In discussing the current state of projects in a large enterprise with an ex-colleague, he shared a shocking revelation with me.
He sounded incredulous: Did you know that there are TWO project managers for every project? One a business and the other an IT project manager!?!
This obviously shows that my friend has had a somewhat sheltered existence, somewhat removed from the realities of today's large projects. The shelter was provided by a vendor of project management tools no less, where he worked as a tool evangelist. So another example it seems, of preaching the good word but not being fully aware of what is happening in the trenches!
I could not resist and replied in an equally surprised tone: That’s amazing! You ONLY have two project managers?
The fact is there are so many different management roles in a project today it is hard to get excited about those with a project manager title. What about a Program Manager .... and all those Development Managers? Isn’t there a Release Manager around somewhere too? Perhaps there are a couple of Change Managers on the project? What about a Business Implementation Manager? .... the list can go on. You have to wonder - what do all these folk do?
The fact is that the more people there are on a project, the more interactions there are (the old n! problem) and the more meetings and the more reporting .... etc. etc. Maybe one should not complain. All that employment is good for the economy.
The Alinement Network is marking a major milestone with Bhuvan Unhelkar of MethodScience coming on board as the editor of the Alinement Magazine. In agreeing to edit at least three issues of the magazine, we can look forward to Bhuvan’s exceptional grasp of the current issues effecting business and IT. Bhuvan is also a contributor to the Alinement Magazine with a thoughtful article on the pros and cons of UML modelling that can be found here.
Bhuvan has chosen the following themes for upcoming issues: • Business Essentials in Turbulent Times • Process Analysis • Change Management
If you would like to contribute an article or commentary on the above themes, or generally provide some thoughts, please feel free to comment below, or simply e-mail us: editors at alinement dot net.
In their book entitled "IT Savvy" (see all new experimental Amazon sidebar below) Peter Weill and Jeanne Ross have done something that does us all a favour. The subtitle "What Top Executives Must Know to Go From Pain to Gain," is brilliant positioning for which we should all be grateful for.
Most experienced practitioners know that the problems enterprises have in delivering new business capabilities cannot ALL come from IT's lousy project execution. Some part of the
blame for the low rate of project success must come from the ever urgent demands
of the customer, who in the name of "business imperative" wreak havoc
with any attempt to create a coherent enterprise architecture.
It should come as no surprise then that the authors penned an earlier book entitled
"Enterprise Architecture As Strategy: Creating a Foundation for
Business Execution" - which oddly does get referenced in the "IT Savvy"
book. Could it be that they do not want to show where they are taking
the executives? Certainly recrafting enterprise architecture as an
"Operating Model" and aiming to establish a "Digitized Platform" for
the business attempts to soften IT jargon.
Maybe using more business acceptable terminology is a lesson we can
all learn. In the meantime, all power to any attempt at educating
executives on how to make their IT more of a strategic asset.
The annual New York Time's feature covering "The Year in Ideas" an interesting read and highly recommended.
But there was an entry on the success of Massively Collaborative Mathematics that particularly impressed me ... and is relevant to the wider goals of this site. This entry describes how, as an experiment in collaboration, a mathematician challenged the readers of his blog to tackle an intractable mathematical problem .... which they amazingly went on to solve!!!!
Now, that is food for thought. If we can solve something like a mathematical problem maybe this whole "wisdom of the crowd" is not so far fetched. Maybe in future the expression "group-think" will start to lose it negative connotations?
Thinking how one might use this technique to solve enterprise management issues I came up with the following:
First there has to be the availability of the individual "brains". The mathematician concerned (Timothy Gower, a Cambridge mathematician and Fields medalist) had a very select following on his blog and so had the necessary "processing-units" available.
Second, not all problems can be expected to be suited to massively collaborative techniques. Gower's thesis was that mathematical problem-solving was largely a process of elimination and so many brains could reduce the possible outcomes until the final solution was reached. Much like computer architectures, not all types of computations are suited to parallel processing so we have to have a suitable problem.
Next, and most importantly, you have to have some coordinating body to keep track of the parallel results from all the different processes and to essentially direct/initiate the next set of processes. This of course sounds a lot like "central control" which some people might think is an anethama to collaborative techniques. But I see no contradiction here, and think this is a great example of the facilitative management that is essential to get the coherence needed in all the massive-parallelism that is taking place. So the challenge is to have just enough control to ensure the collaboration is coordinated and directed to the problem at hand.
