This week (in fact today and just now) I heard some news I did not expect and I heard it from someone I did not expect it to hear it from… my son. You see my son is 15 years old (and a sophomore in high school) and the news he gave me rocked my world as I did not expect it. He said, “Steve Jobs died”.
At that moment just like someone experiencing those last moments of life (like in the movies) I immediately transported to my sophomore year of high school.
It was 1982… I was a sophomore in a new high school and little to no friends to speak of. News of a “computer” on campus soon caught my ear. I quickly hunted down these two “computers”. Apparently they were donated to the school from a company called “Apple”.
Before I knew it I was spending endless lunch and after school hours at this computer. At the time having a computer in high schools was a new concept to everyone (including the staff and teachers)… they simply did not know what to do with these things.
These two computers were placed in a library closet (yes a real closet) and typing room closet… yes I said “typing room”. Ok for those under 45’ish I’ll explain… in 1982 typing was an actual class to teach you how to type on a keyboard… and it was not typing on a computer it was on a typewriter and if you ask me what a typewriter is I’m going to send you to your room and ask you to Google it.
As much as I hate to saying it today “Apple I” was my first true love… and yes my wife is OK with it.
I spent endless (I really mean endless) hours reverse engineering that Apple computer. I “peeked” and “poked” the memory to understand everything about this puppy (again Google it). I recall one day the typing teacher came up to me and said… “Why are you spending so much time at this ‘Computer’? It’s a big waste of time”. I’m very happy to say I ignored that teacher.
Come senior year of high school (1984) I applied to college and to my pleasant surprise “Computer Science” was an actual major. The rest is history as far as I’m concerned.
In truth… over the years my loyalties were with Microsoft. I was a Microsoft believer and an Apple hater. Today however I can say my Microsoft/Apple religious beliefs are actively changing… and that’s a good topic for another day.
Today however my thoughts and admiration are with Steve Jobs… Not because I was a loyalist to his cause, but rather (and in fact and in truth) he was a true adversary in my personal computer revolution. He (and Steve Wozniak) introduced me to computers. They both gave me something to feel passionate about and at age when I needed it the most.
Thank you Steve Jobs…
Although we did not play on the same team, you made every game something to look forward to.
On a final note…
My son (interestingly a sophomore in high school this year) has a class in “Computer Science” using a Mac and Microsoft Windows emulation… The revolution continues.
Cheers.
Michael Emens
More...
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Thursday, September 8, 2011
This Blog is Moving! [Robert Lasater]
In connection with the Software Developer's Forum renaming itself the Silicon Valley Forum, we are moving this blog to svforumelsig.blogspot.com. Current entries on this blog will remain, so any bookmarks or search keys that lead you to entries on this blog will stay valid.
Be sure to start visiting svforumelsig.blogspot.com for the latest postings on Engineering Leadership.
More...
Be sure to start visiting svforumelsig.blogspot.com for the latest postings on Engineering Leadership.
More...
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Announcing the Next EL SIG Meeting, September 15 [Robert Lasater]
The next meeting of the Engineering Leadership SIG will be held on September 15 in SAP Building 2 (3412 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA), starting at 7:00 PM. Doors open at 6:30 PM. Title of the main presentation, "Problems, Big Problems, and Damn Problems: Solving the problems that keep you awake at night", by Jerry L. Talley.
Jerry says "The topic of the talk is a discovery from my 30+ years in organizational development work. I believe there are only 6 types of problems. Each type poses a unique challenge. The most critical decision in problem solving is not 'What's the best solution?', but rather it is 'What type of problem is this?' Once you identify the type you have a clear sense of the critical features that must be explored, what strategy to use in solving the problem, and what a solution would look like...at least in outline form.
"It turns out that strategies that work well for some types are disastrous when applied to other types. And some of the types are easy to confuse for each other. So typing the problem is not always simple; it's just always essential.
"The talk outlines the 6 types and briefly describes the strategy unique to each type. It is a dramatic departure from the classical model of problem solving which has been around since the 1950's and altered very little since then."
Jerry Talley has over 20 years of organizational consulting. Prior to that career, he was an adjunct professor at Stanford University teaching in the Sociology Department for 18 years. Coincident with that experience, he had a practice as a Marriage and Family Therapist for about ten years. Starting in the late 1970's, he moved into organizational development consulting, accumulating over 250 client engagements since that time. His clients included companies in high tech R&D, hospitality, health care, the military, manufacturing, banking and credit unions, education, publishing, mental health, city and county government, not-for-profits, and large consulting houses...and one organic grocery store.
Throughout all these experiences, the common focus was on how people think about and manage complex situations, how they attempt to solve the problems in their world, and how they form relationships with others in that effort.
For more information, go here.
SNACK SPONSOR: Brian Lawley, 280Group - The 280 Group™ provides Product Marketing and Product Management Consultants, Contractors, Training, Books,Certification, and Templates to help companies world wide to define, launch and market breakthrough new products.
SNACK & BEVERAGE NOTES: SVForum provides some pizzas, and SAP welcomes us to help ourselves to soft drinks that we may encounter in the vicinity of our events.
As of August we won't be providing alcoholic beverages in the future so we can spend more money on food.
MANAGEMENT RESOURCES SPONSOR: ProjectConnections.com supports EL SIG members with a wide range of resources for managing organizations, projects, and people. Members can access links to templates, checklists, articles, and more from the ProjectConnections.com Premium library. All this is available to ELSIG members at no charge, at the ELSIG page onProjectConnetions.com (Open Enrollment is offered twice a year for this benefit. It's that time of year! We'll be sending a notice shortly and you can sign up if you haven't already.)
Cost: $20 at the door for non-SDForum members, No charge for SDForum members
BOOK SWAP - Every month! Bring books to share.
JOB SWAP - Check out our Yahoo! Group here: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SDForum_EL_SIG_JobSwap/
PEER-to-PEER Roundtable - Every month! Join us to share insights and advice with peers each month prior to the 7 PM event.
More...
Jerry says "The topic of the talk is a discovery from my 30+ years in organizational development work. I believe there are only 6 types of problems. Each type poses a unique challenge. The most critical decision in problem solving is not 'What's the best solution?', but rather it is 'What type of problem is this?' Once you identify the type you have a clear sense of the critical features that must be explored, what strategy to use in solving the problem, and what a solution would look like...at least in outline form.
"It turns out that strategies that work well for some types are disastrous when applied to other types. And some of the types are easy to confuse for each other. So typing the problem is not always simple; it's just always essential.
"The talk outlines the 6 types and briefly describes the strategy unique to each type. It is a dramatic departure from the classical model of problem solving which has been around since the 1950's and altered very little since then."
Jerry Talley has over 20 years of organizational consulting. Prior to that career, he was an adjunct professor at Stanford University teaching in the Sociology Department for 18 years. Coincident with that experience, he had a practice as a Marriage and Family Therapist for about ten years. Starting in the late 1970's, he moved into organizational development consulting, accumulating over 250 client engagements since that time. His clients included companies in high tech R&D, hospitality, health care, the military, manufacturing, banking and credit unions, education, publishing, mental health, city and county government, not-for-profits, and large consulting houses...and one organic grocery store.
Throughout all these experiences, the common focus was on how people think about and manage complex situations, how they attempt to solve the problems in their world, and how they form relationships with others in that effort.
For more information, go here.
SNACK SPONSOR: Brian Lawley, 280Group - The 280 Group™ provides Product Marketing and Product Management Consultants, Contractors, Training, Books,Certification, and Templates to help companies world wide to define, launch and market breakthrough new products.
SNACK & BEVERAGE NOTES: SVForum provides some pizzas, and SAP welcomes us to help ourselves to soft drinks that we may encounter in the vicinity of our events.
As of August we won't be providing alcoholic beverages in the future so we can spend more money on food.
MANAGEMENT RESOURCES SPONSOR: ProjectConnections.com supports EL SIG members with a wide range of resources for managing organizations, projects, and people. Members can access links to templates, checklists, articles, and more from the ProjectConnections.com Premium library. All this is available to ELSIG members at no charge, at the ELSIG page onProjectConnetions.com (Open Enrollment is offered twice a year for this benefit. It's that time of year! We'll be sending a notice shortly and you can sign up if you haven't already.)
Cost: $20 at the door for non-SDForum members, No charge for SDForum members
BOOK SWAP - Every month! Bring books to share.
JOB SWAP - Check out our Yahoo! Group here: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SDForum_EL_SIG_JobSwap/
PEER-to-PEER Roundtable - Every month! Join us to share insights and advice with peers each month prior to the 7 PM event.
More...
Tuesday, August 9, 2011
Living the Symbolic Life: Metaphors from Yosemite [Elizabeth Agnew]
One consistent way to improve your leadership is to find symbolic meaning in areas of your life where you might not be looking. Take something that’s happening to you, make an abstract summary of it, and see where else the metaphor applies in your life.
Five of my good friends and I went on a backpacking trip to Yosemite National Park over the July fourth holiday. There were many good lessons buried in the three days we spent roughing it in the wilderness. Here are three powerful metaphors I took from the trip that I think you will find helpful, too.
1. When you can no longer see the path ahead, stop, take a load off, and look around in a new way.
On day 1 of our hike, the snow cover was still so deep in some areas that we’d be walking along and then the person in the front would realize they lost track of where the trail went. Conversations would pause and we’d all stop and look around. Sometimes we even had to set our packs down and send one or two people off to scout out the trail. We were looking for clues – large cut logs were a very good sign because it means that the park service had cut a trail through a fallen tree.
Sometimes when you’re already in motion, going along not really paying attention to where you’re headed, you’re realize you’ve lost your way. Release yourself of the weight you’re carrying, take your time, and the path will become clear again.
2. If you push through at the end, you might just end up farther than you thought you would.
On day two, we hiked a large elevation change and several miles. It was late and everyone was ready to be at camp, but we still had two miles to go. The pace was fast so that we could make it to camp by dark. People were silent, managing their own fatigue and pain levels. When we got to our camp, we realize we’d estimated incorrectly where it was, and had hiked a mile more than we had planned!
The element of focus that comes at the end of a project, just when you want to quit, is so essential to a strong finish. Your “second wind” at this point in your progress can give you more momentum than you realize. Power through your finishes!
3. There are greater forces at work beyond our control.
On the drive home, we were headed west on a country highway, almost at the interstate. We slowed down because we saw a car slam on its breaks in the eastbound lane. Two cars behind it, a car was trying to avoid the car that stopped, and pulled out into oncoming traffic – right in front of us. We swerved to avoid it, but the driver was in reaction mode and had turned left into us. We collided hard. Luckily everyone was ok and walked away, but the experience shook us up, especially when we thought about how there was nothing we could have done to avoid it.
I was surprised at the sense of calm surrender I felt when I saw we were about to hit the other car. If, like me, you often feel the most afraid when you feel out of control, take note. This acute instance of knowing I was out of control led to a divine feeling of surrender and calm. The trick now, is for us to learn to apply that same feeling to other areas of our life and work where we are also out of control.
The symbolic life is one where we take meaning in moments that we would otherwise simply log in the memory bank. Leverage all of your experiences so that your future ones may be even richer.
Elizabeth Agnew works with individuals and organizations in technical fields needing tailored leadership development that speaks their language. Liz has logged hundreds of hours coaching individuals from companies such as Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Google, HP, SETI, Lockheed Martin, VNUS and Sun Microsystems. Her background includes experience in adult education, team facilitation, and public speaking. She offers complimentary coaching consultations – call or email today to schedule yours.
More...
Five of my good friends and I went on a backpacking trip to Yosemite National Park over the July fourth holiday. There were many good lessons buried in the three days we spent roughing it in the wilderness. Here are three powerful metaphors I took from the trip that I think you will find helpful, too.
1. When you can no longer see the path ahead, stop, take a load off, and look around in a new way.
On day 1 of our hike, the snow cover was still so deep in some areas that we’d be walking along and then the person in the front would realize they lost track of where the trail went. Conversations would pause and we’d all stop and look around. Sometimes we even had to set our packs down and send one or two people off to scout out the trail. We were looking for clues – large cut logs were a very good sign because it means that the park service had cut a trail through a fallen tree.
Sometimes when you’re already in motion, going along not really paying attention to where you’re headed, you’re realize you’ve lost your way. Release yourself of the weight you’re carrying, take your time, and the path will become clear again.
2. If you push through at the end, you might just end up farther than you thought you would.
On day two, we hiked a large elevation change and several miles. It was late and everyone was ready to be at camp, but we still had two miles to go. The pace was fast so that we could make it to camp by dark. People were silent, managing their own fatigue and pain levels. When we got to our camp, we realize we’d estimated incorrectly where it was, and had hiked a mile more than we had planned!
The element of focus that comes at the end of a project, just when you want to quit, is so essential to a strong finish. Your “second wind” at this point in your progress can give you more momentum than you realize. Power through your finishes!
3. There are greater forces at work beyond our control.
On the drive home, we were headed west on a country highway, almost at the interstate. We slowed down because we saw a car slam on its breaks in the eastbound lane. Two cars behind it, a car was trying to avoid the car that stopped, and pulled out into oncoming traffic – right in front of us. We swerved to avoid it, but the driver was in reaction mode and had turned left into us. We collided hard. Luckily everyone was ok and walked away, but the experience shook us up, especially when we thought about how there was nothing we could have done to avoid it.
I was surprised at the sense of calm surrender I felt when I saw we were about to hit the other car. If, like me, you often feel the most afraid when you feel out of control, take note. This acute instance of knowing I was out of control led to a divine feeling of surrender and calm. The trick now, is for us to learn to apply that same feeling to other areas of our life and work where we are also out of control.
The symbolic life is one where we take meaning in moments that we would otherwise simply log in the memory bank. Leverage all of your experiences so that your future ones may be even richer.
Elizabeth Agnew works with individuals and organizations in technical fields needing tailored leadership development that speaks their language. Liz has logged hundreds of hours coaching individuals from companies such as Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Google, HP, SETI, Lockheed Martin, VNUS and Sun Microsystems. Her background includes experience in adult education, team facilitation, and public speaking. She offers complimentary coaching consultations – call or email today to schedule yours.
More...
Saturday, August 6, 2011
Announcing the Next EL SIG Meeting, August 18 [Robert Lasater]
The next meeting of the Engineering Leadership SIG will be held on August 18 in the SAP Cafeteria (3410 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA), starting at 7:00 PM. Doors open at 6:30 PM. Notice the location is different, on the same street, Hillview, but in the neighboring SAP building. Title of the main presentation is "Rapid Rapport: Creating Influence On Demand", by Bernie Maloney.
TOPIC: Rapid Rapport: Creating Influence On Demand
SPEAKER: Bernie Maloney, PE http://www.linkedin.com/in/berniemaloney
More info: http://www.SVForum.org/elsig
LOCATION: SAP CAFETERIA (not our normal location)
(DIFFERENT THIS TIME because we're combining with another SIG this month)
SAP Labs Cafeteria
3410 Hillview Ave
Palo Alto, California 94304
United States
http://www.saplabs.com
Description: SAP Labs Palo Alto
From 280: exit Page Mill, go east, downhill. Turn right at Coyote Hill, turn right on Hillview and then right again up the hill into the SAP campus.
From 101: exit Oregon Expressway west, uphill. Follow Oregon, Page Mill until you hit Coyote Hill. turn right on Hillview and then right again up the hill into the SAP campus.
=================================================
Snacks and Beverage Sponsor: PMI SV - Julie Godon http://www.pmisv.org/ The Silicon Valley Chapter is a regional component of PMI and a resource for all aspects of project management leadership and information in California's Silicon Valley (southern end of San Francisco Bay). The chapter’s 2,000 plus members enjoy over 200+ yearly local activities supported by an all volunteer staff. In addition, Project Management Professional (PMP) certification has been achieved by over 60% of its members. The Chapter’s mission is to support the interests and needs of its members by providing the leadership and forums for expanding and sharing the knowledge of Project Management.
. . . next month it could be YOU for $100! Please contact Sue Shreve: msshreve 'at' sbcglobal.net
Management Resources Sponsor: ProjectConnections.com supports EL SIG members with a wide range of resources for managing organizations, projects, and people. Members can access links to templates, checklists, articles, and more from the ProjectConnections.com Premium library. All this is available to ELSIG members at no charge, at the ELSIG page on ProjectConnetions.com (Open Enrollment is offered twice a year for this benefit. It's that time of year! We'll be sending a notice shortly and you can sign up if you haven't already.)
