After the Victory

So, let us imagine that we have successfully implemented a process improvement. Victory at last! What may surprise many readers is that the improvement effort has not completed yet. In fact, a large percentage of successful process improvement efforts slide back to square one after the improvement has been made and the effort declared a success.

Let us take a closer look at this phenomenon. What typically happens after a successful improvement effort is that the improvement team or specialist gets moved to another improvement effort. Upper management, too, lessen their attention on the team that was undergoing the improvement. This results in the recently improved team or department in a fledgling state and very susceptible to moving back to their old (bad) habits. Furthermore, they may not be entirely comfortable with the analysis and effort required and without the specialist’s presence may end up spending excessive time and effort on what should be quick and easy. This in turn gravitates the team members to go back to their old ways.

To ensure that this does not happen, even after an improvement effort is declared a success, lines of communication between leadership, the improvement specialists and the team being improved must remain open. Regular checkups with the team should be performed by the improvement specialists albeit less frequently. An improvement effort is not an on/off switch but rather a living, breathing thing that must be properly cared for.

The Cubicle Shuffle

At my client organization’s offices, an interesting and traumatic event for those affected by it was the usual employee cubicle shuffle, where recently moved people had to box up and shift elsewhere. Now, there are many reasons why such a sequence of events would take place (and sometimes they are out of human hands). Generally, however, this is due to poor resource management.

When folks hear about People Management, they generally think along the lines of motivation and psychological counseling and support. However, the most basic part of the organization is the staff and their management at the most basic level involves management of their shelter and place of work. This repeated cubicle shuffle simply denotes the lack of organizational planning to accommodate the most basic requirements of your most basic components.

Effective people management begins with a CMDB that records not only the basic information about the employee such as cubicle number, email address, phone number etc. but also makes note of their skills and capabilities including past experience and skill sets. Much can be researched and perused on the net regarding this topic, but the magic is in the implementation of it.

The Magnificent Seven

In the pursuit of quality, it is necessary to utilize techniques to analyze and evaluate metrics in a quality-oriented fashion. There are seven basic techniques that have been utilized for many decades now in the world of quality management. The utilization of these techniques has resulted in organizations making great strides in their quality management efficiency and quality delivered to the customer.

The seven techniques are as follows:

• Cause and Effect Diagram (Ishikawa Diagram): This breaks down the possible cause of a variation from specifications into six different areas – People, Methods, Machines, Materials, Measurements and Environment. These can be further subdivided into smaller components. The basic idea is to link these areas to the process in order to evaluate which area (or sub-area) could be causing problems. This can be used proactively to evaluate the process for problems before they happen or reactively to zero in on a problem once it has manifested itself.



• Check Sheet: This is a simple document that is used for collecting data in real-time and at the location where the data is generated. The document is typically a blank form that is designed for the quick, easy, and efficient recording of the desired information, which can be either quantitative or qualitative. When the information is quantitative, the check sheet is sometimes called a tally sheet. There are 5 basic types of check sheets: Classification, Location, Frequency, Measurement Scale and Check List.


Control Charts: A control chart consists of points representing a statistic with
• mean, standard deviation and upper and lower control limits also displayed. If analysis of the control chart indicates that the process is currently under control then data from the process can be used to predict the future performance of the process. If the chart indicates that the process being monitored is not in control, analysis of the chart can help determine the sources of variation, which can then be eliminated to bring the process back into control.



• Histogram: A histogram consists of tabular frequencies, shown as adjacent rectangles, erected over discrete intervals (bins), with an area equal to the frequency of the observations in the interval. Histograms are used to plot density of data, and often for density estimation: estimating the probability density function of the underlying variable. The histogram provides insight on the problem (or potential problem) that may be related to the data being plotted.