This is not far off all the experimentation some businesses are doing with Social Media - both internally and through better engagement with their customer-base. Other examples of successful collaboration of indepenent groups is of course all those open-source initiatives that are around.
So presuming we can find the necessary processing-units through a site like this, and we can achieve the facilitative management approach working, the question that remains is: What activites geared to Enterprise Coherence could be suseptible to this approach?
What do you call all those things that change the enterprise? The collective noun for projects?
The simple answer is a portfolio - a portfolio of projects. Sounds about right, and most people (I think) would agree .... But there are still some terminology problems .
Should we have used the term program instead of project? What about the smaller granularity items that are the maintenance or production support changes? Shouldn't they be included in the portfolio?
These may seem somewhat picky formalities but it does indicate that there is no consensus on such terms. Even as PM-BOK tries to cover the project space and ITIL the operational change space, a holistic perspective of what constitutes change to the enterprise is lacking. Certainly from the business viewpoint, organizational change/transformation still has to be considered.
I have been struggling with these terminology questions as I attempt to write a specification for a reporting tool being prototyped as part of my research. But given my inability to find some consistent terminology I have decided that a key feature will need to be the ability to have a user-defined "skin". That way an organization to pick the language that it finds most appropriate ... but it surely its not that difficult to have some standard language in this area?
I don't wish to plug a multinational .... especially not for free. But every now and then the "Big Boys" do something that is really quite impressive.
So I know this shows me to be a geek at heart, but the new Intel TV ad is very clever and says something about innovation and the respect it deserves. Yet our society tends to find it easier to venerate those "beautiful people" in sports, drama, music, etc. with very little recognition for the less public, intellectual pursuits. I guess the ad says something about these other less glamorous endeavours which, in many ways, are more valuable to society.
I first saw the new Intel TV ad while watching the Australian Idol final ..... making the tag line "our rock stars aren't like your rock stars" even more apt. If you have not seen it already, it’s worth taking a look at the ad on YouTube.
Yes, this site was hacked ... even as we were getting it ready for the next step it was brought down ignominiously. To its knees! Virtually a restart!
Showing that even such a modest enterprise as an on-line magazine is worthy of .... I'm embarassed to say ..... good backups.
Ah well, as a friend said - now you will know if you really want to do it. Create a worthwhile community site that tackles some of the real management issues practitioners face in attempting to get businesses run effective? I'm a sucker ... I'm in! Maybe even renewed. Nothing like a challenge ... in Shakespeare's words:
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man, As modest, stillness, and humility, But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood, Disguise fair nature with hard – favour’d rage, Then lend the eye a terrible aspect, Let pry through the portage of the head, Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it .... Now set the teeth, and stretch the nostril wide; Hold hard the breath, and bend up every spirit To his full height!
It all started with a desire to disseminate my PhD research.
I don't think it's really too much to ask that after nine years of research. At this point my thesis has a readership of more than a handful of academics - three of whom were my examiners - and my mother and sisters who at least flipped the pages respectfully.
Anyway, blogging seemed to be the way to get the message out in a digestable form for practitioners .... after all, that was the audience I was always targeting. Being in the IT industry for over 20 years, it did not seem worth doing research simply on theoretical abstractions. I wanted to solve real world problems - and think I have!
The problem with blogging though is that it is just soooo solo .... and being a shy guy, I felt uncomfortable simply being one voice, pumping out this stuff I had already been working on in relative isolation for years. A dialog would be nice .... some feedback with other voices and views on "managing the enterprise" - expecially as the agenda was so broad.
So the idea of a community site was born .... with a selection of feature articles forming a magazine that was supplemented with practitioner blogs, of which I would be but one.
This all seems very self-less I know .... but I held the ultimate hope that this community would actually be an exciting and stimulating web destination that could attract a wider following that I myself could ever command.
Not so self-less .... but an online collaboration of like-minded individuals ? I liked that idea!
And it is crazy and challenging enough that it is at least worth a try - don't you think?
There is something of the Web 2.0 enabled "new media" revolution in the underlying philosophy of the Alinement Network. After all, merely to attempt to create an online magazine site indicates that (I at least think) there is a gap left by the mainstream business, management and technology publications.
The nature of that gap comes down to who is in control of the distribution channels. In newspapers and magazines the business model is to attract advertisers who pay for the privelege of getting their message in front of their key market. So the model requires publishers to do something along these lines:
+ Find a niche market that is not already serviced + Gather some information/ content relevant to them + Create a product that is appealing + Develop a distribution channel + Get vendors and consultants to pay for advertising
space (sometime disguised as content)
While I have no problem with the model above or the profit motive that is at its heart, I can see that there are some unpleasant and most likely unintended consequences of the model.
