Synaptus

Over 20 years ago, as a young Marine, I learned about something called the FEBA, or the forward edge of the battle area. This is where our troops engage with the bad guys. This is where things are messiest, and the point where every logistical aspect of the Marines are focused on supporting.

Now, forget for a second that we are talking about combat. Let’s talk about serving our paying customers. This edge is the most single most important aspect of your business. Let’s call it the forward edge of the customer area, or FECA. It is also where things are messiest. Sue Willet at Bird’s Eye View has a great cartoon that scoffs at the implementation of automation to control costs at this point.

Serving our customer’s is what it is about. I haven’t read about or been in a single strategic planning meeting where the objective was to reduce our ability to provide service to our customers. We need our best, most prepared, most flexible people there. We need to focus our all of our automation, logistics, and process support at preparing these people to deliver value to the customer.

Yet, in the interest of cost savings or  consistency we make decisions about compensation, outsourcing, and automation at these points that result in a less favorable customer experience. If you did a detailed inventory of the capabilities within your organization, it is likely that less than 15% are actually directly interacting with the customer. This is where effectiveness is more important than efficiency. In every other aspect of your business, you can focus on efficiency, but not here.

Unwelcome automation, inflexible service, blaming the customer for lapses in the organization, failure to deliver what was promised to the customer — and I experienced all of these in the last week. What are you to make sure your customers have great experiences? What are you doing to focus all other aspects of your business on the forward edge of the customer area?

I was reviewing the February 8, 2007 Silence Fails data today. Over 80% of people are engaged in at least one significant organization wide initiative they know will fail to achieve the advertised results. Let me say that again.

Over 80% of people are engaged in at least one significant organization wide initiative they know will fail to achieve the advertised results.

60% of the people don’t believe the important issues have been discussed.

On projects that have failed, 60% knew it would fail right away or shortly into the project and 90% of the people new half-way into the project.

In over 80% of the cases, the project could have been gotten back on track if changes had been made. In 70% of the cases people tried to get to the person that could make the change but were unsuccessful.

We know from reviewing past research that most projects fail to deliver the promised results. The thing is, the people on your projects know before it happens, and in most cases while there is still something to be done about it. Why aren’t we having these conversations in our organizations.

For the most part, because no one is asking. And if someone tries to bring it up, no one is listening. We punish people for bringing bad news or being nay-sayers. We think they don’t understand the problem.

We need to learn to listen. How should we listen. As usual, Hal Macomber is out ahead of this issue in Revisiting Two Great Wastes.

Here’s one thing to remember. Adopt an unconditionally positive stance when speaking (and listening). Operate from a concern for keeping the promise of the project. When you take care of the client and the promise(s) you made to the client you can’t go wrong. Don’t attack people. Instead, express your concern or worry that continuing on the current path might lead to failure. And if you get chastised for speaking up, then you know you are on the wrong project.

Organizations, the initiatives to create change, are getting more complex. At the same time, the rate of necessary change is increasing. Isn’t it time we learn how to listen in our organizations?

This might come from the Swiss Army Survival Guide. "When lost in the woods, if the map doesn’t agree with the terrain, in all cases believe the terrain."

A project plan, an executive’s vision, and the team members’ perspective all tend to be based on how things ought to be or were supposed to be. That’s the map. The terrain is what is important to the success of the project. You can’t manage from the map. You have to get grounded and manage from the terrain. That means deeply understanding: your objectives and obstacles, what has really been accomplished and what needs to be done (whether the project plan reflects it or not), the performer’s motivations, the organization’s values, and what we personally are capable of and interested in achieving. Why spend a lot of energy pretending that a map is valid when we know that it isn’t?

As innovators in management we need to look for the realities of the people, the organization, the work, and ourselves to be successful. When the map becomes more important than the terrain, we aren’t helping anyone.

Once again, Tom Peters provides inspiration for what we are trying to do at Synaptus. In his post yesterday Now Don’t You Worry Your Little Self…,  he raises the alarm about 40 million jobs moving out of the US in the next 10 years.

40 million jobs, is that a lot? According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics there are about 150 million Americans in the work force. 40 million jobs moving overseas is over 25% of the jobs in the US. What could cause this to happen?

China has 798 million people in their labor force. India has 509 million workers available in their labor force. Their real wages are far below the US and Europoe. As education rises in these countries and communication technology improves, businesses will move work to where it can be performed well-enough at the best cost.

Stop and think about what this means. The way companies do work is going to change.  We are just entering the knowledge-based, or project-based, or information-based world. My kids will be entering the job force as this world becomes predominant. It took 50-100 years to get really good at managing industrial based organizations. The businesses and individuals that figure out how to thrive in this new world of work are the ones that will survive and grow.

Aligning a dynamic organization with strategy, understanding and improving processes across your business (regardless of your organizations boundaries), productive collaboration, talent management, and project management become key skills to build and manage organizations that will thrive now and survive in future.

The ability to gain competive advantage from these shifts, both for you and your organization, is there today. On the other hand, 10 years is a long way away. You can wait for someone else to figure out how to run businesses profitably and manage the new workforce. I chose not to wait. What will you be doing in 10 years?