• Pareto Chart: A Pareto chart contains both bars and a line graph, where individual values are represented in descending order by bars, and the cumulative total is represented by the line. The purpose of the Pareto chart is to highlight the most important among a (typically large) set of factors. In quality control, it often represents the most common sources of defects, the highest occurring type of defect, or the most frequent reasons for customer complaints, and so on.



• Scatter Diagram: A scatter diagram uses Cartesian co-ordinates to display values for two variables for a set of data. A scatter plot can suggest various kinds of correlations between variables with a certain confidence interval. Correlations may be positive (rising), negative (falling), or null (uncorrelated). If the pattern of dots slopes from lower left to upper right, it suggests a positive correlation between the variables being studied. If the pattern of dots slopes from upper left to lower right, it suggests a negative correlation. A line of best fit (alternatively called 'trend line') can be drawn in order to study the correlation between the variables.



• Stratification: Stratification is a technique that separates data gathered from a variety of sources so that patterns can be observed. These patterns can then be further analyzed to zero in on the root cause of the problem.

The seven basic techniques of quality management have been staples in the toolbox of any quality professional for a long time now. It does not take a lot of effort to start utilizing these techniques in your organization quickly and efficiently. There is really no reason why any and every company shouldn’t be using these tools extensively.

Business’ Disappointment

At my client organization’s offices, while passing through, I overheard two ladies in the marketing team expressing their dissatisfaction with IT and the help desk in particular. I stopped and spoke with them a little bit about what was troubling them. What emerged was the usual lack of quality and support provided by IT for the applications that they use to perform their job functions.

What IT must always keep in the forefront of their minds is that they are ultimately servicing the business. If staff in business cannot access the applications that they require to perform their duties, then this will result in their incapability to bring in new business and increase sales volume. This, in turn, will lower the organization’s competitiveness and damage the brand image. Ultimately, this will result in lower profits and less resources available to all departments including IT.

I have always emphasized that IT is key in today’s times. Most other departments within the typical organization (Sales, Marketing, HR, Accounts etc.) are fairly mature. However, IT is relatively new in that processing information utilizing computers has only been going on for a few decades or so. Sales and marketing have, in their way, been occurring since the dawn of time. What this means is that, generally, IT has the greatest potential for improvement within the organization. A 10% improvement is usually quite easy to achieve in the IT department of most organizations, if not a much higher percentage. If an organization can improve their IT by that amount, it is obvious that they will surge ahead of the competition due to the efficiencies that will be inherent in this improvement to the entire organization. IT is, therefore, the most significant catalyst to an organization’s success nowadays.

It is easy for IT to pigeonhole itself inconstantly putting out fires and only focusing on meeting quarterly numbers. However, this is a short sighted strategy that will hinder the organization and ultimately hurt IT. Constant improvement is not a luxury but a necessity for all of us, especially IT.

Skills Management

With IT being more knowledge centric and requiring an ever greater array of skill sets to get things done, one of the major challenges facing organizations today is the effective management of skills.

Now the skills can be brought on board in a number of ways. There is the option of acquiring In-House talent a.k.a. Full Time Employees. One could get Contractors (which is essentially the same thing nowadays). Consultants could be brought in as well. And then we have the ever present outsourcing option as well.

It is in the regular evaluation, analysis and relevant action in the area of employee/supplier skill set that the effective management of the organizations skills can be successfully undertaken. The ITIL body of knowledge refers to this as Supplier Management and outlines a strategy of classifying suppliers (which can be said to include employees as well) into long and short term suppliers as well as strategic or commodity suppliers. There are, of course, many different techniques and tools to perform the task of managing the skills and suppliers of the organization and these are readily available online. The focus of this post is to emphasize the need for these techniques and the warning to avoid the trap of forever being in fire-fighting mode and not ever getting to perform this important task.

There are many aspects to IT management. Some tasks are considered “essential” such as the successful completion of a critical project. Other tasks such as Skills Management are generally fall into the “we’ll get to them if we can” category. While the completion of the critical project will keep the lights on for tomorrow, it is the other tasks that distinguish a ordinary organization form a world class one.

