Team Building: Corporate ‘in loco parentis’

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

The Requirements Mess

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

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Ethics? <<<<<<<<<<<<<

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

Corporate Double-Speak: The Talent Retention Problem

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

What Business Are You In?

What Business Are You in?

Richard J Perrin PMP CSM SSMBB

Most people who are in business answer that question with a very glib, “That should be obvious! We are in business to make money…”  Well, thank you for stating the obvious, but it’s really not so obvious when you break down that statement. One of the results of being in business is that you may make money, but it has nothing to do with what business you are in.  Making money in the business may simply be a symptom that you’re doing something right (or not…)  It astounds me how many managers I ask that question and how many of them get it wrong or don’t know how to answer it.

The story goes, Ray Kroc was addressing some MBA graduate student candidates in a speech he delivered at Stanford University. He asked the group “What business do you think McDonald’s is in?” One of the students responded something like, “Err, umm, well, dude… you flip hamburgers? You sell fast food, right?”  Kroc responded, “You are correct, selling fast food is what we do, but it’s not the business we are in…”

All of a sudden the wheels started turning in the minds of the MBA students. What was Kroc getting at?  Ray Kroc told the assembly that McDonald’s is actually in the real estate business.  Five years before he purchased McDonald’s from the McDonald brothers for $2.7 million, he set up the Franchise Realty Corp. in 1956.  He did so because he realized that a big chunk of the businesses profits would come from the land on which the franchisees were established.

So once again I ask you, what business are you in? Ask Chuck Schwab, what business he is in and he won’t say brokerage – but he will say software. He sunk his initial investment for his business into the software that would make online trading possible for everyone. Merrill Lynch thought it was a fad – after all, no Internet-based business could ever substitute for full-service broker.  Schwab predicted they would get 25,000 online users the first year; they actually got 250,000 online subscribers the first year, and they never looked back. Lynch, on the other hand, crashed and burned and got bought out by Bank of America.

I started asking this question a long time ago because I encountered a producer in the record business as a young man.  This is before the days of CDs and cassette tapes: vinyl was still king.  He just produced a young artist and put out a single which was receiving top 50 airplay.  The single was making him some money.  I told him that the music business must be good for him.  I’ll never forget his response.  “Music business??!!  The single cost me $7,500 in production costs and so far we’ve sold 150,000 records.  I just got the bill for the pressing of the single and for the album jackets. It cost me $35,000.  I’m not in the music business, I’m in the plastic and paper business!”, at which point he started to laugh.

Ask any car dealership what business they’re in, and I’m sure they won’t tell you that they are in the business of selling cars. I’m sure they make the lion’s share of the profits on service, repairs, and maintenance.

At a music business seminar some years ago, the gentleman running the seminar said that bands should entertain the idea of using merchandising to generate enough income for album projects.  Some of the people in the audience began to scoff at that little bit until he said the following:

“Well, when you get into the music business you had better understand what business you are in.  The group New Kids on the Block sold three triple-platinum albums in two years.  A platinum album is a million sales, therefore three triple-platinum albums constitute 9 million CD sales.  I know their manager, and he told me the band made a dollar for each album that was sold.  A total of $9 million.  Now let me ask you a question, how much do you think that the band grossed in merchandising during the same two-year period?” A peal of hands went up in the audience. The manager of a Jersey shore band offered the figure of $20 million.  The seminar host said, “No, more.”  The manager of a different band offered the amount of $50 million.  The seminar host said, “No, more.”  Then an independent record producer chimed in with the following amount: $100 million, and the seminar host said, “not even close, try $1 billion…”

I looked around the room and saw that half the attendees were open-jawed in disbelief. After the initial shock wore off, the seminar host said, “Yep, when you’ve got your face and name on every lunchbox, protractor, sweatshirt, t-shirt, keychain, bumper sticker, leg warmer, pencil case, etc. and your stuff is being sold at every Kmart, Wal-Mart, Target, and Costco, you will generate some income. The deal that their management worked for them was that they would get 5% off the top of the gross revenues.  That comes to $50 million.” So do the math: $9 million for three, triple-platinum albums versus $50 million for merchandising sales.  What business are they in? Fundamentally, it is merchandising.

