I have the pleasure of attending many project meetings. Some are well-run; others seem to just go through the motions. I was in a meeting this morning with an architectural team. The team was going through the promises they made to remove constraints for the construction members of their team. The project architect took the team from one open commitment to the next checking on how team members were doing fulfilling their promsies. The team got bogged down just once. It only took Peter Drucker's question to get them focussed again. Here it is:

The Project Reformer's e-Tip of the Week

037: Ask a Great Question

The editors at Business 2.0 interviewed Peter Drucker for the year-end issue "How to Succeed in 2005." They asked, "What is it that executives never seem to learn?" Mr. Drucker answered that managers ask the same questions everyone else asks. He says you need the attitude to not start with the question, "What do I want to do?" but with the question, "What needs to be done?" Mr. Drucker's second question places focus on the interests of the company or project and on execution. Don't just try asking the question. Make it a habit. Write the question "What needs to be done?" across the top of your notebook. Post it under the clock on the wall where you have your project meetings. Add it to your email signature. Make a sport out of it; see how many times in the course of your project meetings you can ask and answer, "What needs to be done?" Finish each conversation with someone making a reliable promise to do what needs to be done. The Project Leaders' Studio™

©2004 Hal Macomber | weblog.halmacomber.com | e-Tip Archive | PDF | Submit Tip

What needs to be done at this minute? Get to it!

Excellence has become transient…the Pursuit of Perfection gets in the way of ferreting out the Next Big Thing.

Tom Peters is doing what Tom Peters does best — promoting big ideas and himself along the way. Don't get me wrong; I'm a very big Tom Peters fan. His in your face, not-to-be-ignored style grabs me each time I encounter his writing. In August Tom published a manifesto on the site Change This! Tom's manifesto is titled This I Believe (TIB). I'll just say that Tom's TIBs are provocative. This one caught my attention:

#12. kaizen (Continuous Improvement) Is…Very Dangerous Stuff
Caught with our pants down by vigorous Japanese competitors, we Americans quickly copied their essential competitive ideas, such as Total Quality Management and kaizen. Fair enough! Brilliant, in fact! Yet these important notions are in part cornerstones of an earlier, industrial age…when winning products stayed on the shelves in showroom floors for years, even decades.
Now excellence has become transient (few teams win back-to-back championships in sports, the competition and rate of improvement have become so intense); and the fact is that the Pursuit of Perfection (at today's "sport") gets in the way of ferreting out the Next Big Thing. My de facto mentors in all this are media guru Marshall McLuhan ("If it works, it's obsolete") and IT guru Nicholas Negroponte ("Incrementalism is innovation's worst enemy").

Can this be? Can Tom be calling our baby ugly? You bet he is. And I see why. kaizen is one part of a whole system that Toyota and others use to stay competitive. But it is just one part. When Toyota decided it needed a more hip car than a Corolla it didn't just improve the Corolla in one place and another. Toyota created an all new car — Matrix — and did so in record time, reportedly about one year from conception to market. That is one heck of a project. Competitors take three times as long to launch a new car (even when based on an existing car). But Toyota didn't stop there. They added three performance levels to the car and offered the same performance levels on the Corolla. Their market share and profitability show for it. Toyota has moved in front of Ford to be the number 2 auto manufacturer worldwide and they intend to knock on GM's door.

You can get Tom Peters' TIBs in his manifesto. You can also get the same TIBs in book form along with his thoughts on leadership, excellence, and my favorite — Pity the Poor Brown: Tom Peters Challenges Jim Collins, for Better of for Worse, currently only available in the book. The book is titled Project04: Snapshots of Excellence in Unstable Times. You will also find another Tom Peters' manifesto at Change This!. It's titled Off-Shoring. It's as provocative as TIB.

By the way, Change This! is a project started by Seth Godin of Purple Cow and Free Prize Inside fame. If you act fast you can get Seth's very popular The Bootstrapper's Bible for free. It's available at Change This! 'til December 1, 2004.

John Musser, Columbia University, recently told me about his project management website. The site is titled Software Project Management, but it's so much more.

The site is all the course work, class notes, recommended texts, etc. for John's class on Software Project Management. He also includes references to other useful materials. After you bookmark this site, take some time to explore what John has catalogued. And if you think he's missed something, then drop him a note with your suggestion.