The Wisdom Hierarchy

The Wisdom hierarchy is often mentioned in passing and for a lot of folks is a new topic. It is, however, a great way to gauge the state of an organizations’ (or teams, or even individuals) depth of understanding of a topic.

The components of the Wisdom Hierarchy consist of Data, Information, Knowledge and Wisdom. The first component, Data, is simply that. Usually data is a list of numbers that provide almost no meaning to anyone, unless they are connected in some way to some context. Typically data is unorganized and unprocessed.

Information, the next evolution in the hierarchy, is described as “organized or structured data, which has been processed in such a way that the information now has relevance for a specific purpose or context, and is therefore meaningful, valuable, useful and relevant”.

Knowledge is then derived from information, also applying experiences and insights gained through true cognitive and analytical activity. If someone "memorizes" information, then they have amassed knowledge. This knowledge has useful meaning to them, but it does not provide for, in and of itself, a way to further the knowledge.

Wisdom is the accumulation of the previous levels along with a deep understanding that enables the ability to increase effectiveness.

As readers may have guessed, it is the ability to operate at levels of wisdom that every individual, team and organization should aspire towards. However, how is this to be accomplished? Why, with proper process improvement techniques in place, of course.

The Strategic Plan

The one thing most companies do not create or work out of is a strategic plan. Now I am not talking about a project plan that should be (and is also usually not properly) created for every project but a master strategic plan for the IT department of the organization. This plan should cover a lot of different issues and plan for the long term growth of the company.

The strategic plan should of course first and foremost define and build upon the relationship between the products and services that a company produces and the utilization of these by its customers. This, in the end is the life blood of any business endeavor whether it is IT or retail sales. Financial management, Demand management and just good old fashioned service strategy must be performed to achieve this.

Of course, technology must be involved to decide what should be researched and developed in the future in order for the organization to be more competitive. Constant technological improvement is the lifeblood of any technological organization or department. This is obvious.

Furthermore, supplier management should also be considered in a longer term role within the overall strategy. Possibly, certain suppliers should be handled as longer term partners while other suppliers have a less intimate relationship with the organization. By the same token, a plan for the staff should be thought of and monitored in order to reduce the dramatic changes brought on people’s lives with changes in their employment status.

In reality all aspects of the organization must be considered at the high level and incorporated in a strategic plan. Individual project plans and so on should be deeper dives in to the overall strategic plan. It is the author’s hope that top management performs strategic planning in a well organized and complete way.

Science is not a Democracy

This post might be one of the more meaningful and pertinent to today’s times that I have published in a while. A phenomenon that I have observed taking place is the inclusion of people of various different educational backgrounds working together in the same team. Now this brings together Engineers with Sociology, Psychology and English majors (with no technical knowledge or training). What proceeds to generally happen next is a free for all with everyone trying to come up with the answer in order to get the much vaunted promotion.

The answer to 2+2 is 4. It is not 3. It is not 5. And it will never be anything but 4. Even if all the non mathematics majors go on indefinite strike insisting that in their opinion it should be 3, the correct answer will be 4. If you were to throw a ball up in the air, it will eventually reach an apogee after which it will fall back down (real estate owners, are you listening?) to where it was projected from. The world of science is not a democracy. The laws of physics are not open to debate. Yes, you might be able to circumnavigate the law of gravity (for example) utilizing an airplane but even that follows certain laws of aerodynamics of its own. So what I am trying to illustrate here is that there is one right answer in science and countless wrong answers. Science is not like a philosophy paper that you handed your professor in college with the knowledge that you would at least be guaranteed a “C” grade. In science it’s either an “A” or an “F”.