BOOK SWAP - Every month! Bring books to share.
JOB SWAP - Check out our Yahoo! Group here:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SVForum_EL_SIG_JobSwap/
PEER-to-PEER Roundtable - Every month! Join us to share insights and advice with peers each month prior to the 7 PM event.
BLOG Write or read EL SIG blog posts here: http://sdforumelsig.blogspot.com/
Cost: $20 at the door for non-SVForum members, No charge for SVForum members
For more information, go here.
More...
TOPIC: Rapid Rapport: Creating Influence On Demand
SPEAKER: Bernie Maloney, PE http://www.linkedin.com/in/berniemaloney
More info: http://www.SVForum.org/elsig
LOCATION: SAP CAFETERIA (not our normal location)
(DIFFERENT THIS TIME because we're combining with another SIG this month)
SAP Labs Cafeteria
3410 Hillview Ave
Palo Alto, California 94304
United States
http://www.saplabs.com
Description: SAP Labs Palo Alto
From 280: exit Page Mill, go east, downhill. Turn right at Coyote Hill, turn right on Hillview and then right again up the hill into the SAP campus.
From 101: exit Oregon Expressway west, uphill. Follow Oregon, Page Mill until you hit Coyote Hill. turn right on Hillview and then right again up the hill into the SAP campus.
=================================================
Snacks and Beverage Sponsor: PMI SV - Julie Godon http://www.pmisv.org/ The Silicon Valley Chapter is a regional component of PMI and a resource for all aspects of project management leadership and information in California's Silicon Valley (southern end of San Francisco Bay). The chapter’s 2,000 plus members enjoy over 200+ yearly local activities supported by an all volunteer staff. In addition, Project Management Professional (PMP) certification has been achieved by over 60% of its members. The Chapter’s mission is to support the interests and needs of its members by providing the leadership and forums for expanding and sharing the knowledge of Project Management.
. . . next month it could be YOU for $100! Please contact Sue Shreve: msshreve 'at' sbcglobal.net
Management Resources Sponsor: ProjectConnections.com supports EL SIG members with a wide range of resources for managing organizations, projects, and people. Members can access links to templates, checklists, articles, and more from the ProjectConnections.com Premium library. All this is available to ELSIG members at no charge, at the ELSIG page on ProjectConnetions.com (Open Enrollment is offered twice a year for this benefit. It's that time of year! We'll be sending a notice shortly and you can sign up if you haven't already.)
BOOK SWAP - Every month! Bring books to share.
JOB SWAP - Check out our Yahoo! Group here:
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SVForum_EL_SIG_JobSwap/
PEER-to-PEER Roundtable - Every month! Join us to share insights and advice with peers each month prior to the 7 PM event.
BLOG Write or read EL SIG blog posts here: http://sdforumelsig.blogspot.com/
Cost: $20 at the door for non-SVForum members, No charge for SVForum members
For more information, go here.
More...
Thursday, August 4, 2011
July 21 Meeting Notes - Kimberly Wiefling on Leadership [Robert Lasater]
On July 21, Kimberly Wiefling gave a presentation on leadership - "Why Would Anyone Follow You?" - in her usual energetic and inimitable style. Here is a summary.
Kimberly started by reminding the audience how low retention rates are usually after a presentation or talk. Within a few days the typical participant has forgotten 50%; this rises to 80% after two months. She worked to counter this trend by having the audience participate in several exercises. The first was done in pairs: describe to your partner what you had for lunch today - with enthusiasm.
A leader needs to infect the organization with this kind of great enthusiasm.
You need to be willing to be uncomfortable to accomplish your goal. [Getting people out of their comfort zone was another goal of her exercises.]
Kimberly Wiefling works with mid-level management in Japan. "I use a lot of shock tactics" to get her clients out of their comfort zone.
The next exercise had people get into small groups - two or three people - to list and discuss the characteristics and languages of the worst leaders in the world. Afterword, she polled the audience for their responses:
· Know-it-all
· Lack of focus
· Not able to apologize
· Jeopardizing the team for personal reasons.
· Micromanagement
· Taking credit for others
· Lack of integrity
· Unethical
· Abdication of responsibility
· Fear
Now leaders have only three tools:
· Action
· Communication
· Thinking
-but the last tool is not visible.
And leadership is not on the org chart. Some missing items are:
· Vendors
· Customers
· Venture capitalists
· Competitors
· Government and other regulatory authorities
Five characteristics of people in power:
· Receive more positive feedback
· Have less control over their impulses
· Think about their own needs more
· Have less empathy
· Thinks the rules don't apply to them
Question: do people become more unpleasant when they achieve power over other people, or is it their unpleasantness that causes them to achieve power? Which leads to another exercise: discuss how to avoid the trap of unpleasantness if you have power over people. One strategy to achieve that goal is to lead with questions - listening is the lost leadership skill.
Another exercise (again for pairs): plan an EL SIG holiday party, with your partner responding with "yes, but". (Tip: "yes, but" actually means No.) Next, try with your partner responding with "yes, and".
The final discussion topic was to provide examples of language of an admired and influential leader.
· "Thank you"
· nothing - let the followers take charge of discussions
· "Job well done" - but more detail about why it was well done is always appreciated.
· "What obstacles do you have?"
· "I love that idea."
· "What do you think?"
· "The real credit goes to ..."
· "What do you think it will take to make it happen?"
· "I'm sorry."
· "I don't know."
· "I need help."
Kimberly Wiefling is the author of Scrappy Project Management, one of the top-ranked project management books on Amazon in the US, published in Japanese, and growing in popularity around the world. She splits her work time between the US and Japan.
More...
Kimberly started by reminding the audience how low retention rates are usually after a presentation or talk. Within a few days the typical participant has forgotten 50%; this rises to 80% after two months. She worked to counter this trend by having the audience participate in several exercises. The first was done in pairs: describe to your partner what you had for lunch today - with enthusiasm.
A leader needs to infect the organization with this kind of great enthusiasm.
You need to be willing to be uncomfortable to accomplish your goal. [Getting people out of their comfort zone was another goal of her exercises.]
Kimberly Wiefling works with mid-level management in Japan. "I use a lot of shock tactics" to get her clients out of their comfort zone.
The next exercise had people get into small groups - two or three people - to list and discuss the characteristics and languages of the worst leaders in the world. Afterword, she polled the audience for their responses:
· Know-it-all
· Lack of focus
· Not able to apologize
· Jeopardizing the team for personal reasons.
· Micromanagement
· Taking credit for others
· Lack of integrity
· Unethical
· Abdication of responsibility
· Fear
Now leaders have only three tools:
· Action
· Communication
· Thinking
-but the last tool is not visible.
And leadership is not on the org chart. Some missing items are:
· Vendors
· Customers
· Venture capitalists
· Competitors
· Government and other regulatory authorities
Five characteristics of people in power:
· Receive more positive feedback
· Have less control over their impulses
· Think about their own needs more
· Have less empathy
· Thinks the rules don't apply to them
Question: do people become more unpleasant when they achieve power over other people, or is it their unpleasantness that causes them to achieve power? Which leads to another exercise: discuss how to avoid the trap of unpleasantness if you have power over people. One strategy to achieve that goal is to lead with questions - listening is the lost leadership skill.
Another exercise (again for pairs): plan an EL SIG holiday party, with your partner responding with "yes, but". (Tip: "yes, but" actually means No.) Next, try with your partner responding with "yes, and".
The final discussion topic was to provide examples of language of an admired and influential leader.
· "Thank you"
· nothing - let the followers take charge of discussions
· "Job well done" - but more detail about why it was well done is always appreciated.
· "What obstacles do you have?"
· "I love that idea."
· "What do you think?"
· "The real credit goes to ..."
· "What do you think it will take to make it happen?"
· "I'm sorry."
· "I don't know."
· "I need help."
Kimberly Wiefling is the author of Scrappy Project Management, one of the top-ranked project management books on Amazon in the US, published in Japanese, and growing in popularity around the world. She splits her work time between the US and Japan.
More...
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Even if You’re Wrong, You’re Right - So choose your beliefs carefully! [Elizabeth Agnew]
Everyone lives from their own perspective. Everyone likes to be right. These are both facts about human nature.
Your belief system is the backbone to how you experience the world. Your paradigm, or the lens through which you see the world, is driven by this belief system. It’s just what you know.
When you live from your perspective, you experience the world with your own slant, and how you experience and respond to the world drives your future actions. Your actions reflect what you believe, and so in the end, your beliefs will ultimately become your reality. If you believe something that hinders you, well, what can I say – you’ll be hindered. If you believe you will be successful and flourish, well, what can I say – you’ll flourish.
Your beliefs are the ultimate gatekeeper to your success. If you say “I could never run faster than a 7-minute mile”, it is highly unlikely that you will ever run faster than a 7-minute mile, even if you have the physical talent.
Beliefs that prevent you from taking action that could result in your growth and success are called limiting beliefs. They cap your potential. Because you limit yourself, you won’t see positive results. A lack of good results will reinforce the negative belief that limited you in the first place, and there you go down the negative spiral. Even though you were probably wrong about your limiting belief in the first place, you made yourself right because your actions reflected, and thus reinforced, your beliefs.
Take Jake, for instance, who is afraid he isn’t good in social situations. He fears being the one to speak when there are more than two people in the room because he doesn’t think he has anything worthwhile to say. This belief causes him to stay at home more often, and to stammer and cut short his opinion when asked of it by others. Staying home means he is exposed less and less to the situation he fears, and getting nervous when he has the floor means he does end up having awkward social experiences. Even though Jake is wrong about his potential, he ends up verifying the belief that he is socially awkward. Jake was wrong, but in the end, he made himself right.
This cycle is how your beliefs can easily become self-fulfilling prophecies. “I could never do that.” Even if you’re wrong about the fact that you “could never do that”, you will in the end, be right, because your belief will stop you from ever trying. You make up a story in your head, and the act of choosing to believe that story is what helps it become a fact.
Since this is the case, why not choose beliefs that align with qualities you admire, and the lifestyle that you dream of? Find a way to believe the positive things that you want to be true in your life. If your new beliefs are too much of a stretch from what you’re used to telling yourself, then you won’t really believe them, and then they won’t ever be true for you. Find a way, through delicate phrasing or evidence from the past, to believe the things you want for yourself.
What if Jake said: “You know, I’m okay in social situations, I really am.” This is a modest statement that he can honestly believe in, and a first step to reshaping his belief system. Because he believes this, he will be less likely to turn down an invitation due to nervousness, and less likely to squirm and judge himself on the way he acted in a social group. In the end, again, he will be right.
No matter what, your actions are a product of your thoughts. So even if you’re wrong about your human potential or about your relationship with the world, you’ll be right, because you will live out that belief.
Even if you’re wrong, you’re right, so remember that when you decide what you want to be true for yourself. The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen. What do you want to make happen for yourself?
Elizabeth J. Agnew, MS, ACC
Integrative Leadership Strategies
415-401-7822
liz@integrative-leadership.com
www.integrative-leadership.com
P.O. Box 460515, San Francisco, CA 94110
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Liz works with individuals and organizations in technical fields needing tailored leadership development that speaks their language. Liz has logged hundreds of hours coaching individuals from companies such as Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Google, HP, SETI, Lockheed Martin, VNUS and Sun Microsystems. Her background includes experience in adult education, team facilitation, and public speaking. She offers complimentary coaching consultations – call or email today to schedule yours.
More...
Your belief system is the backbone to how you experience the world. Your paradigm, or the lens through which you see the world, is driven by this belief system. It’s just what you know.
When you live from your perspective, you experience the world with your own slant, and how you experience and respond to the world drives your future actions. Your actions reflect what you believe, and so in the end, your beliefs will ultimately become your reality. If you believe something that hinders you, well, what can I say – you’ll be hindered. If you believe you will be successful and flourish, well, what can I say – you’ll flourish.
Your beliefs are the ultimate gatekeeper to your success. If you say “I could never run faster than a 7-minute mile”, it is highly unlikely that you will ever run faster than a 7-minute mile, even if you have the physical talent.
Beliefs that prevent you from taking action that could result in your growth and success are called limiting beliefs. They cap your potential. Because you limit yourself, you won’t see positive results. A lack of good results will reinforce the negative belief that limited you in the first place, and there you go down the negative spiral. Even though you were probably wrong about your limiting belief in the first place, you made yourself right because your actions reflected, and thus reinforced, your beliefs.
Take Jake, for instance, who is afraid he isn’t good in social situations. He fears being the one to speak when there are more than two people in the room because he doesn’t think he has anything worthwhile to say. This belief causes him to stay at home more often, and to stammer and cut short his opinion when asked of it by others. Staying home means he is exposed less and less to the situation he fears, and getting nervous when he has the floor means he does end up having awkward social experiences. Even though Jake is wrong about his potential, he ends up verifying the belief that he is socially awkward. Jake was wrong, but in the end, he made himself right.
This cycle is how your beliefs can easily become self-fulfilling prophecies. “I could never do that.” Even if you’re wrong about the fact that you “could never do that”, you will in the end, be right, because your belief will stop you from ever trying. You make up a story in your head, and the act of choosing to believe that story is what helps it become a fact.
Since this is the case, why not choose beliefs that align with qualities you admire, and the lifestyle that you dream of? Find a way to believe the positive things that you want to be true in your life. If your new beliefs are too much of a stretch from what you’re used to telling yourself, then you won’t really believe them, and then they won’t ever be true for you. Find a way, through delicate phrasing or evidence from the past, to believe the things you want for yourself.
What if Jake said: “You know, I’m okay in social situations, I really am.” This is a modest statement that he can honestly believe in, and a first step to reshaping his belief system. Because he believes this, he will be less likely to turn down an invitation due to nervousness, and less likely to squirm and judge himself on the way he acted in a social group. In the end, again, he will be right.
No matter what, your actions are a product of your thoughts. So even if you’re wrong about your human potential or about your relationship with the world, you’ll be right, because you will live out that belief.
Even if you’re wrong, you’re right, so remember that when you decide what you want to be true for yourself. The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen. What do you want to make happen for yourself?
Elizabeth J. Agnew, MS, ACC
Integrative Leadership Strategies
415-401-7822
liz@integrative-leadership.com
www.integrative-leadership.com
P.O. Box 460515, San Francisco, CA 94110
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Liz works with individuals and organizations in technical fields needing tailored leadership development that speaks their language. Liz has logged hundreds of hours coaching individuals from companies such as Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Google, HP, SETI, Lockheed Martin, VNUS and Sun Microsystems. Her background includes experience in adult education, team facilitation, and public speaking. She offers complimentary coaching consultations – call or email today to schedule yours.
More...
Friday, June 24, 2011
Announcing the Next EL SIG Meeting, July 21 [Robert Lasater]
The next meeting of the Engineering Leadership SIG will be held on July 21 in SAP Building 2 (3412 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA), starting at 7:00 PM. Doors open at 6:30 PM. Topic of the main presentation, Why Would Anyone Follow You? The Language and Behaviors of the Most Admired (and Despised) Leaders, by EL SIG's own Kimberly Wiefling.
Attend. Find out. Practice. Change.
Leadership is not a position in an organization chart or a title on a business card. Leadership is a way of thinking, behaving, and communicating. Leaders have only 3 tools at their disposal: A.C.T.
• Actions
• Communication (both talking and listening)
• Thinking
Of course followers can only directly experience 2 of those tools. Followers judge the effectiveness of leaders by their actions and communication.
The pitfalls of poor leadership are well known, as are the practices of the most admired leaders in the world. But knowing how to do something has never been enough in itself to assure success. (If knowing how were enough we'd all be rich and thin!)
This event is NOT about telling you how to be a great leader. This highly engaging and interactive session will give you an opportunity to practice acting and communicating like a great leader.
Come curious and prepared to participate, and leave more the kind of leader you admire.
Kimberly Wiefling is the author of Scrappy Project Management, currently ranked #1 on Amazon Kindle US in Total Quality Management. She splits her work time between the US and Japan.
Cost: $20 at the door for non-SDForum members, No charge for SDForum members
BOOK SWAP - Every month! Bring books to share.
JOB SWAP - Check out our Yahoo! Group here: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SDForum_EL_SIG_JobSwap/
PEER-to-PEER Roundtable - Every month! Join us to share insights and advice with peers each month prior to the 7 PM event.
BLOG Write or read EL SIG blog posts here: http://sdforumelsig.blogspot.com/
For more information, go here.
