Read The Mobile MBA: 112 Skills to Take You Further, Faster (Richard Stout's Library) Online
Authors: Jo Owen
•
N
: what is the compelling need to change? What is the problem you are solving? If there is no need for change, you will find it very hard to build momentum to overcome the resistance to change. Smart managers often create the crisis to build the case for change: they show that the competition is about to eat your lunch, or that your existing market is under threat.
•
V
: Lay out a clear vision of the change: what will be different at the end and what are the benefits? For the company, financial benefits are top. For the individual, they need to see that they will have a role and can thrive as a result of the change. So make the vision personal to each individual. If you do not have a clear vision, then you will find lots of effort is dissipated as people try different things in an uncoordinated way.
•
S
: you need the power barons to support your change. Align your agenda with theirs: show that your change agenda will support them. Find a sponsor to guide you through the politics. Once you have support from the top, you will find it much easier to gain support from colleagues: you have just changed their personal risk equation. Now that you have top support, it becomes far more risky for colleagues to stand in the way of change. Beyond top support, you need a very good team supporting you on your change effort. Hold out for the A team, not the B team. If someone is an A player, they are unlikely to be available. So you will naturally be offered a team of people who are available: these will be the B players. As a rule, refuse anyone who is available. Poach the top team.
•
F
: you need some practical first steps to get the bandwagon rolling. Find some early wins that you can publicize: everyone likes to back a winner.
•
C
: the obvious costs of change are time and money. There are also obvious business risks which go with most change ideas. Take time to understand the personal agendas of each individual: work their personal risk/reward equation. If necessary, increase the perceived risk of doing nothing, so that change seems relatively more attractive.
Some 90% of the effort of a change program happens after the formal start; but success is perhaps 90% determined before the formal start. So invest heavily in setting up change to make it succeed. It is better to walk away from a poor set-up, than to commit to losing.
Traditionally, projects fail because they are killed by one of the four horsemen of project apocalypse. Deal with these horsemen, and you have a chance of succeeding.
1. The wrong problem.
“42” is a great answer to “what is seven times six?,” but it is a lousy answer to the question “What is the capital of Australia?” You cannot hope to succeed unless you are answering the right question. The right sort of problem in a firm has three characteristics:
a.
It is important, not just to you, but to your boss, the CEO, and the firm as a whole. If it is not important, it will be ignored.
b.
It is urgent. Lots of things are important, like global warming. But if the boss has a toothache, then it is clear what he will deal with first.
c.
There is a significant prize to be gained from fixing the problem; ideally, it is a financially quantifiable prize. For many IT projects the prize is more basic: do this or you will not be in business in five years’ time. That is an ugly but compelling piece of corporate blackmail. It always works.
2. The wrong sponsor.
You probably have many things in your inbox that are both important and urgent. But these things may be unimportant to your boss or your CEO. If you are starting a project, you need to make sure it has strong support. A powerful sponsor will help you clear the inevitable road blocks that appear, can help you get the key approvals, and can broker deals when you need them. So your project has to be important not just to you but to people who have power in the organization: power to get budget, power to get the right team in place, and power to overcome political resistance. Without strong support, you will quickly find your project disappearing into a blind alley of irrelevance.
3. The wrong team.
If you get the B team on your project, you have a recipe for sleepless nights, constant struggle, and disappointment. You need the A team if you are to succeed. This is what the A team looks like:
• Right mix of skills.
• Right attitude: positive, proactive, and good at dealing with people.
• Right experience: they understand that projects are different from business as usual.
• They will all be unavailable, because they are so good. That is why you need them, not the combination of the untried, unused, and unusable which you will be offered initially. If you get the B team, that is evidence you have a weak sponsor who cannot secure you the right team. Play hardball to get the right team and be prepared to walk away.
4. The wrong process.
This is where the MBA is worthwhile as it will allow you to manage a project well. But if you have the right problem, right sponsor, and the right team then first of all you are unlikely to have the wrong process. And even if your process does go awry, you will have the talent and the support to get it back on track fast.
First, the good news. There are plenty of fully qualified project management practitioners out there who have mastered the 40 activities and seven work processes of formal project management. They can be hired at modest cost and will ensure that you comply with government requirements on project management.
The bad news with formal project management tools is that they become very process bound: once you have completed your risk log, issue log, meeting log, telephone log, master log, and activity log, you may find that you have not actually achieved anything.
Most managers have neither the time nor the need to become fully accredited project managers. And yet we always have to manage projects. So we need something simpler to guide us.
Here are the basic principles:
The basic principles of project management
1. Start at the end.
This infuriates those who suggest “first things first.” But if you simply do first things first, you’ll end up in a random walk from today to the future. Be crystal clear about the end goal, and make sure that everyone else is just as clear. Focus the goal as far as possible. With a clear, focused end goal you can eliminate large amounts of peripheral activity and waste.
2. Work back from the end
and identify the minimum number of steps required to get to the goal. Anyone can create complexity. As a project manager, part of your art is to create simplicity and focus. Within this, identify the critical path of must-hit dates. The critical path simply indicates that activity A has to happen before activity B can start: this gives you the “brick wall” dates which cannot be changed or moved. From this, you get even more focus.