Now let us go back to our scenario of many different expertise levels working together on a project. What I have seen happen often and is a major stumbling block to efficiency is that people who have no clue regarding what the right answer is will insist of speaking “their turn” and forcing their incorrect answer on everyone. If an attempt is made to try and shut these people up, they will instantly round on that person and accuse them of attempting to stifle them and be a “bully”. In extreme cases, the “human rights” of these people will be claimed to have been violated. The manager often ends up playing the role of the judge and a great deal of time and effort is wasted not to mention many times the wrong decision being taken because the English majors were feeling “left out” and the consequences of the wrong decision in terms of defects and rework.

What is really to blame here is the old boys (or old girls) network style of doing things where someone with 10 years of experience in the company has to be taken care of even if they have no knowledge of the position that they are now in. Truly, management needs to handle this situation effectively as what will happen is that the people with expertise will simply leave for better environments to be found at other organizations. Then the company will simply be left with “human rights activists” and zero technical expertise. Management really needs to let people with low technical expertise know what the problem is and to get them to stay out of the way of people with technical expertise.

Sneaking in Improvement

One thing that I have noticed recently is the tendency of companies to move operations to other states to avoid higher taxes in certain states. This is particularly true of California which has the highest taxes for businesses anywhere in the USA. Of course a similar phenomenon has been going on for years with outsourcing to other countries. Now I am not arguing for or against this type of action as it varies from organization to organization and the specific issues concerning each organization. However what I am suggesting is that process improvement could be sneaked in during these times of upheaval as they create the opportunity to get past the usual petty politics during normal times.

The great thing about times of change that involve cost cutting is that the petty power games get steamrollered over by the change coming through. This lessening of petty power politics allows the organization to employ process improvement methodologies and best practices far more easily than during normal times. Of course care must be taken to balance the implementation of process improvement along with the organizational changes that are taking place. However, in spite of the organizational changes taking place, I feel that there is an opportunity to make positive changes that would be difficult in normal times.

It is sad but true that organizations must sneak in something as important as process improvement when people’s guards are down. Until people’s attitude towards process improvement changes, it will have to be performed in whatever way it can be done.

Petty Little Power Games

If I could travel back in time, I would among other things (buying Microsoft stock at the right time etc.) ask the titans of Quality (Deming, Crosby, Juran etc.) how they navigated past the petty power struggles.

To clarify what I mean, I was asked recently why best practices are not widely implemented. My answer? “Petty power struggles”. What do I mean by that? Consider an organization that is low maturity and does not implement the best practices out today. Inspite of its low maturity, there is a sort of structure there. People after years of working there have become managers, directors etc. They have a pecking order of sorts. Now consider that a best practice like ITIL is to be implemented at this organization. The first thing about this development that will strike terror in everyone’s heart is the potential damage that this would bring to the various little power structures all over. A person who was a manger may now no longer be one and someone with ITIL certification could possibly be in a more commanding position. This could occur at all different levels across the organization. So how do people respond to this possible threat? By not implementing the best practice and keeping the status quo. If management insists, the “threatened” staff find numerous ways to cause problems, delays and confusion that effectively bring the implementation to a grinding halt. The most common is that the current project that needs to be completed will be delayed if a best practice implementation is to be performed. This effectively frightens the upper management into delaying the implementation until this important project is completed. At this point the game is as good as over. All the staff have to do now is threaten the well being of other projects as they come down the pipeline and the implementation effort is effectively history.

Over and above this, staff can be deliberately difficult, deliberately dense and intentionally make mistakes in the implementation effort to further undermine it. The one thing they usually do not do is study up on it and become experts at it thus ensuring a position of power in the new way of doing things. That would be the obvious and straightforward way of doing things, but human nature being what it is, the more difficult path is generally chosen in order to preserve the present (and inefficient) status quo.

What these obstructers do not realize is that the future will involve best practices whether they like it or not. The only question is how smoothly or otherwise the best practices will be implemented and with what fallout.

