manage well

Risk is generally assumed to have negative impact. However, a ‘risk’ can also have a positive impact. PMBOK 4/e talks of positive risks and calls them ‘opportunities’. Given that most project managers only have a passing knowledge of managing risks proactively (our industry still seems to reward crisis management notwithstanding the fact that most often people who fix a crisis were responsible for it in the first place!), it is extremely likely that most such opportunities are wasted.

A risk is just a future event with probability of occurance between 0% and 100%. If such probability is 100%, surely that is a certainty, and hence can be put on the plan. If it is 0%, again it is a certainty and hence you can plan accordingly. Risks are also known as ‘known unknowns’ because we know about those events – just that we don’t know what it exact outcome will be. So, it quite likely that the outcome could be positive, and need not always be negative. Sample the following examples of events that could have a positive impact:

• You have made an offer to a manager whose company is fast running out of cash. The grapevine has it that they might not get any funding, and have just weeks before they fold up. If that happens, there is a strong likelihood that the manager whom you have made an offer will join you. Even though this is a negative event par se for that company, but for you, that is a positive event.
• Your competitor initially undercut his prices and won the bid, but now he is in the danger of being disqualified on technical grounds. His loss means business for you, and hence that is a positive risk.
• You offer “no-questions asked product replacement warranty” within 60 days of purchase. You allocate 5% of your your operating margin. Your new product has proved to be a great hit among teenages, and is flying off the shelves, and you expect that cost of product replacement might be within just 2%, thereby improving your overall profit margins on this product.
• You need to arrive at airport on-time, and your commute is through the rush hour. You leave home well in-time, but it is tough and go. However, there is a football match that evening, and it is likely that you find the traffic very thin – possibly because most people are glued to their TV sets.
• Your new software provides a workflow for managing personal finances. An NGO needs a low-cost software to manage its micro-finance product, but best-matching product is out of their reach. Your product *might* meet most of the requirements, including being in the budget, if only they can tweak their workflow a bit.
• You are in construction business, and learn that government is toying with the proposal to reduce duties on cement and steel by 20%.
• A major competitor who is also a large employer in the city is likely to announce lay-offs.
• Because of an early delivery of an input component, you might be able to shave-off weeks from your delivery schedule.
• City administration is likely to announce construction of a new  flyover that will cut down city commute and decongest the downtown.
• You are a tour operator and the international travel association is likely to name your region in “Top Ten Places to visit before you die” list.

Continue reading ‘Do you care about positive risks?’ »

Imagine driving down a country road when a street dog starts chasing your car? The dog ‘attacks’ the car but by the time gets it closer to the car, the car has moved ahead, and so the dog changes direction and attacks at new coordinates. This game goes on for some time, but because the car is faster than dog, dog loses the race never quite catching up the car! The resulting curve looks something like this:

In mathematics, this is known as the ‘curve of pursuit’ –  a curve constructed by analogy to having a point or points which represents pursuers and pursuees, and the curve of pursuit is the curve traced by the pursuers. The dog is attacking the problem as it see right now, but by the time it reaches near it, the problem has gone ahead a few steps! So, a problem-solving approach like this is perhaps only going to prolong the time it takes to solve it, and also make is costly in the process (not to mention, create opportunities for additional problems to breed in that time). A far more prudent approach will be to anticipate tomorrow’s problems and address them today.

Continue reading ‘How to avoid ‘curve of pursuit’ in three simple steps?’ »

Management is often blamed for doublespeak. Quite often, it is blamed on management’s ineffectiveness and immaturity to cut the c**p and come straight to the point, however, truth be told, it might as well be its hard-earned and well-deserved ability :). Only the very best of managers have such gift of the gab and an extremely fertile vocabulary to manage a tricky situation with professional finesse. Average managers might not only find themselves at short end of the stick dealing with tough situations, they might even be inept in using doublespeak for a bonafide reason to save their company, job, credibility or life – whichever happens to be more important at that point.

Is it incorrect to use doublespeak? Illegal? Immoral? Unethical? Noncommital? Dishonest? Unprofessional? Immature? Employee-unfriendly? Slander? I don’t know the answer. Different people have different take on it, but I am sure pretty much everyone among us must have used it sometime or other to get out of a minefield. While the intent may not have been to cheat or mislead others, it perhaps gave you that extra time or ability to get your act together while people, still not fully convinced, at least stopped baying for your blood for now! At other end of the spectrum, such fine skills might also be handy in avoiding giving an opinion or a feedback when someone puts you in a spot, and there is no way you are going to speak up your mind in public.

