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Shock Wave And Footprint: Projects With A Different Culture

November 23, 09 //
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A project has its own culture. This culture can be very different from the organization it is operating in.

How do you make sure the project culture isn’t crushed by the larger organizations’ culture?

And how do you make sure that project team members are still welcome in the organization when the project is done?

sunlight2 Shock Wave And Footprint: Projects With A Different Culture

If your project means require a high level of transparency, but the host organization is all dark and secret, odds are heavily against your project. E.g. when introducing agile into an organization “…the difficulty comes when Agile starts to create transparency and accountability.”

Shock waves

You have to prepare the host organization. Before the project starts, the first shock waves of transparency must have hit the organization. Before the project, create sunlight, put all the dark (non-transparent) parts in the spotlight. Before doing the project, make performance information shared and accessible for everyone. Give it some time, let the dust settle so you can see where the hardcore problems occur.

Footprint

When a project with a deviant culture is finished, project team members become just employees again. Employees of the main culture they challenged for a short period. If the project provided benefits and value for their direct colleagues the deviance will be regarded as useful. If the project leaves the acceptance of transparency and the tools to create it behind, you have left a legacy that people will remember.

When running projects with cultures different from the target organization, you have to think about the shock wave that precedes the project and the footprint it leaves behind.

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Shared Systems View: Bootstrapping Adaptive Capacity In Your Project

August 18, 09 //
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“All this talking about self-organization, complex systems and other fuzzy wuzzy stuff. HOW DO I USE THIS IN A REAL PROJECT?”

Fair enough. It is the same question I have.

In this post I will outline my idea for a technique that combines the notion of a project as human system working towards a desired goal (see: Second Turn: Structure For Resilience) and systems thinking, a technique that can be used to find patterns and the real cause-effect-chains in projects. I would really appreciate your additions and comments to this concept.

teamflow2 Shared Systems View: Bootstrapping Adaptive Capacity In Your Project

Adaptive Capacity

A project is a human system working towards a desired goal. A project is running within an environment that is changing continuously.The project needs ways to deal with these changes and still keep performing its function, that is, reaching the desired goal. The project needs a capacity to adapt.

Self Organization

An important concept that allows for adaptive capacity is “self organization”. In contrast to a traditional central plan-and-control organization this would allow for individuals to act fast upon changes in the environment, it would allocate the proper resources to a problem more efficiently. There is no central bottleneck for information which consumes time. There is no central point of decision that has only a fraction of the collective mental capacity.

Self-organization in project teams only works when everybody uses the same rules of engagement, when everybody has the same sense of how things are done within the team (culture).

Continuous Transparent Feedback

A system always communicates with its environment and based upon the feedback it gets from it, alters its behavior. If a group of animals will drink water from a well and one of the groups dies because of it, they entire group may search for a different well. If a company introduces a new product, and sees its stock plummeting because of it, it might change its strategy. It is therefor essential that the organization members get continuous feedback on their own performance and the environment. This is where the use of analytics, metrics and in-your-face information visualization comes in.

Creating A Shared Systems View

Disclaimer: this is an experimental technique. This is not tested. This is not a best-practice. You should only try this if your are really good. If you know what you are doing. This is an idea.

At the start of your project organize a workshop with your team and key stakeholders. You will create a shared systems view of the project. The benefits of doing this are

  • this will synchronize an important part of the “how we do things” rule set.
  • you will discuss and define the metrics that will be used as a feedback mechanism to the team to self-organize.
  • you will create insights in a complex situation by using the collective knowledge of your team.
  • you create the foundation for fast and speedy discussions when the project is actually running into problems.

The process contains five steps:

1. Go through the flow of the process

The first step is to discuss the flow of the process, the project steps (Prince2, Scrum, XP or your own process). Don’t copy the outline of your handbook, make it dynamic using a whiteboard.

The goal is to create a common understanding of the process. Use an informal notation that uses words and arrows pointing from one word to another.

Look at these examples for suggestions.

2. Define metric variables

The behavior of a system can be described using variables. A variable is an element of the systems you are looking at that changes over time, like “speed of service”, “number of clients” or “number of customers that slap you in the face”. When analyzing or discussing your project, you have to look at a certain variable (like budget overrun, defect rate) over time, and then investigate the trend.

First you have to decide on your variables. You can start anywhere.

Just pick the issue that is bothering you the most, or variables that have the highest priority.

Remember, you are going to look for patterns over time. E.g. Programmer productivity is dropping.

For projects you can use for example:

  • Schedule slippage
  • Budget overrun
  • Developer productivity
  • Size of backlog
  • Number of change requests
  • Number of bugs found
  • Number of test cases performed per day

3. Discuss how variables influence each other

All these variables can rise or fall over a period of time. Discuss how a variable evolved over time and what the current status is. Always use words that indicate movement: goes down, goes up, increases, rises, falls, improves …

Then comes the next step: connecting variables. What is the impact of the movement of the first element on the next?

