cross-functional teams

Friday Hot Washup: Daddy Stovepipe sings the Blues, and Net Neutrality brought to you by Burger King

Daddy Stovepipe sings the Blues — Line and Staff Organizations (and how they undermine organizational effectiveness)

In my daily readings across the web I came upon this very well written blog post by Glen Alleman at his Herding Cat’s blog. The eternal debate in project management surrounds when done is actually done–and what is the best measurement of progress toward the completion of the end item application?

Glen rightly points to the specialization among SMEs in the PM discipline, and the differences between their methods of assessment. These centers of expertise are still aligned along traditional line and staff organizations that separate scheduling, earned value, system engineering, financial management, product engineering, and other specializations.

I’ve written about this issue where information also follows these stove-piped pathways–multiple data streams with overlapping information, but which resists effective optimization and synergy because of the barriers between them. These barriers may be social or perceptual, which then impose themselves upon the information systems that are constructed to support them.

The manner in which we face and interpret the world is the core basis of epistemology. When we develop information systems and analytical methodologies, whether we are consciously aware of it or not, we delve into the difference between justified belief and knowledge. I see the confusion of these positions in daily life and in almost all professions and disciplines. In fact, most of us find ourselves jumping from belief to knowledge effortlessly without being aware of this internal contradiction–and the corresponding reduction in our ability to accurately perceive reality.

The ability to overcome our self-imposed constraints is the key but, I think, our PM organizational structures must be adjusted to allow for the establishment of a learning environment in relation to data. The first step in this evolution must be the mentoring and education of a discipline that combines these domains. What this proposes is that no one individual need know everything about EVM, scheduling, systems engineering, and financial management. But the business environment today is such, if the business or organization wishes to be prepared for the world ahead, to train transition personnel toward a multi-disciplinary project management competency.

I would posit, contrary to Glen’s recommendation, that no one discipline claim to be the basis for cross-functional integration, only because it may be a self-defeating one. In the book Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning about a Highly Connected World by David Easley and Jon Kleinberg of Cornell, our social systems are composed of complex networks, but where negative perceptions develop when the network is no longer considered in balance. This subtle and complex interplay of perceptions drive our ability to work together.

It also affects whether we will stay safe the comfort zone of having our information systems tell us what we need to analyze, or whether we apply a more expansive view of leveraging new information systems that are able to integrate ever expanding sets of relevant data to give us a more complete picture of what constitutes “done.”

Hold the Pickle, Hold the Lettuce, Special Orders Don’t Upset Us: Burger King explains Net Neutrality

The original purpose of the internet has been the free exchange of ideas and knowledge. Initially, under ARPANET, Lawrence Roberts and later Bob Kahn, the focus was on linking academic and research institutions so that knowledge could be shared resulting in collaboration that would overcome geographical barriers. Later the Department of Defense, NASA, and other government organizations highly dependent on R&D were brought into the new internet community.

To some extent there still are pathways within what is now broadly called the Web, to find and share such relevant information with these organizations. With the introduction of commercialization in the early 1990s, however, it has been increasingly hard to perform serious research.

For with the expansion of the internet to the larger world, the larger world’s dysfunctions and destructive influences also entered. Thus, the internet has transitioned from a robust First Amendment free speech machine to a place that also harbors state-sponsored psy-ops and propaganda. It has gone form a safe space for academic freedom and research to a place of organized sabotage, intrusion, theft, and espionage. It has transitioned from a highly organized professional community that hewed to ethical and civil discourse, to one that harbors trolls, prejudice, hostility, bullying, and other forms of human dysfunction. Finally and most significantly, it has become dominated by commercial activity, dominated by high tech giants that stifle innovation, and social networking sites that also allow, applying an extreme Laissez-faire attitude, magnify and spread the more dysfunctional activities found in the web as a whole.

At least for those who still looked to the very positive effects of the internet there was net neutrality. The realization that blogs like this one and the many others that I read on a regular basis, including mainstream news, and scientific journals still were available without being “dollarized” in the words of the naturalist John Muir.

Unfortunately this is no longer the case, or will no longer be the case, perhaps, when the legal dust settles. Burger King has placed it marker down and it is a relevant and funny one. Please enjoy and have a great weekend.

 

Brother Can You (Para)digm? — Four of the Latest Trends in Project Management

At the beginning of the year we are greeted with the annual list of hottest “project management trends” prognostications.  We are now three months into the year and I think it worthwhile to note the latest developments that have come up in project management meetings, conferences, and in the field.  Some of these are in alignment with what you may have seen in some earlier articles, but these are four that I find to be most significant thus far, and there may be a couple of surprises for you here.

a.  Agile and Waterfall continue to duke it out.  As the term Agile is adapted and modified to real world situations, the cult purists become shriller in attempting to enforce the Manifesto that may not be named.  In all seriousness, it is not as if most of these methods had not been used previously–and many of the methods, like scrum, also have their roots in Waterfall and earlier methods.  A great on-line overview and book on the elements of scrum can be found at Agile Learning Labs.  But there is a wide body of knowledge out there concerning social and organizational behavior that is useful in applying what works and doesn’t work.  For example, the observational science behind span of control, team building, the structure of the team in supporting organizational effectiveness, and the use of sprints in avoiding the perpetual death-spiral of adding requirements and not defining “done”, are best practices that identify successful teams (depending how you define success–keeping in mind that a successful team that produces the product often still fails as a going concern, and thus falls into obscurity).

