complete or the customer has decided what ‘done’ means.

Many traditional project managers view the agile/Scrum approach as a series of ‘mini-waterfall’ implementations. To the untrained eye this appears to be the case; however there are significant differences when one dives into the process:

–The team self-organizes around how to accomplish the work. Managers – especially project managers – do not interfere with the team performing the work
–As a result, team members select the activities they will work upon rather than get assigned work by a project manager
–Software is built and delivered to production standards – collaboration between developers and testers is very high from the onset of the process

–Very high collaboration between customers and developers – as frequently as daily – to ensure the correctness of the deliverables The team ‘synchs up’ on a daily basis through a meeting process called a ‘stand-up’ lasting no more than 15 minutes. The team doesn’t status the organization, they status each other The Scrum Master (SM), who replaces the project manager role in the Scrum process, functions as a coach and mentor. The prime objective of the SM is to remove obstacles so that the team can complete the work at hand. It is the SM’s job to status the organization on the team’s progress.

–The team’s progress is captured in burn-down charts that are displayed in plain view on large bulletin boards to anyone who wants to see them. The process is completely transparent; it is not contained on a Gantt chart in the project manager’s computer

–The team delivers a potentially shippable increment of code at the end of the iteration

There are a number of great resources for Scrum and agile. For those interested in more information on the Scrum process, visit the Scrum Alliance website at www.scrumalliance.org, or Jeff Sutherland’s blog at www.jeffsutherland.com. Mike Cohn’s company at www.mountaingoatosftware.com is also an excellent resource for both agile and Scrum processes.

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[i] Blitz QFD, Software QFD for Very Rapid Development, 2000, R Zultner, Zultner & Company (article)

[ii]Blitz QFD, Software QFD for Very Rapid Development, 2000, R Zultner, Zultner & Company (article)

[iii] Oct 8, 20078 Jeff Sutherland presentation to Google.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y10Jvruc_Q

BP in the Age of Transparency

Richard Perrin PMP CSM MBB

What’s that old Chinese curse? I think it goes something like, “May you live in interesting times”. Over the last five years we’ve seen ample evidence that the curse works. Things have been pretty interesting, especially in the industries of finance, brokerage, mortgage lending and most recently, energy.

Consider the plight of BP at this moment – a thumbnail review of recent events for your perusal.

An oil drilling platform operated by BP exploded in the Gulf of Mexico on April 20, 2010 killing 11 human beings, and by recent estimates, gushing 25,000-40,000 barrels of oil per day into the Gulf of Mexico.  To date, they have not been able to stop the leak, and while boatloads of toxic oil dispersant and containment booms have been deployed, the oil has still hit the Louisiana coastline. Ecologically sensitive areas will probably be destroyed and it will take years if not decades to restore. The states of Louisiana and Mississippi face billions of dollars in lost tourism as well as the total destruction of its clamming, shrimping and fishing industries. The oil slick now threatens the coast of the Florida panhandle and NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research), on June 3, 2010 stated the following:

“A detailed computer modeling study released today indicates that oil from the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico might soon extend along thousands of miles of the Atlantic coast and open ocean as early as this summer.”[i]

The spill threatens sensitive coral reefs along part of Florida’s western coast, the Florida keys, and eventually may make its way to the East Coast of the United States fouling beaches from Miami, Florida to North Carolina, by the end of September, 2010.

In short, this is an unmitigated ecological disaster. Unmitigated, because the company who is squarely to blame for this criminal negligence has a demonstrated pattern of fraud, deceit, obfuscation, and  a callous disregard for human life since the completion of the BP-Amoco merger.

Let us not forget other safety issues that BP has failed to correct over the years, to wit, BP’s Texas City refinery explosion that killed 15 people. From the Center for Public Integrity, we see the following: “No other oil company inspected by OSHA since June 2007 was even close to BP in the number of citations issued.  Sunoco Inc. was cited for 127 alleged violations, eight of which were willful. ConocoPhillips Co. was cited for 119, four of which were willful, and Citgo Petroleum Corp. for 101, two of which were willful. [ii]

OSHA defines a willful violation as one “committed with plain indifference to or intentional disregard for employee safety and health.” An egregious willful violation is considered so severe that it can result in a penalty each time a violation occurs, rather than a single penalty for all violations of a regulation. A serious violation is described as one creating a “substantial probability” of death or serious injury. OSHA can refer cases involving worker deaths and wanton disregard for safety rules to the Justice Department for criminal prosecution.

