Category Archives: Change Management

It’s Your Gorilla, So Change the World!

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ARGH!!!!!

 

I had just enough sanity left in me to reflect on just how often that sound escaped from my mouth these days. And then sanity left me and I walked towards the door to my office. All I wanted to do was pound my head on the oak door until all my cares went away.

 

“Gonna break that poor door,” the words cut through my haze of frustration for just a moment. Just a moment. Then they were replaced by new frustrations. Was there ever going to be a day that Hogarth didn’t show up to offer me his ‘words of wisdom’?

 

From his perch, by my office window, my gorilla answered. “Sure there will be. At this rate though, not going to be a for a long time. Leave the door alone, its already got a dent in it.”

 

I threw up my hands. “I give up! I just give up. There is no way I’m ever going to change corporate culture around here.” I threw myself down in a chair and gave a resigned sigh. “I tried to get the test group to share their data with the support group.”

 

Hogarth cocked his head, “And?”

 

I shook my head, “No go, the test guys say it’s too complicated and would only distract support from helping the customers. The support guys are livid because they feel like test is treating them like children.” I sighed. “So the support guys have decided to stop coming to meetings until Test changes their mind.”

 

Hogarth chuckled, “Very adult.”

 

I glared at him. “You’re not helping. If you have some practical advice, I’m all ears. Otherwise, please go away.”

 

Pulling a banana from somewhere (don’t ask, I never do) he began to peel it. “Sure I do, stop trying to fix the world.”

 

“What the hell am I supposed to do?” I snapped.

 

“Be the best damned project manager you can be. Focus on what you have direct control of.” Hogarth took a bite of his banana. “Do that and you’ll change the world.”

 

I laughed. “Oh that’s rich. How exactly can I change the world? I’m just one project manager in a huge company.”

 

Hogarth tossed me a book. “It’s Your Ship.”

 

 

IT’S YOUR SHIP- NOT QUITE A BOOK REVIEW

 

I recently finished reading It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best  Damn Ship in the Navy, by Captain D. Michael Abrashoff. This book goes on my top inspirational books list and I’ll be recommending it to my friends and colleagues as a must read (or listen) book. Abrashoff communicates his powerful advice through great stories and by showing exactly how his advice worked in the real world.

 

I could go into the standard book review format. I’ve got a good system going after all, just check out my Good to Great review.

 

I’m not going to do that though. You see there is a far more powerful message in this book than can be covered by a book review. Beyond Mike’s eleven keys of good command, there is an even larger message to be read. You just have to cock your head to the side and read between the lines.

 

One ship, one crew, one captain, one person, can change the world

 

Captain Abrashoff was on his very first command. He was the junior captain in his naval group. His ship was probably not considered the gem of the fleet , elsewise a new captain wouldn’t have been posted to it. He was assigned an officer who was considered a failure by his last ship. In short, the level of influence that the USS Benfold could exert was not on the level of a Jobs, Clinton, Buffet or Branson. It was lucky if it could influence itself out of its own way. One certainly wouldn’t have expected Benfold to impact the entire US Navy.

 

Yet Abrashoff, Benfold and her crew went on to change the Navy. No, it wasn’t some diabolical plan to take over the world. Heck, Abrashoff probably never envisioned he would even be able to make the sea changes that he did. Instead he was completely and totally focused on what he could do in his little circle of influence. And through that focus, he changed the world.

 

Let’s look at just a handful of the examples I collected from my reading:

 

Steel Fasteners: Now remember, this was 1997, stainless steel had been around a good long while. Painting the ship was an absolute nightmare chore that cut into the new sailors training time. The fasteners on the ship (bolts, screws, nuts, etc) would rust and streak the still perfectly painted metal and you’d have to paint the ship every couple of months. After listening to his crew, Abrashoff bought steel fasteners with his ship credit card (The Navy didn’t stock them). Bang, the painting chore dropped radically. Today all Navy ships are using steel fasteners and other improvements that Benfold trailblazed. Imagine all that recovered productivity?