SNACK & BEVERAGE SPONSOR: LongView International is a innovative Silicon Valley consulting company specializing in semantic technology and software architecture. Together with our clients we achieve success through understanding business goals, formulating the strategy to execution, and building the right solution.
PROJECT CONNECTIONS ONGOING MANAGEMENT SPONSOR: Project Connections is our EL SIG Management Sponsor. ProjectConnections.com is dedicated to practically and affordably supporting individuals as they do their jobs day-to-day and helping them grow their management abilities and careers. We also provide management development and support resources to organizations, through group subscriptions, methodology content licenses, on-demand virtual training programs, virtual coaching, and more - all to help managers improve how critical project work gets done, and to help grow the capabilities of everyone on their staffs and teams.
More...
Attend. Find out. Practice. Change.
Leadership is not a position in an organization chart or a title on a business card. Leadership is a way of thinking, behaving, and communicating. Leaders have only 3 tools at their disposal: A.C.T.
• Actions
• Communication (both talking and listening)
• Thinking
Of course followers can only directly experience 2 of those tools. Followers judge the effectiveness of leaders by their actions and communication.
The pitfalls of poor leadership are well known, as are the practices of the most admired leaders in the world. But knowing how to do something has never been enough in itself to assure success. (If knowing how were enough we'd all be rich and thin!)
This event is NOT about telling you how to be a great leader. This highly engaging and interactive session will give you an opportunity to practice acting and communicating like a great leader.
Come curious and prepared to participate, and leave more the kind of leader you admire.
Kimberly Wiefling is the author of Scrappy Project Management, currently ranked #1 on Amazon Kindle US in Total Quality Management. She splits her work time between the US and Japan.
Cost: $20 at the door for non-SDForum members, No charge for SDForum members
BOOK SWAP - Every month! Bring books to share.
JOB SWAP - Check out our Yahoo! Group here: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SDForum_EL_SIG_JobSwap/
PEER-to-PEER Roundtable - Every month! Join us to share insights and advice with peers each month prior to the 7 PM event.
BLOG Write or read EL SIG blog posts here: http://sdforumelsig.blogspot.com/
For more information, go here.
SNACK & BEVERAGE SPONSOR: LongView International is a innovative Silicon Valley consulting company specializing in semantic technology and software architecture. Together with our clients we achieve success through understanding business goals, formulating the strategy to execution, and building the right solution.
PROJECT CONNECTIONS ONGOING MANAGEMENT SPONSOR: Project Connections is our EL SIG Management Sponsor. ProjectConnections.com is dedicated to practically and affordably supporting individuals as they do their jobs day-to-day and helping them grow their management abilities and careers. We also provide management development and support resources to organizations, through group subscriptions, methodology content licenses, on-demand virtual training programs, virtual coaching, and more - all to help managers improve how critical project work gets done, and to help grow the capabilities of everyone on their staffs and teams.
More...
Monday, June 20, 2011
Meet my Leadership Coach, The Jigsaw Puzzle [Elizabeth Agnew]
As my dad and I poured over our 1500-piece sailboat jigsaw puzzle one holiday break, the metaphors between what we were doing and true leadership ran continuously through my mind. I’m amazed at what paying attention to these metaphors can teach us about our own leadership qualities and how to run a team or business.
Here are four concepts integral to leadership that I found buried in that puzzle box.
1. Accepting impermanence
At any moment, a 3-year-old could come on by and, while thinking she’s helping, systematically dismantle the border of your puzzle, like my niece Grace Anna did. It’s amazing how long it took us to put together the first time, and how quickly we reassembled it the second time.
Impermanence also shows up when the puzzle has been completed. You may leave it around for a day or two to admire your production, but after that you destroy it, only to shelve and forget about it for long enough that would be a challenge to reassemble.
We tend to get attached and want things to stay how they are, or bogged down by wanting to stay on top of all possible information. Comfort overtakes creativity and growth. We can counteract this by accepting – even embracing – the impermanence of our relationships, projects, business, and ultimately our lives. This act, paradoxically, is what fosters growth, creativity, and love.
2. A perfect fit comes with a satisfying click
This is my favorite analogy. As my dad and I were working, he kept finding pieces that were so close to fitting but were not quite a perfect match. In a mock I’m-so-fed-up-with-this voice, he’d bark “get me my hammer!” ostensibly so that he could make it fit. Thing is, that would just cause more misfit pieces later on.
Needless to say, my dad doesn’t stand alone in his desire to force things to work out when they clearly aren’t.
Sometimes the opposite happened; I would be 90% sure the piece fit, but I held it up to the light just to make sure there weren’t any gaps. Sometimes a perfect fit leaves us skeptical and requires closer inspection.
However, most times, the pieces fell into place with an easy yet tangible, all-too-satisfying click.
Some relationships and connections clearly don’t fit and we’ve been known to think that as leaders it’s our job to get out our proverbial hammers and make things work. Yeah, and we’ve seen how well THAT works. Other situations warrant closer inspection under a bright light. And when the connections are right, we’ll notice our own version of the ‘click’ – that is, if we’re paying attention.
3. The ability to scope and focus
It was hard to choose an area of the puzzle to work on, especially when we were just getting started. There was too much to do! But as you can imagine, when we tried, out of hasty overwhelm, to work on the whole puzzle at once, our rate of connecting pieces dwindled greatly compared to when we each committed to a certain area.
Part of the hesitation for committing was the initial time investment of gathering all of those like-colored pieces from the bottomless pile, half of which were upside down! Focusing on a project or area of your business requires the same initial investment.
I naturally chose the easiest areas first and saved the fine-patterned areas like skies, mountains, and trees until the end. It’s funny, because as the easier areas came together, the harder ones then didn’t seem so hard, as if I was more ready for them, or understood them better in the context of the completed areas.
It’s harder to make the critical leadership decision to scope your business or project and focus in on just one part at a time, especially when things are just getting started because there’s so much to think about. Doing so, though, forces you to choose the most relevant from an endless pile of information (half of which is upside down, remember).
This also enables you to progress faster, and perhaps more importantly, to feel the progress you’re making so that your momentum continues. Start on the easier, more attainable areas and see how they come to inform the vaguer, less-defined areas as progress unfolds.
4. Pieces as parts of the whole
As my dad and I worked, each piece (especially the nondescript ones) seemed so insignificant. But even if one piece was missing among the 1500 of them, it would have resulted in an incomplete product. Each piece was individually hand-laid to produce the final product and so each piece was critical. Yet at the same time, each piece was nothing without the context brought by its surrounding pieces.
As leaders, we take action every day to achieve our vision, laying in one or two seemingly insignificant puzzle pieces. Without consideration of the final product and how our small step fits into it, we can become discouraged by a feeling of not having done enough at the end of each day. In other words, each action, devoid of its place in the bigger picture, may not seem to make a difference. Over time though, what a picture you will have constructed with all those tiny pieces!
Puzzles are relaxing and meditative. We maintain a trance-like interest, yet without the urge to rush. We desire the end state of having a completed picture, and that pulls us forward. Ironic, because it’s the means to the end that we relish in.
Leadership, on the other hand, usually isn’t quite so relaxing and meditative. Does that mean it can’t be? Why don’t we relish in the means to the end? Why do we fixate on the end and berate ourselves for not being there sooner?
If we weren’t so attached then maybe the means would be as rewarding as the end. If we looked for and tolerated only perfect fits, we wouldn’t waste our time on the wrong stuff. If we took the effort to scope our projects and focus on one thing at a time, we’d get the right stuff done. If we saw the pieces as parts of the whole, maybe we’d have more perspective.
Maybe leadership could actually be as therapeutic as a jigsaw puzzle.
Elizabeth J. Agnew, MS, ACC
Integrative Leadership Strategies
415-401-7822
liz@integrative-leadership.com
www.integrative-leadership.com
P.O. Box 460515, San Francisco, CA 94110
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Liz works with individuals and organizations in technical fields needing tailored leadership development that speaks their language. Liz has logged hundreds of hours coaching individuals from companies such as Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Google, HP, SETI, Lockheed Martin, VNUS and Sun Microsystems. Her background includes experience in adult education, team facilitation, and public speaking. She offers complimentary coaching consultations – call or email today to schedule yours.
More...
Here are four concepts integral to leadership that I found buried in that puzzle box.
1. Accepting impermanence
At any moment, a 3-year-old could come on by and, while thinking she’s helping, systematically dismantle the border of your puzzle, like my niece Grace Anna did. It’s amazing how long it took us to put together the first time, and how quickly we reassembled it the second time.
Impermanence also shows up when the puzzle has been completed. You may leave it around for a day or two to admire your production, but after that you destroy it, only to shelve and forget about it for long enough that would be a challenge to reassemble.
We tend to get attached and want things to stay how they are, or bogged down by wanting to stay on top of all possible information. Comfort overtakes creativity and growth. We can counteract this by accepting – even embracing – the impermanence of our relationships, projects, business, and ultimately our lives. This act, paradoxically, is what fosters growth, creativity, and love.
2. A perfect fit comes with a satisfying click
This is my favorite analogy. As my dad and I were working, he kept finding pieces that were so close to fitting but were not quite a perfect match. In a mock I’m-so-fed-up-with-this voice, he’d bark “get me my hammer!” ostensibly so that he could make it fit. Thing is, that would just cause more misfit pieces later on.
Needless to say, my dad doesn’t stand alone in his desire to force things to work out when they clearly aren’t.
Sometimes the opposite happened; I would be 90% sure the piece fit, but I held it up to the light just to make sure there weren’t any gaps. Sometimes a perfect fit leaves us skeptical and requires closer inspection.
However, most times, the pieces fell into place with an easy yet tangible, all-too-satisfying click.
Some relationships and connections clearly don’t fit and we’ve been known to think that as leaders it’s our job to get out our proverbial hammers and make things work. Yeah, and we’ve seen how well THAT works. Other situations warrant closer inspection under a bright light. And when the connections are right, we’ll notice our own version of the ‘click’ – that is, if we’re paying attention.
3. The ability to scope and focus
It was hard to choose an area of the puzzle to work on, especially when we were just getting started. There was too much to do! But as you can imagine, when we tried, out of hasty overwhelm, to work on the whole puzzle at once, our rate of connecting pieces dwindled greatly compared to when we each committed to a certain area.
Part of the hesitation for committing was the initial time investment of gathering all of those like-colored pieces from the bottomless pile, half of which were upside down! Focusing on a project or area of your business requires the same initial investment.
I naturally chose the easiest areas first and saved the fine-patterned areas like skies, mountains, and trees until the end. It’s funny, because as the easier areas came together, the harder ones then didn’t seem so hard, as if I was more ready for them, or understood them better in the context of the completed areas.
It’s harder to make the critical leadership decision to scope your business or project and focus in on just one part at a time, especially when things are just getting started because there’s so much to think about. Doing so, though, forces you to choose the most relevant from an endless pile of information (half of which is upside down, remember).
This also enables you to progress faster, and perhaps more importantly, to feel the progress you’re making so that your momentum continues. Start on the easier, more attainable areas and see how they come to inform the vaguer, less-defined areas as progress unfolds.
4. Pieces as parts of the whole
As my dad and I worked, each piece (especially the nondescript ones) seemed so insignificant. But even if one piece was missing among the 1500 of them, it would have resulted in an incomplete product. Each piece was individually hand-laid to produce the final product and so each piece was critical. Yet at the same time, each piece was nothing without the context brought by its surrounding pieces.
As leaders, we take action every day to achieve our vision, laying in one or two seemingly insignificant puzzle pieces. Without consideration of the final product and how our small step fits into it, we can become discouraged by a feeling of not having done enough at the end of each day. In other words, each action, devoid of its place in the bigger picture, may not seem to make a difference. Over time though, what a picture you will have constructed with all those tiny pieces!
Puzzles are relaxing and meditative. We maintain a trance-like interest, yet without the urge to rush. We desire the end state of having a completed picture, and that pulls us forward. Ironic, because it’s the means to the end that we relish in.
Leadership, on the other hand, usually isn’t quite so relaxing and meditative. Does that mean it can’t be? Why don’t we relish in the means to the end? Why do we fixate on the end and berate ourselves for not being there sooner?
If we weren’t so attached then maybe the means would be as rewarding as the end. If we looked for and tolerated only perfect fits, we wouldn’t waste our time on the wrong stuff. If we took the effort to scope our projects and focus on one thing at a time, we’d get the right stuff done. If we saw the pieces as parts of the whole, maybe we’d have more perspective.
Maybe leadership could actually be as therapeutic as a jigsaw puzzle.
Elizabeth J. Agnew, MS, ACC
Integrative Leadership Strategies
415-401-7822
liz@integrative-leadership.com
www.integrative-leadership.com
P.O. Box 460515, San Francisco, CA 94110
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Liz works with individuals and organizations in technical fields needing tailored leadership development that speaks their language. Liz has logged hundreds of hours coaching individuals from companies such as Jet Propulsion Laboratories, Google, HP, SETI, Lockheed Martin, VNUS and Sun Microsystems. Her background includes experience in adult education, team facilitation, and public speaking. She offers complimentary coaching consultations – call or email today to schedule yours.
More...
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
Avoiding Stone Age Practices in the Age of the Internet [Kimberly Wiefling]
Albert Einstein has been widely quoted as saying “There are two things that are infinite, the universe, and human stupidity – and I’m not sure about the universe.” Like most people, I usually write this off as an amusing, sarcastic quip he made on a bad day. I mean, it can't possibly be taken literally, right?
Then I wander across a news item or business situation that make me wonder if maybe he was on to something. In spite of common sense, again and again I encounter companies repeating tragically avoidable mistakes, hamstringing themselves with the same ludicrous errors their competitors (fortunately) are also making.
Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here
Although Steven McConnell clearly mapped out a step-by-step recipe for successful software product development projects over a decade ago in “Software Project Survival Guide – How to Be Sure Your First Important Project Isn’t Your Last”, a surprising level of ignorance seems to prevail in some software development organizations. Here are a few real-world examples that I have encountered in the past year:
· In spite of the availability of free bug tracking software like Bugzilla, one software organization that has been in business for over a decade still didn’t have a bug tracking system. No, I’m not kidding.
· Another, similar decade-old organization pushed changes in the source code directly to the live production server, upon which their customers depended. Really, they did this.
· One software product development team in a Fortune 100 company reported that their schedule had slipped due to the fact that, during the quality testing phase, they’d unexpectedly found bugs that needed to be fixed before shipment. Yes, unexpectedly.
Using one of my favorite thinking tools, called API (Assumption of Positive Intent), I searched my mind for an explanation of why smart, well-educated, experienced people would behave in such seemingly less-than-brilliant ways. I’m sorry to be negative, but I came up empty at that particular moment. Stick with me – by the end of the article all shall be revealed. But until then, more mayhem!
We Can Send a Man to the Moon, and Yet . . .
The widespread availability of inexpensive, even free, internet-based collaboration tools has made working with people scattered around the planet relatively easy compared to even a few years ago. (In the not-so-distant past I was sending memory sticks of big files to Japan through the physical mail!) Today, wikis, Skype, and shared document services such as Sharefile, Dropbox or Box.net have given even small companies like mine the ability to do business around the globe almost effortlessly – at least from an IT standpoint. And yet I’m personally aware of large, so-called global businesses that are still hampered by the following:
· No ability to videoconference from work (although Skyping from a nearby Starbuck’s is a no problem!).
· No storage location where a file can be stored, where every employee in the world can access it (but placing it unofficially on Dropbox is easy as pie!).
· No cross-divisional team collaboration website that can serve as a project dashboard, collaboration space, and team memory for projects (but for $100 you can set up one heck of a collaboration system on sites.google.com).
Naturally my suggestions to explore using commonly available tools like Google Sites (Google’s version of a wiki), Skype (free videoconferencing), and cloud file storage tools are met with the standard retort: “Our IT group won’t let us use that due to security issues.” Point well taken. Security is certainly a valid consideration. But so is getting our work done, eh? And if email were invented today, I am quite sure it would be forbidden by IT departments worldwide due to similar concerns, as would credit cards (they track everything we do!) and cell phones (and they know where we are!).
Any one of these 21st century super-cool tools won’t necessarily work for a particular environment, but it’s up to the project manager and the IT people to work together to figure out what will work. The question we should be asking is “What WILL make it possible to efficiently, effectively, and securely share files, documents, and other critical project information in today’s global business environment?” I’m truly stymied by encountering the brick wall of “It’s not possible.” year after year with various clients. No worries, I’m not tired, and I’m not giving up, I’m just puzzled. Perhaps I’ll be deluged by responses full of cautionary notes, but I personally would prefer an onslaught of email answering the question “What would make it possible?”