After the BP refinery in Texas City blew up on March 23, 2005, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board, an independent federal agency, concluded that the disaster was caused by “organizational and safety deficiencies at all levels of the BP Corporation… Our investigation team turned up extensive evidence showing a catastrophe waiting to happen.”[iii]

To quote ABC News: “According to the Center for Public Integrity, in the last three years, BP refineries in Ohio and Texas have accounted for 97 percent of the “egregious, willful” violations handed out by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).” There have been over 750 of these “egregious, willful” violations to which BP has paid a total of $373 million in fines to avoid prosecution.[iv]

If you’re having trouble visualizing what this looks like, the following graph will show you a picture that will make it razor sharp:

You may notice that the Citgo sliver is so thin it doesn’t even show up on the bar chart. The other slivers from Sunoco and Conoco-Philips are barely visible.

It is mind–boggling to believe that BP thought that paying $373 million in fines was actually cheaper than fixing their safety issues. However, given that the profits of BP have been somewhere between $4 -5 billion per quarter, $373 million spread out over three or four years is basically walking-around money to these guys. It comes to less than  one-half of 1% of BP’s profits in the same period.  If anything, it is clear that BP is simply thumbing their noses at any regulatory authority in the United States, and has discovered that they can do so with virtual impunity.  Apparently, it’s more profitable to willfully put people in harm’s way than it is to fix the problem.  With this as their guiding philosophical corporate principle, in my humble estimation, they are not fit to do business in this country; in fact, they’re not fit to be doing business anywhere.

If you are a project manager and have been observing this incredible fiasco as it has unfolded, you may ask yourself, ‘I wonder if BP had implemented any emergency backup plans to address the potential of a blowout’.  The answer is, yes they did, but they were woefully inadequate and obviously never tried, as evidenced by the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon. Making plans is one thing, implementing them is something entirely different.   Anybody can pay lip service to creating project management plans by creating a stack of documentation with the requisite sign offs by the appropriate executives. The real question is: are you actually doing what you say you’re doing? Plans are meaningless if you fail to execute and execute well.

If you’re a certified project manager, you might also wonder if BP had any PMP certified project managers working for them while all this was going on. You might also wonder if they had access to any information that points to the absolute culpability of BP in this disaster at every level of management.  In other words, what are your ethical responsibilities as a certified Project manager?

Ethics is something that’s taken very seriously by the Project Management Institute. From the moment an individual decides to pursue a certification in project management through the Project Management Institute and fills out the application to do so, they are immediately subject to PMI’s Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct. If you are already a PMP (Project Management Professional), you’ve already taken the exam where you were asked not just a few questions that involved the ethics of responsibility, respect, honesty, and fairness.  Each of these four categories is further broken down into two types of standards: aspirational standards and mandatory standards.

Mandatory standards are required by PMI, and failure to follow mandatory standards can result in disciplinary action, up to expulsion from the Project Management Institute and revocation of the Project Management Professional credential. Aspirational standards, while not mandatory, are also not optional. This means that while adherence to the aspirational standards is not mandatory, you can’t ignore them either – you can’t ‘cherry pick’ what you choose to follow and what you won’t follow. PMPs have to do their utmost to ensure that they are also following PMI’s aspirational standards.

As a PMP, I regard PMI’s Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct as the project manager’s ‘Hippocratic oath’ – a guiding light or a prime directive.  It advises the ethical behavior of the PMP in all project activities and decisions.

The first area that PMI discusses in this code is the area of Responsibility. I would like to draw your attention to the first aspirational standard in this code which reads as follows:

“We make decisions and take actions based on the best interests of society, public safety, and the environment.”[v]

While this is an aspirational standard, it is not optional.  Your job as a PMP is not only to protect the project but to protect the interests of society at large.  If BP had any PMP’s working for them while all this was going on, then BP had to be giving their PMP’s the ‘mushroom’ treatment. (Keep them in the dark and feed them a lot of sh*t…) Because as a PMP, the PMI Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct requires the credential holder to substantiate ‘egregious and willful’ violations of the law and communicate them to the appropriate governing body e.g. OSHA.

Let’s compare the BP oil spill responses to Toyota’s response regarding their accelerator failures. When Toyota had accelerator problems with its cars, Toyota President Akio Toyoda, a descendant of the founder of the Toyota Corporation, stated the following:

“When consumers purchase a Toyota, they are not simply purchasing a car, truck or van. They are placing their trust in our company. The past few weeks, however, have made clear that Toyota has not lived up to the high standards we set for ourselves. More important, we have not lived up to the high standards you have come to expect from us. I am deeply disappointed by that and apologize. As the president of Toyota, I take personal responsibility. That is why I am personally leading the effort to restore trust in our word and in our products.”[vi]

Compare this to recent statements by Tony Hayward, the CEO of BP:

“There’s no one who wants this over more than I do. I’d like my life back.” (You can watch the video at:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/01/bp-ceo-tony-hayward-video_n_595906.html)

“The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean,” Hayward told The Guardian on May 14. “The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”

“I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest,” Hayward told Sky News on May 18.