Your own power and authority will only get you so far. You'll gain power when you share it. So goes the argument of the editor of Harvard Business Review. Read on…

The Project Reformer's e-Tip of the Week

036: Exercise Power Collaboratively

One of my favorite business writers is Thomas A. Stewart. Stewart wrote for Fortune Magazine and Business 2.0 before joining Harvard Business Review as editor. He's not doing much writing anymore. However, he does write the opening essay for each issue of HBR. I open to it each issue. The October lead article is titled "Surprises for New CEOs," a collaboration of Michael Porter, Jay Lorsch, and Nitin Nohria. Their article is a winner. Stewart's commentary is unforgettable. Stewart sums up the article with the following: "The more power you have, the more important it is to exercise that power collaboratively." HBR's target readers are the leaders of our companies. Stewart's one sentence conclusion is good advice for all of us who find we are accumulating power and authority. This is especially appropriate for project managers on big, or complex, or troubled projects. It's also practical advice. Project leaders can't be in all places at once. Projects by nature are distributed in their organization and execution. Sharing power with project performers only accumulates more power for the leader. The organization functions better when each member is in the position to act with authority. Try it. Explore with your team how you can share power with them. The Project Leaders' Studio™

©2004 Hal Macomber | weblog.halmacomber.com | e-Tip Archive | PDF | Submit Tip

Try this on your projects. First, discuss it openly with your project team. How collaborative are you in your leadership? You'll never know if you don't ask!

It takes an uncommon common sense to see opportunity where others continue to take the same old actions. Henry Mintzberg may be just one of those people. Most people know him from his provocative writing in the Harvard Business Review. A few have the pleasure of engaging with him as Professor Mintzberg, at McGill University, Montreal. In Professor Mintzberg's latest opinion piece he argues for less leadership, Enough Leadership, HBR, November 2004. But read it closely; what he really is calling for is more leadership from people throughout the organization.

The professor asks three questions:

• If leadership is about stimulating teamwork, how are the stock options distributed in your company?
• If leadership is about taking the long view, how many of these stock options can be cashed in in the short run?
• If leadership is about building trust, if people are really a company's "greatest assets," how many of these assets have been shown the door in recent years? And how much trust has that engendered among those who remain?

Provide just enough leadership to support the efforts of others.

We know too well the answers to these questions. And we see the business results that go with those answers. The common sense in the business world places too much responsibility on a few people for the well-being of the firm, the employees, shareholders, and customers.

The professor uses an example from the IBM company turnaround to make his point. Lou Gertsner is often credited in the press with riding in on a white horse to save IBM. In the example of IBM's entry into the world of e-business, Professor Mintzberg argues:

"Instead of setting direction, (Lou Gerstner) supported the direction setting of others. He provided less leadership, but appropriate leadership. Just enough leadership."

The professor prescribes three actions for providing just enough leadership.

1. Stop the dysfunctional separation of leadership from management.
2. Involve the followers in the selection of the leaders.
3. Recognize the importance of (leaders) being engaged.

In closing, Professor Mintzberg characterizes the situation with lines from a play,

"Unhappy the land that has no heroes."

"No," says another. "Unhappy the land that needs heroes."

The parallels to our situation on projects couldn't be clearer. So often I hear people say that what we need is a change or injection of new leadership. Rarely does one person make that significant difference. What we need on projects is to cultivate leadership throughout the project team.

I just finished the book QBQ!: The Question Behind the Question®, by John G. Miller. This is a wonderful little book that belongs in every briefcase (not on your bookshelves) and ready to give to that special person you want to see succeed. The author's premise is we ask really lousy questions that direct our attention away from where we can be most effective in taking action. Simply, the better questions — the questions behind the question — place the accountability for action on the questioner.

No sooner had I finished the book than I read John Brandt's Industry Week column Suffocating Under That Golden Parachute?. John is offering to be any company's scapegoat for poor performance. Rather than firing the CEO and paying the usual $20 million severance John is offering to be fired for half the amount. Now that's accountability! And a bargain to boot! The board of directors can avoid the public embarrassment of letting go one of their own. Who knows, the favor just might need to be returned.

Those of us just doing our projects may never avail ourselves of John Brandt's services, so I suggest we take John Miller's advice. If you want better answers, then you gotta start asking better questions. Those better questions — the questions behind the questions — all have the same form.

What can I do now to make the situation better?

The question takes our attention away from others and places accountability where we have greatest influence — on ourself. That question alone just might save the project and your career.