All that being said, if you want to structure these best practices into a cohesive methodology, call it Agile, Waterfall or Harry, and can make money at it while helping people succeed in a healthy work environment, all power to you.  In IT, however, it is this last point that makes this particular controversy seem like we’ve been here before.  When woo-woo concepts like #NoEstimates and self-organization are thrown about, the very useful and empirical nature of the enterprise enters into magical thinking and ideology.  The mathematics of unsuccessful IT projects has not changed significantly since the shift to Agile.  From what one can discern from the so-called studies on the market, which are mostly anecdotal or based on unscientific surveys, somewhere north of 50% of IT projects fail, failure defined as behind schedule and over cost, or failing to meet functionality requirements.

Given this, Agile seems to be the latest belle to the ball and virtually any process improvement introducing scrum, teaming, and sprints seems to get the tag.  Still, there is much blood and thunder being expended for a result that amounts to the same (and probably less than the) mathematical chance of success as found in the coin flip.  I think for the remainder of the year the more acceptable and structured portions of Agile will get the nod.

b.  Business technology is now driving process.  This trend, I think, is why process improvements like Agile, that claim to be the panacea, cannot deliver on their promises.  As best practices they can help organizations avoid a net negative, but they rarely can provide a net positive.  Applying new processes and procedures while driving blind will still run you off the road.  The big story in 2015, I think, is the ability to handle big data and to integrate that data in a manner to more clearly reveal context to business stakeholders.  For years in A&D, DoD, governance, and other verticals engaged in complex, multi-year project management, we have seen the push and pull of interests regarding the amount of data that is delivered or reported.  With new technologies this is no longer an issue.  Delivering a 20GB file has virtually the same marginal cost as delivering a 10GB file.  Sizes smaller than 1G aren’t even worth talking about.

Recently I heard someone refer to the storage space required for all this immense data, it’s immense I tell you!  Well storage is cheap and large amounts of data can be accessed through virtual repositories using APIs and smart methods of normalizing data that requires integration at the level defined by the systems’ interrelationships.  There is more than one way to skin this cat, and more methods for handling bigger data are coming on-line every year.  Thus, the issue is not more or less data, but better data regardless of the size of the underlying file or table structure or the amount of information.  The first go-round of this process will require that all of the data available already in repositories be surveyed to determine how to optimize the information it contains.  Then, once transformed into intelligence, to determine the best manner of delivery so that it provides both significance and context to the decision maker.  For many organizations, this is the question that will be answered in 2015 and into 2016.  At that point it is the data that will dictate the systems and procedures needed to take advantage of this powerful advance in business intelligence.

c.  Cross-functional teams will soon morph into cross-functional team members.  As data originating from previously stove-piped competencies is integrated into a cohesive whole, the skillsets necessary to understand the data, know how to convert it into intelligence, and act appropriately on that intelligence will begin to shift to require a broader, multi-disciplinary understanding.  Businesses and organizations will soon find that they can no longer afford the specialist who only understands cost, schedule, risk, or any one aspect of the other various specialties that were dictated by the old line-and-staff and division of labor practices of the 20th century.  Businesses and organizations that place short term, shareholder, and equity holder interests ahead of the business will soon find themselves out of business in this new world.  The same will apply to organizations that continue to suppress and compartmentalize data.  This is because a cross-functional individual that can maximize the use of this new information paradigm requires education and development.  To achieve this goal dictates the need for the establishment of a learning organization, which requires investment and a long term view.  A learning organization exposes its members to become competent in each aspect of the business, with development including successive assignments of greater responsibility and complexity.  For the project management community, we will increasingly see the introduction of more Business Analysts and, I think, the introduction of the competency of Project Analyst to displace–at first–both cost analyst and schedule analyst.  Other competency consolidation will soon follow.

d.  The new cross-functional competencies–Business Analysts and Project Analysts–will take on an increasing role in design and deployment of technology solutions in the business.  This takes us full circle in our feedback loop that begins with big data driving process.  We are already seeing organizations that have implemented the new technologies and are taking advantage of new insights not only introducing new multi-disciplinary competencies, but also introducing new technologies that adapt the user environment to the needs of the business.  Once the business and project analyst has determined how to interact with the data and the systems necessary to the decision-making process that follows, adaptable technologies that do not take the hard-coded “one size fits all” user interfaces are, and will continue, to find wide acceptance.  Fewer off-line and one-off utilities that have been used to fill the gaps resulting from the deficiencies in inflexible hard-coded business applications will allow innovative approaches to analysis to be mainstreamed into the organization.  Once again, we are already seeing this effect in 2015 and the trend will only accelerate as possessing greater technological knowledge becomes an essential element of being an analyst.

Despite dire predictions regarding innovation, it appears that we are on the cusp of another rapid shift in organizational transformation.  The new world of big data comes with both great promise and great risks.  For project management organizations, the key in taking advantage of its promise and minimizing its risks is to stay ahead of the transformation by embracing it and leading the organization into positioning itself to reap its benefits.