Victus pro Scientia Opus -- Food for the Knowledge Worker

When Your IT Project Is Doomed to Fail

There is an old saying in golf that every golf bet is won or lost on the first tee.  For those of you who are non-golfers, non-bettors, or both, the first tee is where golfers' handicaps are discussed/negotiated and where they establish the number of strokes the better players will "give" the other players to even up the match. 

The specifics of golf handicapping are somewhat beyond me (kind of like quantum physics or Microsoft software licensing, in that "necessarily complex" category), but the overall gist of it lines up with a very simple formula for project success that I learned as part of PMP training:  "Success Equals Results Minus Expectations"

We were also taught as project managers that the time to negotiate the project's constraints is at the outset.  Once you agree to the project charter in the initiation phase and the project schedule in the planning phase, it gets a lot harder to negotiate or to complain about them later, even when legitimate reasons for doing so exist.

This week's Congressional hearings about why the enrollment portals for the Affordable Care Act (aka "Obamacare") reminded me of many of these things.  Seeing and hearing IT executives wish, retrospectively and very, very publicly, for more time to test their solution prior to rollout made me sad because I knew that their chances for success
were depressingly low right from the outset. 

When time is your primary project constraint, the only other constraints you can tweak are
quality and cost, and even adding resources/cost do not necessarily reduce time (in fact, they tend to increase it -- see also Brooks' Law from the classic:  "The Mythical Man-Month"). 

I do not envy the IT consultants who tried to build the ACA sites -- that was a tough job, and I doubt they'll realize much profit now (Congressional scrutiny, I would think,
would tend to have a dampening effect on profitability).  So, what can we learn from this? 

The lesson for me is that Project Managers get their first, best, chance, prior to the first tee, to walk (or run) away when we know we can't win.  Here are some great ways to assess your chances up front by looking for project "red flags"  (I love #3, personally): 

"11 Signs Your IT Project Is Doomed" 

Baseball As Collaboration Metaphor

[Note:  This post was made possible by an idea hatched by my friend and colleague Nancy Settle-Murphy when we worked together on a recent post about the 2013 Red Sox "Road to Redemption."  NSM provided editorial insight on this post as well, and provides a ton of insight about how people and organizations work together at guidedinsights.com.]

By day, I've been (as usual) thinking about SharePoint and other collaboration technologies, and how businesses solve problems and create value by effectively using them. 

However, by night, the Boston Red Sox have been on an entertaining run through the Major League Baseball playoffs, so I've been spending time wrapping up the baseball season by watching the Sox create some magic moments in October, frequently late into the night.

With that in mind, let's explore the junction between SharePoint and baseball via metaphor:

Baseball	SharePoint	Commonality
Infielders	Lines of Business   (LOB*)	Closest to action  (home plate = where revenue is generated)
Outfielders	Information   Technology (IT)	Last line of defense but still critical, constrained (fences = budgets)
Catcher	Human Resources	Calls signals, captain of defense (positioning fielders = organizational development and training)

* -- for purposes of this blog post, LOB means "Line of Business," not "[Runners] Left on Base" as in baseball. 

The key risks for a business trying to collaborate with too many infielders (LOB), not enough outfielders (IT):   chaos/Babel, security risk (e.g., of sensitive data being shared ad hoc via unsafe collab, like personal DropBox or SkyDrive, or just e-mailed), operational risk (no service-level agreements, or SLAs, for collaboration technologies, so they may not be available when we need them).

The key risk for a business trying to collaborate with too many outfielders (IT), and no infielders (LOB):  a well-governed wasteland that is so secure and well-ordered that no one goes there.

In baseball, the fun part comes when balls that are into the gaps between the infielders and outfielders (with apologies to Crash Davis):

• the bloop,
• the gork,
• the Texas leaguer,
• the bleeder,
• the dying quail,
• the ball hit into "no man's land" that falls between the infield and the outfield. 

Depending on how it's played, it can turn into a great play:

  

an error, or just a hit that falls between the fielders ("I thought you had it") 

 

 

In SharePoint, there is a rough equivalent:  gaps between the business users of the real-world technology and the IT organization responsible for its infrastructure/technical governance.  We fill these gaps with operational governance, a set of conventions and norms that answer questions like:  Who is allowed to create new sites?  Who
decides whether we can federate or share content with external parties?   Who decides on the interface/navigation? Who decides who has access to which content? Who creates expiration dates for content? Who can set alerts?

