Victus pro Scientia Opus -- Food for the Knowledge Worker

More Done Than Said

[Editor's Note: This will be the last post about baseball for a while.  I promise.  I had to get it out of my system. Thanks for indulging me.]

Those who know me know that I frequently can be found on baseball fields in the Greater Lowell, MA area, playing baseball in a men's baseball league.  It's a great release, gets us all outside in the summer sun, connects me to the game I grew up loving, and feeds my competitive juices just enough.

Recently, we held our annual end-of-season banquet where we celebrated, in muted fashion, the retirement of a friend and teammate with whom I've played for 11 of my 14
years in the league.  Because of his reticence and hatred of the limelight, a more public celebration, toast, roast, encomiums, etc. at the banquet were out of the question. 

HOWEVER, because of my process orientation, I (compulsively? Perhaps. Whatever.) I thought a lot about what I've learned from him over that time, as a sort of "lessons learned."  Here goes:

1. Know the game.  My teammate was a student of the game who had clearly received great coaching.  In addition to the natural talents he had, he understood the situation at any instant in the game, and knew the right offensive approach (e.g., take pitches to work the count when down by a few runs) or defensive play to "steal an out" in a key situation.  Larger lesson:  it's not just about technique (doing things right), but also about a broader understanding of the context (doing the right things).
2. Capitalize on your opponents' inattention.  Not infrequently, an opponent would hit one of my pitches for a double, and if he was a weaker hitter, he would be visibly happy/excited about the hit as he stood on second base. When the next hitter came to the plate, my teammate and I would frequently pick the still-celebrating player off second base.  There are many other instances of this, but most are too arcane (truly "inside baseball" stuff) or too competitively valuable going forward to share here.  Larger lesson:  Never take your eye off the ball.  Never stop competing.
3. If you don't have something useful to say, watch, listen, and keep your mouth shut.  My teammate was a man of few words, many of which were acerbic and hilarious, and he didn't have the highest tolerance for those who were unnecessarily chatty.  In fact, I'm not sure how he tolerated me and my incessant patter for as long as he did.  His quiet demeanor didn't mean he wasn't competitive and passionate about playing the game the right way, just that he led by action rather than words.  Larger lesson:  Shut up.  You might learn something.

There's an old expression, attributed to either Aesop or former Notre Dame football coach Lou Holtz, that goes:  "When all is said and done, more is said than done." 

Cheers to a friend and teammate who lived up to the opposite.

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.]