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.