 

Real Time Communication from a Weapon System: We take instant communication for granted a lot. In 1997 cell phones were still bricks, AOL was still one of the largest email providers, and computer radio traffic was still in its infancy. It could take hours if not days to get orders out to everyone. This caused some pretty serious issues in the Persian Gulf and the Iraqi peacekeeping mission. Abrashoff listened to one of his petty officers. Then he bucked the system and brought the idea to his Admiral. End result? The computer network system for the Tomahawk Cruise Missile system was leveraged to allow real time, two way communication between ships of the fleet. It was rolled out across the Navy and changed how ship to ship coordination was done.

 

Get the food on the ship!: I was floored by this one. In the 90’s, Navy ships were still having their food stores loaded by hand. They would form a human chain and pass the boxes from the dock to the storage lockers. Abrashoff told a non-Navy friend (it pays to have a wide network!) about the problem. Long story short, his friend created a conveyor belt system that could be setup quickly and load the ship in a fraction of the time and labor. Not to mention with more safety. The Navy hired that guy to load all ships in the San Diego port.

 

New Sailor Policy: You just graduated from Navy boot camp. You fly a civilian airline across country and find your own way to the ship you will be serving on. Almost everyone is off the ship because its in port. You spend the first forty-eight hours just trying to find the head (bathroom) and how to get back to the deck (outside) of the ship. Abrashoff set up a new sailor on-boarding process that greatly improved morale and new hire ramp up speed. The process was copied by other ships and I wouldn’t be surprised if its not SOP for the Navy now.

 

You can change the world

 

Yes, you. The project manager on the right. You sitting in your cube with a stack of Gant charts threatening to bury you. You with the action item list that looks more like a parts list for a nuclear sub. You, the project manager who just had to go turn back on the office lights because the timer automatically turns them off at 10:00pm.

 

We can change our companies, we can change the world. We don’t have to be the CEO. We don’t have to have a dozen direct reports.

 

What we have to do is be the best we can be. Focus on what we are good at, do it and keep doing it. When you something really well, people notice. I’ve had it happen to me. I’ve created MSFT Office templates for my own use. I always put my name into the properties section when I do it. Many times I’ve gotten a document sent to me from some other project. Gee, this looks familiar. Well, hey there, look at that. My template, tweaked a little and being used half a company away. Guess it worked.

 

If one junior Captain, one single destroyer can change the United States Navy, then a good project manager can damn well change the world.

 

So what are you waiting for?

Gorilla McPhee and the Groundhog

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You know the nice thing about banging your head on the desk?

It feels so good when you stop…

And some days that is enough to look forward to. Days like today, launch day. The day we put our best face on and release into the wild the product we’d been working on for the last eighteen months.

You know the old joke about products? “Products don’t launch, they escape.” Well our product overpowered the prison guards and stole a tank to bust out. And I was left sitting in my office with that horrid déjà vu feeling of having done all of this before.

Because we had, on the last release.

The authentication database locked up after a hundred logins, just like last time. The servers couldn’t handle the traffic load of a major part of our user base logging in at the same time, just like last time. I could go on, only my head was getting sore and it really didn’t matter. Oh, sure, we’d improved the build process, getting down to twenty-four hours from build to completed tests. Other than that, though, we had made almost the exact same mistakes as last time and as certain as the sun comes up we would make most of them again.

This was all like some bad metaphor, I just wasn’t sure which one.

“Ground Hog Day”

“Wha?” I looked up to see Hogarth filling my doorway. “Hogarth, what do you need?”

My gorilla lumbered into the room and took a seat on the ground next to my fichus tree. With a contented sigh, he leaned back against the wall and helped himself to a branch from the fichus. Finally he looked up at me and said, “You were looking for a metaphor to describe your problem with déjà vu, I was suggesting Ground Hog Day.” He held up a finger, ” The movie not the actual day.” His teeth stripped a piece of bark from the fichus branch before he continued, “Every time Bill Murray went through his day, he learned something. Eventually he even started improving things.”

Hogarth gave a wave towards the hallway and the other offices. “Stop trying fix everything all at once, it won’t ever happen. Pick one thing, and fix it. Then repeat the process again and again.”