What is management? We train some of our managers in business school. They study marketing, accounting, finance, statistics, operations, policy, organizational behavior, economics, and decision-making. Recently, students also have courses in ethics, leadership, and entrepreneurism. Dig into the syllabus and you'll find an emphasis on making good choices. That's right, to manage is understood to mean be the decision maker. What a burden.

It's time we gave up the notion that the head of the organization can control the body.

I'm not saying our future managers needn't study the above subjects. Those subjects introduce the wanna-be manager to the everyday conversation of managing. However, I am saying that managing as decision-making as a way of understanding the primary role of a manager is obsolete.

The managing as decision-making paradigm is left over from the time when we thought the head is smarter than the body. The one person on top tells the rest what to do. The brain controls the rest of the organism. Armies, the Roman Catholic Church, and governments worldwide have been based on that view. We now understand organisms don't work this way. It's time we gave up the notion that the head of the organization can control the extensive body of autonomous thinking and caring human beings.

There's no reason to accept a portfolio of projects where a few succeed while the others miss important objectives.

So what is it that managers do in this alternative view of an organization? They cultivate conditions or circumstances for performance. Managers care for the promises to the customers, the network of commitments for delivering on those promises, and the well-being or futures of the people they manage. Giving one more importance over the other won't succeed in the long-run.

Greg Howell, Lauri Koskela, John Draper, and I authored a paper which we presented at IGLC-12, in Denmark, titled Leadership and Project Management: Time for a Change from Fayol to Flores. In that paper we contrast the prevailing style of project management with a style we see emerging. We don't think you need to settle for lackluster project performance. There's no reason to accept a portfolio of projects where a few succeed while the others miss important objectives. I could say that we need to make numerous changes to the way we do projects, but I won't. We need to make one significant change. Give up the tyranny of being a manager who has to make the right decisions. Instead, create planning conversations in your organization and on your teams that continue to unfold with the changing futures. The success of your projects depends on it. Even more, so does your sanity!

In today's Wall Street Journal (WSJ) technology columnist Lee Gomes claims that we won't be seeing another tech investment boom for at least five years. He offers the following as explanation:

"One of the not-so-secret Dirty Little Secrets of the tech world is that no one knows how to make this stuff work. When Hewlett-Packard, which is in the business of telling other companies how to make this stuff work, turned in a disappointing quarter in August, it placed much of the blame on a badly flubbed in-house effort to computerize its own operations."

Lee Gomes, When Pundits Predict Tech's Future, 11-15-04

How can this be? Lee Gomes has it part right. But it's not tech know-how that is the problem. As Larry Bossidy has said it comes down to execution. Not execution of the technology issues; it comes down to the way we do projects.

Competitiveness today depends on doing projects well, both those projects for customers and the internal projects that launch new products and add capability. When will we wake up? We are in the project age. The information age and the continuing stream of new innovations only amplifies the requirement of doing projects well.

Sure there's a not-so-secret Dirty Little Secret. In spite of the best efforts of well-intentioned professionals we get one project disappointment after another. Accepted wisdom and current practice of project management is to blame. It's time to abandon obsolete project management theory and practice embracing agile, eXtreme, and lean project delivery in its place.

The lean construction movement now has its own professional journal. I've just finished reading the new Lean Construction Journal. This first issue will provide someone new to lean construction a survey of the breadth of issues and directions currently being investigated. The writing is first rate. As usual for this set of authors, their papers are well-referenced. These are the first four papers:

1. Generic Implementation of Lean Concepts in Simulation Models, by Jack M. Farrar, Simaan M. AbouRizk, and Xiaoming Mao
2. Moving on - Beyond Lean Thinking, by Lauri Koskela
3. Competing Construction Management Paradigms, by Glenn Ballard and Gregory A. Howell
4. Lean Construction: Where Are We And How To Proceed? by Sven Bertelsen

I urge you to read the Editors' Note. In just over two pages, Tariq Abdelhamid and Alan Mossman create a context for the journal calling on 12 years of research and investigation. Not sure what lean construction is? You'll have a much better idea once you've read their note.

The panel of advisors and reviewers hail from 11 countries making this truly an international effort. If you are interested in having your paper published, then contact the editors. You'll find instructions for authors and how to contact the editors on the home page.

The journal is available for free to Lean Construction Institute (LCI) members and sponsors. It is $30 for others. I understand this first issue is available to the general public for free for a short time. You can either get the entire contents of the first issue or select from the individual papers. But hurry! Or better yet, get yourself a membership to LCI.

Enjoy!