Negativity Doesn't Help

Last year this blog site did quite well at the Computer Weekly IT blog awards for 2009. Out of a sense of curiosity, I went to the blog site of one of the other sites that had done well also to have a look at what they were up to. I was surprised and dismayed that this other site seemed to do nothing besides ridicule and put down ITIL and other methodologies. Now, of course if a scam of some sort exists and someone is spreading the word on that, they are doing the world a favor. However, to mindlessly put down something that has been designed to help seem seems quite pointless.

The interesting part of this for me is that ITIL is quite benign. You can do what you want with it. You can turn around and have nothing to do with it or you could partially implement some of it or you could go the whole hog and really implement all aspects of it to a rigorous level. The choice is up to you. So why blame ITIL? Why the negativity?

It would seem that people will do anything and everything except the right thing. There is no use in either being negative or attacking something that is there to help. Particularly if the choice is in your hands and you can use it or not as you please. My experience has been that any methodology works if implemented correctly and all methodologies fail if implemented incorrectly. So really it’s up to you.

Making Matrixed Work

The matrixed style of management is becoming more and more popular in IT project and services nowadays. It would also seem that this style will continue to gain popularity in the future as well. However, like anything in this world, there are advantages and disadvantages to this style of management and there can be problems with this approach if the potential negatives are not handled correctly.

The matrixed style can basically be summarized as the selection of staff from a function or bench to perform tasks in a project which upon completion results in their returning to their function or bench to await subsequent deployment. The advantages of this are:

• Much greater agility, especially when the organization has to handle multiple projects simultaneously



• Individuals can be chosen according to the needs of the project



• Greater individual contribution as the staff members of a matrixed environment have each been chosen for their specific skill set



• Project managers have greater autonomy and control over the project management

The disadvantages of the matrixed environment are:

• Conflict between the home department and the project for staff members



• Difficulty in managing the project of the project manager does not have enough power



• Staff morale is reduced due to stress of having to find another project to work on

The matrixed environment is attractive because the disadvantages can be managed leaving the organization to reap the benefits of the advantages. So what can be done to ensure that the matrixed environment can work? Some suggestions are:

• Identifying team members and ensuring the proper line of command over them is established to disallow any chance of conflicting work assignments



• Establishing effective communication channels. This is crucial because the staff members will be getting potentially conflicting information from their “home’ departments. Therefore, communication has to be extremely solid



• Effective project information dissemination. The matrixed structure offers a higher potential of staff not getting the information that they should get regarding the project. This should be thought about and planned for right from the beginning

Of course much more information regarding the structure and management of matrixed organization exists and the interested reader can research this online. It is just a shame to me that a efficient way of doing things gets a bad name simply because of the simple avoidance of some the pitfalls.

The Point of Statistics

Out and about in the world of IT, I tend to see a great deal of variety as I meet with different organizations and individuals. One thing that a lot of people (especially without a technical background) tend to be unclear about is the basic reason for the existence of statistics. Improvement initiatives like Six Sigma rely heavily on statistics and it is a good idea for those weak in this area to strengthen up and learn a bit more about it. The purpose of this week’s post is to get folks started with a high level summary of the topic and those that are interested can research the topic further online.

Statistics exists mainly because you cannot measure everything. Let me illustrate this with an example. Let us assume that I own a paper clip manufacturing company. Now this company is manufacturing one million paper clips a day utilizing four different machines. Can I measure and test each of the million paper clips being produced every day? I would require a staff of at least 10,000 to do that which would drive me into a loss making state very quickly. So what do I do? I take a “sample” of the 1,000,000 clips being produced (also known as the “population”). The derivation of the sample could be performed in many thought provoking ways. As there are four machines, perhaps a sample of 1,000 clips could be taken from each machine on the hour every hour for a total of 32,000 clips to be tested for defects. This way if a particular machine is malfunctioning, it will be quickly and easily spotted. Of course, there are many permutations and combinations of deriving the sample units from the population, this being only one of many.