Tortured by the Demons of Excessive Workload and Aversion to Planning
As I write it’s starting to dawn on me that stupidity can’t possibly be the explanation for the bewildering examples of worst practices above. But what is at the root of all of this, or at least the largest of the many tendrils?
Last time I checked everyone I know who had a job was more overworked than ever, with at least a half-dozen important tasks or projects on their plate at once, all of which were prioritized either HOT, VERY HOT, RED HOT, or DO IT NOW! The necessity of taking the time to plan - not just what we do, but how we do it - has been understandably put on the backburner. If you haven’t read Chapter 5 of my Scrappy Project Management book recently, you might want to check out this chapter, available free on ProjectConnections.com, for more insights into this “tyranny of the urgent”.
Working faster, “doing more with less”, and the all-too-common firefighting, heroics, and diving catches can feel like an enlivening experience, even as you’re digging your own project grave. An aversion to planning is characteristic of many human beings (especially engineers), and it never feels like there’s enough time to plan. In a way it’s actually quite a relief not to have the time to do any long-term strategic thinking, especially when the world sometimes seems to be changing so rapidly that any such plans will be obsolete long before they’re implemented. We can just come in to work everyday, sort through what’s piled up in our email inbox, and respond to the crisis de jour, adrenaline coursing through our veins the whole time. Wahoo!
Corporate Culture Trumps All, and Yet is Neglected
Peter Drucker is credited with saying “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”, meaning that if you can’t get the company culture right it won’t much matter what kind of bug-tracking software you implement, or whether you have a wiki or a place to share files. In spite of a wide array of research, books, and articles on exactly what works with millions of people worldwide, I still find that most work environments fail to implement even the most basic elements required of healthy, vibrant, work environments: corporate cultures capable of fostering and enhancing business results. (See my previous article on this topic if you want more on this rant.) The project leader is the source of culture in the immediate project environment, so we’re responsible for what Mr. Druker claims is even more high leverage than business strategy. What an awesome opportunity and responsibility! Most of the changes required to create a best-in-class culture cost absolutely nothing, except the time to plan and implement practices such as:
· Making sure that everyone who’s working together gets to know each other face-to-face
· Making sure each individual knows what’s expected of them, and has the tools and skills to do it.
· Providing a clear line-of-sight from individual goals to organizational goals, mission, and purpose.
But we’re all still burdened with the fact that we’re human beings, and our nature is to succumb to the overwhelm of extremely demanding work environments. Even I need a reminder now and then that I’m venturing far outside the zone of common sense. Let’s help each other stay out of that well-traveled area, shall we? Make a pact with your teammates early in the project that you’ll raise a red flag when reason recedes.
A Beacon of Light in the Darkness
My friend and former colleague Jateen Parekh is the founder and CTO of Jelli, a company that’s re-inventing radio. I heard him give a talk recently where he shared what he’d learned on the journey from being an engineer to a company founder, people leader, and business manager. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool technologist by background, passion, and profession, and yet in his role as the leader of a very techno-centric company he’s embraced pretty much every one of the business management, process excellence, and people-focused practices referred to above.
Listening to Jateen reminded me that working ON the business – on the WAY we conduct ourselves while doing business - is just as important as working IN the business, especially when it is OUR business. Ignoring best practices proven to work better than chaos, lacking discipline to follow processes that we know make sense, pretending common sense doesn’t apply to our work environment because “our business is different” … these choices are inexcusable for today’s project managers. Surely this is one of the most important roles of a project leader. We have a responsibility to step back and question the processes and practices in use, and ask if there is a better way to achieve our business results, find answers to this question, and thoughtfully implement solutions that enjoy the buy-in, commitment, and support of all key stakeholders.
If you haven’t got time for that, then at least pause and reflect on this bit of advice from Dr. Eli Goldratt, author of—among many books—the bestseller The Goal:. “Just stop doing the stupid stuff! The rest is genius!”
Kimberly Wiefling is the author of Scrappy Project Management, currently ranked #1 on Amazon Kindle US in Total Quality Management. She splits her work time between the US and Japan.
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Then I wander across a news item or business situation that make me wonder if maybe he was on to something. In spite of common sense, again and again I encounter companies repeating tragically avoidable mistakes, hamstringing themselves with the same ludicrous errors their competitors (fortunately) are also making.
Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter Here
Although Steven McConnell clearly mapped out a step-by-step recipe for successful software product development projects over a decade ago in “Software Project Survival Guide – How to Be Sure Your First Important Project Isn’t Your Last”, a surprising level of ignorance seems to prevail in some software development organizations. Here are a few real-world examples that I have encountered in the past year:
· In spite of the availability of free bug tracking software like Bugzilla, one software organization that has been in business for over a decade still didn’t have a bug tracking system. No, I’m not kidding.
· Another, similar decade-old organization pushed changes in the source code directly to the live production server, upon which their customers depended. Really, they did this.
· One software product development team in a Fortune 100 company reported that their schedule had slipped due to the fact that, during the quality testing phase, they’d unexpectedly found bugs that needed to be fixed before shipment. Yes, unexpectedly.
Using one of my favorite thinking tools, called API (Assumption of Positive Intent), I searched my mind for an explanation of why smart, well-educated, experienced people would behave in such seemingly less-than-brilliant ways. I’m sorry to be negative, but I came up empty at that particular moment. Stick with me – by the end of the article all shall be revealed. But until then, more mayhem!
We Can Send a Man to the Moon, and Yet . . .
The widespread availability of inexpensive, even free, internet-based collaboration tools has made working with people scattered around the planet relatively easy compared to even a few years ago. (In the not-so-distant past I was sending memory sticks of big files to Japan through the physical mail!) Today, wikis, Skype, and shared document services such as Sharefile, Dropbox or Box.net have given even small companies like mine the ability to do business around the globe almost effortlessly – at least from an IT standpoint. And yet I’m personally aware of large, so-called global businesses that are still hampered by the following:
· No ability to videoconference from work (although Skyping from a nearby Starbuck’s is a no problem!).
· No storage location where a file can be stored, where every employee in the world can access it (but placing it unofficially on Dropbox is easy as pie!).
· No cross-divisional team collaboration website that can serve as a project dashboard, collaboration space, and team memory for projects (but for $100 you can set up one heck of a collaboration system on sites.google.com).
Naturally my suggestions to explore using commonly available tools like Google Sites (Google’s version of a wiki), Skype (free videoconferencing), and cloud file storage tools are met with the standard retort: “Our IT group won’t let us use that due to security issues.” Point well taken. Security is certainly a valid consideration. But so is getting our work done, eh? And if email were invented today, I am quite sure it would be forbidden by IT departments worldwide due to similar concerns, as would credit cards (they track everything we do!) and cell phones (and they know where we are!).
Any one of these 21st century super-cool tools won’t necessarily work for a particular environment, but it’s up to the project manager and the IT people to work together to figure out what will work. The question we should be asking is “What WILL make it possible to efficiently, effectively, and securely share files, documents, and other critical project information in today’s global business environment?” I’m truly stymied by encountering the brick wall of “It’s not possible.” year after year with various clients. No worries, I’m not tired, and I’m not giving up, I’m just puzzled. Perhaps I’ll be deluged by responses full of cautionary notes, but I personally would prefer an onslaught of email answering the question “What would make it possible?”
Tortured by the Demons of Excessive Workload and Aversion to Planning
As I write it’s starting to dawn on me that stupidity can’t possibly be the explanation for the bewildering examples of worst practices above. But what is at the root of all of this, or at least the largest of the many tendrils?
Last time I checked everyone I know who had a job was more overworked than ever, with at least a half-dozen important tasks or projects on their plate at once, all of which were prioritized either HOT, VERY HOT, RED HOT, or DO IT NOW! The necessity of taking the time to plan - not just what we do, but how we do it - has been understandably put on the backburner. If you haven’t read Chapter 5 of my Scrappy Project Management book recently, you might want to check out this chapter, available free on ProjectConnections.com, for more insights into this “tyranny of the urgent”.
Working faster, “doing more with less”, and the all-too-common firefighting, heroics, and diving catches can feel like an enlivening experience, even as you’re digging your own project grave. An aversion to planning is characteristic of many human beings (especially engineers), and it never feels like there’s enough time to plan. In a way it’s actually quite a relief not to have the time to do any long-term strategic thinking, especially when the world sometimes seems to be changing so rapidly that any such plans will be obsolete long before they’re implemented. We can just come in to work everyday, sort through what’s piled up in our email inbox, and respond to the crisis de jour, adrenaline coursing through our veins the whole time. Wahoo!
Corporate Culture Trumps All, and Yet is Neglected
Peter Drucker is credited with saying “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”, meaning that if you can’t get the company culture right it won’t much matter what kind of bug-tracking software you implement, or whether you have a wiki or a place to share files. In spite of a wide array of research, books, and articles on exactly what works with millions of people worldwide, I still find that most work environments fail to implement even the most basic elements required of healthy, vibrant, work environments: corporate cultures capable of fostering and enhancing business results. (See my previous article on this topic if you want more on this rant.) The project leader is the source of culture in the immediate project environment, so we’re responsible for what Mr. Druker claims is even more high leverage than business strategy. What an awesome opportunity and responsibility! Most of the changes required to create a best-in-class culture cost absolutely nothing, except the time to plan and implement practices such as:
· Making sure that everyone who’s working together gets to know each other face-to-face
· Making sure each individual knows what’s expected of them, and has the tools and skills to do it.
· Providing a clear line-of-sight from individual goals to organizational goals, mission, and purpose.
But we’re all still burdened with the fact that we’re human beings, and our nature is to succumb to the overwhelm of extremely demanding work environments. Even I need a reminder now and then that I’m venturing far outside the zone of common sense. Let’s help each other stay out of that well-traveled area, shall we? Make a pact with your teammates early in the project that you’ll raise a red flag when reason recedes.
A Beacon of Light in the Darkness
My friend and former colleague Jateen Parekh is the founder and CTO of Jelli, a company that’s re-inventing radio. I heard him give a talk recently where he shared what he’d learned on the journey from being an engineer to a company founder, people leader, and business manager. He’s a dyed-in-the-wool technologist by background, passion, and profession, and yet in his role as the leader of a very techno-centric company he’s embraced pretty much every one of the business management, process excellence, and people-focused practices referred to above.
Listening to Jateen reminded me that working ON the business – on the WAY we conduct ourselves while doing business - is just as important as working IN the business, especially when it is OUR business. Ignoring best practices proven to work better than chaos, lacking discipline to follow processes that we know make sense, pretending common sense doesn’t apply to our work environment because “our business is different” … these choices are inexcusable for today’s project managers. Surely this is one of the most important roles of a project leader. We have a responsibility to step back and question the processes and practices in use, and ask if there is a better way to achieve our business results, find answers to this question, and thoughtfully implement solutions that enjoy the buy-in, commitment, and support of all key stakeholders.
If you haven’t got time for that, then at least pause and reflect on this bit of advice from Dr. Eli Goldratt, author of—among many books—the bestseller The Goal:. “Just stop doing the stupid stuff! The rest is genius!”
Kimberly Wiefling is the author of Scrappy Project Management, currently ranked #1 on Amazon Kindle US in Total Quality Management. She splits her work time between the US and Japan.
More...
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Announcing the Next EL SIG Meeting, May 19 [Robert Lasater]
The next meeting of the Engineering Leadership SIG will be held on May 19 in SAP Building 2 (3412 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA), starting at 7:00 PM. Doors open at 6:30 PM. Topic of the main presentation, Energetic Communication for Engineering Leaders, by Tia Turnbull.
Energetic Communication for Engineering Leaders
The energy of a leader is critical to generating results. How do you impact the energy of your team and other colleagues? Explore the four ways we drain energy and the four ways we lift people’s energy in communication. Become someone who lifts the energy of any environment in the first five minutes of showing up.
Whether at home or at work communication difficulties can interfere with ones ability to concentrate at the task at hand. You will have an opportunity for question and answers.
Attending this talk will help you to:
· Create more uplifting communication that builds rapport, trust, a safer environment and more effective results.
· Stay present and think clearly in the moment.
· Not have your energy drained while you are working in a draining situation with people who need your help.
· Be aware of subtle choices in communication that could be causing conflict.
· Improve listening skills.
· Stay focused, decide and take new and effective actions.
· Question assumptions and make more empowering choices.
· Confidently enter into communication to resolve any issues.
What you will learn:
· The four simple ways to drain energy that encompasses all communication problems.
· The four ways to lift energy in communication.
· The six mental entities that show up in every conversation between two people.
· The most powerful and rewarding way to really listen to what someone else is saying.
· A quick script using non-violent communication that can help you to take responsibility and resolve communication issues quickly.
Learning these skills will help you to:
· Create more uplifting communication that builds rapport, trust, a safer environment and more effective results.
· Stay present and think clearly in the moment.
· Not have your energy drained while you are working in a draining situation with people who need your help.
· Be aware of subtle choices in communication that could be causing conflict.
· Improve listening skills.
· Stay focused, decide and take new and effective actions.
· Question assumptions and make more empowering choices.
Learn a quick process to help people to question assumptions and make more empowering choices.
Tia Turnbull is a professional life coach who has worked with thousands of people to help them get where they want to be in their lives. Today she will be presenting Energetic Environments. Communication tools and skills for empowering yourself while lifting others. How particular communication choices can lead you away from your goals with your clients, and in any relationship, and how to make choices that have you get what you want more often.
Cost: $20 at the door for non-SDForum members, No charge for SDForum members
BOOK SWAP - Every month! Bring books to share.
JOB SWAP - Check out our Yahoo! Group here: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SDForum_EL_SIG_JobSwap/
PEER-to-PEER Roundtable - Every month! Join us to share insights and advice with peers each month prior to the 7 PM event.
BLOG Write or read EL SIG blog posts here: http://sdforumelsig.blogspot.com/
For more information, go here.
SNACK & BEVERAGE SPONSOR: LongView International is a innovative Silicon Valley consulting company specializing in semantic technology and software architecture. Together with our clients we achieve success through understanding business goals, formulating the strategy to execution, and building the right solution.
PROJECT CONNECTIONS ONGOING MANAGEMENT SPONSOR: Project Connections is our EL SIG Management Sponsor. ProjectConnections.com is dedicated to practically and affordably supporting individuals as they do their jobs day-to-day and helping them grow their management abilities and careers. We also provide management development and support resources to organizations, through group subscriptions, methodology content licenses, on-demand virtual training programs, virtual coaching, and more - all to help managers improve how critical project work gets done, and to help grow the capabilities of everyone on their staffs and teams.
More...
Energetic Communication for Engineering Leaders
The energy of a leader is critical to generating results. How do you impact the energy of your team and other colleagues? Explore the four ways we drain energy and the four ways we lift people’s energy in communication. Become someone who lifts the energy of any environment in the first five minutes of showing up.
Whether at home or at work communication difficulties can interfere with ones ability to concentrate at the task at hand. You will have an opportunity for question and answers.
Attending this talk will help you to:
· Create more uplifting communication that builds rapport, trust, a safer environment and more effective results.
· Stay present and think clearly in the moment.
· Not have your energy drained while you are working in a draining situation with people who need your help.
· Be aware of subtle choices in communication that could be causing conflict.
· Improve listening skills.
· Stay focused, decide and take new and effective actions.
· Question assumptions and make more empowering choices.
· Confidently enter into communication to resolve any issues.
What you will learn:
· The four simple ways to drain energy that encompasses all communication problems.
· The four ways to lift energy in communication.
· The six mental entities that show up in every conversation between two people.
· The most powerful and rewarding way to really listen to what someone else is saying.
· A quick script using non-violent communication that can help you to take responsibility and resolve communication issues quickly.
Learning these skills will help you to:
· Create more uplifting communication that builds rapport, trust, a safer environment and more effective results.
· Stay present and think clearly in the moment.
· Not have your energy drained while you are working in a draining situation with people who need your help.
· Be aware of subtle choices in communication that could be causing conflict.
· Improve listening skills.
· Stay focused, decide and take new and effective actions.
· Question assumptions and make more empowering choices.
Learn a quick process to help people to question assumptions and make more empowering choices.