I've been telling people listening is the master skill of the leader. Jeffrey Cufaude goes one step further. In
Just Perhaps, Jeffrey reminds us that sincere inquiry with the predisposition of being influenced by what is said is critical for bringing us together.

"Until we can listen to others with whom we might violently disagree with some degree of authentic curiosity, openness, and respect, little is possible."

Next time you find yourself disagreeing OR agreeing, stop to investigate why the person is saying what s/he's saying. You're bound to be surprised.

After a handful of reader comments and another handful of reader emails I've decided I need to comment further on Wednesday's posting Innovation and Lean Go Hand-in-Glove. I wrote it in response to Joyce Wycoff's Do Less, Have More appearing in her weblog Good Morning Thinkers! Joyce argued for more slack time so people have time to be innovative saying that companies focus on "sucking out all the fat" so they are left with a "lean machine" eliminates the time to be innovative. I commented that lean initiatives create slack time. Each reader essentially has the same thing to say to me. I've included the text of one of those emails followed by my response.

  >
  > You and Joyce Wycoff are talking two different things. When a company
  > goes "lean," they often take out too many employees "because they are
  > going to work smarter." The thing that happens is the work is not
  > analyzed for best procedures and risks, so the remaining employees are left to
  > carry an extra work load and have no time to think or act proactively.
  > You, on the other hand, are talking about solving problems before
  > removing employees — and no where did you indicate removing employees is
  > necessarily part of the plan. What you could be removing is time, or
  > waste, or effort.
  >

One way of seeing the situation is that Joyce and I are talking two different things. However the risk is that most people will not see that. When we communicate there is always the denotative meaning, the connotative meanings, and the oh-so numerous misunderstandings. Those misunderstandings have numerous sources. Here are two. The first is a blindness to the denotative meaning in the choice of words used. The second is a blindness to the listeners' knowledge of denotative meaning. As David Schmaltz points out in his comment to my posting there is a growing understanding of lean to be mean. It is that definition that Joyce conveys. It is unfortunate. I encounter one person after another that has objections to lean initiatives because they anticipate mean consequences. I've traced this back to Chain-Saw Al Dunlop's driving Sunbeam into the ground under the banner of lean. We have to change this. We can't let anyone think that Joyce and I are writing about the same thing. Lean has a very specific meaning that everyone in business must know to be successful.

The lean approach has separated Dell from everyone else in their industry. Dell is able to invest in new US factories at a time where others are off-shoring. The lean approach allows Toyota to build cars in each of the markets they serve rather than exporting from Japan. The lean approach is responsible for an Ohio general contractor expanding in a very competitive and scarce market these last two years while other firms struggle for their existence. A hallmark of all three firms is how they've systematically tapped the everyday-always inventiveness of their people. Invest in Dell and Toyota. They will continue to thrive as will other firms who take a lean approach. Too bad you can't invest in the Ohio GC. It's a 100% employee owned firm.

I have my own take on why innovation is stifled. It has to do with the Two Great Wastes: not listening and not speaking. But that's for another time…

So thank you Joyce for continuing to write on innovation. I'll keep visiting your weblog Good Morning Thinkers!. And thank you everyone who wrote comments and emails. You've given me the opportunity to sharpen our understanding of lean.

A host of books have been published on company-wide improvement approaches. One of the first descriptions of the approach that makes Toyota and other Japanese firms successful with continuous improvement was kaizen, written by Masaaki Imai, published in 1986. Imai updated that work with gemba kaizen in 1997. Along the way there have been many good books about employee initiated everyday improvement and innovation. The latest is the book Ideas Are Free, by Alan G. Robinson, Dean M. Schroeder.

Robinson and Schoeder claim a company-wide practice of putting the small ideas into use will separate your firm from your competitors without tipping your hand as to what is making you more competitive. Here are their eight recommendations for an idea system:

1. Ideas are encouraged and welcomed.
2. Submitting ideas is simple.
3. Evaluation of ideas is quick and effective.
4. Feedback is timely, constructive and informative.
5. Implementation is rapid and smooth.
6. Ideas are reviewed for additional potential.
7. People are recognized, and success is celebrated.
8. Idea system performance is measured, reviewed and improved.

I have one quibble with the authors. They place too much emphasis on ideas and no attention on making assessments that lead to innovation. (There'll be another posting on just that point.) There are plenty of ideas available from our project team members and throughout our firms. Greg Howell and I have found the missing element to be what we call The Two Great Wastes: not listening and not speaking. None of this works without an environment that embraces the varied opinions and contributions of everyone. There must be attentive listening and unfettered speaking. It takes leadership to get both.

