And so the Party Begins

I'm sitting backstage, enjoying the show.  Ty Kiisel and Raechel Logan are onstage and doing an awesome job.  The Keynote today, at the conference, is actually going to be the Talking Work podcast.  There's a live band, several hundred people in the audience, and the stage looks like the set of The Tonight Show.  I'm sitting backstage, sipping my water and listening to Donna Fitzgerald speak.  I wonder to myself, what is Ty going to want to talk about?  Before I answer my own question, I notice one of the people backstage approaching me, as he mouths something into his radio. He smiles at me and says, "They're about ready for you, Derek.  If you would please, got ahead and get into position."  I remember from the rehearsal the night before that I was to go stand on an X and wait for the lights to come on.   ...and so the party begins. The entire WorkOut 2011: TalkingWork Keynote lasted about 1 hour and 26 minutes.  I modified the embedded YouTube link so that it would advance to just before I came on.  But, I would really recommend you go back to the beginning and watch the whole thing.  Donna had some excellent talking points. I don't want to say what anyone talked about.  It's so much better letting them speak for themselves, via the video.  Ty and Raechel were amazing hosts and AtTask blew me away by the level of quality this event had.

So, sit back and enjoy the show.  And could someone please tell me where the hell that green feather went!? (Don't worry, you'll find out) Since this post was written, the Keynote video has been changed to "private".  It looks like each of the interviews will have their own video on YouTube.

I have a quote by Seth Godin that has recently become my mantra. He wrote

Go, give a speech. Go, start a blog. Go, ship that thing that you’ve been hiding. Begin, begin, begin and then improve. Being a novice is way overrated.

Thank you again to Ty and Raechel for inviting me out to Utah, to enjoy your event and share in the wonderful conversations.

What I've heard Ty say rings true.

It doesn't matter what we do.  It doesn't matter what industry we're in or even what our role is.  We all share one thing in common.  And that is we all work.

---

Veni Vidi Loquor

Julius Caesar, in recognition of his overwhelming victory against Pharnaces II of Pontus, sent a simple, but powerful message back to Rome and the Senate: "VENI VIDI VICI", I came, I saw, I conquered.  My message back to Washington DC and my Project Management colleagues: "VENI VIDI LOQUOR", I came, I saw, I spoke. It's now been a solid week since I left for home from the AtTask Work Management Summit (WorkOut2011), in Salt Lake City.  I was asked to come out to Utah and be a speaking guest of the conference.  I basically ran two themes:  [1] Balanced project management through the use of Agile concepts [2] Project Management Zombies.

I had the opportunity to participate on a panel the first day I was there and then was part of the keynote the next.  The keynote was by far the highlight of my trip, sharing the stage with Ty Kiisel and Raechel Logan (The hosts of TalkingWork), Donna Fitzgerald (Research Director at Gartner), and Scott Johnson (Founder and CEO of AtTask).

WorkOut 2011 was nothing short of spectacular.   From the exceptional venue (The Grand American Hotel), to the passionate and approachable people, to the forward thinking product design, I am in awe of what AtTask delivered.

Because I spoke completely unscripted, I'll have to wait until the YouTube videos comes out (I've been told by the Firm Snapp Conner PR, my panel talk and the Keynote will be out soon) to see exactly what I said.  Fortunately, a few people in the audience quoted me in their tweets.

"One of our failings in this day and age is we forget we're working with people."

"Inspire more people from the bottom up, empower them to become leaders"

"Remember you're not managing resources - you're managing people"

"Don't judge zombies [on a project] they don't know what they're doing"

Thank you, everyone, for the memories! I look forward to seeing you all again.

Photo: Bryant Livingston

Zombie Elephant

I read a REALLY compelling post by Philippe Kruchten, who among others, was at the 10 years agile celebration meeting in Snowbird, UT, organized by Alistair Cockburn on February 12. Philippe stated on his blog post, after covering the walls with a couple of hundred issues cards, David Anderson noted that there was “an elephant in the room”. [read Philippe's post to find out what it was]  ...A small group identified a few other such “elephants in the room”, i.e., other topics that the agile community is not really willing to tackle for a variety of reasons. They ended up with a long list of about 12 such “undiscussable” topics (or at least not discussable in the open).

The elephant that jumped out at me was number eleven.