“Augh!!!” I threw my hands up in the air. Had I any real hair to speak of, I’d probably have been yanking it out of my head right then. “Am I ever going to be rid of you? Am I doomed to a life of moral correctness being delivered to me by an 800 pound gorilla?”

Hogarth folded his hands over his belly and gave me a soothing smile. “When you need me but do not want me, then I must stay. When you want me but no longer need me, then I have to go.”

Oh no! I wasn’t going to be tricked this time. He’d made me look like an idiot too many times with his obscure historical quotes, “What famous philosopher said that?”

Hogarth smiled at me, “Nanny McPhee.”

“Huh?”

 

Coaches (Agile, Lean, Business) are like Nanny McPhee and Businesses are like the Ground Hog Day movie.

Last week I had the privilege to attend the SFAgile2012 “Unconference” in San Francisco. It was a great experience and I am still processing everything that I took in. In the coming weeks I hope to write about more of my observations and personal discoveries, like being caught in the middle of converging philosophies, the agile survival guide for functional managers, the need for a new definition of agile (who knew manifesto was such a highly charged word), or even a humorous look at the word fachidiot.

Right now though, I want to tie together two threads I experienced at SFAgile2012.

Hackerpenuer – or the Ground Hog Effect

The first was Joshua Kerievsky’s (@JoshuaKerievsky) closing keynote at the conference. One of the attendees recorded his keynote and I think it is very much worth watching. No matter what your preferred methodology is, I believe Josh’s points will resonate with you. And his use of the movie “Ground Hog” day to illustrate both the problems with learning and the benefits of learning from mistakes was superb. He extended the ongoing theme of the conference, that of the cultural hacker.

Part 1- http://youtu.be/29WekhL_c44  Part 2- http://youtu.be/_ArGvKpJI8k

His use of the movie was very telling and I can’t begin to cover everything. One of the powerful take aways I had was in the power of iteration. We watch as Phil relives the same day over and over again. We watch as someone is given the chance to “if you could do it all over again, would you do it differently.” Phil could, because his iterations were short and he remembered what happened the last time he was able to make changes and experiment.

What if your iteration is nine weeks long and you don’t do integration until week seven*? That means you have to go seven weeks between each time you get to effect a change. And then it’s a lot like the theory of reincarnation. Yes, you get to live life again, only you don’t remember the last  life, so you just might make the mistakes again.

*Yes, we know it’s a bad idea to wait so long for integration testing. It works for this example though.

What’s our Goal? – Mission – Values – Purpose

The second thread was one that I was unable to put words to during the conference. It was not until after, when reading Olaf Lewitz’s (@olaflewitz) Twitter profile, that I was able to put words to the thread. Even now, I find myself struggling with words I am happy with. For now, our Goal through Mission, Value, Purpose (MVP, yes I planned that) will have to do.

Olaf’s Twitter profile reads: “Linchpin. @agile42 Coach. When you need me, but do not want me, I must stay. When you want me, but no longer need me, then I have to go. (NannyMcPhee)”

Nanny McPhee is another movie, one in which Emma Thompson plays a character much like Mary Poppins. If you remove all the sugar and spice and everything nice and replace it with warts and boils and in your face honesty. McPhee could be the living embodiment of what happens when an organization embraces Agile/Lean methods. It is often said that Agile is a great tool for revealing the warts in your organization. And for those that stick with it, they find that the warts are not really that big  compared to the beauty of effectiveness they can achieve.

Nanny McPhee is also the perfect coach. She doesn’t try and change you. She creates opportunities for you to see change, she asks you the questions you are asking yourself, and she helps you to see the change you want to make. She doesn’t lead a horse to water, she asks the horse “Where is the water?” (After sneaking up on the horse in his stall and apologizing that the door was open.)

This brings to the interesting question. One I am still not sure I can even put properly into words. For want of something I’ll just settle for “Who are we, what do we do, what is our purpose (Hmm WWW. I think MVP is better). Really though I think the right question is, “What is my goal?”

We already have an idea of Olaf’s purpose through his espousing the McPhee mantra.

Simon Marcus, the CTO of The Library Corporation, summed it up as “Continuous learning and respect for others.”