Firstly, it is about dividing up the market, categorizing readers into "types" and then feeding them information (probably just content actually - see the distinction) only relevant to that type. The result of these targetted publications is that they create siloed-thinking at the industry level, where business and technology roles are separated; managers and specialists isolated. Which all goes to make running the "whole" that much more difficult to keep together.
Secondly, the content is written by third-parties who at best had some past experiences in the industry they are writing about. Often the authors are generalists. They may be journalists or simply people who can write well, and their whole experience of the industry (or niche) they are writing about is based upon the interactions they have with the very vendors and consultants who have a barrow to push.
Finally, when the viability of the model is based upon the advertising revenue it is simply impossible to "tell it like it is" even if the writers wanted to do so. The publishers and/or editors are too scared to rock the financial boat because they realize their advertisers will not appreciate having their ads juxtaposed by unfriendly articles discussing implementation problems.
The result of the above three points (and there may be more you can think off) is that we get an extremely narrow and stilted viewpoint from our industry press. There are taboo topics, there are "holy-cows" that are exempt from any critisism and to compensate there are is an abundance of industry jargon and buzz-words that have more to do with marketing hype than any real advances in management thinking. Sometimes the profit motive can have a corrupting effect on things.
Having said all that I would love to get some return from the effort it has taken, and will continue to take, to establish the Alinement Network. Advertising is of course one of the first things that comes to mind as a revenue stream and so there is an ethical trap that is very easy to fall into. At this stage I am hopeful that a balance can be struck and in the end it is a tension between editorial integrity and business outcomes.
The web presents online publications with a few opportunities to tackle this ethical challenge. In summary, and worthy of more discussion (with you the reader) I can see the following opportunities to escape the trap that the profit motive sets for all publishers:
+ The web is a cheap way of publishing so without the need for a lot of infrastructure the costs can be contained + This is particularly true when one utilizes the Web 2.0's User Provided Content model making the wage bill shrink down to just the core editorial staff + User content also means that there is less of an ability to muzzle the press with the "real story" likely to emerge even if the publisher would prefer it not to + Then there are web-ads which are conveniently dumb on the actual content of the article and only triggered by keywords - whether or not they receive positive treatment.
So there is some hope of a new form of media that comes with the Web 2.0 model which does not destroy financial incentive but rather adapts it so that the business model is targetting the readers (users) rather than the
It is an important power-shift which make possible new business models, creates new opportunities and calls for different skillsets - maybe making knowledge and experience a valuable commodity once again.
It would be good to hear your thoughts on this subject .....
I was in the newsagents recently and came across a magazine with a pertinent message - the front cover screamed Magazine 2.0. It was an experiement by the Anthill Magazine to secure user content and even run a contest to design its front cover based upon user submissions.
How about that! I had to buy the magazine of course as it was a hardcopy version of what the Alinement Network is attempting to do. There are differences and in a way it is a lot more aggressive to apply the Web 2.0 principles to a traditional magazine publishing model .... but there is no stopping the momentum of User Provided Content.
As in the case of Anthill's experiment, I personally consider some coordination necessary in sifting and sorting the user content in order to provide some value-add that can then sustain the momentum of user contributions. The difference between data and information comes to mind here - content is a whole lot of data but it takes some organizing and shaping to make it more easily accessible and so valuable. Who knows, with some luck you might even be able to create some knowledge.
So that would say that at heart I am a control-freak and, ultimately, not a believer in the self-organizing principles espoused by those with a more agile bent. It's not that I don't believe that amazing things are not possible with simply trust in the "wisdom of the crowd" .... it's more that I fear the probability of success can be too low and don't have the patience (or is it lifespan) to take a simply evolutionary perspective of success.
In discussing the current state of projects in a large enterprise with an ex-colleague, he shared a shocking revelation with me.
The Alinement Network is marking a major milestone with Bhuvan Unhelkar of 
The annual New York Time's feature covering "
What do you call all those things that change the enterprise? The collective noun for projects?
o the breech dear friends .....
There is something of the Web 2.0 enabled "new media" revolution in the underlying philosophy of the Alinement Network. After all, merely to attempt to create an online magazine site indicates that (I at least think) there is a gap left by the mainstream business, management and technology publications.