How many meetings have we been to where someone has lamely introduced the idea of solving a problem by “brainstorming” Usually this involves someone standing up next to a flipchart with a marker pen and barking out “Okay let’s have some ideas then team”. The resulting silence resembles one of those Spaghetti Western scenes where the camera pans around a lonely frontier town with tumble weed blowing in the wind.
To avoid that scenario have a look at this excellent presentation I found on LinkedIn the other day. (By the way have you noticed how much better LinkedIn is getting these days – lots more relevant content and groups to join)

This video made me laugh. It shows an IT Project Manager meeting up with a Business Manager a day before launching a new software system. The Business Manager has got a few tiny requests he’d like to add in….

This week the UK newspapers have been full of a report from a parliamentary investigation into the abject failure of yet another government project. The FiReControl project was commissioned in 2004. The objective was to consolidate 46 local fire control centres that co-ordinate fire and rescue services in the UK to nine regional centres linked by a national IT system.

Seven years and half a billion pounds later all the UK has to show for the project are nine empty buildings. (Although to be fair the London centre will be used soon) The national IT system was simply not delivered. What went wrong? The report highlighted a number of areas that anyone with a modicum of knowledge of project best practices such as PRINCE2 or the PMI could have spotted during the project.

Firstly the report highlighted a complete lack of accountability and responsibility amongst the management team. This will come as no surprise to those of us who have worked on large public projects. Endemic in many of these projects are large governance committees and complicated organizational structures which make it very difficult to work out who is accountable. This is completely against best practices such as PRINCE2 (which is supposed to be the government’s preferred method for project delivery) that clearly state that one individual should be recognised as having ultimate accountability for the project.

Another highlighted problem was the inability of the project team to work with the 46 local areas. These areas would have to transfer their operational capabilities to the nine regional controls and also work with them post-project. They were obviously important stakeholders. There are some very good ideas on how to work with such stakeholders in PRINCE2’s Organization theme. (Have a read of my old blog Prince2 in Practice – Engaging Senior Management in Projects for a synopsis of how the Organization theme works)

In a PRINCE2 project the local areas could have been given the Senior User role on the main decision making body the Project Board. Because there were so many of them a “local centre user committee” could have been set up to represent their needs which would then send a number of representatives to the Project Board meeting to ensure major decisions took account of their interests. The committee could have helped to specify the project’s products and carry out quality control. So how did the project team actually handle the local centres? Yes you’ve guessed it – they completely ignored their views and didn’t involve them in any decisions on the design of the regional centres and the IT system!

The management of third party contractors and consultants was another problem area highlighted by the report. The public projects I have been involved in always seem to have an over-reliance on consultants. PA Consulting were used on the project and came under fire (excuse the pun!) In my opinion consultants are unfairly blamed. Not satisfied with their complex and obscure governance structure that prevents anyone being blamed for the failure of the project, those in charge of public projects also recruit potential scapegoats in case of project failure. As is being proven right now, if the project fails, those managing the project can say – oh we were just following the consultant’s advice. The key to project success is someone taking responsibility for the project, someone who is willing to stand up and be counted for the success or failure of the project.

A software supplier called Cassidian was awarded the contract for the IT system. The investigation highlighted the fact that they had no direct experience of the area. Time and again the public sector seem to go through onerous procurement procedures only to end up with the wrong supplier. In the PRINCE2 model the Senior Users should be involved with specifying the requirements of the deliverables and choosing suppliers. As I have already discussed the local centres should have been taking on this role and giving input into the specification for the system. Of course they were not, so there seems little hope of a product that even if it had been delivered, would have been fit for purpose.

What has always struck me in public projects is the poor attitude of suppliers involved with delivering public services. It is almost as if, knowing that they have been chosen using a ridiculously over complicated procurement process, they realise the public body wouldn’t want to repeat the process and so won’t curtail their contract. They also know that most public bodies won’t take action against poor delivery. One of the suppliers I was dealing with on a local government project was late in their delivery (by over three months) I remember trying to get the Project Board to sanction legal action against the contractor to recover penalty clauses without any success.

I have never worked with Cassidian, so I wouldn’t want to tar them with the same brush as the awful contractors I had to muddle through with on the local government project. But the parliamentary report highlights the poor management the government department responsible for the project had over the software supplier. No milestones were set in place that might have given the department early warning of late delivery. A poor contract was put in place that paid the supplier late – causing a lot of tension.