There's no magical formula or golden ratio in business collaboration technologies akin to the "shift" that teams use against David Ortiz, but there are some prescriptions/strategies I can offer:

1. Norms/rules: a convention in baseball is that a ball hit in the air between an infielder and an outfielder belongs to the infielder until an outfielder "calls him off".  Make sure that your organization has a default, agreed-upon, norm (similar) -- e.g., site administration rights can be delegated to a manager in LOB if (a) trained (document this) and (b) pproved by LOB leadership.  IT administrates/ratifies based on (a) and (b), but LOB approves.
2. [I'll steal a concept from softball here:]  a tenth "short" fielder or "extra player" typically positioned between the infielders and outfielders, who catches those in-between hits that would otherwise land between infield and outfield. Some examples of these "short fielders" to catch the "in-betweens" are:

 

• A Business Analyst who reports to IT, works as concierge to LOB
• A separate Organizational Development lead who reports to HR or an executive/officer, to bridge gaps and perform "shuttle diplomacy" between IT & LOB.  I recently met a client with the title:  Executive Director or Organizational
  & Systems Development -- it really shows a high level of commitment to cross-functional collaboration on his employer's part.
• Corporate Facilities.  Especially in large, distributed organizations, the Facilities organizations can be highly attuned to not just *where* people work, but also *how* they work.  Organizations such as New Ways of Working http://www.newwow.net/about-us have great resources to help organizations bridge these gaps.

In summary:  To paraphrase John Cougar Mellencamp, "It's a sad, sad, sad, sad [# of sads?] feeling when you're living on those in-betweens."  Have a plan for the "in-betweens" that involves both norms (to make the easy stuff as automatic as possible) and humans (to intervene and work across the field of business) to accelerate and optimize your collaboration technologies.

Happy collaborating, and GO SOX!

Fenway Magic and Turning Around a Team

The Red Sox are inspiring people all over New England and beyond.  Consistently high performance, a team ethos we haven't seen at Fenway in years, gut-wrenching late-inning drama, and a genuine personality (see also: #fearthebeard) have made them compelling to watch, especially when one considers the well-documented depths to which they fell in 2012, and that only six months ago, a bruised city turned to them for inspiration in the wake of the tragedy on Patriot's Day.

So, how did they turn things around so quickly?  I was fortunate to be able to work with my colleague Nancy Settle-Murphy, an expert in teamwork and organizational development (truth be told, I did little more than fact-check baseball information and flesh out a few metaphors) on an article that examines this "worst to first" phenomenon in more depth.  Enjoy!

The Sounds of (Disconnected) Silence

I had the great pleasure to attend this week's U.S. Open Championship golf tournament at Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, Maryland.  All in all, it was a remarkable experience on many levels: 

• the immense skill displayed by the players (as of this writing, Rory McIlroy was running away with the tournament),
• the beauty and challenge of a U.S. Open-caliber course, and
• the sheer logistical effort associated with getting approximately 45,000 patrons to and from the event, around the premises etc.

But the most interesting thing to me, something I haven't seen in many years, was an almost total absence of mobile devices:  phones, cameras, PDAs, and the like.  The USGA bans mobile phones and cameras from the Open to prevent distracting sounds at inopportune times, and spectators were told that mobile phones and other devices were not permitted on the grounds or even the shuttle buses.  In fact, we were wanded at the entrance to the club to enforce this, and there were "disallowed items" tents where spectators were forced to check their devices.

The downside:

• People lacked access to information they were used to ("Did Havret win the British Open?" "What's Phil Mickelson's wife's name again?" "What time is it?  I don't wear a watch anymore.").
• Coordinating meetups was exponentially more difficult than it had been since, say, 1995.  Something as simple as "Meet me at the concession stand behind the 7th green" had to be planned out before arriving at Congressional.
• A profusion of what looked like spasms from people continually and reflexively patting their pockets or groping for an absent belt-holstered phone. 

The upside:

• People were more engaged with what was going on around them (one of the great events in golf), and with each other, actually looking one another in the eye and mostly listening when spoken to.
• Other than some "overserved" patrons, people were generally walking in a straight line, with purpose, toward their destination, rather than weaving, head down, oblivious to the flow of people around them.

Overall the effect of this grand social experiment was...refreshing.  I don't know when or where I'll see something similar, but it made me cherish the "unplugged" time even as I counted down the hours until I could tweet and blog about it.

[Note:  A great article in the Washington Post about this phenomenon today provided inspiration for this post.]

Mashing up Private and Public

(Flickr photo hello, neighbours! by D'Arcy Norman)

As someone who is:

• active in several social media communities, 
• committed to helping clients think about how information is shared and secured,
• interested in current events (like the newly enacted Mass Privacy statute and well-publicized data security breaches), and
• fortunate to have access to some really smart people on topics involving knowledge management, social computing, and information security,

I think a lot about private vs public communications.

For a while, I have considered on-line privacy in light of a construct I first saw courtesy of Doug Cornelius through one of his many presentations (perhaps at the Boston KM Forum).  I appreciated the concise summary of how people share information on the internet via the "Four Ps:  Personal, Professional, Public, and Private."