“The oil is on the surface. There aren’t any plumes,” Hayward told The Associated Press on May 30, even as scientists from the University of South Florida, the University of Georgia, Southern Mississippi University, and other institutions were reporting evidence of massive underwater oil plumes — including one 22 miles long, six miles wide, and more than a thousand feet deep.[vii]

When comparing the statements of the president of Toyota to statements made by the CEO of BP, the differences are like night and day. Akio Toyoda is a stand-up guy. Tony Hayward stands for nothing except Tony Hayward – it’s all about him…

After choking out that he “wanted his life back” in a recent news broadcast, Tony Hayward realized suddenly from a PR perspective, that his statement didn’t play very well with the public.  He then stated on June 2:

“I made a hurtful and thoughtless comment on Sunday when I said that “I wanted my life back.” When I read that recently, I was appalled. I apologize, especially to the families of the 11 men who lost their lives in this tragic accident.” Crocodile tears, Tony; at this point you’re a day late and about $40 billion short.

On June 11, 2010, Congressman Alan Grayson of Florida reported on WCBT that he recently attended a closed door meeting with BP executives regarding the ‘gusher in the Gulf’. At over 50 days into this disaster, he asked BP executives two questions:

1. What have you done to prevent an event like this from occurring again? BP’s response: NOTHING
2. What are you doing to protect the food supply in the Gulf from being destroyed? BP’s response: NOTHING

It is surprising that the Justice Department has not hauled senior BP executives into court and prosecuted them under the provisions of the RICO act.

30 years ago before the advent of the web, it might have been much easier for BP to ‘spin’ their way out of their current troubles and control the damage to the company’s image. But it is not 1980, it is 2010, and if you are not ‘walking your talk’ the entire world will know this in under an hour thanks to the Web, smart phones and social media.  In fact, you would have to be a complete moron to believe that the spin-doctored pronouncements issuing from your corporate ivory tower carry any weight at all, given that your statements can be easily controverted with the facts in less than five minutes and broadcast all over the world.

It is the age of transparency.  Your ethics and responsibilities to your customers and society at large are on the line – front and center – every day. What will you do?

Domo arrigato gozaimas!  本当にありがとうございます

With profound respect – The Project-Ninja!

©Richard J Perrin 2010

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[i] http://www2.ucar.edu/news/ocean-currents-likely-to-carry-oil-spill-along-atlantic-coast

[ii] http://www.thecuttingedgenews.com/index.php?article=12199, Jim Morris and M.B. Pell, Center for Public Integrity

[iii] http://www.csb.gov/newsroom/detail.aspx?nid=311

[iv] http://abcnews.go.com/WN/bps-dismal-safety-record/story?id=10763042

[v] PDC Handbook, March 2009, Project Management Institute, p. 34

[vi] http://www.cnn.com/2010/BUSINESS/02/10/money.toyoda.op-ed/index.html

[vii] http://www.opposingviews.com/i/bp-ceo-tony-hayward-s-ridiculous-statements-on-the-gulf-disaster

Richard J Perrin CSM MBB PMP

Apologies for the long  drought in postings.  Deadlines, deadines, deadlines…  My promise to you is that you will see something new in the space every two to three weeks. Lots has been going on and there’s a lot to talk about. Now to the subject at hand: the talent retention problem.

Many conversations with project managers and various employees at Fortune 500 companies of late revolve around how difficult it is to find and retain talent for an organization. In a recent conversation with a hiring manager at a large company, his comment was that, given the current recession and availability of lots of talent, the quality of the people coming through the door was surprisingly low. I asked him why he thought this was the case.  He surmised that the last round of layoffs at major companies in which hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people were laid off was because these organizations were shedding themselves of poor performers and not very talented individuals.  In fact, this point of view is typical of what I hear from hiring managers.

So the message is, “it’s so hard to find good help these days…”? My response to that conceit is simply this: it’s a poor carpenter that blames his tools. Nonetheless, it is this common perception that fuels current thinking regarding talent retention. The bullet points below are from an online presentation posted by a Korn Ferry talent executive :

• More than 75% on the executives believe that their organizations

• • Don’t recruit highly talented people.

• • Don’t identify high and low performance.

• • Don’t retain top talent and assign the best to fast track jobs.

• • Don’t hold line managers accountable for people quality.

• • Don’t develop talent effectively.