So, if such are the untold virtues of doublespeak, why don’t they teach it in B-schools? I mean, come on, let’s not kid ourselves. We are all grown-ups here who understand our own moral, values and ethics and pretty well understand the invisible fences of responsible behavior at workplace. Given that no classroom prepares you for real-life snafus, why not stop pretending that corporate life is a bed of pink roses, and instead, prepare people to better face those tough moments with grace and deftness of a master.

Continue reading ‘Do you doublespeak?’ »

What is worse then an anarchy ? You might say that is the absolute abyss, but I think blind allegiance is even more dangerous (and that includes following the letter but tweaking the spirit – things like ‘creative accounting‘ or its parallels in every field). Anarchy at least allows for things to become ‘better’ in order to survive – whether it is the idealogy, resistance, or even musclepower, or any other ills (and hopefully at some point, social forces of constructive destruction take over). But in a land where unquestionable compliance and blind allegiance rule the roost, IMNSHO, is like a terminal patient off the ventilator support. When people are on their deathbed, they don’t regret things that they did but much rather the things they did not do!

In project management, life is no less colorful. We have process pundits (read “prescription police”) shouting from the rooftop with a megaphone on how heavens will strike them bone dead with lighting if they ever as much as strayed from the ‘standards’. When projects are being postmortemed, we don’t often ask what or why the project did something that they did, but why they did not do things that they did not do. And quite often, you find answer in the map itself – because the map did not factor-in those conditions that were actually encountered on the terrain, the blind followers just followed the Pied Piper and danced their way into the river of death. What a terrible waste of human talent.

Why do we get stuck with methods so much that our result-orientation takes a back seat ? I think there might be many answers, but some that deserve merit:

Continue reading ‘Our methodology is 100% pure, our result is another thing!’ »

It’s not about the project management methodology anymore. Frankly, it never was, even though it has triggered off some of the most senseless wars in the history of project management. Starting with Frederick Winslow Taylor‘s Scientific Management to Henry Ford‘s assembly-line based mass production system and eventually landing in a ‘flavor-of-the-day’ methodology (CMM, ISO, Agile, XP, Scrum, Lean, Kanban….and add your favorite one here), project management community, especially in software field, has seen it all…and still counting! All these project management methodologies have been eulogized as silver bullets in their heydays (and some still continue to be worshipped as we speak), and have subsequently been improved upon by the next wave of innovation driven by ever-evolving business needs, state of technology and the sociological changes at the workplace. However, each predecessor has been uncharitably rejected and unceremoniously relegated to trash by every successive methodology champs. However, that doesn’t seem to have stopped project woes, certainly not – going by the claims made in their marketing brochures . So, whom are we to trust – the overzealous champs or their ever-evolving methodologies ?

For most practitioners, novices and experienced folks alike, project management methodology became this one large target to shoot at, the advertisement to get the project deal, the crutches to hold the project on to, the lame excuse against change in project specs, the insurance against failures, perhaps the…raison d’être for project managers ? “Sorry, the manual says do it this way, we can’t change that”. “The process handbook says we can’t take any changes anymore – tell customers to wait until the next release which is just six months away”. “You are not approved to prototype, so stop that effort”. “Our company’s org structure doesn’t allow an engineer to manage the project – the risks are too high”. “Our metrics are within the control limits, so I don’t understand why engineers fear a project delay”. Goes without saying, they come in all hues. 

Little did we realize that the ‘problem’ was a moving target. We continued to ‘evolve’ our ‘solution’ blissfully unaware that the problem was also upgrading itself. Every new fix has led to a newer generation of problem that seems to have outpaced the development of solutions – so far, and I see no good reason why we will never have a ‘perfect solution’ for every type of problem. So, it doesn’t amuse me when people on Agile / Scrum discussion boards try to indiscriminately apply those principles to just about every type of problem under the sun, and then when, predictably, things don’t work, they blame that Agile / Scrum is not being applied in its spirit. Have you ever seen a project manager so baptized that he won’t think beyond the book ? I think those blind preachers are just living like a frog in a well.