3. Break the project down into manageable, bite sized chunks.
“Reengineering the corporation” is too big for anyone. Break this down into more manageable work
streams, each with its own critical path, and each with its stream lead who can be held accountable for the progress of that workstream.
4. Identify other pre-conditions of success and how you will manage them.
If you are working on a marketing project then IT and HR may not seem important, until you realize the sales force may need retraining and new incentives, supported by a new IT system. Make sure the project enablers are properly managed.
5. Put in place simple governance.
This is partly about monitoring progress, but also about ensuring you have the support of key stakeholders, so put together a small project board of the power brokers. Arrange the frequency of reporting and meeting so that the team can actually make progress, rather than spending their whole time writing reports and trying to second guess your needs. Once a week is too often, once a quarter is too infrequent. The scale, complexity, and stage of project will determine how often you need to meet.
From a governance perspective you have three simple ways of messing up your project:
• Keep changing your goal and specifications
• Being slow in making decisions
• Once you have made a decision, changing it
Of course, this should not happen. But all three of these are very familiar to anyone who has provided IT projects or been involved in defense procurement. It is a very easy way to ensure cost and time over runs.
Which is higher quality: a $100 meal at the Fat Duck or a $2 Big Mac at McDonald’s? The answer is, obviously, it depends. It depends on what you mean by quality.
As you eat your snail porridge at the Fat Duck, you will have plenty of time to think about what quality really means. “Quality” has traditionally been associated with high price and exclusivity: handmade Louis Vuitton baggage, tailored suits, and Rolls-Royces. That is a view of quality which is defined by the customer. If a customer believes that high quality bathrooms have gold taps, then gold taps are part of the quality proposition.
For managers, quality is different. Quality is ultimately about consistency, and the absense of defects. If you make a billion microchips, you want a billion microchips that all work in the same way. If you make a billion bottles of cola, you want them all to be the same. You do not want one in every million to have a rat’s tail in it. And if you make a billion burgers every year, you want the customer to know what they are getting each time will be exactly what they expect: the same as last time. So on this metric, McDonald’s is better quality than the Fat Duck: it has more consistency and more predictability of taste, offering, and service.
quality is ultimately about consistency
In practice, price affects our perceptions of quality. If we went into McDonald’s and they charged us $100 for a Big Mac, we might think it a pretty poor quality offering at that price.
So quality does not exist in a vacuum and is not an end in itself. It is a means to an end: the ultimate end is to make money and grow sustainably. But even the godfather of the modern quality movement, Edward Deming, recognized that quality was simply part of a greater purpose. Deming ‘s first principle of his 14 principles of management was to “become competitive and stay in business, and to provide jobs.”
If quality is, for management purposes, mainly about consistency, then that has implications for how it works and where it works. Clearly, consistent quality can and should be achieved wherever there are repetitive tasks to be done: making cars or making burgers can have the full weight of quality practices applied to them. And this is where you will find quality best practiced.
Where jobs are ambiguous and customized, it is much harder to achieve consistent quality. If each job is different, then there can be no consistency. This is the curse of most office and managerial jobs: the jobs are always shifting and consistency is elusive. So the quality movement has not made much progress in the white collar world of law firms, consulting, and other professional services.
But even in the white collar world it is possible to achieve some consistency, and the key is to achieve scale. With scale, jobs can become more specialized and more repetitive. A lone lawyer has to deal with anything and anyone that walks through the door. A large firm can have lawyers specializing in the most arcane aspect of the law. The specialists see the same sorts of case repeatedly, build expertise and can achieve a level of quality which the lone practitioner can never achieve. This is the lesson Adam Smith learned from the pin makers of Gloucester, applied to the modern world: specialization works.
Who is the better football player: the fan who buys the replica team shirt and wears it to the stadium, or the professional who is selected for the team and
plays in the stadium? Most of us can work out the answer to that one. The fan may look like the professional, but only in his dreams does he play like one.
And yet many managers acted like the sports fan when it came to quality. During the 1980s, Japan appeared to be on the cusp of world domination and quality seemed to be at the heart of its success. So managers went around copying little bits of the Japanese approach to quality: they put in suggestion boxes, or they tried to design better products, or they tried a little bit of
kaizen
(continuous improvement). They bought the replica shirt and showed their allegiance to team quality. But they were never in the same league as the professionals.
Quality is like a heart operation: don’t try doing just half of it. Do it all or not at all. Here are some of the principles:
•
Don’t inspect for quality at the end;
build quality in from the start (product design) and onward through production.
•
Delegate to the lowest level possible:
let team members monitor their own performance and institute their own improvement ideas.
•
Break down barriers
between departments, suppliers, and customers: everyone has to work together to understand and deliver quality.
•
Get rid of slogans:
slogans do not produce quality, people do.
•
Invest in your team:
constant education and improvement with on-the-job training.
•
Drive out fear
in assessment and rewards, so that people focus on the job and avoid game playing.
Most production and process driven firms that survive have understood that quality is a whole firm effort. And most are applying quality at a more or less competent level: they have to, simply to stay in business. By comparison, most professional services firms with their highly paid partners look like highly inefficient cottage industries. The first person to understand how to drive quality into this world will cause a revolution and make a fortune: they can be the Henry Ford of the 21st century.