Honda will tell you they are in the small engine business.

Harley-Davidson will tell you they are in the ‘image’ business.

Toyota states they are in the innovation and creativity business.

As a project manager, what business is your company in? Knowing what business the business is in will focus you on the goals and the strategic aims of the business. It is a key to understanding project governance.  It becomes your prime directive.

How we actually do that will be the subject of some upcoming posts.

Domo arrigato gozaimas – with profound respect.  The Project-Ninja

When Things Go Wrong…

When Things Go Wrong…

Richard Perrin PMP SSMBB CSM

“Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth” – Sherlock Holmes (A. Conan Doyle, 1859-1930)

Sometimes great companies make mistakes.  It’s acutely distressful when the great company has a reputation as a provider of some of the highest quality products available on the market. Toyota has, unfortunately, found itself in the inconceivable position of being one of those companies. When at least 19 deaths and over 1,000 accidents have been reported since 2001 involving Toyota and Lexus brand vehicles because of an electronic accelerator malfunction or design flaw, it’s a very serious business.

I’m sure Toyota’s competitors are dancing the schadenfreude polka at this point – after all it is completely uncharacteristic for a company of Toyota’s reputation for quality and safety to be facing a problem of this magnitude.  But as we have seen, when it does happen, the competition is ready to pounce. In the case of GM and Ford, it’s payback time with a capital ‘P’.

Of course, watching American competitors dance with glee over Toyota’s issues is like the pot lecturing the kettle for its blackness. For those with short memories, let us recall that American automakers were the subject of an interesting book in 1965 called, “Unsafe at Any Speed”, written by Ralph Nader.   Did the ‘big three’ respond by making their cars safer?  Not even close. On March 22, 1966, GM President James Roche was forced to appear before a US Senate subcommittee and apologize to Nader for the company’s ongoing campaign of harassment and intimidation against him. In other words, GM’s response to the criticism was a carefully orchestrated character assassination program against the whistle-blower.

Or you might remember that it was Ford that almost went out of business when it failed to recall the Pinto. The gas tank on this car would occasionally explode when rear-ended by another vehicle, killing the occupants of the Pinto and earning it the nickname of the “barbecue that seats 4”… After performing a cost/risk benefit analysis, Ford’s bean counters decided that it was cheaper to get sued for wrongful death ($49.5 M) than it was to fix the problem ($137M). This was revealed in a Mother Jones article in which it referenced the now famous “Pinto Memo”. You may also recall that the NHTSA (National Highway Traffic Safety Administration) found no reason to have the Pinto recalled until public outrage grew so deafening that the NHTSA was forced to reconsider its position. In a 1979 landmark case of the State of Indiana v. Ford Motor Co., Ford became the first American corporation ever indicted or prosecuted on criminal homicide charges. For more details on Ford’s egregious behavior, check out the Mother Jones article, ‘Pinto Madness’ at: http://motherjones.com/politics/1977/09/pinto-madness.

The Problem

The issue has two components:

1. The nature of electronic systems
2. Electronic systems in the environment

After years of experience working on sophisticated computer systems from micro to mainframe, experience teaches us several things:

1. When electronic systems fail, they usually fail without warning; sometimes catastrophically.      Anyone that has experienced a hard drive crash on their personal computing device can attest to this simple reality
2. When our technology fails us, the usual response is to implement more technology…

Users (especially unsophisticated users, i.e., The Public) will use an electronic system any way they see fit, not necessarily in the way you designed it to work. For example: fly-by-wire systems have been available on combat aircraft for years.  Modern fighters like the F-22 Raptor cost in excess of $100 million each, and the pilots who fly them are highly skilled, highly trained, and the cost of their training is also in the millions of dollars. Compare the extensive and rigorous training of the combat pilot to the training received by most automobile drivers in the United States. In most cases, I’m sure many readers wonder how some individuals get driver’s licenses at all… In short, tracking how the customer actually uses the product, in this case the accelerator or the brake, could take years of data collection.  The old saying, “make it idiot-proof and nature will invent a bigger idiot for you…” is especially true here.