Continue reading ‘Does your project management methodology lets you free think?’ »

A friend sent this story sometime back:

The Japanese have a great liking for fresh fish. But the waters close to Japan have not held many fish for decades. So, to feed the Japanese population, fishing boats got bigger and went farther than ever. The farther the fishermen went, the longer it took to bring back the fish. The longer it took them to bring back the fish, the staler they grew. The fish were not fresh and the Japanese did not like the taste. To solve this problem, fishing companies installed freezers on their boats. They would catch the fish and freeze them at sea. Freezers allowed the boats to go farther and stay longer. However, the Japanese could taste the difference between fresh and frozen fish. And they did not like the taste of frozen fish. The frozen fish brought a lower price. So, fishing companies installed fish tanks. They would catch the fish and stuff them in the tanks, fin to fin. After a little hashing around, the fish stopped moving. They were tired and dull, but alive.
 
Unfortunately, the Japanese could still taste the difference. Because the fish did not move for days, they lost their fresh-fish taste. The Japanese preferred the lively taste of fresh fish, not sluggish fish. The fishing industry faced an impending crisis! But today, it has got over that crisis and has emerged as one of the most important trades in that country! How did Japanese fishing companies solve this problem? How do they get fresh-tasting fish to Japan?
 
To keep the fish tasting fresh, the Japanese fishing companies still put the fish in the tanks. But now they add a small shark to each tank. The shark eats a few fish, but most of the fish arrive in a very lively state. The fish are challenged and hence are constantly on the move. And they survive and arrive in a healthy state! They command a higher price and are most sought-after. The challenge they face keeps them fresh!
 
Humans are no different. L. Ron Hubbard observed in the early 1950′s: “Man thrives, oddly enough, only in the presence of a challenging environment.” George Bernard Shaw said: “Satisfaction is death!”
 
If you are steadily conquering challenges, you are happy. Your challenges keep you energized. You are excited to try new solutions. You have fun. You are alive! Instead of avoiding challenges, jump into them. Do not postpone a task, simply because its challenging. Catch these challenges by their horns and vanquish them. Enjoy the game. If your challenges are too large or too numerous, do not give up. Giving up makes you tired. Instead, reorganize. Find more determination, more knowledge, more help. Don’t create success and revel in it in a state of inertia. You have the resources, skills and abilities to make a difference.
 
Moral of the story: Put a shark in your tank and see how far you can really go!

Continue reading ‘Where is the shark in your cubicle ?’ »

Disclaimer: I got this in an email. This is not written by me, and is not my intellectual property. If you know the original source to it, I will be happy to link to it, and if it is copyrighted, I will be happy to seek permission to repost on my site, or take it off, as the case might be. I am sharing it here because I think there is good value in this illustration that everyone can learn from. I enjoyed reading it, and hope you enjoy too

Every company has a performance appraisal system in place to measure the effectiveness of its employees. Employees are normally rated in most of the companies in the Good, Very Good, Excellent, Outstanding categories. Apart from the above, non performance category is also there, which is not depicted here). Needless to say everyone wants to be rated Outstanding.

Continue reading ‘Initiative + Continuous Improvement => Superior Performance’ »

We Bangaloreans love our city, its greenery and reasonably well-maintained gardens, its great weather, its wonderful people who are mostly peace-loving and gentle in nature, its attitude (“swalpa adjust maadi“), its food (simply too good !), its openness and warmth towards non-Kannadigas (thanks for making us a part of your culture – and yes, we promise not to ever let you down), its intellectual capital and its generally understated elegance anchored by universal middle-class values like simplicity, respect, hard work and honesty. We also love its IT industry like a rare vintage wine, and its newfound romance with its vibrant enterpreunership eco-system that continues to attract best of the talent from all over India to its doors.

Of course, we don’t love its roads…and we simply love to critize its perennial and ever mounting traffic woes.

After living in Bangalore for last 14 years, and paying all my taxes to Karnataka government on-time, I feel I have earned the coveted rights of being called as a ‘Bangalorean’. It is with this self-endowed right and pride that I share my view of what ails Bangalore traffic.

Continue reading ‘Solution to Bangalore’s Traffic problems ?’ »

In  my previous post When are you planning to fail ?, I argued that early failures were a far more effective learning tool than early successes. Those ‘gentle failures’ could help you avoid, or at least minimize the chances of ‘grand failures’.

My colleague from PMI NPDSIG, Kimberly Johnson, shared that post with some of her ex-colleagues (Thanks Kim !), including Art Fry, inventor of perhaps most-well-known office product, Post-It Notes.  Here is what he wrote back:

“Good article, Kim. In most product development programs you must consider dealing with failure, because only one in 3000 to 5000 raw ideas become a success. So the question is, How do you check out the failures as quickly and inexpensively as possible?