Better project governance, stakeholder management and third party contractor management seem to be the three keys that might have brought success to this project. I would be interested to hear any comments from anyone directly involved in this project or other public projects on whether you agree or disagree with my conclusions.

Many people ask me if there is any software available to help run a PRINCE2 project. One of the challenges of PRINCE2 is using all the management documents that the method recommends. A good piece of software would be ideal to help create and update the plans, the logs and the quality documentations. There are also a number of diagrammatical tools such as product breakdown structures (PBS) which once again would be useful to create in a piece of software.

I recently reviewed P2ware Planner. It has some very good features. One area I particularly liked was how the software dealt with PRINCE2’s product based planning approach. For those of you who’s PRINCE2 is a little rusty here’s a quick recap of how you use the method to plan.

• Firstly the project manager works with the delivery teams to create a product breakdown structure (PBS). This hierarchical diagram would show all the products that need to be delivered and also which products are components of other products.
• Secondly, the project manager works with the teams to create a Product Description for each product identified in the PBS. A Product Description is a specification for a product.
• Then the project manager and the teams create a product flow diagram that shows the sequence of delivery for the products
• Next the project manager creates a configuration item record for each product. A configuration item record tracks a product’s latest status information.
• Finally the project manager can create a gantt chart showing all the activities that need to be done to deliver the products, who will do them and what dates they will occur.

The PRINCE2 product based planning approach is far more rigorous and robust approach than the more traditional method of jumping straight to creating a gantt chart. It helps the project teams think carefully through what will be created and helps to reduce the risk of common project problems such as scope creep and forgetting to deliver essential products. Unfortunately, the most widely used planning software, MS Project, has no facilities do any of the product-focused steps such as creating PBS’s or Product Descriptions. This is where software products such as P2ware Planner are very useful.

Have a look at the figure below. It’s a screenshot from the P2ware product. It shows how you can create a PBS. A really neat feature is that you can click on any product in the PBS and create its product description and also it’s configuration item record. (You can see the Product Description and Configuration Item Record details on the left hand side of the screen shot). For me, combining the PBS, the Product Descriptions and the Configuration Item Records on one screen makes things very simple.

Another good feature is that once you’ve created all the product information – the software will start to create a Gantt Chart for you using the information in the product flow diagram.

I think the P2ware software is definitely worth a look if you’re running medium to large scale PRINCE2 project. As well as the planning tools it also has facilities for creating and updating all the PRINCE2 logs and registers.

The website is at www.p2ware.com . It has a number of videos showing what the product offers plus you can download a trial version. If you do use it – I would be very interested to see what you thought of it.

Cheers for now

David Hinde

One of the more useful PRINCE2 ideas is its approach to starting a project. One of the greatest temptations in any initiative is to stop talking and planning the project and just get on with the real work. Wasting time with unnecessary analysis is of course a bad thing, but rushing into the work can actually turn out to be a false economy, leading to more wasted time later on.
What are the common problems caused by starting project too quickly? Here’s my top seven:

1. Not thinking through or being vague about what the project will create. This usually leads to client dissatisfaction when what they thought was being created isn’t or the users changing their minds during the building of the products.
2. Not taking time to identify all the important stakeholders to the project and agree the project’s scope with them. This usually leads to these important stakeholders appearing later on in the initiative and wanting major changes to the project definition which then lead to cost or schedule overruns.
3. Not working and consulting with those who disagree with the initiative, especially if those who disagree have power or influence. It’s better to have the arguments and power struggles up front before resources have been committed.
4. Not agreeing who is doing what on a project. Later on it becomes clear that either there are a number of people working at cross-purposes to each other or important project responsibilities are not being attended to.
5. Senior stakeholders getting too involved with the details of the project. Senior stakeholders should concern themselves with the key decisions in the project and helping to clear major roadblocks to the project. They rarely have the necessary technical skills to make product decisions or the management time to operate on a day-to-day basis. Unfortunately if they do get involved with the detail of the project their opinions are given too much weight due to their authority in the organization.
6. Senior stakeholders not getting involved enough in a project. This seems to contradict the last point, but if the senior stakeholders are completely hands off on the project, then they won’t be available to commit resources or resolve difficult problems
7. Not focusing on and clearly defining what the project objectives are and how the organization should benefit. If this isn’t done how does the project team know when the initiative should stop and also whether the project has been successful?

