Killing Projects (softly)

builder.au: 10 tips for leading your team to peak performance:

There are times when failed initiatives will expose the weaknesses of certain employees, but there are plenty of times when you have good employees working on projects that simply don’t pan out. Figuring out the difference between those two scenarios is part of becoming a good manager. If it’s a good person on a bad project, the person who was running the project isn’t any less talented because the project didn’t materialise. So make sure you use the project as a learning experience and reassign the person to something new without excessive hand-wringing. Otherwise, you will make your employees overly risk-averse, and they will be reluctant to jump into the next big project or to make bold moves when managing the project.

The Importance of Stakeholder Analysis

The Art of Project Management, Getting Results Through Power:

Since power is the ability to get work done, and project management is about getting work done, project managers need power. The application of power is what politics is all about. Very little position power accrues to most project managers, and you will get immersed in some level of politics in every organization, wherever you do projects that impact others.

The article provides an example where a team failed to inform the “senior manager” that they were employing their own preferred methods to manage the project and were subsequently removed.

The fact is that not only is the person right above you in a project as much a stakeholder as anyone, they’re often a stakeholder that requires special consideration because they may be quite particular about the internals of how you’re getting the work done to deliver the milestones.

Human, All Too Human

Rob Berg at BPM Insights wonders why we’re all so “Busy”:

If I sit and think about a client’s business challenge for five hours while staring at the Pacific Ocean, am I being less productive than attempting the same great feat while juggling my cell phone, blackberry and laptop? In which scenario will the client gain more value? What is worth more to the client? Me multitasking, and after two weeks finally squeezing out enough time to consider and respond thoughtfully to the client’s issues, or spending a half-day staring out to sea, contemplating possible solutions based on twenty-plus years of experience and a whole lot of formal education and heading back to the office to write them down?

To Rob’s point, wasn’t it Friedrich Nietzsche who said “A man who is very busy seldom changes his opinions”?

15 Minute Survey on Your BPMN Usage

Via Go Flow, a BPMN satisfaction survey from a PhD student at Queensland University of Technology:

The data collection will be conducted through a Web-based survey, which has been designed for BPMN users, which means that anyone that uses BPMN to create process models for whatever purpose is welcome and encouraged to participate.

Participation in this study is purely voluntary. If you do agree to participate, you can withdraw from participation at any time during the project without comment or penalty. Your decision to participate or withdraw will in no way impact upon your current or future relationship with QUT or UQ.

Your participation in this study will consist of completing the survey, which will take about fifteen (15) minutes. The survey will remain open until midnight June 30, 2007.

For some non-technical background on BPMN, Bruce Silver has some informative posts on his blog.

“The Weakest Part of a Process”

Via Vinayak Khadye, Your BPM Implementation is Bound to Fail:

By virtue of being a business process, we know that it has to span across the organization. The weakest part of a process is at the interface between departments, when the handoff does not work well.

The BPM Mindset

I saw Andrew Spanyi speak at yesterday’s Executive Breakfast hosted by Appian (trust me when I say I watered down the “executive” aspect of the breakfast through the simple fact of my attendance…) where he discussed the 18 companies examined in his Mindset Study (PDF).

Of the 18 companies, the third that he highlighted as outperforming the Dow Jones Industrial Average last year evinced both relentless communication on the central role of improving and managing business processes and had a high level process schematic prominently displayed in addition to the organization chart typical of almost any organization.

Can companies hope to succeed in BPM efforts without this kind of relatively rare, overt devotion to process? Lombardi’s Phil Gilbert in 2005:

Most companies’ culture reflects the functional organization chart. This is where budget (power) and responsibility live. The single biggest reason process-centric projects fail today is bad governance. Processes span functions and when optimizing a given process, political disputes arise, and there’s no single owner that has the power to drive the project to completion. Something that is good for the organization is, basically, killed because someone’s power would have been diminished.

One theme I seem to run into over and over is that if a company doesn’t already have a corporate culture that demands the utmost attention to and respect for cross-functional end-to-end processes, one department or project within that company shouldn’t really take on, much less expect benefit from, a BPM initiative.

Web 2.0 Sites as Cheap Toasters

Last month Andrew at the strategyst was responding to the low cost of Web tools by noting:

The price of failure is small, but so are the barriers to entry. If you can do it on the cheap, so can anyone else. In this environment, technology and IP are no longer the significant sources of competitive advantage.

Then in Sunday’s NY Times Magazine, Not Necessarily Toast had this:

“In the long run, everything is a toaster.” That is to say, even the most impressive breakthrough eventually becomes mundane, with all producers offering more or less identical versions of the same item and competing largely on the basis of price: innovation runs its course, and the thing becomes a commodity…design and aesthetics have been important drivers of toaster sales in recent years — but often these are just the sorts of developments that are instantly imitated by all competitors. A brushed or polished stainless-steel look was new a few years ago; now it’s widespread.

Which lead me to Om Malik’s recent post, Web 2.0: End of Innocence where he points out (in the context of the latest batch of “Web 2.0″ startups):

…innovators, entrepreneurs and even larger players have to take off the rose-tinted glasses, and worry about web giants’ ability to go from friend-to-foe almost overnight.

Combining all three opinions, one salient possibility comes to mind: all the new Web sites coming out, asking me to create a new login and password, aren’t destined to be acquired by Google, Yahoo!, etc., they’re simply destined to be copied. As I’m sure someone has already pointed out, Microsoft got pretty good at a version of this tactic not too long ago.

The ashtray, the remote control, the paddle game

Bruce MacEwen writes about the McKinsey Quarterly’s Building the Civilized Workplace, discussing the impact on an organization that chooses to tolerate …jerks:

Is being a jerk contagious? Yes. Which is why a jerk-free workplace begins with you. And this only makes sense. If I’m attacked, my first, albeit basest, instinct is to counter-attack. If I lack the organizational status to counter-attack directly, I’ll counter-attack obliquely, by becoming disenchanted, losing faith in the firm, giving less than my best effort (or certainly not going the extra mile on nights and weekends).

If you go through the trouble to access the McKinsey report yourself, you can read the whole thing. Here’s an excerpt:

Dalgaard is emphatic about applying this rule at SuccessFactors because part of its mission is to help companies focus more on performance and less on politics. Employees aren’t expected to be perfect, but when they lose their cool or belittle colleagues, inadvertently or not, they are expected to repent. Dalgaard himself is not above the rule—he explained to me that, given the pressures of running a rapidly growing business, he too occasionally “blows it” at meetings. At times, he has apologized to all 400-plus people in his company, not just to the people at the meeting in question, because “word about my behavior would get out.”