11. Certification (the “zombie elephant”) This massive elephant was reported dead a few times, but seems to reappear…

Now, I don't want to beat this proverbial dead horse but I do think it's important to talk about this.  The idea of "Agile" Project Management certification seems to drive some people super crazy.  There are arguments against certifications (in general), saying they are just a way to make money; that they don't offer any real value.  Like it or not, certifications ARE out there and they ARE here to stay.  This argument is not unique to the Agile Community.  There are almost daily debates in the blogosphere on the subject of certification value.  There is a distinct difference between wisdom and knowledge and I think the Agile community has a lot of wisdom to offer the "traditional" project management community.  If you don't have the wisdom, you need some basic foundation of education in order to help projects (and people) reach their goals.

The ongoing problem I see is some people outside our project teams perceive those with certifications as experts.  It's either that or the Hiring Managers are so damn lazy that they go looking for certifications rather than actual people who will make good culture fits.  Either way, we have the same results.  People who don't know the first thing about project management or leadership, with certifications, get hired.  This is not an issue with the certification itself.  It's a marketing issue.  The message is being controlled by the wrong people.  The communities as a whole need to be more vocal and shape the correct message.

In my post for Agile Scout, about the State of Agile, I called it mastery-based learning and the paradox of the certification.  What is the goal?  Are we trying to discover better ways to deliver value to our customers or are we just trying to get a piece of paper and a few extra letters after our names?  Some only care about getting a passing score on a certification exam versus being a good manager or leader.  I would argue that certifications do offer some value but we may need to do away with terms like "Master" or "Professional", in order to help control the message.

So, why certification and not traditional higher education?  In preparation for writing another blog post, I was reading a University of Maryland textbook on Systems Analysis. The section on Agile & Scrum were flat out wrong!  In addition, this college textbook used Wikipedia as its reference source.

I would argue, the respective communities introduce themselves to the elephant in the room and get to work on better ways to educate people and measure proficiency.  You better do it soon, before that elephant becomes an 800 pound gorilla.

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Office of Zombie Personnel Management

A few days ago, we had a snow storm come through the Washington DC area.  Just a few hours before it hit, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) announced Federal Employees should depart 2 HOURS earlier than their normal departure time from work.  Unfortunately, if you were anyone in the Washington DC metro area and you left 2 hours earlier, you were screwed!  I heard of people being stuck in traffic for up to 12 hours, trying to get home.  It was a combination of people not using their own brains and OPM not knowing how to react to the weather.  There were a lot of people angry at OPM for making the late call and underestimating the volume of people leaving at the same time (due to the storm). One issue is the Federal Government has been really slow to adopt telework.  When there was a threat of pandemic flu, they appeared to be paralyzed with fear, at the thought of people actually working from home.  Many of us (contractors) tried to explain we would actually get more work done, if we had the opportunity to telework.  If more people were teleworking, fewer would be out there messing up traffic.  Last year, when the Federal Government shut down for 4 days due to snow, many of us sat at home and did nothing.  It wasn't by choice, mind you.  We were not authorized to do any work outside the office.

Part of my frustration rests with the fact that in the corporate world, teleworking or having distributed teams is not uncommon.  It's not perfect but I would say it works.  We've figured it out, leveraging a combination of communication tools and approaches.

The other main issue is the lack of practical wisdom or the desire to just take care of people supporting the Federal Government.  I've previously quoted the definition of Practical Wisdom as

Have the moral will to make right by people. Have the moral skill to figure out what doing right means.

As a contractor, for the last 2 days, I've been in the office.  If I was not, I won't be paid.  For the last 2 days, this notice has gone out.

With forecast conditions for [date] highly variable and may include ice, sleet, and freezing rain, concern for safety is paramount. To protect the safety of Federal workers and our community, maintain continuity of operations and assist employees in planning accordingly, OPM has announced for [date], the option for unscheduled leave/telework.

Well, the freezing rain did not come.  Yes, the parking lots yesterday morning were icy.  But, the roads were fine yesterday and they were fine today.  If fact, the forecasted high temperature for today is 54 degrees!

Because OPM announced all Federal workers could either take leave or telework, most did.

Let's see how much work gets done today.