• • Don’t have a competency aligned to must win-battles

• Organizations do an excellent job in de-railing talented people and under-using their strengths. [i]

This is an issue that I have heard repeated, ad nauseum, since the early 1990′s. It is the final bullet point in the list above that is the linchpin in this all too typical scenario: while bemoaning the inability to secure the necessary talent it needs, the organization is simultaneously derailing the talent it currently possesses.  Just like a wailing chorus in a Greek tragedy, they point out the tragic flaw in the protagonist as the tragedy winds towards its ineluctable end. We all know where it’s going, and the protagonists (the executives) are powerless to do anything about it. In the end, everybody dies and we’ll leave the theater having learned, hopefully, a valuable lesson.  The problem is, the executives aren’t really paying attention.

If you’re the CEO of a company in which you’re having trouble retaining talent and your executives are responsible, then you need to fire all your executives. After all, if you are an empowered executive, why aren’t you doing anything about your talent recruitment/retention problems?

The ‘Occam’s Razor’ answer is obvious: because you don’t really want to do anything about it, you just love to complain about it…

Let’s talk about talent for a moment. Talented people in the existing organization usually:

-are threatening to existing mediocrity

-threaten the status quo

-are feared by upper managers who aren’t quite so talented

-follow their own muse and see little use for ‘rules’ or ‘conventional wisdom’

-find targets no one else sees and hits them, sometimes brilliantly

Given that the current crop of CEO’s in the Fortune 100 all look like they were sired by the same father, we are shackled with the ‘just like me’ syndrome: they seek out people that are ‘just like me’. With the notable exception of Ricardo Semler (CEO of Semco, ‘The Seven Day Weekend’), who among these individuals would actively seek out someone who really thinks differently than they do, or who might seriously disagree with them?  The CEOs who invite contrarians into their circle can be counted on one hand, maybe two.

Let’s examine some of the current crop of CEOs. After the recent oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, Tony Hayward, the CEO of BP stated, according to the Guardian: “The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.”  What kind of talent would you expect to attract with a statement like that from a CEO whose only concern is corporate damage control? At this point, lawyers… One has to wonder what this chap is smoking.

Unfortunately and of late, we see too many CEO’s of this ilk. We only have to look at the CEO’s of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, WAMU, Bear Stearns, GM, Citibank, AIG, Goldman Sachs, etc., to see where their example has led us.

Or consider the episode several years back where Bill Gates was whining to the US Congress about the need to expand the H1-B visa program as he was having trouble finding qualified US development resources (talent).  Given that Mr. Gates off-shored a lot of Microsoft’s development/programming work to places such as China, I find it rather disingenuous that the guy who created his own shortage is whining about the lack of qualified resources.  Can’t recruit ‘highly talented people’? Looks like he’s beating them away with a stick.

So, if you were one of those highly talented software engineers, project managers, directors, or some other executive and got laid off due to downsizing, rightsizing, zero-sum-game-sizing, or whatever the current doubletalk is these days for firing people; would you be looking for a job in the same kind of organization that just cut you loose? Getting back to the original question, my answer to the hiring manager would be this: the real talent is looking elsewhere and creating their own opportunities.  They want nothing to do with you…

In the 1980s after the movie ‘Wall Street’, opining the concept that ‘greed is good’, grabbed the national psyche, a series of large companies completely shafted a generation of employees. Many people that had put in close to 25 years of dedicated service were furloughed just before they could collect their pensions. Fast-forward to the mid-1990s. An HR professional was complaining to me about the general lack of loyalty to her company from the current crop of employees.  She couldn’t understand what had changed and why the employees were suddenly so ‘mercenary’.  I said, “were you asleep during the 1980s or did you think all those leveraged buyouts were just a nightmare?”  The concept is simple:

If you want loyalty from employees, you first have to show loyalty to employees. If you want respect from employees, you have to show respect to employees. And if you are expecting honesty and candor from your employees then your own decision process has to be equally transparent and honest.

So all-in-all, to answer the talent retention question, consider the following:

• To recruit talent, one first has to show respect for talent
• To retain talent, one would best make them partners, not just hired hands
• To develop talent, one must make an actual commitment to that process instead of only paying lip service to it

As I deliver IT seminars all over the US with groups ranging from members of Fortune 500 companies to start-ups, the one constant that I hear on the subject of HR departments and talent acquisition/retention is this:  HR departments are more focused on protecting the company from a lawsuit than they are on talent retention or acquisition.

Welcome to New Business Paradigms 101.

Domo arrigato gozaimas!  本当にありがとうございます

With profound respect – The Project Ninja

©Richard J Perrin 2010

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[i] Slim Lambert, Leadership and Talent Senior consultant at Korn Ferry. http://www.slideshare.net/slimlambert/strategic-talent-management-3967945