Can you think of any more starting a project gotcha’s? All comments welcome.

PRINCE2 helps to avoid many of these problems by disciplining an organization to stop before they create any products for a project and create a Project Initiation Documentation. This document clearly defines the project, it’s scope, it’s objectives and it’s products. PRINCE2 then ensures that this document is agreed with all the major stakeholders on a project before the work can commence.
In the next part of this series of blogs I will look at the Project Initiation Documentation in more detail and how it increases the likelihood of a successful project.

This post on BNET made me laugh. I think a few people I’ve worked with have read this book! A few things I especially recognise is the advice of being vague about what is required and remembering that your ability to remain in power is directly linked to keeping your employees as confused and disorientated as possible!
Take a few minutes out and have a read – hopefully you won’t recognise too many qualities in your boss.
The 7 Habits of Highly Ineffective Managers

I talked in the last part of this series about how more senior managers are often tasked with developing their strategic thinking. The first step to doing this is to be quite clear what strategy is. Strategy is all about the position your organization will take in its environment. The position should give it some competitive advantage against other organizations. Michael Porter defines strategy as a “broad formula for how a business is going to compete.”

For example, compare how Apple and Dell sell their laptops. Apple’s products are often nearly twice the price of Dell’s and yet they are still highly competitive. Apple has chosen to focus on creating products which are seen as high quality, creative, easy to use and sometimes more maverick and irreverent. People are more than willing to pay a lot extra for these qualities. It means that although Apple is selling the same basic product as Dell – the laptop – it is actually not competing directly with Dell. By its strategy Apple has positioned itself away from cheaper brands and made itself more competitive.

When I was younger I worked for Mars. I worked in the marketing division that sold Uncle Ben’s Rice. Rice is basically a commodity. You would think that, given a certain level of quality, people decide on what rice to buy based on price. However Uncle Ben’s – a highly successful product for many years – is usually around twice the price of its competitors. It has chosen a very unique position in the marketplace. It is the rice product, “that never sticks” and so it is very easy to cook. Using a special patented manufacturing process, Master Foods has positioned its commodity product to give themselves a very successful formula to compete.

Strategy also draws boundaries around an organization’s activities. A few years ago I worked with a software company. They had no discernable strategy, or maybe you could call it a knee jerk strategy. They sold a software product that held and reported on personnel data for an organization. Every few weeks one of their sales people would get very excited about a new opportunity. Maybe the opportunity was to sell a French version of their product, or maybe to sell a product to a large conglomerate or to sell specialized software that would run on a mainframe. Every few weeks this new opportunity would send their development team off in a new direction, developing new products.

The result of course, was that the development team were so busy going this way and that; the quality of all the products fell to an unacceptable level. Also they had no credibility in any of the niche markets they tried to fill. A conglomerate reviewing the personal software market, wants a supplier who has a track record in their marketplace, not a company that has just knocked up a version of their product to suit a large customer. Strategy provides a focus behind which all the rest of an organization’s activities are aligned and co-ordinated. Without it the organisation is rudderless, flailing about from one opportunity to the next.

I will talk more about Michael Porter’s ideas later on in this series of articles, but for now I’ll finish on a video of him giving his take on what strategy is. He mentions that he often hears organizations say that things like internationalising, outsourcing production or ramping up R & D expenditure are their strategy. But as we have just seen, none of these will give an organization a position from which it will better compete. These are all example of steps or tactics, which might help an organization towards whatever strategy they have decided upon.

Hi. Sorry I haven’t written much this month. I am up to my eyes in work at the moment, mainly writing a book. Its all about managing projects, but I’ll talk more about it later in the year.

In the mean time have a look at this article that appeared on the BBC web site – The art of explaining stuff It’s all about how to explain things. I thought it aligned nicely with the last blog post on how to use narratives to convey a message. I often think in business, we are guilty of either not explaining a concept thoroughly to someone, or pretending we do understand something! The latter is sometimes most difficult, as we don’t want to admit we haven’t quite got our heads around some idea.

I recently started to teach a new senior management course written by a colleague of mine. There’s lots of good stuff in it: strategic thinking, dealing with politics, controlling large change programmes. But stuck right at the end are a few slides on story telling as a management tool. At first I just couldn’t see how telling tales could be useful in the hardnosed places I’ve worked. In fact I didn’t think anyone would give you the time of day to listen to them. I didn’t tell my author colleague, but I have to admit I skipped over the topic the first time I taught the course.