Electronic systems are subject to SEU – Single Event Upset.  According to physicist William Price, formerly of Jet Propulsion Laboratories at the California Institute of Technology: “The effect occurs when a single ionizing particle (cosmic ray) impinges on a sensitive part of an integrated semiconductor circuit causing the circuit to trigger some key unintended function. This effect is well known in the aerospace world and been studied for about twenty-five years. High-speed memory circuits are particularly sensitive. In such circuits the effect of an impinging ionizing particle can cause a 1 to become a 0 or vice-versa. Other electronic device types are also sensitive to SEU. It has already been proved experimentally that such events can occur on earth’s surface. Solutions to the aerospace SEU problems have been studied for years and several work-a-rounds exist.”

General electronic interference can wreck havoc with computer systems; unpredictable events that are extremely difficult to isolate. Given that we are awash in digital signals by simply walking down the street, passing under high tension wires, in close proximity to microwave telecommunication towers, etc., it becomes critically important that an electrical system handling acceleration or breaking in a car is impervious to environmental, electronic ‘noise’. John Liu, a Wayne State University professor of electrical and computer engineering, who consults to the auto industry stated, “This problem is well-known to all automakers. If you can solve this problem, you would be a multi-billionaire.” He says that, theoretically, a cell phone, satellite radio or even a restaurant’s large microwave could cause an electronically controlled car’s accelerator to surge out of control. Professor Liu compares it to the problem of signal jamming on military aircraft. “The problem is (that) the expertise for preventing signal jamming rests in the Department of Defense, not the automakers or their suppliers”.

The underlying problem appears to be one of perception; we think that there is a technological solution for all of our technical problems.  However given the statements made by Professor Liu, it may be that no automobile manufacturer may be able to solve this problem given the current state of technology.  At this point it appears that we have reached the limit of the capabilities that our electronic systems can provide for us, at least for commercially produced product.  “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth”.

The solution? If we apply Occam’s razor to this problem, the solution is almost self-evident and painfully simple. All electronic systems that control acceleration and braking in any commercially manufactured vehicle must contain a manual override that can be instantly applied at the first hint of a braking or acceleration problem.  The solution to the problem results in less technology, not more technology. While it may make the car a little more expensive, a manual override system will virtually guarantee that no driver will be subject to sudden and uncontrollable acceleration.

Given Toyota’s historical focus on customer satisfaction and safety, it appears as though they are going to whatever lengths necessary to resolve this problem. I think that the reputation and the future of the company rides on the decisions and the actions that they take over the next month or two – hopefully they will be the best decisions for the company, their customers, and society at large.

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

With profound respect, the Project Ninja.

Quality Is Job One?

Quality Is Job One ?

Richard Perrin PMP MSSBB CSM

“Quality is job one”. That used to be the tagline to some TV commercials that were produced by the Ford Motor Company some years back.  This was in response to the Japanese automobile invasion led by the Toyota and Honda. You’ll probably remember that neither Toyota nor Honda used such a tagline in any of their commercials. They never had to – they produce some of the highest quality vehicles available anywhere.  Saying so is like a mortgage broker pushing a sub-prime mortgage telling you,” Trust me, I’m honest. The rate on this adjustable rate mortgage is tied to such a solid index that it will never go up more than once a year…”.   (The same guy also tried to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge).

Let’s put this old saw out to pasture once and for all:

Quality is not job one, taking care of your customer is job one.

Check out Consumer Reports online.  As of January, 2010, there are exactly 107 cars that meet their most stringent, second-tier recommendations (red check mark with a circle around it). Honda and Toyota make 37 of those 107 cars or over one third of the highest quality cars across all global automobile manufacturers.  Noticeably absent from this list are Chrysler, Cadillac, Dodge, GMC, Jeep, Jaguar, Buick and Land Rover.