Joshua Kerievsky’s (@JoshuaKerievsky), following his Hackerpenuer theme has “Hacking, Hutzpah, Happiness, Hustle, and Health.” (Yes, he hacked Chutzpah to make it work).

Illan Goldstein (@iagile), an Asutralian Agilist, responded to my own goal statement with “To constantly improve and to never go backwards.”

Which brings me to my goal. What is one sentence I can use to sum up my goal as a program manager, coach, facilitator, <insert title here>? For me, I say “My goal is to spend every day trying to make myself obsolete.”

This is not my personal life goal (my wife would object). This is my goal in working with teams and a company. After a twittersation (conversaion on twitter) with  @iagile and some others, I realize that even something so simple can lead to confusion. Words are amazing.

My thoughts are that if I am always trying to make myself obsolete for my current team/org, then I am working to better myself, better the team, empower the team and improve the value stream. It is almost certainly an unattainable goal and I think that is just fine. It is not the goal that matters, it is the journey that matters.

So with two popular moves, we see answers to change, the value of short iterations, the value of revealing the warts, and some clues to what is our purpose as coaches.

 

> I will always strive to not be needed. If I ever am not needed, I will be filled with joy and contentment for the world will surely be a much better place. <

 

Joel Bancroft-Connors

The Gorilla Talker

Want me to talk to your gorilla? Send me an email, jbancroftconnors@gmail.com

The Gorilla changing room- Making decisions out of choices

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“WAIT, WAIT, What?”
Bob hasn’t been handling stress to well lately. His last word broke into a near falsetto and the tick above his eye was threatening to register on the Richter scale.
Monica didn’t seem the least phased by the outburst. I think it would have taken a good 9.0 to shake the plastic smile from her face. “Marketing thinks Pantone Snorkel Blue 19-4049 is not the right shade for the logo on the case. We want to look at Dark Blue 19-4035 instead.”
Okay, so I have to admit Bob was probably justifiably upset. Me, I was having an odd sense of déjà vu.
“Excuse me, Monica, but didn’t we go over the logo color about three weeks ago and all agree on Snorkel Blue?” I asked, trying to give poor Bob time for his blood pressure to get back down under 200.
Monica gave a casual wave with her absolutely pristine fingernails. “Well, yes, but marketing wasn’t sure then so we didn’t say anything.”
If Monica kept talking in the third person I might just snap myself. “Okay, we are starting mass production in a day. I’m not even sure we can change the color. Wally?” I turned to look at the head of our hardware team.