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Zombie Procurement Strategy

The last few weeks I have been advising a Federal Procurement team as they refine a Procurement Statement of Work (SOW).  Unfortunately, I see the existing version as being very heavy and I want the final product to be much more lean.  A perfect example is the current program has 29 documents that are contractually required to be delivered.   Do these documents provide value?  No, most of them to not.

Opportunity 1

Instead of writing the SOW with statements like "Contract holder will deliver this document" and not provide why or how it will help the customer accomplish their goals, I think we miss an opportunity.  I believe we need to advance the conversation with the potential vendors, by structuring the future work as Epics.  As long as the customer quantifies "reasonable", we give the potential vendors an opportunity to think outside the box.

As the owner of the production system, I want to be able to know the average wait time when a customer calls, so I can ensure they are receiving a reasonable level of customer service.

Opportunity 2

Rather than using practical wisdom to create a new SOW, some would rather rely on past policy, procedures, and governance, regardless of current and future needs or if they ever made sense.  I've challenged some by saying there are no procurement requirements stating that we must have these 29 documents.  One Zombie response was  "I found management plans and documents referred to in the PMBOK.  We should require the vendor to deliver all of them ".

Before I emptied a full can of Zombie Away on him, I said that wasn't the most efficient approach.  The PMBOK also says to use "expert judgement".  If you are not prepared to use expert judgement, a vendor is going to take your Zombie money and walk off with it.  All you'll be left with is an empty wallet and 29 documents.

I'm all for looking to the PMBOK for guidance.  But remember, it is a guide, not commandments.

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Zombie Tug of War

This week I'm in an all-out tug of war with the zombies.  Just short of getting hostile with the lot, I figured writing a blog post would be more cathartic.  I'm going to rant about enterprise tools and how I see them fit into the world of business.  I've been asked many times what products I would suggest to satisfy different needs.  I'll admit, I'm pretty passionate about some of the tools I use.  I love Evernote.  Why?  My memory sucks!   If I can get my thoughts into Evernote, I know I'll be good.  I also love using AgileZen.  I know, you've heard me talk about them before.  I keep a physical Kanban and a virtual one.  It's what I describe as both lightweight and elegant. It just works!  One more little app you may of heard of that I love is Google docs.  I like the fact that I can edit my documents anywhere and then share or collaborate on them with other team members. There are 3 primary commonalities that I can note about these 3 applications.  [1] They are super easy to use,  [2] either free or very affordable, [3] they help me save time.

So, what are the zombies taunting me with?

I'm working with a customer who is on a Novell network, uses Groupwise email, and has the poorest implementation of Microsoft SharePoint I've seen since I was introduced to SharePoint 5+ years ago.  None of these applications are necessarily bad.  But, when it comes to this bastardized configuration I'm currently dealing with, I get the feeling the only reasons these apps are being used is because really good salespeople sold a few zombies on these half-baked solutions.

Before you spend tens of thousands of hard earned dollars on the next "silver bullet", ask yourself why you need the product.  Are you trying to fix a process?  If so, I think you'll end up with an expensive crappy process.  Let me be very blunt.  Enterprise software will not fix a crappy process! Enterprise software is for making a refined process more efficient.  When I started advising this customer over two years ago, a vendor had just sold them on a deployment of MS SharePoint with Project Server.   Why?  So the customer could internally track time being billed to different work packages.  That's it!  What I found odd was the customer didn't have an existing way of internally tracking the time.  So, instead of having people fill out Excel spreadsheets to get them started, they just went for a solution that would solve all of their problems.  Have you read that promise before?

The result?  A solution nobody uses.

Score: Zombies 1 / Humanity -$50,000

My apologies for the negative nature of this post.  Happier posts are on the way!

[VIA: Oxford Dictionaries]

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Zombie Leadership

I just had an hour long conversation with a colleague about leadership.  We both agreed when you're working under the authority of a good or bad leader, you know it.  We also agreed that we would rather deal with a bad leader with a mission than have a complete absence of leadership. If you are working toward a goal, and you realize (on your own or from the assistance of others) that you're going in the wrong direction, you make a correction and get back on track.  You rely on leadership to guide you in the right direction.  Even leaders who are the worst of egoists have a vision and turn that into a mission. Unfortunately, that vision and mission may include throwing you under a bus along the way.