However always up for a challenge I decided to do some research for the second time I ran the course. I bought myself a couple of books; Storytelling: Branding in Practice by Klaus Fog and the Leader’s Guide to Storytelling by Stephen Denning. Both were extremely interesting. The Fog book gives a template structure that help you put a story together and the Denning book describes how to use stories in the fast-paced no-nonsense world of work.

What stood out most for me was the range of example business stories that the Fog book gave. I was surprised to realise I knew many of them already. For example, the story of how 3M invented the post-it note. I’d be quite surprised if you don’t know it too. In the process of trying to invent a new glue, a researcher produced a substance that didn’t quite work. It stuck things together, but then it was easy to pull them apart. Thinking it unusual, but not able to come up with an application he told some of his colleagues. Sometime later another 3M employee who was a keen choir singer was trying to figure out how to keep multiple bookmarks in his hymn book. Remembering the unsticky glue, he dabbed some of the substance on each marker and realised how useful it was. The Post-it was born.

A few things struck me about this story. Firstly it effectively communicates some of 3M’s core values: innovation, not being afraid to make mistakes and to keep trying even in the face of failure. Secondly how this story has gone “viral” Many people who hear it retell it, thereby spreading 3M’s message. Thirdly how much more effective it is than a dry abstract mission statement such as “3M value innovation” Basically it sold me on the idea that story telling could be a useful business tool.

Ken Blanchard’s One Minute Manager is another great example of using a narrative to convey a management message. Blanchard sets out a number of useful ideas for effective management intertwined with a story of a young manager being mentored by the slightly mysterious but successful “One Minute Manager”. This book has been one of the best selling management development books for over twenty years showing how powerful the story approach can be.

Still not convinced? Probably you might be thinking, well this is all fine in theory but no-one’s going to have time to listen to some tale in my work. For one thing that might think me a bit strange! The Denning book has a good answer to this. His research shows that business stories don’t have to be like real stories at all. In fact, maybe the name “story” is misleading. Really we mean a narrative. For example, instead of telling a junior manager the importance of clear delegation, giving an example of the consequences of a time when you didn’t clearly delegate is all that’s required. It allows people to identify with the experience and put themselves into that situation and hopefully learn from it. The narrative might only take a few sentences; it doesn’t have to be long.

In the training course now I spend much more time on this topic. I go through a template structure for a story and we discuss in a group why you might want to tell a narrative. It turns out there might be all sorts of reasons from conveying how things are done here, to helping individuals to learn, to telling a tale which might quash a rumour that’s going round the office. At the end we have some fun getting each attendee to come up with a useful short narrative they could use in work. Have a go – you might be surprised how much more impactful you become in your organisation. Story telling can be quite persuasive!

As managers move up the levels of their organisations they are often asked to thing more strategically. But what exactly does this mean? In this series of articles I want to take a good look at this, often rather obtuse, subject area.

What is strategy? How does it differ from tactics? It’s one of those slightly ambiguous terms that can mean many things.  My dictionary’s definition is “the practice or art of using stratagems.” Under stratagems it says, “plan or trick especially to deceive a enemy.”  I’m pretty sure that not what is meant by strategy in business. Not always anyway! So we’ll look at coming up with a new definition of strategy using the ideas of people like Harvard Professor and strategy guru Michael Porter and considering some case studies taken from the digital industries of software, hardware and mobile phones. In these fast moving industries we’ll see it is particularly important to get strategy right.

We will look at some of the models that help us analyse the strategic situation of organisations. We’ll dust down SWOT – such as cliché – but also as we’ll see incredibly useful. We’ll also review a new alternative to SWOT, Michael Porter’s Five Competitive Forces Model.

Strategy usually starts to rear its ugly head when managers move into what is generally called the middle management position. Suddenly they are uncomfortably close, maybe even a direct line report away, from the supposed purveyors of strategy, the board of directors. This can lead to a number of challenges. Maybe no discernable strategy actually exists. What is the middle managers role then? Alternatively there might be an excellent strategy, but it is hidden away in the ivory tower of the boardroom. As a result the implementation layer of the organisation is acting in a confused or conflicting matter with the general direction suggested by this strategy. Once again, how does the middle manager face this challenge?

I hope you enjoy this series of articles and I look forward to your comments.

For Part 2 of this series click here