Continue reading ‘Art Fry shares views on Failure…’ »

Yes, you read it right…when are you planning to fail ?

In the world where insatiable hunger for ‘success’ is an obsessive-complusive disorder (OCD), we don’t think of ‘failure’ much. It is shunned, scoffed at, systematically eliminated (or mitigated, at least), avoided, bypassed, ignored….everything but embraced with open mind and open arms. All management ideas are directed towards the age-old wisdom of “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail” and not on something like…”what won’t kill you only makes you stronger”. All project management philosophies are centred around safeguarding the projects from any possible failures…but has that stopped projects from grand failures? Every risk management action is towards making the project safe from failing…and yet we still see so many projects biting the dust, struggling for survival. Failure appears to be a social embarrassment that is best avoided at dinner table conversations. New-age enterpreunership, especially in Internet world, has helped a lot to eliminate the stigma that eventually comes with people associated with any well-known failure, but in everyday lives, we still continue to play safe, rather extremely safe. Of course, I am not talking about breaking the law and driving without seat-belts on or driving in the middle of the road jeopardizing everyone’s life. I am talking about thinking like Fosbury and challenging the established way a high jump is done – even at the risk of failing because what you are about to propose hasn’t been tested and certified to succeed. I am talking about taking those small daily gambles that strenghten you when they fail. I am not interested in those small daily gambles that are supposed to strenghten you if they succeed – honestly, they don’t teach you anything. In fact, those small successes might limit your ability to reach for higher skies because you remain contended by those sweet-smelling early successes. In my view, people who don’t want to risk gentle failures must prepare themselves for grand failure !

The word ‘fail’ is such a four-letter word that is evokes very strong emotional responses. In an achievement-oriented society and success-intoxicated corporate culture, fear of failure drives people to seek safer havens. When choosing what subjects to take in college, we ‘force’ our children to take the ‘safest’ subjects – they are the subjects that have maximum job potential ensure maximum longevity in job market. (I agree that ‘force’ is not the right word here, but it is not in its literal sense that I use this word here. The ‘force’ can come from parental expectations, societal pressure, peer pressure, ‘coolnees’ of a job, perks of the job, etc.). Traditionally, they have been Engineering and Medicine and anything else that ensured a government job (in India, and I am sure every country has had its own fixations at different times). So, the foundation to seek safety from failure gets laid right at the start of one’s career (well, in my view it is erected right after birth and we are still curing it by the time we start our careers, but that’s for another blog post). After graduating, there is once again a massive derisking operation: find some company that has a ‘big’ name (even if one is doing a fairly mechanical job there). Basically, trade any hopes or ambitions to do something new and creative in life with rock-solid jobb safety in a mundane assignment! As a rookie, you then become a link in this enormous chain where your job is dictated by the volumes of SOP (Standard Operating Procedures) that trade your urge to experiment / innovate with a higher ‘percieved’ safety of the given process. The logic being: this is the way we know it has been done before, and since it worked the last time, we expect it will always work and hence this is the standard procedure. Wow !

Continue reading ‘When are you planning to fail ?’ »

We human beings love to innovate, create better ideas and solutions, achieve efficiency in operations and so on. To do so, most people ask for the latest and greatest tools, the newest of the management fads, the really costly consultants so that they could ‘innovate’. The solitary aim and hope being those ‘new silver bullets’ have the right power to fix your problems.

However, they could not be any further from truth – real innovation happens when there are real constraints on the system and not when you have infinte amount of resources and problem-solving tools. When you try to remove or reduce the constraints just by adding resources alone (which could be time, money, people, tools, methodology, ..whatever), you are actually making the problem worse. Without challenging the people to come up with smart solutions, you are asking them to move away from that ‘source of innovation’ and do something else. This might be ok in some cases, but invariably, it deprives the golden opportunity to find some real cool way to solve complex problems. A far more effective way would be to respect that constraint without trying to satiate the bottleneck by throwing money (or whatever you can afford to throw) at the problem.

The great Indian epic, Mahabharata, has the story of lower-caste prince Eklavya who is an expert archer and wants to become the world’s best archer ever. He goes to the guru of noble princes, Dronacharya, who refuses to teach him as he comes from lower caste, so what if he is a prince. Not to give up so easily, Eklavya makes a statue of his ‘guru’ and ‘learns’ from him and become the ace archer ! Who says you need a guru to learn something – you can even learn something without having the right tools in hands. When I was growing up, my father told me the story of a poor boy who is determined to learn typing and win the typing contest. The only problem is that he doesn’t know typewriting and has no means to attend typing classes. He comes up with a novel idea: he copies the QWERTY layout of the typewriter on a piece of paper and practices ‘hitting’ the key on that piece of paper ! After a month of practicing ‘typing’, he finally makes it !