Tia Turnbull is a professional life coach who has worked with thousands of people to help them get where they want to be in their lives. Today she will be presenting Energetic Environments. Communication tools and skills for empowering yourself while lifting others. How particular communication choices can lead you away from your goals with your clients, and in any relationship, and how to make choices that have you get what you want more often.
Cost: $20 at the door for non-SDForum members, No charge for SDForum members
BOOK SWAP - Every month! Bring books to share.
JOB SWAP - Check out our Yahoo! Group here: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SDForum_EL_SIG_JobSwap/
PEER-to-PEER Roundtable - Every month! Join us to share insights and advice with peers each month prior to the 7 PM event.
BLOG Write or read EL SIG blog posts here: http://sdforumelsig.blogspot.com/
For more information, go here.
SNACK & BEVERAGE SPONSOR: LongView International is a innovative Silicon Valley consulting company specializing in semantic technology and software architecture. Together with our clients we achieve success through understanding business goals, formulating the strategy to execution, and building the right solution.
PROJECT CONNECTIONS ONGOING MANAGEMENT SPONSOR: Project Connections is our EL SIG Management Sponsor. ProjectConnections.com is dedicated to practically and affordably supporting individuals as they do their jobs day-to-day and helping them grow their management abilities and careers. We also provide management development and support resources to organizations, through group subscriptions, methodology content licenses, on-demand virtual training programs, virtual coaching, and more - all to help managers improve how critical project work gets done, and to help grow the capabilities of everyone on their staffs and teams.
More...
Thursday, May 5, 2011
April 21 Meeting Notes - Product Management [Robert Lasater]
The April 21 meeting of the Engineering Leadership SIG of the SD Forum featured a talk on Product Management by Rich Mironov. His presentation was outstanding, one of the best I have seen at an Engineering Leadership SIG event. Here is a summary of Mironov’s talk.
Overview of Product Managment
Mironov began by stating Product Management engages in four areas:
· Product
· People and Organization
· Process
· Technical Knowledge
and an effective Product Manager must have some knowledge and background in all four areas.
Before proceeding further with his actual talk, Mironov asked the audience to take a few minutes and list some good and some bad experiences with Product Management.
Examples from the audience of good experiences with Product Management:
· Focus
· Good technical knowledge
· Made decisive product decisions
· Infectious enthusiasm
· Good financial analysis
· Voice of the customer
Examples of bad experiences:
· No business plan
· Senior management undercut product management
· Undefined product management role
· Threw specification over the fence
· Feature du jour
· Old product preconception
· Product management thinks they have good technical knowledge
· “I know what the customer wants.”
· No view of competitive product
Not all bad experiences were the result of product management.
What Does a Product Manger Do?
· Drives delivery and market acceptance
· Targets market segments, not individual customers
· Resolves competing priorities
· Drives acceptance and adaptation
· Makes money
· Even internal projects need to have willing customers
How Does Product Management Interact with the Rest of the Organization?
Product Management works with:
· Developers
· Executives
· Marketing and Sales – more broadly, markets and customers.
Product Management provides some specific inputs to developers:
· Market information
· Priorities
· Requirements
· User stories
· Roadmaps
And the developers provide Product Management a working product.
Product Management provides a different set of inputs to marketing and sales:
· Segments
· Benefits and features
· Prices
· Qualification
· Demonstrations
And Marketing and Sales provides Product Management with field input and market feedback.
It is essential for product managers to talk with actual customers. Ideally, one-third of their time they should be engaged with customers. A more realistic goal is one-fifth of their time with customers.
Product Management provides a third set of inputs to executives:
· Strategy
· Forecasts
· Competitive intelligence
And the executive team provides Product Management a Yes/No decision on a particular product or project, along with budgets, staffing and funding.
Mironov noted engineers become product managers as a path to becoming part of the senior executive team.
Planning Horizons and the Agile SW Process
From the Agile framework comes the hierarchy Daily – Sprint – Release – Product portfolio – Strategy. Product managers start in the center of this hierarchy – Release and Product Portfolio – but will find themselves from time to time engaged at all levels of the hierarchy.
The Nature of Product Management’s Role
There is no rational sequence for Product Management.
· All aspects must be worked in parallel.
· It is interrupt driven.
· Bottom-up shapes top-down and top-down shapes bottoms-up.
· Product Management must provide strategy, judgment and integration as well as execution.
· Every Product Manager should spend a significant amount of time with customers.
Good Product Managers drive decisions despite uncertainties and contradictory goals.
Since Product Management is a collection of people-related skills, it requires mentoring; difficult to get it on your own without strong role models. And one the most valuable aspects of Mironov’s presentation was his emphasis on how Product Management can fail. Knowing what can go wrong can be much more helpful than merely learning about successes.
Example Product Management Failure Modes
The first set of examples show how a Product Manager can fail when working with an Agile team:
· Product Manager only works part-time on Product Management.
· Lack of detail on stories (e.g. why the product is superior, or what are customers looking for in the product line)
· Hand waving and bluster.
· Best of intentions but pulled in too many directions
· “Build what I meant”
The second set of examples show how a Product Manager can fail in the market:
· Weak on the real world – pricing, discounts, upgrades and packaging
· Disconnected from other teams.
· Belief in rational users
· Trade off company-wide product strategy for product level features.
· Assume a few customers represent the market.
Mironov closed on a very positive theme, how you can help Product Management.
Seven Ways to Help Product Management
· Ask about Use Cases and customer problems
· Do not demand that Product Managers be as technical as engineers.
· Not every user story becomes a feature
· Expect Product Managers to translate features into customer-relevant benefits
· Ask about forecasts, shipments and revenue
· Quietly sit in on some customer meetings
· Channel your Inner Product Manager
More...
Overview of Product Managment
Mironov began by stating Product Management engages in four areas:
· Product
· People and Organization
· Process
· Technical Knowledge
and an effective Product Manager must have some knowledge and background in all four areas.
Before proceeding further with his actual talk, Mironov asked the audience to take a few minutes and list some good and some bad experiences with Product Management.
Examples from the audience of good experiences with Product Management:
· Focus
· Good technical knowledge
· Made decisive product decisions
· Infectious enthusiasm
· Good financial analysis
· Voice of the customer
Examples of bad experiences:
· No business plan
· Senior management undercut product management
· Undefined product management role
· Threw specification over the fence
· Feature du jour
· Old product preconception
· Product management thinks they have good technical knowledge
· “I know what the customer wants.”
· No view of competitive product
Not all bad experiences were the result of product management.
What Does a Product Manger Do?
· Drives delivery and market acceptance
· Targets market segments, not individual customers
· Resolves competing priorities
· Drives acceptance and adaptation
· Makes money
· Even internal projects need to have willing customers
How Does Product Management Interact with the Rest of the Organization?
Product Management works with:
· Developers
· Executives
· Marketing and Sales – more broadly, markets and customers.
Product Management provides some specific inputs to developers:
· Market information
· Priorities
· Requirements
· User stories
· Roadmaps
And the developers provide Product Management a working product.
Product Management provides a different set of inputs to marketing and sales:
· Segments
· Benefits and features
· Prices
· Qualification
· Demonstrations
And Marketing and Sales provides Product Management with field input and market feedback.
It is essential for product managers to talk with actual customers. Ideally, one-third of their time they should be engaged with customers. A more realistic goal is one-fifth of their time with customers.
Product Management provides a third set of inputs to executives:
· Strategy
· Forecasts
· Competitive intelligence
And the executive team provides Product Management a Yes/No decision on a particular product or project, along with budgets, staffing and funding.
Mironov noted engineers become product managers as a path to becoming part of the senior executive team.
Planning Horizons and the Agile SW Process
From the Agile framework comes the hierarchy Daily – Sprint – Release – Product portfolio – Strategy. Product managers start in the center of this hierarchy – Release and Product Portfolio – but will find themselves from time to time engaged at all levels of the hierarchy.
The Nature of Product Management’s Role
There is no rational sequence for Product Management.
· All aspects must be worked in parallel.
· It is interrupt driven.
· Bottom-up shapes top-down and top-down shapes bottoms-up.
· Product Management must provide strategy, judgment and integration as well as execution.
· Every Product Manager should spend a significant amount of time with customers.
Good Product Managers drive decisions despite uncertainties and contradictory goals.
Since Product Management is a collection of people-related skills, it requires mentoring; difficult to get it on your own without strong role models. And one the most valuable aspects of Mironov’s presentation was his emphasis on how Product Management can fail. Knowing what can go wrong can be much more helpful than merely learning about successes.
Example Product Management Failure Modes
The first set of examples show how a Product Manager can fail when working with an Agile team:
· Product Manager only works part-time on Product Management.
· Lack of detail on stories (e.g. why the product is superior, or what are customers looking for in the product line)
· Hand waving and bluster.
· Best of intentions but pulled in too many directions
· “Build what I meant”
The second set of examples show how a Product Manager can fail in the market:
· Weak on the real world – pricing, discounts, upgrades and packaging
· Disconnected from other teams.
· Belief in rational users
· Trade off company-wide product strategy for product level features.
· Assume a few customers represent the market.
Mironov closed on a very positive theme, how you can help Product Management.
Seven Ways to Help Product Management
· Ask about Use Cases and customer problems
· Do not demand that Product Managers be as technical as engineers.
· Not every user story becomes a feature
· Expect Product Managers to translate features into customer-relevant benefits
· Ask about forecasts, shipments and revenue
· Quietly sit in on some customer meetings
· Channel your Inner Product Manager
More...
Monday, May 2, 2011
Project Leadership Lessons from a Heart-wrenching Tragedy [Kimberly Wiefling]
As you may know, Kimberly Wiefling has extensive business and personal contacts in Japan. Here she discusses her reaction to the recent earthquake and tsunami disaster, and finds some lessons for product management and engineering leadership.
Pardon me if I’m not my normally humorous self. I’m obsessing on disaster these days after the recent quake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant tragedies in Japan. While there have been plenty of tragedies in the past that could have consumed my emotional bandwidth (see the complete list on Wikipedia if you don’t already feel like self-medicating with tequila), this is much more personal. Just about every month for the last five years I’ve flown to Japan to work for a couple of weeks. From my home in the Silicon Valley, Japan seemed a long way off. Until now, that is.
On March 11 at 4:00 AM the iPhone on my bed table rang. It was my dad calling from my parents' home in Florida. “Get up! Your friends are in trouble.” he said. I don’t know what he thought I could do about a natural disaster occurring over 5,000 miles away, but that’s my dad -- no matter how dire the circumstances, he always thinks there’s something a person can do to make a positive difference.
Through my work with global Japanese companies I’ve met thousands of people who live in Japan. Many I consider friends, and some are as precious to me as my dear ol’ dad. I had just returned from Asia two days ago, and I was in Tokyo only five days before the quake struck. So up I got, and immediately scoured the internet for news from Nippon. Needless to say, what I saw was tragic beyond comprehension.
As the disaster unfolded before my eyes, I watched a tsunami wash away an entire village. At that moment, any illusion of separateness I may have felt was washed away with that village and those lives. This was not an event that I perceived as happening to “strangers,” people distant from me. No, at that moment, with so many ties to people living in Japan, I strongly felt that this was happening to “us.”
Shared Pain Focuses the Mind
Immediately I felt an overwhelming urge to help. Figuring out how to help took a while, but there was no question that I needed to be a part of the solution. I could fill this article with the personal stories of people I know, and how they are carrying on in the face of a continuing series of threats and disasters, but there are plenty of places you can read about that. Instead, let’s honor the memory of those who have suffered and died by exploring what this experience can teach us about being better project leaders. I’ve boiled it down to the following three insights for starters, though there are surely more lessons to be learned:
· “We-centric thinking” clarifies the goal and focuses people on finding solutions.
· The human mind has a limited ability to imagine risks. There is no bottom to “worse.”
· “Possibility thinking” is effective even in tragic and seemingly impossible situations.
Crisis Creates Clarity
The moment I grasped the situation in Japan (thanks to horrifyingly vivid videos on the web and graphic descriptions of events from my friends living there), I was immediately willing to do whatever necessary. The overarching goal was so clear, and the need so immediate and compelling, that I was willing to do whatever I could to help. I started contacting people on both sides of the Pacific to see what could be done, and so did many others. Perhaps most inspiringly, the people of Japan reached out to help each other with a depth of compassion and selflessness that left the world in awe. One American woman living near the affected region wrote us that, in this time of food shortages, she returns home each night to find that someone has left food on her doorstep. Heck, after forgetting to pack my lunch for a recent university alumni picnic, I sat, foodless, with a couple who never even offered me so much as an olive.
Imagine if everyone involved in a challenging project first and foremost had an attitude of “What can I do to help?” What if each of the people involved on your project – teammates, sponsors, executives, suppliers, and customers – brought that attitude to every meeting and discussion? Don’t get me wrong, I believe that most people intend to help, even if that intention is buried deep within their psyche. But it gets obscured by time pressures, differing perceptions of the goals, and competition for resources, not to mention pride, turf wars, and ego.
Over the years I’ve noticed a sort of fragmentation that occurs in some project ecosystems that can be summed up as “us vs. them.” In stressful project environments (which is basically all of them, but who's counting?) I’ve noticed a variety of different schisms:
· Our company vs. the customer
· Our project team vs. the execs
· Me vs. “the others”
When I facilitate team effectiveness workshops, I sometimes divide the participants into two groups and locate them in opposite corners of the room, giving both groups the same instructions: get the other group to come to their corner of the room. Then I sit back and watch. Even when the entire group is comprised of people from the same company, even the same division – people who know each other, for crying out loud – successfully completing the task by simply having the groups switch positions is a solution that eludes them for as long as 23 minutes. (Yes, that’s the world record, but I’m sworn to secrecy which company it was.) Separating people by as little as 4 meters is enough to cause the “us vs. them” syndrome.
On projects, as long as the illusion of separateness persists we can find ourselves working at cross-purposes with the very people needed to achieve the project goals. When instead we view ourselves as “we,” we’re unencumbered by the obstacles of ego, hierarchy and competition. Adrift on the same iceberg, we’re instantly united in helping each other find solutions that enable us to step safely onto the shore of success. When we create this sense of unity among the various stakeholders in our projects (ideally without the presence of an external hazard, natural or man-made) we get everyone involved and focused on making a positive difference.
There Is No Bottom to Worse
In view of the fact that multiple layers of backup systems failed in the Fukushima nuclear power plants, I’m of the opinion that human beings have no imagination for disaster.
In “Scrappy Business Contingency Planning” the author (and my friend), Michael Seese, admonishes those doing disaster planning not to focus on what kind of disaster might interrupt power – only on what to do when that power is interrupted, as it will surely be. Michael has a talent for gloom and doom thinking, but I doubt that even he could have imagined all of the ways things could go badly wrong at the power plants. When I asked him to comment on the unfolding nuclear nightmare he said “In some sense, I see the Japanese response to the events at Fukushima as being like our Y2K preparation efforts. I worked on several Y2K remediation projects. I couldn't help but smile when – after the clock struck midnight and our world didn't grind to a halt – people said, "Nothing happened! Look at all that money that was wasted." Of course, nothing happened – because we spent that time, effort, and money. It's the same thing in Japan. Who could say what would have happened had they not pumped in sea water, and dumped more water in by helicopter?
One takeaway from this disaster is that business contingency plans need to tested, and re-tested. Of course, it's not practical to test a nuclear meltdown. But hopefully the lessons learned at Fukushima Daiichi will enable Japan – and other countries – to make their nuclear power plants safer.”
Yes, let’s all hope so. I know some people think “dilution is the solution to pollution”; our vast oceans can only absorb so much radioactivity.
The human mind has a limited ability to imagine risk. Even in Japan, where risk aversion, attention detail, and avoidance of failure are legendary (almost a national pastime), engineers failed to imagine the recent catastrophic string of events and design around them. In my experience, no amount of risk assessment and planning captures all possibilities. Things can always be worse than we imagined.
The Best Is Always Yet to Come
“We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.” John W. Gardner, US administrator (1912 - 2002)
Faced with the choice to either give up hope or trudge on in a hopeless cause, I'm prone to choose trudging. Why? Because if I’ve learned anything in 20 years of leading, and working on, all kinds of projects with varying degrees of impossibility, it’s that human beings – myself included – are notoriously poor judges of when something is hopeless.
