The first question to ask about strategy

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Are you a strategy competition guy?
Do you know the first question to ask about competitive strategy?

Roger Martin says this:

I look at the core strategy choices and ask myself if I could make the opposite choice without looking stupid .... The point is this: If the opposite of your core strategy choices looks stupid, then every competitor is going to have more or less the exact same strategy as you. That means that you are likely to be indistinguishable from your competitors

Well, that's certainly something to check yourself about: is a counter strategy or corollary stategy "stupid"? If so, no one is going to adopt it, and so everyone -- yourself included -- will line up with your strategy. What then is your competitive discriminator? After all, "me too" is not all that compelling.

Thus, the search is on:

• A strategy with a compelling discriminator
• A strategy that has a plausible alternative, less compelling, but nonetheless one that your competition could align with

I can't tell you how many business development sessions I've been in where the only thing the sales people (or marketing) can come up with is "me too". How does that win you any business?
Somehow, in the manner of Kano, you need to come up with the "Ah hah!"

And, is there a formula approach to "Ah hah!"? Not that I've ever found. The epiphany just happens, but mostly it happens with a lot of people interacting with high entropy: lots of disorder from which something gells.  It just happens!

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Networking with strangers

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I hate, hate, hate networking with strangers, especially in a big ballroom that is ostensibly a "networking session".

It turns out I'm not the only one

Dorie Clark seems to feel as I do (or, I feel as she does) about approaching total strangers with small talk and icebreakers lines.

She writes:

•  Make them come to you. The very best solution I’ve found for uncomfortable events where you don’t know anyone is arranging to be the speaker.
• Bring a friend.  When you have a “wingman” at your side to help highlight your accomplishments at networking events, it can give you the confidence you need to approach others and break into conversations.
• Have a few opening lines ready. They don’t have to be profound; the goal is to kickstart a dialogue
• Research in advance. Finally, it’s easier to talk to someone if they don’t feel like a stranger. Even if you haven’t met them in person before, having some background information about them can suggest possible topics of conversation.

By the way, there is a difference between introverted and shy. Shy is the problem here, more so than introvert. That's why the techniques Dorie suggests are more aimed at creating comfort in a crowd where a shy person is more likely to be outgoing if there is safety in the environment and setting.

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Government Brief: NASA Maintains Positive Trend for Large-Scale Projects

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Here's some news you can use: Traditional methods actually can work, even with a lot of software!

Take a look at this report from Appel* News:

A recent GAO report confirmed that cost and schedule growth among NASA’s major acquisition projects remains low compared with previous years.

In 2009, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) was mandated to review selected large-scale NASA programs, projects, and activities to assess the agency’s planning and execution. The GAO’s seventh annual assessment examined three areas: current performance of NASA’s portfolio of large-scale projects, the agency’s approach to developing and maturing critical technologies, and NASA’s efforts to reduce acquisitions risk and strengthen its management of large, complex projects.

Defined as having an estimated life-cycle cost of more than $250 million, the 16 major projects examined by the GAO included 12 in the implementation stage—for which cost and schedule baselines exist—and 4 in the formulation stage.

Among the projects, the GAO found that cost and schedule growth remained low, with a total cost growth of 2.4% compared with 3% for the previous year* and an average schedule increase of just three months compared with original baseline schedules.

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Appel: "Academy of program/project & engineering leadership", a unit of NASA

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Riding a bicycle

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Are you steeped in experience? Is doing a project like riding a bicycle? No matter how long it's been, you can get on a ride. There are basics that are so instinctive and built-in that they are almost mindless... you do it the same way every time, and each new experience draws on those instincts.

Take a look at this and you might give your instincts a second thought:

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You've got institutional knowledge

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Hey team ... Great job ... See you next time we need a job done, for sure.

But what are you leaving behind as institutional knowledge?

• If Agile, then a working product (but who knows how it works?)
• If traditional, then a working product plus a knowledge base of documents, some useful and some worthless (but how do you know which is which?)
• If hybrid --- Agile in the waterfall as it were ---  then hopefully you've worked out a protocol of minimum but useful stuff to institutionalize. 

By now you've probably figured out my bias. Team retrospection is good, necessary, but sometimes too private. Some stuff, especially lessons learned, needs institutional storage, indexing, and retrieval capability. 

Of course on the other hand the traditionalists often big down on document authoring and maintenance, the latter being as important as any other function lest the former be obsoleted. 

So message and media are the beginning of a useful knowledge base to be sure. But, there's actually little institutional knowledge if members of the institution can't find it and can't trust it once found. 

So two issues. 

1. Store for retrieval, and
2. Validate for trustworthiness. 

Re 1: as any archivist will tell you, there's a big difference in the "store it schematic" and the "retrieve it schematic".  And regardless of schematic (data schema) you will need indexing and a means to form queries. 