So much has been made of the opportunity line workers and project performers have for contributing ideas for improvement in their daily work. 15 years ago I worked at ABB Asea Brown Boveri. I wondered what the opportunity was for harnessing the inventiveness of our highly skilled engineers. So I did an experiment. I worked with 8 engineers. First, I taught them the standard problem-solving techniques. Then I challenged them as a group of 8 to come up with 20 adopted improvements each week. I further stipulated that the team didn't succeed unless each person had originated 1 adopted improvement in that week. They got off to a slow start. I remember the first week had fewer than 10 adopted improvements and 2 or 3 of the people didn't contribute one idea. But we kept at it. At the end of the month the team had over 100 adopted improvements with everyone meeting their weekly targets. At that point they became really innovative. The second month had even more adopted improvements. It was also at that time that ABB made major organizational changes resulting in me moving from Connecticut to Switzerland. The team was disbanded.

So are ideas free? I think not. While I'm a really big fan of continuous improvement systems, here in the USA we seem not to have the stick-to-it-ness to make these approaches successful. It takes a significant effort and rethinking of how we will manage our firms and our projects. That effort is not free. It at least comes with an opportunity cost if not a real investment in training and communication of company policy. These costs (or investments) are real. So you might ask, "Is it worth investing?" Without doubt. But take it on for strategic advantage as the authors of Ideas Are Free recommend.

For those of you ready to start here's my recommendation. One of the best guides to adopting continuous improvement is The Idea Generator: Quick and Easy kaizen, by Bunji Tozawa and Norman Bodek. Their approach works. One of the authors is by far the most authoritative person on the subject. I call Norman Bodek the godfather of the lean movement in the western world. He had Taiichi Ohno's and Shigeo Shingo's books on Toyota translated into English and published in the US. Norman's latest book is Kaikaku: The Power and Magic of Lean. He's written a history of the lean movement that presents in one place all the elements of the lean approach. It's sure to be a winner.

Joyce Wycoff suggests that one of the reasons companies aren't more innovative is they have become so lean they don't have the time for thinking, Good Morning Thinkers!: Do Less, Have More. I've found the exact opposite to be true. Taking a lean approach to projects frees up time that otherwise is spent addressing what should have happened yesterday, but didn't. Reliability in your processes and results makes time available for team members to improve and innovate in their work. That in turn makes the project more lean generating even more time for thinking and innovation.

Are you a project executive? Consider the lead to this article, Is Project Management a Crime?, published yesterday:

Is poor project management a crime? The answer could be 'yes' now that the Sarbanes-Oxley Act makes senior executives criminally liable for misrepresenting financial information.

Pay attention. If the following is true then we all better get in action.

What can project-based organizations do to help ensure compliancy with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act? If they do not already have a properly defined internal process for project management, then — according to Section 404 — they will need to implement one.

So what are we to do? Of course the author is ready with a recommendation: adopt an Earned Value Management System (EVMS). Huh? She cites Boeing and BAE Systems as two companies that endorse EVMS as best practice.

I've read the article three times. I'm beginning to think that the author actually believes what she is saying. So let's put her advice in perspective. The vast majority of projects involve just a few people. That's right, just a few people working for a short time. The last thing any of those people need is a highly structured reporting system for managing their projects. For the bulk of the projects EVMS will just add time and expense to the project without improving project performance. On the other end, let's consider the large projects. EVMS is a system designed for authorizing payments from the customer to the performing organization based on a baselined project plan usually created 90 or more days ahead of time. Large projects need a steering mechanism that adjusts to unexpected conditions. I've not seen an EVMS that will do that.

I doubt EVMS will satisfy SOX. Companies need more than a formal approach. Project and company executives will sleep at night when they know their project teams are managing their projects in the midst of the uncertainty of today's world. No over-the-shoulder tool will help them do that. They need an approach and skills that produces a coherent set of commitments to satisfy the promise(s) to the customer.

It's been far too long since I've posted on these pages. My life has been busy…so busy. And I've enjoyed every minute.

Among other matters, my youngest son is investigating his options for college. We've enjoyed our tours. It's been great father-son bonding.

I've concluded that college is wasted on teenagers! Boy would I enjoy spending four years of my life immersed in learning without a care about work. Oh well…

So now I'm back writing. I've been working on some exciting projects. I'll share my learnings and my short-comings. And I hope to hear from you along the way.