Even in the most dire circumstances, asking “What does this make possible that wasn’t possible before?” helps open the mind to creative ideas and breakthrough thinking. I’ve been pondering this in relationship to the quake/tsunami/nuclear triple tragedy, and so far I’ve come up with a few possibilities:
This will bring the world closer to Japan. People all over the world have voiced their admiration of the dignity, compassion and selflessness of the people of Japan. My friends in Japan are a bit amused by how much attention the press is giving to the headline “There’s no looting!” To them, they can’t imagine why anyone would loot. While some cynics say it’s just that negative events aren’t being reported, I disagree. I can personally testify to getting my wallet back with over 30,000 yen in it after leaving it in a Tokyo taxi. The driver delivered it to my hotel for free, left it at the front desk, and it was returned to me the next morning.
This will bring Japan closer to their neighbors. After years of icy relationships, Korea and China sent help to Japan . . . and Japan accepted.
This will bring the people of Japan closer to each other. Disasters have a way of recalibrating us about what’s important. In a country where avoiding risk is almost a national pastime, living with the daily threat of aftershocks and longer-term consequences of nuclear contamination are likely to shift thinking about risk. Now that daily life is risky, perhaps other kinds of risk-taking, like innovation and breakthrough thinking, won’t seem quite as dangerous by comparison. As Helen Keller said, “Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.”
I think it’s pretty safe to say that any project you or I may be working on can’t be nearly as dreadful as the situation unfolding in Japan. Consequently, I’m quite certain that we can find some “great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems” in whatever project currently stymies us. Even if it’s true that the situation is hopeless, the illusion that we can make a difference can inspire us to build capabilities that make the next situation less so. There are advantages to leading your team as if the best is yet to come while dealing with the current reality. Jim Collins labeled this “The Stockdale Paradox”:
“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” - Rear Admiral James B. Stockdale
The New Normal
Some of my colleagues at ALC Education in Tokyo slept on the 19th floor of their office building the night of the quake as they waited for trains to resume operation. Others – parents with stranded children – walked for six hours or more to get home to them. In the weeks that followed they weathered power shortages, devastating news of the missing and the dead, and ongoing scares from aftershocks and radiation. Through it all the people of Japan are inspiring the entire world through their stunning examples of selflessness and compassion—two ingredients that I feel quite sure I can use to improve my next project. I hope we’ll all emerge committed to applying these and the other lessons learned to our projects and our lives as life on Earth returns to the “new normal.”
If you’d like to donate to the Japan Relief Fund, one option is through the American Red Cross:
https://american.redcross.org/site/SPageServer?pagename=ntld_main
Kimberly Wiefling is the author of Scrappy Project Management, one of the top-ranked project management books on Amazon in the US, published in Japanese, and growing in popularity around the world. She splits her work time between the US and Japan.
More...
Pardon me if I’m not my normally humorous self. I’m obsessing on disaster these days after the recent quake, tsunami, and nuclear power plant tragedies in Japan. While there have been plenty of tragedies in the past that could have consumed my emotional bandwidth (see the complete list on Wikipedia if you don’t already feel like self-medicating with tequila), this is much more personal. Just about every month for the last five years I’ve flown to Japan to work for a couple of weeks. From my home in the Silicon Valley, Japan seemed a long way off. Until now, that is.
On March 11 at 4:00 AM the iPhone on my bed table rang. It was my dad calling from my parents' home in Florida. “Get up! Your friends are in trouble.” he said. I don’t know what he thought I could do about a natural disaster occurring over 5,000 miles away, but that’s my dad -- no matter how dire the circumstances, he always thinks there’s something a person can do to make a positive difference.
Through my work with global Japanese companies I’ve met thousands of people who live in Japan. Many I consider friends, and some are as precious to me as my dear ol’ dad. I had just returned from Asia two days ago, and I was in Tokyo only five days before the quake struck. So up I got, and immediately scoured the internet for news from Nippon. Needless to say, what I saw was tragic beyond comprehension.
As the disaster unfolded before my eyes, I watched a tsunami wash away an entire village. At that moment, any illusion of separateness I may have felt was washed away with that village and those lives. This was not an event that I perceived as happening to “strangers,” people distant from me. No, at that moment, with so many ties to people living in Japan, I strongly felt that this was happening to “us.”
Shared Pain Focuses the Mind
Immediately I felt an overwhelming urge to help. Figuring out how to help took a while, but there was no question that I needed to be a part of the solution. I could fill this article with the personal stories of people I know, and how they are carrying on in the face of a continuing series of threats and disasters, but there are plenty of places you can read about that. Instead, let’s honor the memory of those who have suffered and died by exploring what this experience can teach us about being better project leaders. I’ve boiled it down to the following three insights for starters, though there are surely more lessons to be learned:
· “We-centric thinking” clarifies the goal and focuses people on finding solutions.
· The human mind has a limited ability to imagine risks. There is no bottom to “worse.”
· “Possibility thinking” is effective even in tragic and seemingly impossible situations.
Crisis Creates Clarity
The moment I grasped the situation in Japan (thanks to horrifyingly vivid videos on the web and graphic descriptions of events from my friends living there), I was immediately willing to do whatever necessary. The overarching goal was so clear, and the need so immediate and compelling, that I was willing to do whatever I could to help. I started contacting people on both sides of the Pacific to see what could be done, and so did many others. Perhaps most inspiringly, the people of Japan reached out to help each other with a depth of compassion and selflessness that left the world in awe. One American woman living near the affected region wrote us that, in this time of food shortages, she returns home each night to find that someone has left food on her doorstep. Heck, after forgetting to pack my lunch for a recent university alumni picnic, I sat, foodless, with a couple who never even offered me so much as an olive.
Imagine if everyone involved in a challenging project first and foremost had an attitude of “What can I do to help?” What if each of the people involved on your project – teammates, sponsors, executives, suppliers, and customers – brought that attitude to every meeting and discussion? Don’t get me wrong, I believe that most people intend to help, even if that intention is buried deep within their psyche. But it gets obscured by time pressures, differing perceptions of the goals, and competition for resources, not to mention pride, turf wars, and ego.
Over the years I’ve noticed a sort of fragmentation that occurs in some project ecosystems that can be summed up as “us vs. them.” In stressful project environments (which is basically all of them, but who's counting?) I’ve noticed a variety of different schisms:
· Our company vs. the customer
· Our project team vs. the execs
· Me vs. “the others”
When I facilitate team effectiveness workshops, I sometimes divide the participants into two groups and locate them in opposite corners of the room, giving both groups the same instructions: get the other group to come to their corner of the room. Then I sit back and watch. Even when the entire group is comprised of people from the same company, even the same division – people who know each other, for crying out loud – successfully completing the task by simply having the groups switch positions is a solution that eludes them for as long as 23 minutes. (Yes, that’s the world record, but I’m sworn to secrecy which company it was.) Separating people by as little as 4 meters is enough to cause the “us vs. them” syndrome.
On projects, as long as the illusion of separateness persists we can find ourselves working at cross-purposes with the very people needed to achieve the project goals. When instead we view ourselves as “we,” we’re unencumbered by the obstacles of ego, hierarchy and competition. Adrift on the same iceberg, we’re instantly united in helping each other find solutions that enable us to step safely onto the shore of success. When we create this sense of unity among the various stakeholders in our projects (ideally without the presence of an external hazard, natural or man-made) we get everyone involved and focused on making a positive difference.
There Is No Bottom to Worse
In view of the fact that multiple layers of backup systems failed in the Fukushima nuclear power plants, I’m of the opinion that human beings have no imagination for disaster.
In “Scrappy Business Contingency Planning” the author (and my friend), Michael Seese, admonishes those doing disaster planning not to focus on what kind of disaster might interrupt power – only on what to do when that power is interrupted, as it will surely be. Michael has a talent for gloom and doom thinking, but I doubt that even he could have imagined all of the ways things could go badly wrong at the power plants. When I asked him to comment on the unfolding nuclear nightmare he said “In some sense, I see the Japanese response to the events at Fukushima as being like our Y2K preparation efforts. I worked on several Y2K remediation projects. I couldn't help but smile when – after the clock struck midnight and our world didn't grind to a halt – people said, "Nothing happened! Look at all that money that was wasted." Of course, nothing happened – because we spent that time, effort, and money. It's the same thing in Japan. Who could say what would have happened had they not pumped in sea water, and dumped more water in by helicopter?
One takeaway from this disaster is that business contingency plans need to tested, and re-tested. Of course, it's not practical to test a nuclear meltdown. But hopefully the lessons learned at Fukushima Daiichi will enable Japan – and other countries – to make their nuclear power plants safer.”
Yes, let’s all hope so. I know some people think “dilution is the solution to pollution”; our vast oceans can only absorb so much radioactivity.
The human mind has a limited ability to imagine risk. Even in Japan, where risk aversion, attention detail, and avoidance of failure are legendary (almost a national pastime), engineers failed to imagine the recent catastrophic string of events and design around them. In my experience, no amount of risk assessment and planning captures all possibilities. Things can always be worse than we imagined.
The Best Is Always Yet to Come
“We are continually faced with a series of great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems.” John W. Gardner, US administrator (1912 - 2002)
Faced with the choice to either give up hope or trudge on in a hopeless cause, I'm prone to choose trudging. Why? Because if I’ve learned anything in 20 years of leading, and working on, all kinds of projects with varying degrees of impossibility, it’s that human beings – myself included – are notoriously poor judges of when something is hopeless.
Even in the most dire circumstances, asking “What does this make possible that wasn’t possible before?” helps open the mind to creative ideas and breakthrough thinking. I’ve been pondering this in relationship to the quake/tsunami/nuclear triple tragedy, and so far I’ve come up with a few possibilities:
This will bring the world closer to Japan. People all over the world have voiced their admiration of the dignity, compassion and selflessness of the people of Japan. My friends in Japan are a bit amused by how much attention the press is giving to the headline “There’s no looting!” To them, they can’t imagine why anyone would loot. While some cynics say it’s just that negative events aren’t being reported, I disagree. I can personally testify to getting my wallet back with over 30,000 yen in it after leaving it in a Tokyo taxi. The driver delivered it to my hotel for free, left it at the front desk, and it was returned to me the next morning.
This will bring Japan closer to their neighbors. After years of icy relationships, Korea and China sent help to Japan . . . and Japan accepted.
This will bring the people of Japan closer to each other. Disasters have a way of recalibrating us about what’s important. In a country where avoiding risk is almost a national pastime, living with the daily threat of aftershocks and longer-term consequences of nuclear contamination are likely to shift thinking about risk. Now that daily life is risky, perhaps other kinds of risk-taking, like innovation and breakthrough thinking, won’t seem quite as dangerous by comparison. As Helen Keller said, “Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.”
I think it’s pretty safe to say that any project you or I may be working on can’t be nearly as dreadful as the situation unfolding in Japan. Consequently, I’m quite certain that we can find some “great opportunities brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems” in whatever project currently stymies us. Even if it’s true that the situation is hopeless, the illusion that we can make a difference can inspire us to build capabilities that make the next situation less so. There are advantages to leading your team as if the best is yet to come while dealing with the current reality. Jim Collins labeled this “The Stockdale Paradox”:
“You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” - Rear Admiral James B. Stockdale
The New Normal
Some of my colleagues at ALC Education in Tokyo slept on the 19th floor of their office building the night of the quake as they waited for trains to resume operation. Others – parents with stranded children – walked for six hours or more to get home to them. In the weeks that followed they weathered power shortages, devastating news of the missing and the dead, and ongoing scares from aftershocks and radiation. Through it all the people of Japan are inspiring the entire world through their stunning examples of selflessness and compassion—two ingredients that I feel quite sure I can use to improve my next project. I hope we’ll all emerge committed to applying these and the other lessons learned to our projects and our lives as life on Earth returns to the “new normal.”
If you’d like to donate to the Japan Relief Fund, one option is through the American Red Cross:
https://american.redcross.org/site/SPageServer?pagename=ntld_main
Kimberly Wiefling is the author of Scrappy Project Management, one of the top-ranked project management books on Amazon in the US, published in Japanese, and growing in popularity around the world. She splits her work time between the US and Japan.
More...
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Announcing the Next EL SIG Meeting, Apr 21 [Robert Lasater]
The next meeting of the Engineering Leadership SIG will be held on April 21 in SAP Building 2 (3412 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA), starting at 7:00 PM. Doors open at 6:30 PM. Topic of the main presentation, How can we (Engineering) work better with our Product Managers -- and what do Product Managers do, anyway?, by Rich Mironov.
TITLE: How can we (Engineering) work better with our Product Managers -- and what do Product Managers do, anyway
Product Management is a poorly understood role that varies widely between companies. In addition, technical teams see only one part of the product management challenge: critical interactions with sales/marketing and executives are not visible to them. In this talk our speaker will outline the product management role, how it fits with engineering (including agile teams), and ways that engineering and PM can help each other to get great products to market.
SPEAKER: Rich Mironov http://www.mironov.com/
Rich Mironov is a serial entrepreneur, seasoned VP Product Management/ VP Marketing, go-to-market strategist and agile “product guy”. He's currently CEO of a stealth startup, and is a veteran of four earlier software tech start-ups and dozens of consulting engagements.
Rich earned his software stripes writing COBOL at HP, then spent six years in product management at Tandem Computers, launching the company’s first TCP/IP stack. At Sybase, he oversaw database connectivity to more than 40 operating systems, and shipped the first commercial solution for dynamic linking of web pages with databases (web.sql). He was the first “product guy” at four networking-related start-ups, including iPass (NASDAQ: IPAS) and AirMagnet (acquired by Flunk Networks), where he was VP Marketing/Product Management. From 2007 to 2009, he was CMO of Enthiosys, an agile product management consultancy.
Rich’s 2008 book, “The Art of Product Management” captures the best of his Product Bytes blog (2001 to 2008), and represents the scrappy entrepreneur in all of us. Rich serves on the board of SVPMA, has taught in Haas’ executive education program, and produced (chaired) the product manager/product owner track for Agile Alliance’s 2009 and 2010 conferences.
Rich has a BS Physics from Yale with a thesis on dinosaur extinction theories, and an MBA from Stanford.
Cost: $20 at the door for non-SDForum members, No charge for SDForum members
BOOK SWAP - Every month! Bring books to share.
JOB SWAP - Check out our Yahoo! Group here: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SDForum_EL_SIG_JobSwap/
PEER-to-PEER Roundtable - Every month! Join us to share insights and advice with peers each month prior to the 7 PM event.
For more information, go here.
More...
TITLE: How can we (Engineering) work better with our Product Managers -- and what do Product Managers do, anyway
Product Management is a poorly understood role that varies widely between companies. In addition, technical teams see only one part of the product management challenge: critical interactions with sales/marketing and executives are not visible to them. In this talk our speaker will outline the product management role, how it fits with engineering (including agile teams), and ways that engineering and PM can help each other to get great products to market.
SPEAKER: Rich Mironov http://www.mironov.com/
Rich Mironov is a serial entrepreneur, seasoned VP Product Management/ VP Marketing, go-to-market strategist and agile “product guy”. He's currently CEO of a stealth startup, and is a veteran of four earlier software tech start-ups and dozens of consulting engagements.
Rich earned his software stripes writing COBOL at HP, then spent six years in product management at Tandem Computers, launching the company’s first TCP/IP stack. At Sybase, he oversaw database connectivity to more than 40 operating systems, and shipped the first commercial solution for dynamic linking of web pages with databases (web.sql). He was the first “product guy” at four networking-related start-ups, including iPass (NASDAQ: IPAS) and AirMagnet (acquired by Flunk Networks), where he was VP Marketing/Product Management. From 2007 to 2009, he was CMO of Enthiosys, an agile product management consultancy.
Rich’s 2008 book, “The Art of Product Management” captures the best of his Product Bytes blog (2001 to 2008), and represents the scrappy entrepreneur in all of us. Rich serves on the board of SVPMA, has taught in Haas’ executive education program, and produced (chaired) the product manager/product owner track for Agile Alliance’s 2009 and 2010 conferences.
Rich has a BS Physics from Yale with a thesis on dinosaur extinction theories, and an MBA from Stanford.
Cost: $20 at the door for non-SDForum members, No charge for SDForum members
BOOK SWAP - Every month! Bring books to share.
JOB SWAP - Check out our Yahoo! Group here: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SDForum_EL_SIG_JobSwap/
PEER-to-PEER Roundtable - Every month! Join us to share insights and advice with peers each month prior to the 7 PM event.
For more information, go here.
More...