As project managers, one of the aspects of managing projects is to deliver a quality product.  Quality is one of the knowledge areas contained in the Project Management Body of Knowledge®. The idea is to implement a quality management system that promotes continuous improvement throughout the project process. Failing to meet the project’s quality requirements can have serious negative consequences for the stakeholders as well as for the organization in which the project is being implemented.

Given that the evolution of quality process has been going on for the last 60 years, it is astounding how many products lack the fundamental quality elements that will keep the customer coming back for more.  It all starts with how we define quality.

Many businesses define quality from their perspective; after all it passed all the tests and meets the specifications that were given to us. Wrong.  PMI defines quality as: “The degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfills requirements”.[1] That definition is slightly better, but very slightly. It leaves too much open to the imagination, and more importantly to misinterpretation. After all, what do you mean by ‘requirements’?  PMI has a definition of the term ‘requirement’ which describes the documented needs, wants and expectations of project stakeholders and customers. Put those two things together and you have a reasonable definition of what we mean by quality.  Many look at this definition and find it only vaguely satisfying; it doesn’t quite hit the bull’s-eye.

However, Peter Drucker said it best from his book Innovation and Entrepreneurship:

“Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for. A product is not quality because it is hard to make and costs a lot of money, as manufacturers typically believe. This is incompetence. Customers pay only for what is of use to them and gives them value. Nothing else constitutes quality”[2]

Stated a little differently, there is no such thing as an “inherent quality characteristic”. It all depends on your customer’s perception. Auto manufacturers such as Toyota and Honda constantly capture feedback from customers to incrementally improve their products.  This process, originally defined by Dr. Walter Shewhart at Western electric in the 1920s, was expanded by Dr. W. Edwards Deming in a series of lectures to senior Japanese management in the early 1950s. It is a fundamental empirical process: Plan – Do – Check – Act. A diagram of the cycle appears below.

This cycle became the foundation of what the Japanese call kaizen – a process of incremental improvement. Every plan starts with some theory of reality – we build a plan based on what we think will happen (or what we want to happen…). We then execute the plan to the best of our ability. As we are executing the plan, we are checking or verifying the result. It is in the ‘check’ process where we determine if what we thought would happen actually did happen. Then we act on the results – we analyze what worked and what didn’t work. We keep the things that worked, document what we learned in the process, and then we make some decisions about what we can do to fix the things that don’t work.  Those decisions get rolled into our next planning phase and we repeat the cycle, gradually and consistently improving the product according to what the customer finds valuable.

I was speaking with an engineer that I met in 2005 on a flight to San Diego who had worked with Honda for a number of years. In our discussion about the difference between the quality of the vehicles made by Honda and Toyota, versus what was being cranked out by GM and Chrysler, he told me the following story which brings the point home.  This occurred in the early years when Honda was fairly new to the car market in the United States.

A customer was at a Honda dealership checking out the product line.  The customer walked up to several different cars, looked at the exteriors of the cars, looked at the interiors of the cars and then opened the door to sit behind the steering wheel of one of the models.  After checking out the dashboard and instrument panel, the gentleman got up out of the car and shut the door.  As he was walking away from the vehicle he suddenly stopped, turned around, re-opened the door and then shut it again. Something seemed to be puzzling the customer.  He re-opened the door and shut it a little harder.  Still apparently dissatisfied with something, he reopened the door for a third time and slammed it with both hands.

One of the salesmen walked up to the customer and asked “is there a problem with the car?”  The customer responded, “It didn’t sound like the door had closed – it hardly made a sound when I shut it the first time.” The salesmen stated that the vehicle was engineered this way, so that when the door was closed, it hardly made a sound. In the salesmen’s conversation with the customer, it appears that the customer was waiting for that pleasant auditory ‘thud’ he was accustomed to when shutting the door of an American-made vehicle. The lack of that auditory ‘thud’ made the vehicle sound cheap and flimsy to the customer’s ears. In fact, this same feedback was obtained from a number of customers that went to Honda dealerships.