Continue reading ‘Ability to innovate is directly proportional to constraints in the system’ »

Revolutionaries are a restless lot. In a way, they are like the ‘shooting stars’ in an organization – they are seriously outnumbered by the hundreds of twinkle-twinkle little stars, they enter an organization with tails-on-fire hurry, and (try to) change everyone and everything around them within the short time span that they are there, and then they burn out (or just lose interest when the work they set out for is either accomplished, or get bored when it doesn’t get accomplished) and just move on. They don’t have a lot of time, patience or socialistic motives making small changes here and there, or to make elaborate plans and do surveys, investigations and pilots, and so on. They would rather be out there in the middle of heat, dust and all the adrenalin-pumping and chest-thumping action than be found napping in a death-by-powerpoint meeting full of naysayers who believe it is their fundamental right to protect the status quo.

While some are born revolutionaries, some people don that role for some phase of their professional life. Irrespective of whether you are one or not, chances are that you might be reporting to one, or working with one, or managing one such person sometime in your life. I would even bet that sometime in your career, you might find the need to shift gears and play that role. These ideas have helped me over the years, and I hope they help you as well:

Continue reading ‘Ten Commandments for Revolutionary Change Agents’ »

In one of my previous posts, I had talked about an article I wrote for business review magazine. It got published in the Dec 2008 issue. The article discusses following ten ‘wisdoms’ from Toyota for its managers:

1. Open the Window. It’s a big world out there !
2. Make the most sincere efforts in your assigned position
3. Taking on challenges is the way to gain experience

4. Be an Innovative and Creative Thinker

   Continue reading ‘Toyota’s Wisdom for Tomorrow’s Managers…published’ »

Change is painful, especially when you have to change yourself. However, in reality all change is really about – changing yourself ! When people ignore this simple and timeless truth, they start accumulating a lot of ‘rigidity’ – growing at the rate of one day at a time, until that years-of-accumulated-and-hardened-behavior becomes a Frankenstein’s monster and an inseparable and indistinguishable part of themselves ! So much so, that they don’t even see that as the problem. I read somewhere that it takes an average of 21 days for a practice to become habit. I think the same must be true for negative change – i.e., refusal to adapt to changes around us. And in, perhaps, as little as 21 days, we just fortify ourselves against the impending and growing change around us. When that happens, another fantastic thing happens. Since we are out of tune with the system, there is a real danger of the system rejecting us. To preempt that from happening, we reject the system ! We criticise the environment around us, we comment on people’s behavior, we become cynical of changes, we are uncomfortable with others enjoying their newfound happiness…and we defend our own stand tooth and nail….and become even more rigid in that process. There is one thing as maintaining your values and convictions, and quite another to be rigid. A hairline separates them, and any judgment is as subjective as any other one. In reality, one person knows the right judgment – you.

The trick, of course, is to view every small, delta, incremental change as something as trivial as driving you brand-new car on a dirt road in the country. Just as you would slow down at every hump or look out for potholes, and chickens and dogs trying to cross the road, so should you in real life.

Mac Anderson is Founder of Simple Truths who make lovely self-help books. In a post, he shared a wonderful story:

Continue reading ‘Change yourself, not the mirror’ »

This mail is doing its customary rounds on the net, and not for a wrong reason! Though there are obvious pitfalls of stereotyping people, it also serves as a handy learning guide, even a field manual, when the similarities are generic in nature, and far outweigh the minute differences that might make an individual unique and different from others, but not dramatically different from other fellow tribesmen. The fact is we are all different, and success at workplace is also impacted by our ability to recognize, appreciate, respect and work through such cross-cultural differences. In today’s increasingly globalized world, this serves as a good starting point to recognize that there are people different from us, and a team’s success is impacted by mutual understanding of such differences.

These icons were designed by Liu Young who was born in China and educated in Germany. She is an accomplished designer…check out her work at http://www.yangliudesign.com/. I found her usage of metaphors captured in nice little icons very interesting, and even if it is a gross generalization of human beings, it is a nice piece of creative work!

Legend: Blue –> Westerner, Red –> Asian

Continue reading ‘What is your cross-cultural quotient ?’ »