My organizational project maangement presentation at the Magic City Technology Council went well yesterday. It was well received and almost everyone wanted more information later. You can see the slides here. 

Almost everyone agreed with the idea that it is important to think about how other aspects in the organization impact project maangement. But, it is also obvious from the feedback that organizations have a difficult time looking at themselves from a bigger perspective.

The most important question was how do we drive advocacy from management for organizational project management. I believe the answer is to identify those organizational capabilities where breakdowns are costly to the project. Identify some metrics on the capability and the cost of low performance to the project.

Present the data to management looking for help or improvement on projects. If it is presented in a its-not-my-fault way, it won’t be well received. You have to set the context that you are not deflecting blame by showing how capabilities external to the project negatively effect your project. You need to show up with an answer on how that capability can perform better and how it benefits them.

If you can expand the project management context a little bit. You will begin to improve the ability to deliver projects. Then show the next person how to expand the context. Maybe over time, the organization is working together to deliver project results. Take the presentation. Ask questions. Help spread the word about organizational project management.

In our e-zine this week, we published an interview with Ric Merrifield at Microsoft. The subject was Business Architecture. It wasn’t well received by some of our subscribers.

Microsoft! Business Architecture! Heck, if I wanted to read technical stuff I’d subscribe to Joel Sposky. I had three people unsubscribe to the e-zine over straying away from business and into this technical area.

But business architecture isn’t technical — and Microsoft is very interested in the business models of their clients. It helps them provide better solutions than just pushing software out the door. But when you hear the words Microsoft and Architecture together, you mind jumps to technology. You bring a specific background of obviousness to how you listen to everything after that.

Ted Walls and David Walden discuss the problem of different backgrounds of obviousness in Understanding Unclear Situations and Each Other Using the Language Processing Method

"Unfortunately, however, when two or more people are trying to understand, discuss, and act on a complex business situation, the fact that each person has a different background of obviousness and therefore reasons differently can lead to confusion and unproductive effort. We talk past each other."

We participate in different conversations in different ways. Based on how we participate, we may we decide to listen and interpret the information differently. The situation, certain words, how someone looks, the location, and our prior experience can all trigger the way we participate. I am participating differently with my 11-year-old daughter than I am with a senior executive.

Based on the trigger of Microsoft and Architecture, the subscribers came to the conversation with a preconception that we were talking about something technical. We were talking about a way to develop a common understanding of an organization’s business model. This is important when you are trying to align people, process, and technology improvements with the strategy of the organization.

This break down happens between different functional areas all the time. People stop listening to things they could understand because they choose to participate in a way that keeps them from understanding. It is the responsibility of both parties to get past this problem.

Are there words, or situations, or people that trigger a specific way of participating in conversations with them? Does your ability to comprehend someone break down based on different backgrounds of understanding? Pay attention to those situations where you are participating in a way that is unproductive. See if you can shift to a more productive way of listening.

Several of my favorite bloggers have discussed multi-tasking. Reforming Project Management, Focused Performance, and Clarke Ching often explain the dreadful impact of multi-tasking. Multi-tasking is bad for a number of reasons. All of them have been widely discussed. But I want to discuss four of them here.

One.

Starting sooner doesn’t mean you will finish sooner. Let’s say you have three people that want you to do something. To simplify this example, each thing takes three days to perform. You want to make everyone happy so you start working everything as soon as possible. You switch between them each day to continue to show progress on each thing. So your work looks like this.

ABCABCABC

You deliver "A" on day 7. "B" on day 8. And "C" on day 9.  In trying to make everyone happy, you pushed A and B back and didn’t do C any favors. If you had worked on these things in sequence, your work would look like this.

AAABBBCCC

You deliver "A" on day 3. "B" on day 6. And "C" is still delivered on day 9. Starting sooner didn’t get work done sooner.

Two.

Sometimes work needs to be expedited. It just happens. In the second work flow above, you could just drop the expedited work into the queue as the next thing to do. You don’t interupt other work in progress, and you will finish it just as fast as possible. Remember, starting it as soon as possible isn’t what’s important. Finishing it as soon as possible is what’s important. Mixing expedited work into the middle of the flow will slow everyone down.

Three.

When you take longer to deliver work, you raise the risk that the customer requirements will change.  You want to have the shortest amount of time from when the work starts to when the work is delivered to the customer. This will reduce the risk that the customer requirements will change on work in progress. When customer requirements change on work in process, it creates rework. Rework is extremely expensive.

Four.

Task switching is expensive. As this NY times article points out, we are not effective at getting back to productive work when we are multi-tasking. Having multiple tasks active at a time increases the likelihood of interuption.

Our work lives are probably impacted by most of these issues. Often in combination. The multiplying effects of multitasking is devastating to performance in organizations. Just fixing this problem can double the productivity of a work group. You can have the right people, the best processes, and a solid strategy. Managing the flow of work through each person in the organization has the potential to boost productivity as much as any people, process, or strategy improvement.

What can you put into place to reduce the impact of multitasking on your organization?