The effort that it took to take the normal sound of the car door closing, and rethink it to make the door shut quietly, took some inventive design engineering.  In Japan, Honda’s customers appreciate that the car doors shut quietly.  However, to an average American consumer, it only sounded cheap.  Honda engineers literally had to dumb down their design for the American market. Yes, it was less expensive to make a car that way, but that’s what the average American customer was willing to pay for.

Just because your product is expensive and may be difficult to make, does not automatically bestow intrinsic, high quality characteristics on your product.  It all comes down to what your customer is willing to pay for…

To do that, you need to capture the ‘voice of the customer’. This will be the subject of my next posting.

Do you have any similar or interesting stories on product quality you would care to share? Drop me a line!

Domo arrigato gozaimas.  With profound respect, the Project Ninja.

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[1] PMBOK Guide®, 4^th edition, p. 445

[2] Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter Drucker, 1985

The Project Ninja

The Project Ninja

Richard Perrin PMP SSMBB CSM

What? A blog about project management? Aren’t there a zillion sites you can go to that will teach you about project management basics? Sure. Most of them are a rehash of what’s in the PMBOK® and talk about ‘best practices’. What a snore…

This is also not your big-five, leave you a stack of documentation and say we did the job, bury you with jargon, “we follow the PMI methodology”, bulls**t either.

This is the in-your-face, no holds barred, in the trenches, down-and-dirty theater of real world project management.  It’s messy, the boss is a lunatic, your stakeholders are vampires and through it all you have to make something work and deliver what the customer thinks they wanted.

My name is Richard Perrin, the host of this project management ‘thrill ride’. You’re not in Kansas anymore; you’ve just stumbled into Jurassic Park. I’ve worked in a number of different industries including aerospace, telecommunications, banking, brokerage, healthcare, publishing, retail, education, entertainment, energy, as well as state and federal government agencies. My goal is simply to say it like it is:  most businesses simply pay lip service to what they call project management.  They learn a bunch of buzzwords and stick it in their mission statement so they can look like they might be somebody with whom you would want to do business. Most of them are liars. Most of their projects blow up also:

As of 2008, the Standish Group’s Chaos report offers a revealing window into the world of IT project management. Successful projects – 32%; challenged projects – 44%; failed projects – 24%. In other words, 68% of all the projects attempted in the Fortune 1000 are either challenged or fail outright.

We have the tools, we’re just not asking the right questions… My promise to you is that this is the place where we will ask the right questions and most of the time, get them answered.

So what’s with this ‘ninja’ stuff? I’ve never been called by a headhunter that said “Hey Rich, I’ve got a real cupcake job for you.  The customer is great, the project is rolling along smoothly, and all you need to do is oversee it until it finishes.” Nope.  The call I usually get usually resembles something like: the project is heading down a porcelain facility, the customer’s hair is on fire, the last project manager left the project in disgust and we could sure use some help… to which I usually respond, “What you need is a project ninja – a surgical specialist that will, with rapidity and precision, address your project issues and bring a chaotic situation back under control but without leaving a trail of bodies behind.” Welcome to the world of the Project Management Ninja.

So every two weeks, expect a new posting that will address some unique aspect of project management that we as project managers must deal with, whether by choice, circumstance, or through discovery. Much of what we discuss will not only cover general business but the explosion of the software industry that has infiltrated the nervous system of every business system and human being on the face of the planet.

One of our more brilliant futurists, Ray Kurzweil, wrote that if Moore’s law continues to prove correct – that CPU capacity doubles every 18 to 24 months – somewhere between the year 2025 and 2030, you will be able to buy a laptop for under $1000 that has the computing capacity equal to that of the human brain.  I told a colleague about what I was going for in this blog and he said, “Okay, so it will be like the Matrix in 15 years. Human beings and software will merge to the point where you can do what they did in the movie; insert something in the base of your skull that will instantly give you the knowledge to fly a Huey.” My response was, “No, in 15 years the Huey will be smart enough to fly itself. You’ll have to be smart enough to give it the right directions and ask the right questions”.

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

With profound respect – The Project Ninja