Wally looked at me with a pained expression that didn’t need words. If they had words, they’d probably been something like “I’ve had our manufacturer change the blasted logo color seven times, how many more do you want to change it?”
Monica gave a dismissive wave to Wally. “Marketing feels certain that the color has to change, can’t you just speed up the shipping process to cover?”
Bob leaned forward, smoke veritably curling from his ears. “We already chose the color, five times. If you can’t be bothered to attend the meetings because you are to busy getting your forehead botoxed…”
Hogarth sidled up to me, his hot breath on my neck the first clue I had to his nearness. Thing is I wasn’t surprised. The meeting was going just so many different ways of wrong that I knew he was bound to show up sooner or later. I guess you could say I was starting to learn and understand his presence. His appearances were no longer absolute surprises of non-sequiturs.  I could almost hear the lesson he was about to give.
“So does this make you Bill Murray?” he asked.
Blink… Huh? Blink… Blink… That was not the lesson I was expecting.
I turned away from Bob’s latest fusillade at Monica and stared at Hogarth. His brilliant white smile was in counterpoint to his bushy black eyebrow raised at me in question. Sometimes I think he truly takes pleasure in confounding me to speechlessness. “Hogarth, what on earth are you talking about?”
“Groundhog day of course. You know, the film with Bill Murray reliving the same day over and over until he gets things right?”
“Hogarth, it’s not February, I’m not Bill Murray and what the hell does this have to do with the meeting.”
“Well didn’t you already decide on the color of the logo five times?”
“No, it’s been seven…” Hogarth just looked at me.  “Oh, hell.”
There is a malaise sweeping business, from San Francisco to Sydney and Johannesburg to Edinburgh the same problem is rearing up to prevent companies from succeeding, from moving forward, from getting anything done, from not killing each other in meetings of death, from doing the right things, the right way. What is this frightening cancer? What is this thing that is able to crush your projects and leave the teams wondering what was the license plate of the bus they were just thrown under?
We can’t make decisions… To be clear, we are very good at picking choices. We are wonderful at nodding heads and saying “yes” but we are absolutely abysmal at making and committing to decisions. When it comes to putting the rubber to the road, we are found to be lacking even the tires needed to hit the road.
Wait a minute. You just said we are very good at making choices, what’s the problem?
A choice is not a decision: A choice is picking someone to ask to prom night. A decision is saying “I do” to marry your spouse. When you go to Baskin and Robbins (A US based Ice Cream store) there are thirty-one choices of ice cream, but there is only one decision as to what you’ll get on that single scoop. A decision is a stake in the ground with clear accountability tied to it.
Accountability… There’s that scary word again. Don’t run away, it won’t bite. Accountability is easy. It can be fulfilled with Mark Horstman’s single law of project management., “Who, Does What, By When.”
You see, what so often happens is that everyone is sitting in the room and a plan is developed. People nod their heads, and maybe the guy who was really opposed decides now is not the time to object. But then there is no follow up. Sure it might have gotten documented in the meeting minutes, but no one was assigned ownership. No date was set. No specific plan was set. How do we know if it is done? How do we know if what was agreed is what is being done? How do you measure the “acceptance criteria?”
If a choice was made, you don’t. If a decision was documented then you have.
Hey now! Don’t run scared just because I used the “D” word. Documentation does not need to mean a twenty page requirements document. Documentation just needs to be “Who,” “What,” “When.” The only hard part is the what and if you define what by the acceptance criteria it can be pretty darn easy.
You have the power! Stop the déjà vu cycle! Don’t go through another Groundhog day again. Don’t let a meeting end without “Who,” What,” and “When” being written down and agreed to.
Change isn’t a bad thing. But changing because you didn’t agree the first time is a waste.
Joel Bancroft-Connors
The Gorilla Talker
Want me to talk to your gorilla? mailto:jbancroftconnors@gmail.com
You can follow me on twitter, @JBC_PMP

The Stealth Gorilla

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Or- How to enact change control under resistance.