Because productivity is dropping, the risk of schedule slippage increases. You have to try to tell your story using sentences that indicate a causal relationship. “As this happens, then …”, “This in turn causes …”.

Go back and forth for a while. Make the story as detailed as possible. Avoid being judgemental. Only look for cause and effects.

(This technique is described in detail in The Fifth Discipline Fieldbook.)

4. Put delays in to the systems view

In this step you explicitly focus on delays. Not every effect follows its cause nicely in a timely fashion; it doesn’t have to wait neatly until the cause is completely finished before it will start. You can have time issues. Delays can occur in all kinds of loops. Problematic situations can arise when interacting loops have different kinds of timing. Delays make it difficult to “see” cause and effects, because it is not clear what triggered an event if its root happened already a while ago.

One of the main causes of problems within projects (and companies in general) are two interacting processes where one of them has a large delay; this delay causes problems in the other, much faster process.

5. Summarize

In the final step of the workshop you will create an integrated map of the process steps, the variables, causes and effects and delays. This will be the reference/starting point when future problems in the project are discussed. Every future discussion will cause an update in the systems view.

I would really appreciate your additions and comments to this concept.

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When Not Everyone In Your Team Is Using The Same Rules

August 13, 09 //
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Ever tried to have a conversation while your aunt Edna is yapping, loud, having a chat with someone else one feet away?

It’s hard to concentrate when another conversation is interfering with yours. Your communication channel gets polluted.

Aunty Edna isn’t aware of what see is doing. She didn’t intend to sabotage my conversation. I guess. I hope.

If in a team all members are interacting using the same rules, you can get stellar results. No need for central coordination.

Polluting Interactions

Problems arise when the interactions get polluted, when people are operating under a different rule set. By accident or on purpose.

If someone is unaware of the rules of engagement the solution is very simple: you address it, you talk about it.

The Dark Side

If someone is cheating, if a person is showing his dark side by knowingly polluting the communication channel (using corporate politics, pushing his own agenda, being dishonest) you use the same strategy: address it. If there is an elephant in the room, it is best to introduce him.

A good cure against people using their own rules is transparency. Make the actions within the team visible to the team.

No, you should not tell everyone that Joe is slow and late as always. But you should make sure that the team gets the proper metrics and progress information to determine the “health” of their operation.

And always, always lead by example. Show the team how it’s done.

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Two Strategies For Aligning Means

July 30, 09 //
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Aligning the means between individuals, project and organization is a Herculean task for any Project Leader. The means are the rules of the project. The way things are done.

Following are two strategies that can be used to align means. To provide you with some ideas. To start the discussion.

Patterning – Going Through The Motions

In essence, with this strategy the project team is told what the means are; the larger organization knows best. This idea originates from Jeff Sutherland in “Shock Therapy: Bootstrapping Hyperproductive Scrum”. If you have a new team that has no experience with Scrum, you will put a very experienced Scum Master in charge and he will set the rules. Relentlessly.

Only a few rules, that make up the basics of Scrum, but they have to be followed with strong discipline. The Scrum Master will make sure this happens.
Set the rules first, than, after a while, let go when it becomes natural. This is called “patterning”.

Continuous Transparent Feedback

A human system always communicates with its environment and based upon the feedback it gets from it, alters its behavior. If a group of animals will drink water from a well and one of the groups dies because of it, they entire group may search for a different well. If a company introduces a new product, and sees its stock plummeting because of it, it might change its strategy.

It is therefor essential that the project members get continuous feedback on their own performance and the environment. This is where the use of analytics, metrics, “in-your-face” information visualization and plain old coaching comes in. By providing feedback to the team on how well they perform under the current project rule set, they will adapt to more effective means if needed.

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Does Transparency Lead To More Ethical Behavior?

April 2, 09 //
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We are working with people from all over the world. Globalization goes together together with an increase in transparency of reputations. The Internet introduced deadly transparency. The flattened and connected world makes sure reputations spread faster than you can say “Slartibartfast”.

With an increase in geographical and cultural distance the aspect of “trust” becomes all important. When people have never met, there are only two mechanism we can fall back on:

  • reputation: what others are saying about the other person, and
  • trying to read “telltale signs“, look for behavior or other marks that they identify with trustworthiness.

This second mechanism might be as simple as being friendly and saying “hello” every time you see someone down the hall. People attempt to detect the tell-tale signs of trustworthiness not only based upon behavioral markers that society associates with it; it has also to do with the similarity of the other with you. Persons that are more viewed as being equal or “the same” are more likely to be considered honest and sincere towards you.
(more…)

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