Tuesday, March 15, 2011
Announcing the Next EL SIG Meeting, Mar 17 [Robert Lasater]
The next meeting of the Engineering Leadership SIG will be held on March 17 in SAP Building 2 (3412 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA), starting at 7:00 PM. Doors open at 6:30 PM. Topic of the main presentation, The Human Dimension in Leadership to Fast, Effective and Scalable Product Development, by Corinne Rattay.
Time: March 17, 2011 | 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Place: SAP - Baltic/Caribbean rooms in Building 2 (NEW BUILDING THIS YEAR!)
3412 Hillview Avenue
Palo Alto, CA 94304
Topic: The Human Dimension in Leadership to Fast, Effective and Scalable Product Development
Most Engineering teams never get a chance to show their full potential. Leaders in fast-growing companies have learned to accept average team results, day-to-day stress and constant last-minute surprises in their deadline struggles. Why is this the way most high-tech companies approach software or product development? Why live with organizational tension and eventual team burnout when there are proven ways to get better products out faster and create a culture of happy teams? In this interactive and stimulating talk, engineering leaders at all levels will experience a paradigm shift in their level of thinking, which is the first step towards needed transformational change in R&D organizations so they can scale from successful start-ups to efficient, mature, market-leading companies. Corinne Rattay is an expert in R&D Transformation leveraging her engineering leadership experience at Juniper Networks. She will share exciting, personal insights and experiences she has gained in over a decade as engineering leader and director, explaining the crucial foundation of the human dimension in leadership combined with key product lifecycle processes that truly work.
About the Speaker
Corinne Rattay is an accomplished, passionate and thought-stimulating executive with 15 years of success in engineering leadership, product development, global team building & remote team management, off-shoring, business coaching and management consulting.
She has gained a well-rounded industry experience at Juniper Networks, Alcatel France and successful start-up companies holding positions such as Director of Engineering, Director of System Test & Product Validation, Product Manager, Program Management, Process Design, and reaching all the way to hands-on customer field trials, System Integration, real-time Software Development & radio frequency Microchip Design.
As a Breakthrough Leadership Consultant she helps high-tech executives achieve extraordinary results with:
- Product Development, overcoming barriers to innovation, better products, faster cycles
- Change Acceleration, shifting paradigms and beliefs to create new possibilities
- Leadership Transformation, elevating the client's thinking quality and leadership focus
Corinne Rattay has written for our blog.
She can be reached at crattay@crexecutiveconsulting.com or at www.CRexecutiveconsulting.com
Agenda
6:30 - 7:00 Registration, Free wine, beer, snacks, pizza, soda and networking
6:31 - 6:59 Engineering Leadership Roundtable (New and Expanded!)
7:00 - 7:10 Introduction and brief announcements
7:10 - 8:20 Keynote and Q&A
8:20 - 8:30 Other announcements (next month's topic & speaker, jobs, blogs ...)
8:30 - 8:45 Informal networking
8:45 - 8:50 Clean up and have a safe trip home!
COOL FEATURES OF OUR EVENTS AND SIG:
• BOOK SWAP - Every month! Bring books to share.
• JOB SWAP - Check out our Yahoo! Group here: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SDForum_EL_SIG_JobSwap/
• PEER-to-PEER Roundtable - Every month! Join us to share insights and advice with peers each month prior to the 7 PM event.
• BLOG: Write or read EL SIG blog posts here: http://sdforumelsig.blogspot.com/
Snack and Beverage Sponsor: Matt Perez of Nearsoft
ONGOING MANAGEMENT SPONSOR: Project Connections is our EL SIG Management Sponsor.
Location: SAP -Baltic/Caribbean rooms in Building 2
3412 Hillview Avenue
Palo Alto, CA 94304
Cost:
$20 at the door for non-SDForum members
No charge for SDForum members
For more information, go here.
More...
Time: March 17, 2011 | 6:30 PM - 9:00 PM
Place: SAP - Baltic/Caribbean rooms in Building 2 (NEW BUILDING THIS YEAR!)
3412 Hillview Avenue
Palo Alto, CA 94304
Topic: The Human Dimension in Leadership to Fast, Effective and Scalable Product Development
Most Engineering teams never get a chance to show their full potential. Leaders in fast-growing companies have learned to accept average team results, day-to-day stress and constant last-minute surprises in their deadline struggles. Why is this the way most high-tech companies approach software or product development? Why live with organizational tension and eventual team burnout when there are proven ways to get better products out faster and create a culture of happy teams? In this interactive and stimulating talk, engineering leaders at all levels will experience a paradigm shift in their level of thinking, which is the first step towards needed transformational change in R&D organizations so they can scale from successful start-ups to efficient, mature, market-leading companies. Corinne Rattay is an expert in R&D Transformation leveraging her engineering leadership experience at Juniper Networks. She will share exciting, personal insights and experiences she has gained in over a decade as engineering leader and director, explaining the crucial foundation of the human dimension in leadership combined with key product lifecycle processes that truly work.
About the Speaker
Corinne Rattay is an accomplished, passionate and thought-stimulating executive with 15 years of success in engineering leadership, product development, global team building & remote team management, off-shoring, business coaching and management consulting.
She has gained a well-rounded industry experience at Juniper Networks, Alcatel France and successful start-up companies holding positions such as Director of Engineering, Director of System Test & Product Validation, Product Manager, Program Management, Process Design, and reaching all the way to hands-on customer field trials, System Integration, real-time Software Development & radio frequency Microchip Design.
As a Breakthrough Leadership Consultant she helps high-tech executives achieve extraordinary results with:
- Product Development, overcoming barriers to innovation, better products, faster cycles
- Change Acceleration, shifting paradigms and beliefs to create new possibilities
- Leadership Transformation, elevating the client's thinking quality and leadership focus
Corinne Rattay has written for our blog.
She can be reached at crattay@crexecutiveconsulting.com or at www.CRexecutiveconsulting.com
Agenda
6:30 - 7:00 Registration, Free wine, beer, snacks, pizza, soda and networking
6:31 - 6:59 Engineering Leadership Roundtable (New and Expanded!)
7:00 - 7:10 Introduction and brief announcements
7:10 - 8:20 Keynote and Q&A
8:20 - 8:30 Other announcements (next month's topic & speaker, jobs, blogs ...)
8:30 - 8:45 Informal networking
8:45 - 8:50 Clean up and have a safe trip home!
COOL FEATURES OF OUR EVENTS AND SIG:
• BOOK SWAP - Every month! Bring books to share.
• JOB SWAP - Check out our Yahoo! Group here: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/SDForum_EL_SIG_JobSwap/
• PEER-to-PEER Roundtable - Every month! Join us to share insights and advice with peers each month prior to the 7 PM event.
• BLOG: Write or read EL SIG blog posts here: http://sdforumelsig.blogspot.com/
Snack and Beverage Sponsor: Matt Perez of Nearsoft
ONGOING MANAGEMENT SPONSOR: Project Connections is our EL SIG Management Sponsor.
Location: SAP -Baltic/Caribbean rooms in Building 2
3412 Hillview Avenue
Palo Alto, CA 94304
Cost:
$20 at the door for non-SDForum members
No charge for SDForum members
For more information, go here.
More...
Monday, February 28, 2011
February 17 Meeting Notes [Robert Lasater]
On February 17, 2011, the Engineering Leadership SIG of the SD Forum met at SAP headquarters in Palo Alto, California. Featured was a presentation, “Keys to Collaborative Leadership”, given by Mark Voorsanger and Liz Agnew. Both are Certified Coaches.
The presentation was organized as a meal in a fine restaurant, with three “courses”, an appetizer, a main dish and dessert. Each “course” came with a challenge and a goal. The first part, an introduction, was designed to whet the audience’s appetite. The overall goal of the presentation was to inspire new thinking.
Mark V acknowledged that “collaborative leadership” might seem to be an oxymoron, and responded with a quote from Albert Einstein: “if an idea is not absurd, it is not worth pursuing.”
Whetting Your Appetite
To demonstrate the need for collaborative leadership, Mark V quoted two sets of statistics from a recent survey of American employees. The first divided employees into three groups:
Engaged 29%
Not Engaged 54%
Actively disengaged 17%
They then asked the participants in the survey if their current job brings out my most creative ideas. The results were broken down among the three categories:
Engaged 59%
Not Engaged 17%
Actively disengaged 3%
Not surprisingly, most of those who were not engaged or actively disengaged felt their job did not bring out their most creative ideas.
Now the current paradigm for leadership is Hierarchy. Decisions are made at the top. The currencies are power and authority. Mark V characterized hierarchy as working well when:
· People at the top have all required information.
· People being managed are doing rote tasks.
· People being managed are easily replaced
This of course does not characterized modern engineering organizations. Mark V though did stress that hierarchy has its place, especially when decisions need to be made quickly.
At this point, Mark V asked the audience to participate in an exercise. Gather in small groups and discuss how ineffective collaboration is costing you and your organization. Afterwards, several members of the audience shared their responses. They included:
· If you don’t do it my way, you are not collaborating
· Decisions are made without adequate information.
· Software is not reusable.
· There is no safe environment for unusual ideas.
Appetizer: Defining Key Terms
Challenge: No common language
Goal: Define key terms for a collaborative process
Mark V spent several minutes defining some key terms.
Collaboration: All relevant stakeholders have ownership and alignment around what we are going to do and how we are going to do it.
Relevant Stakeholder:
· People with the power to make a decision.
· People with the power to block a decision.
· People affected by a decision
· People with relevant information and expertise.
Ownership: the extent to which people feel or believe that a process, decision or outcome is theirs.
Alignment: The extent to which people see and understand a problem or decision.
Here is a metaphor for ownership vs. alignment:
Ownership: get everyone on the boat.
Alignment: get everyone rowing in the same direction.
And he provided this insight regarding Content vs Process: Content gets attention; process, not so much. Content is What; process is How.
And finally: a Collaborative Leader is someone who leads according to the principle of ownership and alignment.
Regarding introducing the principles of Collaborative Leadership, Mark V pointed out that one needs to be careful with change. Organizations tend to reject change the way one’s immune system rejects a foreign microbe. A suggestion: think small.
Main Dish: Problem Solving Template
Challenge: No common process
Goal: find a common process
A Problem is any situation that you want to change.
There are three obstacles to solving problems:
1. Groups don’t know how to (or don’t even think to) align around the problem that they want to solve. No agreement on the problem = No agreement on the solution + infinite arguing about solutions
2. Groups use implicit processes to do their work. Collaborative problem solving relies on explicit win/win processes.
3. People solve problems iteratively – so that nothing is transparent.
Mark V presented a structured process with a 5-step problem solving template
1. Context (what effect is the problem having; what happens if it is not addressed?)
2. Problem statement – a one sentence statement
3. Intent
4. Desired outcomes
5. Action plan
Mark V cautioned against “baking a solution” into the statement or intent. And one should build ownership and alignment at each step.
Finally there is the question of time. One of the advantages of hierarchical decision making is it is faster; collaborative problem solving takes longer. So it is necessary to concede that hierarchical decision making sometimes is required. But beware of creating a false sense of crisis. This will only work a limited number of times.
At this point, Mark V opened the floor for questions.
Q: How do you deal with the fact that not all stakeholders are equal?
A: Those who are less important are gently and politely informed of this.
Q: How do you avoid “baking the solution” into the problem statement?
A: By actively blocking these attempts. By reminding everyone of the importance of ownership and alignment.
Dessert: The Number One Missing Ingredient in Meetings
Challenge: Unproductive meetings
Goal: More productive meetings
The number one missing ingredient in meetings is the Process – the How. Make it explicit.
One final question:
Q: How to decide on decisions without a hierarchy
A: Some suggestions:
· Vote
· Consensus
· Unanimous consent
Be explicit about the process.
Mark Voorsanger is the Founder of Skyward Coaching (www.SkywardCoaching.com), 415-606-2101. His emal address is Mark@SkywardCoaching.com
Liz Agnew is president of Integrative Leadership Strategies (www.Integrative-Leadership.com), 415.401.7822. Her email address is: liz@integrative-leadership.com
---------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Lasater maintains this blog for the Engineering Leadership Special Interest Group of the SD Forum.
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The presentation was organized as a meal in a fine restaurant, with three “courses”, an appetizer, a main dish and dessert. Each “course” came with a challenge and a goal. The first part, an introduction, was designed to whet the audience’s appetite. The overall goal of the presentation was to inspire new thinking.
Mark V acknowledged that “collaborative leadership” might seem to be an oxymoron, and responded with a quote from Albert Einstein: “if an idea is not absurd, it is not worth pursuing.”
Whetting Your Appetite
To demonstrate the need for collaborative leadership, Mark V quoted two sets of statistics from a recent survey of American employees. The first divided employees into three groups:
Engaged 29%
Not Engaged 54%
Actively disengaged 17%
They then asked the participants in the survey if their current job brings out my most creative ideas. The results were broken down among the three categories:
Engaged 59%
Not Engaged 17%
Actively disengaged 3%
Not surprisingly, most of those who were not engaged or actively disengaged felt their job did not bring out their most creative ideas.
Now the current paradigm for leadership is Hierarchy. Decisions are made at the top. The currencies are power and authority. Mark V characterized hierarchy as working well when:
· People at the top have all required information.
· People being managed are doing rote tasks.
· People being managed are easily replaced
This of course does not characterized modern engineering organizations. Mark V though did stress that hierarchy has its place, especially when decisions need to be made quickly.
At this point, Mark V asked the audience to participate in an exercise. Gather in small groups and discuss how ineffective collaboration is costing you and your organization. Afterwards, several members of the audience shared their responses. They included:
· If you don’t do it my way, you are not collaborating
· Decisions are made without adequate information.
· Software is not reusable.
· There is no safe environment for unusual ideas.
Appetizer: Defining Key Terms
Challenge: No common language
Goal: Define key terms for a collaborative process
Mark V spent several minutes defining some key terms.
Collaboration: All relevant stakeholders have ownership and alignment around what we are going to do and how we are going to do it.
Relevant Stakeholder:
· People with the power to make a decision.
· People with the power to block a decision.
· People affected by a decision
· People with relevant information and expertise.
Ownership: the extent to which people feel or believe that a process, decision or outcome is theirs.
Alignment: The extent to which people see and understand a problem or decision.
Here is a metaphor for ownership vs. alignment:
Ownership: get everyone on the boat.
Alignment: get everyone rowing in the same direction.
And he provided this insight regarding Content vs Process: Content gets attention; process, not so much. Content is What; process is How.
And finally: a Collaborative Leader is someone who leads according to the principle of ownership and alignment.
Regarding introducing the principles of Collaborative Leadership, Mark V pointed out that one needs to be careful with change. Organizations tend to reject change the way one’s immune system rejects a foreign microbe. A suggestion: think small.
Main Dish: Problem Solving Template
Challenge: No common process
Goal: find a common process
A Problem is any situation that you want to change.
There are three obstacles to solving problems:
1. Groups don’t know how to (or don’t even think to) align around the problem that they want to solve. No agreement on the problem = No agreement on the solution + infinite arguing about solutions
2. Groups use implicit processes to do their work. Collaborative problem solving relies on explicit win/win processes.
3. People solve problems iteratively – so that nothing is transparent.
Mark V presented a structured process with a 5-step problem solving template
1. Context (what effect is the problem having; what happens if it is not addressed?)
2. Problem statement – a one sentence statement
3. Intent
4. Desired outcomes
5. Action plan
Mark V cautioned against “baking a solution” into the statement or intent. And one should build ownership and alignment at each step.
Finally there is the question of time. One of the advantages of hierarchical decision making is it is faster; collaborative problem solving takes longer. So it is necessary to concede that hierarchical decision making sometimes is required. But beware of creating a false sense of crisis. This will only work a limited number of times.
At this point, Mark V opened the floor for questions.
Q: How do you deal with the fact that not all stakeholders are equal?
A: Those who are less important are gently and politely informed of this.
Q: How do you avoid “baking the solution” into the problem statement?
A: By actively blocking these attempts. By reminding everyone of the importance of ownership and alignment.
Dessert: The Number One Missing Ingredient in Meetings
Challenge: Unproductive meetings
Goal: More productive meetings
The number one missing ingredient in meetings is the Process – the How. Make it explicit.
One final question:
Q: How to decide on decisions without a hierarchy
A: Some suggestions:
· Vote
· Consensus
· Unanimous consent
Be explicit about the process.