If you read my post on servant-leadership, you saw the I represented leadership on a grid.  On the far left, we had egoism.  On the far right, we had altruism.  If we added zombieism to the group, you would see it off to the left of the chart.  Zombieism shouldn't really be on the chart because it is that absence of leadership.  But, we still need to put it into context.

Zombieism: When a zombie acts solely to feed itself.  You can find zombies exhibiting this orientation at every level of an organization.  The zombie thinks that it is a leader of a hoard but is a destructive force because it makes no leadership decisions, good or bad.  It merely feeds.  It mere exists.

Next we have different styles of leadership

7 Traditional Leadership Styles

1. Autocratic - To make a decision without input from others.
2. Coaching – To provide instruction to others.
3. Consensus – To problem solve by a group as a whole.
4. Consultative – To invite others to provide ideas.
5. Directing – To give authoritative instructions to.
6. Facilitating – To coordinate or expedite.
7. Supporting – To provide assistance during the process.

7 Zombie Leadership Styles

1. Anti-Autocratic - To not make a decision without input from others.
2. Anti-Coaching – To not provide instruction to others.
3. Anti-Consensus – To not problem solve by a group as a whole.
4. Anti-Consultative – To not invite others to provide ideas.
5. Anti-Directing – To not give authoritative instructions to.
6. Anti-Facilitating – To not coordinate or expedite.
7. Anti-Supporting – To not provide assistance during the process.

If you look at your boss, your boss's boss, or your boss's boss's boss, and they delegate ALL of their authority to others, it does not make them a good leader!  It makes them a zombie leader.

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Procurement Zombies

I just finished reviewing a 42 page Statement of Work (SOW), which at some point will become the basis of dozens of (if not more) proposals, which will result in the award of a contract.  If there was ever a time I would want to guard myself against zombie infiltration, the procurement cycle would be it.  But at some point, zombies will get involved. In an attempt to be thorough (yet entertaining and brief) let's focus on the Project Procurement Management processes: Planning, Conducting, Administering, and Closing.

Planning

The process of documenting project purchasing decisions, specifying the approach, and identifying potential sellers.

Conducting

The process of obtaining seller responses, selecting a seller, and awarding a contract

Administering

The process of managing procurement relationships, monitoring contract performance, and making changes or corrections as needed.

Closing

The process of completing each project procurement.

I pulled these from Chapter 12, Page 313 of the PMBOK Guide 4th Edition

For the sake of brevity,  I am not going to tell you the right or wrong way to manage procurements.  I'm not a procurement specialist.  So instead, since it's Festivus, I'm going to air grievances.

Procurements involve currency.  That means that if it is your money being spent, you want to get as much value for your money as possible.  It also means that if it is not your money being spent, zombies seem to be drawn to procurements more than brains.  Don't ask me to provide a metric for this.  Just trust me.

In 15 years, I can not say I've witnessed any zombie activity at the planning stage.  Then again, I've never seen a unicorn either but I'm not saying they don't exist.  Perhaps the zombies defer to the humans at this early stage.   But the further along in the process, the more zombies seem to appear.  If you really want to see a zombie swarm, add a purchasing card into the mix.  Somehow, purchasing card usage can actually accelerate human-zombies transformations.

Opportunistic Procurement Zombie

Let's say a zombie needs a new computer because its current one died.  I know, ironic.  The undead having something die.  Anyway, it gets on the phone with someone willing to sell a new shiny computer.  If the boss fails to establish a budget or specific specifications for the replacement device, there's a pretty good chance the zombie is going to order much more than really needed.  Good planning in this case, can cut down on zombie purchasing.

Entitled Procurement Zombie

Back in the day, working as a hardware consultant for a few federal programs, I witnessed a strange sense of entitlement. When it comes to zombie to human ratios, I've seen way more zombies on September 30th of each year than on any Halloween.   These zombies, to ensure their program budgets will be equal or greater than the year before, go on a wild spending spree every September 30th (end of the fiscal year).  I knew a colleague who worked for a zombie on a federal program.  He was given a purchase card and instructed to contact Dell and order as many laptops as possible until he had spent "X" dollars.  He was they instructed to ask them to not ship the laptops because the program had no need for them and nowhere to store them.

If you enjoyed the post great!  If not, I will challenge you to a feat of strength.

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