I took an old laptop in to a shop to have it repaired before Christmas. They lost it in January but promised to look for it. I went in today, for the 10th visit, to find out the status of my laptop. The manager was not familiar with my problem. I expressed my dissatisfaction with the overall situation. The manager replied to me, "You shouldn’t be mad at me. I just started working here. I am not familiar with the situation." I told him I didn’t care whose fault it was. I didn’t care that he was new, my concern was that I brought my laptop into his establishment, and didn’t want to feel like it was my fault that it was missing.

He continued to explain to me that it wasn’t his fault. I acquiesced and asked him to try to find my laptop. He went into the system and started asking me questions about the make, model, and serial number of my computer. I asked him to review the records on his system. Surprisingly, I don’t have the serial number of my old laptop memorized. It was not in the current record in his system. So, I asked him to find a prior service record for my laptop. He found a prior record and got the answers to his questions.

He wasn’t sure how to proceed in looking for my laptop. I asked him a series of questions about how a laptop typically would be processed and we identified three points it could be missing. We identified how he could verify whether my laptop was in those locations. It took about 30 minutes for him to agree to take responsibility to look for my missing computer.

I believe this is a talent management and process problem. From a talent management aspect, the basics of the business were so obvious to everyone else that no one explained the laptop process to the manager when he was on-boarded. Also, this is a new manager. The business doesn’t have a clear understanding of the necessary skills and competencies for a manager in this store. He may be technically competent but he lacks some customer service competencies.

From a process aspect, there is no process to ensure accurate information is stored when orders are entered. There is no process to track customer complaints. There is no process to ensure inventory moves reliably through the system. This shop is very affordable, and they have historically done quality repair work on my computers.

There are two more local PC shops and two computer repair chains nearby my house. By failing to hire talent and manage their processes with the view of the customer in mind, this company has lost a customer. It isn’t enough that they are cheaper and technically competent. What capabilities within your company are most visible to the customer? Are you keeping in mind the customer impact of the talent and process decisions you are making? 

I will be presenting on OPM3 to the Magic City Technology Council meeting tomorrow at 2:00 pm at the Cahaba Grand Conference Center. The subject for the conference is Dynamic Software Development in the 21st Century. I will be discussing how project management doesn’t exist in a vacuum and how project management success is dependent on the aspects of Organizational Project Management (Portfolio, Program, and Organizational Enablers). OPM3 is an existing standard to identify where and how to improve these other aspects in support of improving project management.  I will include my slides on the Synaptus resource page on Wednesday. Please come by if you can make it.

Shu Ha Ri is a martial arts concept that describes the stages of learning to master something. Shu is about learning fundamentals, and techniques. Ha is about learning all of the exceptions to the fundamentals, the special cases that you have to overcome to perform the fundamentals in the real world. Ri is about being able to do something perfectly and without effort.  It is a progression that you have to go through to master anything.

Have you ever tried to dribble a basketball between your legs or behind your back? Have you ever tried to pitch from a pitchers mound? Have you every tried to throw a karate kick? When you first do these things, they are very hard. You will look awkward and feel foolish. If you are determined to learn, you can practice them until you feel you can do it. This is Shu - learning the fundamentals. The first time you are actually dribbling through traffic in a game, or pitching to a big guy with a bat, or trying to fight an opponent, these techniques are suddenly very hard again. You feel that they won’t work. You have to learn them all over again under the nuances of a real life situation. This is Ha - learning to perform the fundamentals in real life. Ri is when you can apply these techniques correctly without even thinking. And the gap between the people who are great at these things, who have reached Ri, and those who haven’t is really big.

I took Shotokan for a number of years. Shotokan is a strict martial art. There aren’t a lot of fancy moves and there isn’t a lot of improvisation in the forms. I found this restricting at first and I asked my master, Mister Takashina, why we couldn’t improvise new moves like other maritial arts did. I can’t demonstrate his unique Japaneese/John Wayne accent so I won’t even try.

"Dennis, William Shakespeare had 26 letters, just like you. He perfected the use of those letters. Giving you more letters may impress some people, but it won’t make you like William Shakespeare. Your challenge is to focus on perfecting the application of what you already know."

I see this as one of the fundamental challenges of organizational learning. The techniques that work in the classroom or in a book, don’t work the first time given the challenges and exceptions that aris in real life. So, people either "go by the book" even when it doesn’t make any sense. Or, they go about doing whatever doesn’t get them fired. You see this when people are enforcing policies that clearly are destructive to the people around them. You also see this when people are just going through the motions and not trying to do any better than what is expected.

We don’t strive to transcend to Ri in business. There are many techniques and opportunties for unbelievable improvements in performance. They require the desire, effort, and practice to get them through Ha to Ri. Ri is not performing without intention. It is being able to perform something in the real world perfectly and without effort.  Watching Dwayne Wade play basketball, Roger Clemens pitch, or Chuck Liddell fight are examples of Ri. Have you seen examples of Shu Ha and Ri in your organization? Where have you let Ha stop you from improving performance? Where do you need to strive for Ri?