Astute readers will have noticed one problem with all of this and it is the following: we produced 1,000,000 paper clips and we only tested 32,000. How do we know that this sample accurately represented the population? What if we only tested the 32,000 that were good and the remaining 968,000 are bad? And this is where statistics helps us. Not only can we perform useful operations like mean, median and standard deviation on our sample, we can use statistical techniques to tell us how accurately the sample’s data co-relates to the population itself. So, in our example, we can say that the sample of 32,000 turned out to be 98% defect free and we are 90% sure that the remaining units of the rest are the population also are 98% defect free. This, ability to predict quality levels of the units that were never tested is the chief strength of statistics and the various techniques of statistics that exist. Of course there are other applications of statistics, but this is the primary one.

I speak of statistics this week because it is about time that IT organizations start utilizing all the tools available to them through this discipline and improving their efficiency. There are organizations that utilize function points and advanced statistical techniques in a big way and they are at levels of efficiency that are going to be very hard to beat. It’s time for the others to get going.

The Love of Ad-Hoc

I was yet again exposed last week to an instance of an organization performing their tasks in an ad-hoc style. I see this seemingly in built preference to ad-hoc so often that it strikes me as remarkable. While there should be a consideration towards reduction of cost and efficiency and optimization, ad-hoc is not the path to effective cost cutting, efficiency or optimization. A lot of work is required for achieving these 3 characteristics and simply avoiding any effort at structuring the way things are performed is not beneficial in any way.

And yet, ad-hoc is so prevalent even today. From an ad-hoc style of gathering requirements to an ad hoc style of designing, developing and testing, the ad-hoc way seems quite ubiquitous. Why is this? I think that it really just boils down to laziness and inertia. Sure, there is some measure of ignorance and lack of awareness of the current best practices out there, but this, too, can be finally attributed to laziness. Perhaps the feeling of comfort that comes from leaving things alone is also a factor. “Don’t fix it if it isn’t broken” seems to be the mantra of safety. However, the problem with this is that your competition isn’t leaving well enough alone. The competition is marching forward and if you don’t you will be left in the dust.

Hoshin Kanri

After postings of a more philosophical nature, let us delve into the nuts and bolts of IT process improvement with Hoshin Kanri. In Japanese, “hoshin” means shining metal, compass, or pointing the direction and “kanri” means management or control. The name describes the alignment an organization towards accomplishing a goal through effective planning.

Hoshin Kanri links the high level executive goals and objectives to increasingly lower levels of management and activities until the lowest level activity is aligned to the organization’s overall objectives.

At the beginning of the Hoshin Planning process, top management sets the overall vision and the annual high-level policies and targets for the company. At each level moving downward, managers and employees participate in the definition—from the overall vision and their annual targets—of the strategy and detailed action plan they will use to attain their targets. They also define the measures that will be used to demonstrate that they have successfully achieved their targets. Then, targets, in turn are passed on to the next level down. Regular reviews take place to identify progress and problems, and to initiate corrective action.

The levels of activity from high to low are:

• Corporate level objectives



• Service level Objectives



• Functional Objectives



• Team Objectives



• Specific Activities, Goals & Resources

The advantage of this type of setup is that not only is the organization aligned towards high level objective but it is also very well positioned to quickly make adjustments to change in strategy. That is, a higher degree of agility and ability to rapidly change will be introduced. A better setup of accountability will also exist with Hoshin Kanri.

Hoshin Kanri is another tactical advantage an organization can give itself. It is not an end-all or be-all but it can help optimize things further. The interested reader can find out more about this technique online.

The Trust Factor

As I spend more and more time and effort promoting the implementation of best practices, it emerges, more and more that the first and most important step is trust. Trust in the person giving advice and recommendation, trust in the process methodologies and finally trust in themselves: that they can implement the best practices successfully.