The office was deserted. Only a few lights burned like pools of florescent haze.Using the light cast off of my monitor to see by, I typed furiously at my keyboard. My masterpiece was nearly complete. I lovingly stroked the cover of a book lying just outside the illumination cast by the monitor. “Soon, soon my precious we shall have them following process. We shall have the one true way.” Sliding the book into the light, I gazed at the cover. The MoPRoK, the Management of Projects Repository of Knowledge* would make all things right. Tomorrow we would start fresh, we would wipe the slate clean and start following the plan from A to Z. Finally we would have process and all would be good!
I was about to release a maniacal cackle of glee when my thoughts were shattered by a flash of steel and the dull thunk an object striking something. Looking down I saw a shimmering metal star vibrating in the cover of my beloved MoPRoK. Spinning about in my chair I caught site of Hogarth. At least I was fairly certain it was Hogarth, I couldn’t be certain with the absurd black outfit he was wearing. But it was hard to mistake those mischievous eyes peaking out from the cloth over his face.
“Hogarth, what the hell are you doing?”
Striking the most absurd pose I’ve ever seen on a gorilla, and that is no mean feat, Hogarth hissed “I am Neeeeenjhaa!” He made a series of moves that I could only construe to be his interpretation of martial arts moves. I must stress “interpretation” when I say this. Gorillas were not designed to be Bruce Lee.
“What on earth are you talking about?” I asked.
Sliding towards me, Hogarth began speaking. His lips were moving in rapid succession as he did so in an obvious, but poor, attempt to mimic bad comics mimicking bad martial arts movies, “I am the process that slips through the dark. I am the template that appears unbidden. I am the change that happens when no one is looking. I am, Stealth Process!”
I rolled my eyes with a groan. “You can’t be serious? I am not going to don a set of black pajamas and sneak through the office.”
Hogarth pulled a bright yellow banana from a hidden pocket and perched on my desk. “Oh I definitely don’t recommend the black outfit, people already see you as the harbinger of creative death.”
“What? Now listen here, I’m just following industry standard process. There are hundreds of thousands of MPs using the MoPRoK. There is a process and it works.”
Hogarth spoke around a mouthful of fruit, “Uh huh, and if you were setting things up from scratch, then that might just work. But you’re not and it won’t. This team is about as open to change as Fort Knox. You’re trying to change a raging river with nothing more than a kayak paddle. It ain’t gonna happen.”
Sigh… And once again the ever practical Hogarth spoke true words of wisdom. The Stealth Gorilla was here to show me the errors of my ways. So now we take a practical look at how to bring about change in an organization that is resistant to change for any number of reasons.
Process can be good. Process can be great. Process can be wonderful. It can create predictability, accountability, reliability. It can assure proper communication. It can help define just what is “done”. It can do everything but walk the dog (well maybe it can). But no process works in a vacuum.  And when your team is highly resistant to change it won’t matter what process you roll out, it will meet resistance.
You can’t just wholly drop a new process into any organization. And when you have a change resistant organization, then the challenges increase ten fold.
Enter the Stealth Gorilla.
It’s a fairly simple process, which ties into one of my Gorilla Project Management  maxims. “First step is to get it done, then figure out who owns it.”
Several companies back I had the pleasure of interfacing with the Sales organization. I processed special exceptions to what was supported in our products. We’d originally had no process around this at all. This was good (sales always got the exceptions they asked for) and bad on many levels. Sales was never really sure if they had buy in on the exception. Support felt they got dumped with all the weird stuff and Engineering found itself fixing bugs on things they never intended to support. So we needed a process, but getting the Sales team to adopt any kind of process was akin to getting the UN to agree on the definition of Hurly Burly.
The first was to start documenting everything. The only process we had was Sales sending an email requesting (and expecting) approval of the exception. So I started there, documenting everything they asked for. Picking up the phone and calling the sales guys to ask questions and make sure all the information was captured. I went back through the backlog of old requests and updated those as well. All this was posted in a common location, so everyone knew what was out there. Now the company had a common understanding of what had been promised to customers. I kept doing this for several months, slowly refining a submission template.
Then I started sending the template back to sales with questions, “Do I have this right?” I particularly worked with the major thought leaders in sales, showing them the value of complete data by ensuring request that had all the data were fast tracked through approval. Eventually I started getting pre-filled out templates. After another few months, we flipped things around and Sales had to fill out the formal request form to even have an exception looked at. From there we slowly ramped up process on the approval side. I’d work with the sales rep to understand the business impact, we’d compare that to the cost of supporting the change and so on. Eventually, we would make it to a point of making fully qualified cost benefit analysis on the exceptions.
“But that’s so much work, I don’t want to work that hard.”
No one ever said project management was easy. If we wanted an easy job, we would never have taken on a role that often has mountains of responsibility and a kids shovel of authority. Yes, it is hard work I will not deny that. But it is effective work and effective is what matters. In my example, we created predictability, common understanding, a formal approval process (we even started turning down many sales requests) and in the end we took the process from roughly eight to ten weeks, to, on average, twenty days. With a little investment in time and effort, we created a process that worked for everyone and made the company more effective.
If we’d just slammed down a process and mandated Sales go through it from day one, I have little doubt they would have just stopped asking and figured out a way around the system. Instead we made them a part of the process and they ended up owning the process just as much as everyone else involved.
When you run into resistance, take a page from mother nature and practice a little erosion. Work slowly and make it easy to start. Then, like a good video game, add more and more complexity until you have a complete process everyone is bought into.
Joel BC
Veteran, the Project Manager wars
Want me to talk to your gorilla? Send me an email
You can follow me on twitter, @JBC_PMP
*The MoPRoK is an entirely made up name intended to represent any number of “bibles” for how to do project management. There is nothing wrong with bodies of knowledge and I support them fully. It is all in how you implement them.