Last week, I felt the lines among those four quadrants blur more than a little as I read the speaker's crib notes from a keynote presentation given at the recent South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) conference by danah boyd.  ms boyd is a researcher whose focus includes studying how young people use the internet and social media, and she spends a lot of time listening to young internet users and thinking about how expectations and social mores are evolving around the concept of privacy.

In Dr. boyd's keynote speech, she highlights several instances where online systems are evolving in unexpected ways (e.g., well-publicized unseemly goings-on on chatroulette, mash-ups of location-based applications used as farcical "robbery helpers"), and instances where service providers have changed the rules unexpectedly by commission or omission, often hiding under the self-serving rubric of "Privacy is Dead." 

If you live a fair amount of your life on-line (yes, I'm talking to you, Facebookers), a quick look to take stock of what information you're broadcasting, whether intentionally or inadvertently, on the Internet might be in order:  the best data point from Dr. boyd's presentation might be that 65% of Facebook users have left their privacy settings at the lowest level (all open to the public).  This is severely at odds with the Pew Foundation's research that 85% of all adults want to control who has access to their personal information.  Have you checked your privacy settings lately?

So, in addition to creating a reminder to yourself to get your car's oil changed, to change the batteries in your home's smoke detectors, and to get your annual free credit report, perhaps you should consider a periodic "on-line reputation monitoring" exercise.  Search for yourself using the search engine or your on-line social community of choice every few months, and see what you've been broadcasting about yourself to the world.  You may be surprised at what you find.

If you develop or use on-line communities in your place of work, heed Dr. boyd's advice to consider whether you are providing a space that is clearly and unequivocally public, or one that provides a feeling of privacy.  If the latter, spend time considering your policies and norms, and listen to your users to understand their expectations.  The price of publicly exposing information thought to be private can be enormous, in both economic and real human terms.  As Dr. boyd's examples illustrate, there are lives in the balance.

The Enchantress of Numbers

Whether they are colleagues, clients, or associates from my business, I am blessed to work with many women in the field of technology. 

Today, on Ada Lovelace Day, let us take a moment to remember the woman who often thought of as the first computer programmer, having written programs for computers (Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine) before they even existed. She is credited with being the first person with the vision to see computers (even before they were know as such) to perform functions beyond mathematical calculations.

The lingua franca of the US Department of Defense, the computer programming language Ada, is named after her, and Britain awards a medal and holds a competition for women in computer science in her name,  but Charles Babbage summed up his feelings for her most beautifully:

Forget this world and all its troubles and if
possible its multitudinous Charlatans — every thing
in short but the Enchantress of Numbers.

Blog Rally to Help the Boston Globe

[originally based on Paul Levy's idea -- I'm happy to contribute, and to be counted among the bloggers offered the chance to amplify this message]

We have all read recently about the threat of possible closure faced by the Boston Globe.  A number of Boston-based bloggers who care about the continued existence of the Globe have banded together in conducting a blog rally.  We are simultaneously posting this paragraph to solicit your ideas of steps the Globe could take to improve its financial picture.

We view the Globe as an important community resource, and we think that lots of people in the region agree and might have creative ideas that might help in this situation. So, here's your chance.  Please don't write with nasty comments and sarcasm:  Use this forum for thoughtful and interesting steps you would recommend to the management that would improve readership, enhance the Globe's community presence, and make money.  Who knows, someone here might come up with an idea that will work, or at least help.  Thank you.

As an inveterate reader, media junkie, blogger, thinker, and citizen, my visualizing Boston without the Globe is sad and scary.  I think of the role that the media plays as a check and balance to those in power (the famous line attributed to Jimmy Breslin about the media's role being "comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable" comes to mind), from government to church to corporations to higher education, and know that Boston needs a world-class daily newspaper.  So, how would YOU propose to save, improve, re-direct or otherwise enhance the Globe?

Inaugural Word Clouds: Bush vs Obama

Mike Volpe from HubSpot (thanks, Drew Smith [twitter:  @smith_drew] for the tip!), has a terrific blog if you're a marketer, or just interested in how people use language in marketing and interact with and consume social media.  He just posted a great blog article about comparing word clouds of the Bush 2000 inauguration speech and the Obama 2008 inauguration speech.  For those readers not familiar with the concept (i.e., if you missed this previous post, a word cloud or tag cloud is defined as:

"...a visualization of word frequencies. [A] tag cloud enables you to see how frequently words appear in a given text, or see the relationship between a column of words and a column of numbers.  The size of the word corresponds to the quantity associated with that word."
[source:  ManyEyes blog from IBM,  http://manyeyes.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/page/Tag_Cloud.html]

The comparison of speeches like these is a use case I've heard for a qualitative, visual analysis tool, and I'm pleased to see it actually used in a timely and topical way.  I have no desire for a political discussion here, so take a look for yourself, and see how the speeches compare when held up against one another.