Usually all three areas of trust are missing. This then requires the process of gaining trust from people and the organization. However, trust is something that has to be earned and typically earned over time. Consistent reliable, dependable performance over time is usually what builds trust. This can be done to achieve the trust required but can an organization afford the time required for this trust to fall in place? The time involved could easily be months, perhaps years. By this time, the competition could have implemented these strategies and best practices and moved far ahead in the race.

Therefore, it is necessary that organizations and people quickly gain trust in what is best for them. This, however, is something they must decide. And there we have the Catch-22. How do they decide what is right for them when they don’t trust it? The only way out of this quandary is awareness and education. Become more aware of the best practices out there and the ability to make the right choices will get a lot easier.

The conclusion is that a higher degree of awareness and knowledge is needed to have the right level of trust for the right technique. Those who do not improve continuously will pay the price for their lackadaisical attitude.

Decisive Action

There are far too many people out there, at all levels, from top management to entry level, that are allergic to taking decisive action. Now a decisive action does not mean a stupid action. It does not mean an improperly thought out, unplanned, immature action. I mean the type of action where a stand of some sort is made and held to instead of the typical wishy-washy let’s stay forever safe and not get anywhere type of fence sitting that has resulted in the IT industry being so chaotic and unstructured.

Not every minute of every day is going to require decisive action. But when the need for such action is required, it is imperative that it be taken. Perhaps the greatest general ever, Napoleon Bonaparte, was famous for taking decisive actions that would alter the course of history, sometimes in the thick of battle. What he is less famous for is the huge amount of planning and preparation he went through prior to his decision making. The result? A legend, who almost took over all of Europe.

Now, we in our cubicles and offices need not worry about being a Napoleon, making life or death decisions, but the principle remains the same as does the benefit. So how does all this apply to IT Process Improvement? To cite just one example, when a decision to implement a methodology is made, it should be implemented with a decisive, do or die energy. Now this does not mean that it should not be carefully monitored and course corrections taken. This does not mean that risk analysis and mitigation be not performed. It does mean that we don’t give up at the first obstacle that comes by or worse even not take the decision to implement an improvement in the first place. Even an entry level person in his cubicle can apply decisive action taking in small and measured ways. Of course, if the organizational culture is one of non-decisiveness then it may be best to be discrete in this aspect as I can testify by my own experiences. This is an ideology that is most effective when applied by the senior management and it naturally trickles down to the lower levels as the organizational culture becomes imbued with a certain fearlessness.

Plan carefully and then take decisive action. This has always been the way of the truly successful.

The Unwanted Stepchild

Speaking with a client last week, I was yet again made to realize the lack of emphasis placed on continual improvement at all levels within the organization. The roles in their organization were based on frantic attempts to make it through the day with essentially no emphasis on any sort of improvement initiatives. It would seem that improvement is considered the stepchild in most IT organizations. And yet this is the most effective long term strategy an organization can employ to get ahead of the competition.

Oh sure, there is a conceptual agreement that there should always be continual improvement. However, when the rubber hits the road, it all falls apart. Why is this?

Mostly, it’s a lack of commitment and follow-through at all levels within the organization. Lack of planning and not keeping up with changing techniques and methodologies is also to blame. Perhaps most telling of all is what I hear consistently that not all new methodologies are “good”. Or just because some governing body has released a new body of knowledge, it is not necessary to implement it. Perhaps so, but it is surely necessary to be aware of it and at least consider it. On this topic, I would like to emphasize that most reputable governing bodies (PMI, ASQ, QAI etc.) have very deeply field tested bodies of knowledge. These techniques and methodologies were created by academics and industry professionals and then utilized in the field numerous times before even being brought to the public. Most people are unaware that ITIL is over 21 years old. Things don’t stay around for 21 years in the IT industry unless there is something to them.

The fact of the matter is that there are a huge number of improvement tools, techniques and methodologies out there. But the desire to implement all this needs to be realized. Until then, continual improvement will remain an unwanted stepchild.