Re 2: this one is expensive and consuming. It's clearly pay me now or pay me later. If you don't invest in validation then you will invest in correcting later on.

Hey, did I say you could leave?!

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Ideology: a project driver?

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Ideology: "A systematic scheme of ideas used to justify a policy"

Simon Heffer,
"A short history of power" 

Heffer goes on to say: "Defense of values and identity is a statement of ideology."

Is this news you can use?

I don't want to make a big deal of this, but when I read Heffer I was somewhat struck by idea of a "systematic scheme" as a description of ideology. I wouldn't call my personal ideology systematic, nor capable of being put down as a schematic (scheme)

On the other hand ..........
When it comes to doing projects there maybe something here that's actionable

• The enterprise certainly has values, but if the organization is big enough, there are probably multiple value sets, each by a "senior executive" with their own turf. Thus, if you're doing projects across the enterprise, there may be multiple ideologies to contend with, and they may clash.
  Your action: to be the risk manager where there are collisions of ideology
• I've always thought of policy as a consequence of ideology, but Heffer puts it the other way around: ideology as justification for policy.
  What does that mean for you? Beware policies with no foundation in values; such polices can be changed on a dime, and then values retrofit to justify them. Troubling, to be sure
• Some good news: if you begin with a value set, then just the defense of those values is an ideology. For many, certainly for me, I can describe my values easier than I can describe an ideology
  Project managers: Your project inherits values from your sponsor, and melds them with values inherited from your training and experience, maybe also from some rules that are written down.
  
  Thus, projects are going to have a synthesized ideology, thus a synthesized value set. Consequently, as you assemble the team, some training (should I say indoctrination?) required.
  
  Read as: slower velocity in the beginning, some schedule required and some cost to establish the ideology!

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Process: Reflection, refinement, tuning,

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Any process that does not have provisions for its own refinement will eventually fail or be abandoned*

- W. R. Corcoran

Corcoran is probably correct --- but how would we know? There are a lot of processes out there, many have been around forever, many oldies still effective. But, I take his point: change, adapt, or fade away to either obsolescence or irrelevance.

Of course, naturally changing demographics takes care of a lot of this somewhat automatically. New organizations, people new to organizations, and young people without the baggage of experience all tend to reinvent.

And, why not? The wheels of today are far superior to the wheels of ancient times. Can you imagine taking your chariot in to have the wheels balanced? Not likely. Perhaps the wheel does need reinvention from time to time.

Of course, we digress: reinvention is not exactly refinement, which suggests tuning on the margins. Refinement is more about lessons learned, feedback, TQM metrics, and the like, all aimed at weeding out the ineffective.

Of course, if you are locked into some kind of maturity model or ISO certification, refinement is no small matter, as changes must find their way into documentation, training, deployment, and so on.

Nonetheless, I get it: change, adapt, or fade away to either obsolescence or irrelevance.

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Quoted by Glen Alleman from "The Phoenix Handbook: The Ultimate Event Evaluation Manual for Finding Profit Improvement in Adverse Events, Nuclear Safety Review Concepts, 19 October 1997."



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Customer focus -- a quotation

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If the customer is not satisfied, he may not want to pay for our efforts. If the customer is not successful, he may not be able to pay. If he is not more successful than he al­ready was, why should he pay?

Niels Malotaux

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Is it a plan if no one is assigned?

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Our topic today: Is it a plan if no one is assigned to the tasks in the plan?

That is more or less the question posed by Agilist Mike Cohn in a recent posting:
Paraphrasing: if your team has an Agile iteration (sprint) planning meeting, and you talk about all the stuff that needs to get done, and the tasks necessary thereto, but you have a culture of no one signs up for anything, have you a plan, and should this be the process?

I'm from the school of "unscheduled events don't happen", and schedules require resources, else they are more a hope than a schedule

So, I was a bit surprised that this question even comes up. Any sprint planning I'm in ends with confidence that things will get done because we know who is going to do them.

Lecture ends here

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Excuse me, but what job did you say?

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Agile Principle 5: Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

Trust them to get the job done. What job?

• Is it the job described in the business plan and in subsequent project plans, albeit lean plans consistent with the Agile Manifesto?
• Is it the job that has been estimated and scheduled?
• Is it the job as interpreted in near real time by the functional user?
• Is it the job that evolves over several iterations and is adapted to the emergent value proposition?

Trust them to get the job done. What’s the definition of “DONE”?

• Is it done when time/money runs out?
• Is it done when the backlog is fully exhausted?
• Or, is it done when the customer says it's done, or someone else says it is done?

If you can't give a 30 second elevator speech on each of these to the satisfaction of sponsor, product owner, and customer/user, you are not ready for prime time

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