Mark Voorsanger is the Founder of Skyward Coaching (www.SkywardCoaching.com), 415-606-2101. His emal address is Mark@SkywardCoaching.com
Liz Agnew is president of Integrative Leadership Strategies (www.Integrative-Leadership.com), 415.401.7822. Her email address is: liz@integrative-leadership.com
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Robert Lasater maintains this blog for the Engineering Leadership Special Interest Group of the SD Forum.
More...
Monday, February 21, 2011
One’s Feminine Side Can Still Hurt One’s Career [Robert Lasater]
A few months ago, Kimberly Wiefling wrote about the advantages a woman’s feminine side can bring to the workplace. Unfortunately a recent study shows those same characteristics can hurt a woman starting her career.
Before proceeding, some background is helpful. When someone receives a PhD in the sciences or mathematics, a typical next step is to take a post-doctorate, a one or two year assignment, a chance to continue research and get work published. Often one takes two or three of these temporary positions before starting a (presumably) more permanent position in the academy or industry. And key to this process are the letters of recommendation, from one’s PhD advisor or post-doctorate supervisor, or other professional mentors.
Recently Professors Randi Martin and Michelle Hebl of my alma mater, Rice University, reviewed several hundred of these letters of recommendation, written for both men and women candidates. They found the ones for men typically described the candidate using terms such as “confident”, “aggressive” and “daring”, while the letters for women uses terms such as “affectionate”, “nurturing” and “tactful” – the kinds of qualities Kimberly point out add value in the engineering workplace.
And when they took their collection of letters, took out names and personal pronouns (“he”, “she”, etc.), and then asked other faculty members to evaluate the (now anonymous) candidates, those written for men got significantly better rankings than the ones written for women. The candidates described as “confident”, “aggressive” and “daring” were more likely to be hired than those described as “affectionate”, “nurturing” and “tactful”. This despite the fact they had taken out all references to gender, and had insured the candidates described with feminine qualities had as much professional success - papers published, lead author, recognition and awards – as those described with masculine qualities.
It is unfortunate that the quick lesson from this work is likely to be to suppress terms like affectionate, nurturing and tactful, even though such people – men and women both – help make the workplace a less contentious and more productive place. But women too can be confident, aggressive and daring, and mentors do need to look for these qualities in the women they are guiding and advising.
I just want to add that in the sciences and mathematics, the most important qualities one looks for are originality and – yes it is masculine – daring. They describe Richard Feynman – and Barbara McClintock, who eventually won the Nobel Prize for her work in genetics. Oh, and persistence. It took 30 years for the scientific community to recognize the importance of McClintock’s work.
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Robert Lasater maintains this blog for the Engineering Leadership Special Interest Group of the SD Forum.
More...
Before proceeding, some background is helpful. When someone receives a PhD in the sciences or mathematics, a typical next step is to take a post-doctorate, a one or two year assignment, a chance to continue research and get work published. Often one takes two or three of these temporary positions before starting a (presumably) more permanent position in the academy or industry. And key to this process are the letters of recommendation, from one’s PhD advisor or post-doctorate supervisor, or other professional mentors.
Recently Professors Randi Martin and Michelle Hebl of my alma mater, Rice University, reviewed several hundred of these letters of recommendation, written for both men and women candidates. They found the ones for men typically described the candidate using terms such as “confident”, “aggressive” and “daring”, while the letters for women uses terms such as “affectionate”, “nurturing” and “tactful” – the kinds of qualities Kimberly point out add value in the engineering workplace.
And when they took their collection of letters, took out names and personal pronouns (“he”, “she”, etc.), and then asked other faculty members to evaluate the (now anonymous) candidates, those written for men got significantly better rankings than the ones written for women. The candidates described as “confident”, “aggressive” and “daring” were more likely to be hired than those described as “affectionate”, “nurturing” and “tactful”. This despite the fact they had taken out all references to gender, and had insured the candidates described with feminine qualities had as much professional success - papers published, lead author, recognition and awards – as those described with masculine qualities.
It is unfortunate that the quick lesson from this work is likely to be to suppress terms like affectionate, nurturing and tactful, even though such people – men and women both – help make the workplace a less contentious and more productive place. But women too can be confident, aggressive and daring, and mentors do need to look for these qualities in the women they are guiding and advising.
I just want to add that in the sciences and mathematics, the most important qualities one looks for are originality and – yes it is masculine – daring. They describe Richard Feynman – and Barbara McClintock, who eventually won the Nobel Prize for her work in genetics. Oh, and persistence. It took 30 years for the scientific community to recognize the importance of McClintock’s work.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Robert Lasater maintains this blog for the Engineering Leadership Special Interest Group of the SD Forum.
More...
Saturday, February 5, 2011
Announcing the Next EL SIG Meeting, Feb 17 [Robert Lasater]
The next meeting of the Engineering Leadership SIG will be held on February 17 in SAP Building 2 (3412 Hillview Avenue, Palo Alto, CA), starting at 7:00 PM. Doors open at 6:30 PM.
TITLE: The Keys to Collaborative Leadership
SPEAKERS: Mark Voorsanger and Elizabeth Agnew
About the Speakers:
Mark Voorsanger is an executive coach and consultant with over 25 years working with and managing high technology teams. His experience as a business entrepreneur, senior corporate manager overseeing globally distributed production units, and executive coach and consultant focusing on leadership development and collaboration make him uniquely qualified to work with leaders in high tech.
As the founder of Skyward Coaching, Mark brings the COS and his collaborative facilitation skills to literally every client engagement, from individual coaching to the facilitation of corporate strategic planning. Mark's client list includes Electronic Arts, Sega, DreamWorks, CompuShare and Kaiser Permanente.
Liz Agnew is a certified coach specializing in leadership development and collaboration. Liz earned a bachelor's degree in engineering from Cornell University and a master's degree from Stanford. As president of Integrative Leadership Strategies, LLC, Liz's mission is to bring the world together by making the workplace a sanctuary for learning and truth. She transforms one team at a time, teaching them to work transparently and heal the pain of poor work relationships. Liz's previous clients include Genentech, Hewlett Packard, The City of Atlanta, Sun Microsystems, Lockheed Martin, and Jet Propulsion Laboratories.
Liz Agnew has written previously for our blog.
Details of talk:
Nearly every organization we know operates according to some version of the hierarchical system, which uses power and authority to accomplish things.
Although many have attempted to democratize their workplace by getting “flatter” and working in teams, power and authority remain the primary “currency” being traded. If you can accumulate enough power and authority in a hierarchical system, you can “win.” But as we know, a hierarchy concentrates power and authority in a few people at the very top. This prevents the rest of the organization from having the currency required to solve problems and accomplish goals. It makes working across the silos nearly impossible. And it makes the “leader” with the most power and authority essential.
Moreover, the degree of complexity in today’s fast-moving, global marketplace is simply beyond the capacity of the hierarchical approach. The interdependent, multi-faceted problems and opportunities facing leaders and organizations require a new system: one that engages workers by connecting the people with the information to those who make the decisions, and the people who make the decisions to those who implement them. The leader who can help their organizations make the journey to this new paradigm will predominate.
In this talk, Mark Voorsanger & Liz Agnew will introduce and explore the fundamental principles that drive Collaborative Leadership in organizations, principles that have the capacity to transform how we get work done. Join Mark & Liz for this fun and interactive session on The Keys to Collaborative Leadership.
For more information, including a detailed schedule, go here.
More...
TITLE: The Keys to Collaborative Leadership
SPEAKERS: Mark Voorsanger and Elizabeth Agnew
About the Speakers:
Mark Voorsanger is an executive coach and consultant with over 25 years working with and managing high technology teams. His experience as a business entrepreneur, senior corporate manager overseeing globally distributed production units, and executive coach and consultant focusing on leadership development and collaboration make him uniquely qualified to work with leaders in high tech.
As the founder of Skyward Coaching, Mark brings the COS and his collaborative facilitation skills to literally every client engagement, from individual coaching to the facilitation of corporate strategic planning. Mark's client list includes Electronic Arts, Sega, DreamWorks, CompuShare and Kaiser Permanente.
Liz Agnew is a certified coach specializing in leadership development and collaboration. Liz earned a bachelor's degree in engineering from Cornell University and a master's degree from Stanford. As president of Integrative Leadership Strategies, LLC, Liz's mission is to bring the world together by making the workplace a sanctuary for learning and truth. She transforms one team at a time, teaching them to work transparently and heal the pain of poor work relationships. Liz's previous clients include Genentech, Hewlett Packard, The City of Atlanta, Sun Microsystems, Lockheed Martin, and Jet Propulsion Laboratories.
Liz Agnew has written previously for our blog.
Details of talk:
Nearly every organization we know operates according to some version of the hierarchical system, which uses power and authority to accomplish things.
Although many have attempted to democratize their workplace by getting “flatter” and working in teams, power and authority remain the primary “currency” being traded. If you can accumulate enough power and authority in a hierarchical system, you can “win.” But as we know, a hierarchy concentrates power and authority in a few people at the very top. This prevents the rest of the organization from having the currency required to solve problems and accomplish goals. It makes working across the silos nearly impossible. And it makes the “leader” with the most power and authority essential.
Moreover, the degree of complexity in today’s fast-moving, global marketplace is simply beyond the capacity of the hierarchical approach. The interdependent, multi-faceted problems and opportunities facing leaders and organizations require a new system: one that engages workers by connecting the people with the information to those who make the decisions, and the people who make the decisions to those who implement them. The leader who can help their organizations make the journey to this new paradigm will predominate.
In this talk, Mark Voorsanger & Liz Agnew will introduce and explore the fundamental principles that drive Collaborative Leadership in organizations, principles that have the capacity to transform how we get work done. Join Mark & Liz for this fun and interactive session on The Keys to Collaborative Leadership.
For more information, including a detailed schedule, go here.
More...
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Company Wide Process Definition [Chris Bryant]
So, you have a small company that has grown from a startup with nice growth over the last few years. Now suddenly you are beginning to feel like you are losing touch with what is going on. You don’t know what is happening with customers. You hear about issues but can’t track down the history of how they came up. You’ve hired several new people in various departments but they don’t know what to do and are causing problems by doing the wrong thing or aren’t getting the right things done. You absolutely need to hire a dozen new people for various departments but are afraid that you’ll just end up with more people running around not knowing what to do or spending all their time trying to find out whom to ask the right questions of.
You are questioning what customers are buying what and what the prospects are for the next quarter. However, your head of Sales and Marketing are both traveling or out sick and can’t be contacted. Your field service techs are spending all their time putting out fires instead of helping with new installations.
You are looking at absolutely needing to get your next version of a product or a new product underway but the “indispensable” person that knows how everything is put together just left for a competitor.
Any of these sound familiar? If not, they may soon…
Congratulations, your startup is successful and is now evolving from a single department into an organization with multiple departments and multiple responsibilities. How do you facilitate communications? How do you determine what’s going on? How do you avoid the trap of the indispensable” employee?
The answer is complex but primarily involves determining how your company operates. In one word: PROCESS
Many view process as a straight jacket that large companies use to inhibit free thinking and keep the company from changing. It’s the primary source of red tape to keep things running in well worn ruts. Unfortunately this is true in many companies.
Process is neither an end product nor a tool. It is a skeleton used to facilitate communication and capture of critical company information. It is the framework on which tools and company interactions are hung. It should never be an inhibitor and must always be an enabler. It needs to be constantly reviewed and adapted as your company changes.
A company process is by no means simple. At the highest view it should be simple enough to be contained on a single sheet of paper. This would be a company model that shows clearly what your customer and supplier interactions are and who and when communication occurs. This outlines the scope of the company and how its products and/or services are created, sold, delivered and serviced. This really involves creating a model of the company. This should never be an “ideal” model as it must reflect how things are really done instead of how they should be done. However, while creating this model all the “it would be nice if” and “we could do better if” comments should be recorded. Also, when creating this model, talk with the people actually doing the work in addition to the department leads. It is the people in the trenches that often know more about how things are really done. Not to say that a manager is clueless. Far from it, however the undocumented steps and “just in case” things to do are often viewed as not important enough to mention. This allows you to capture those little details that have been painstakingly learned over time but are not obvious to new employees. This will enable each new employee from repeating the same mistakes and “learning the hard way”.
Determine how and what information is captured at the various interaction points. The view is to make this information capture as easy and adaptable as possible. If it is ever viewed as too complex, customers will be encouraged to weigh the effort of interaction against the possible gain and unless the gain far outweighs the effort, they won’t bother. Also, procedures that aren’t followed are far worse than no procedure at all. Even cursory information about a prospect or issue can be followed up on. However, if the potential customer or issue information is never captured then it is less than worthless as it could have cost you a customer.
Next is to drill down internally on what departments/organizations are responsible for what. This should model what is currently done as well as what information they really need and how it is currently captured, if at all. The view here is to begin to look for easy improvements that could facilitate communications, data flow, and information capture. Again, the goal is to determine how to facilitate each person’s job and eliminate redundancies and source of miscommunications. This section of the model also provides a necessary framework on which training for new employees can be created.
At this point you have a basic model of how things currently are done; now the real work begins to look at how to optimize interactions between departments to make sure that required artifacts are captured and necessary information is available.
------------------------------------------------------
Chris Bryant has extensive experience in managing software development teams as well as in general business operation. He has held numerous governing board positions from Treasurer to Chairman. He has a Masters in Computer Engineering from Santa Clajavascript:void(0)ra University and has dealt with hardware, firmware, applications, GUI and overall product design.
More...
You are questioning what customers are buying what and what the prospects are for the next quarter. However, your head of Sales and Marketing are both traveling or out sick and can’t be contacted. Your field service techs are spending all their time putting out fires instead of helping with new installations.
You are looking at absolutely needing to get your next version of a product or a new product underway but the “indispensable” person that knows how everything is put together just left for a competitor.
Any of these sound familiar? If not, they may soon…
Congratulations, your startup is successful and is now evolving from a single department into an organization with multiple departments and multiple responsibilities. How do you facilitate communications? How do you determine what’s going on? How do you avoid the trap of the indispensable” employee?
The answer is complex but primarily involves determining how your company operates. In one word: PROCESS
Many view process as a straight jacket that large companies use to inhibit free thinking and keep the company from changing. It’s the primary source of red tape to keep things running in well worn ruts. Unfortunately this is true in many companies.
Process is neither an end product nor a tool. It is a skeleton used to facilitate communication and capture of critical company information. It is the framework on which tools and company interactions are hung. It should never be an inhibitor and must always be an enabler. It needs to be constantly reviewed and adapted as your company changes.
A company process is by no means simple. At the highest view it should be simple enough to be contained on a single sheet of paper. This would be a company model that shows clearly what your customer and supplier interactions are and who and when communication occurs. This outlines the scope of the company and how its products and/or services are created, sold, delivered and serviced. This really involves creating a model of the company. This should never be an “ideal” model as it must reflect how things are really done instead of how they should be done. However, while creating this model all the “it would be nice if” and “we could do better if” comments should be recorded. Also, when creating this model, talk with the people actually doing the work in addition to the department leads. It is the people in the trenches that often know more about how things are really done. Not to say that a manager is clueless. Far from it, however the undocumented steps and “just in case” things to do are often viewed as not important enough to mention. This allows you to capture those little details that have been painstakingly learned over time but are not obvious to new employees. This will enable each new employee from repeating the same mistakes and “learning the hard way”.
Determine how and what information is captured at the various interaction points. The view is to make this information capture as easy and adaptable as possible. If it is ever viewed as too complex, customers will be encouraged to weigh the effort of interaction against the possible gain and unless the gain far outweighs the effort, they won’t bother. Also, procedures that aren’t followed are far worse than no procedure at all. Even cursory information about a prospect or issue can be followed up on. However, if the potential customer or issue information is never captured then it is less than worthless as it could have cost you a customer.
Next is to drill down internally on what departments/organizations are responsible for what. This should model what is currently done as well as what information they really need and how it is currently captured, if at all. The view here is to begin to look for easy improvements that could facilitate communications, data flow, and information capture. Again, the goal is to determine how to facilitate each person’s job and eliminate redundancies and source of miscommunications. This section of the model also provides a necessary framework on which training for new employees can be created.
At this point you have a basic model of how things currently are done; now the real work begins to look at how to optimize interactions between departments to make sure that required artifacts are captured and necessary information is available.
------------------------------------------------------
Chris Bryant has extensive experience in managing software development teams as well as in general business operation. He has held numerous governing board positions from Treasurer to Chairman. He has a Masters in Computer Engineering from Santa Clajavascript:void(0)ra University and has dealt with hardware, firmware, applications, GUI and overall product design.
More...
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