Sifting Through the Avalanche

With the topic of age and leadership analyzed to death in the last couple of weeks, an issue that came up repeatedly was is there really a necessity for constant learning by everyone. The challenging thing about this issue is that there is a huge volume of information and change coming at us all at the speed of light. So how do we sift through this vast amount of information in a way that most benefits us? Clearly, we cannot ignore all this information and do nothing. And yet it is humanely impossible for one person to learn everything. So what is the answer?

The most obvious starting point would be to specialize in one’s area of expertise. This means that a Project Manager should pay special attention to the changes in tools, techniques and methodologies that are occurring in the area of project management and to ensure that they learnt what was important and relevant to them. However, staying current in one’s area of specialization is the bare minimum required nowadays.

It is at this point that the IT professional must choose where they wish to move towards in terms of their career and longer term goals and keep current with that. Also, one area that most IT professionals would do well to master is the use of proper terminology and an awareness of what the industry standard is even if it is not utilized at their place of work. A higher level learning of overall management techniques such as ITIL and CMMI may also be a good idea, irrespective of specialization.

Over and above this, folks will want to keep up with the culture of the times which is changing all the time as well. It was not very long ago that Facebook, Twitter and MySpace were pretty much unheard of. Now Facebook has overtaken Google for the number of hits worldwide. Clearly this is something both individuals and organizations must keep abreast of now.

It’s getting to be so that constant learning is now a mandatory part of our lives. It’s a question of how smart we can be about it. Like anything else it’s going to be a challenge of getting the most bang for the buck, or in this case, time.

Age and Leadership 2 – Stayin’ Hip

Last week’s post on age and leadership sparked some lively debate on various discussion boards. The range of issues brought forward by various people and their points of view resulted in a continuation of the topic with this week’s post. Many thanks to the people who posted their point of view and sparked debate and discussion. After all that is what a blog is all about.

Let us start at the beginning. As IT projects usually start with requirements definition, let us also start with the requirements necessary for leadership positions. After all how can we discuss the effect that age has on leadership abilities when the leadership abilities themselves are undefined? Some of the criteria for effective leadership are:

• Communication skills



• Problem solving skills



• Adaptability to change



• Time management



• Stress management



• Interpersonal relations and teamwork



• Ability to set goals and articulate a vision



• Managing conflict

This is, of course, not a comprehensive list, but it does cover most of the criteria. The interesting thing about this list is that it has been true and relatively unchanged for millennia. So how does the current age of information and technology affect these criteria? How are these issues affected by the fact that we are in the year 2010?

Adaptability to change has never been as important and that too, at all levels. Market changes, customer preference changes, technology changes, methodology changes, tools and technique changes are all occurring at incredible speed. Of course not all changes are necessary or even good. However, the ability to make the decision on which change to implement is necessary and this can only be achieved by being very well informed and in touch with what is current.

Furthermore, all the other criteria now require knowledge of the latest tools and techniques to accomplish effectively. Time management is not possible without the latest handheld device and mail, VoIP and other technologies today.

For true leadership, the ability to read the future, i.e. the visionary capability, is impossible without a thorough understanding of the market and the culture of the times, which is vastly different from just 10 years ago. I, myself, have to keep going to urbandictionary.com to lookup words that did not exist a few years ago.

So what emerges is that a great deal of extra effort is required by all professionals nowadays and senior management in particular to keep up with all that is necessary to perform their duties effectively. What steps could be taken to achieve these leadership abilities relevant to our times? Some effective steps that can be undertaken are:

• Constant learning (or at the least, awareness) of new technology and methodologies



• Regular association with younger people and observance of their activities



• Staying current of the "lingo" used nowadays (which is a job in and of itself)



• Being open to change and constantly adapting to the new changes in technology AND culture.

In my opinion, the professional who performs these steps will be useful irrespective of age. Even an 18 year old who fails to perform these steps will be obsolete. Perhaps the moral of the story is that we must remain in a state of constant learning more than ever before.