Risk Management in Agile

Extending observations from one of the classes I facilitated on digital project management, I was wondering how to address the impact of risk management in agile initiatives. Earlier this month, I had a family emergency and I traveled to India to meet a family member who was critically admitted to the hospital. As I discussed the medical condition of my family member with the physician, I remembered one of my earlier speeches where I had discussed the notion of ECG waveform as the warning trigger of risk in monitoring one's health daily.

I resonated with the ECG waveform and its principles to agile approaches to project management or product development. The ECG waveform represents the heart pumping a certain volume of blood every fraction of a second (varies from person to person due to many reasons). From a physiological standpoint, the P wave represents the atrial contraction pumping oxygenated blood into the ventricular chambers. The QRS wave represents the ventricular contraction denoting the rate of  blood distribution. Finally, the T wave represents the ventricular relaxation before the heart is ready for another cycle. It is, therefore, no wonder, that one can think of every PQRST cycle as an iteration. The amount of blood consistently bumped represents the velocity.

Now, if this analogy is true, then, we can relate to risk also in an agile iteration. When we contract work to other teams or depend on others to complete the work, the functionality of the other organs (e.g.: respiratory systems) to deliver oxygenated blood without any challenges arising from circulation is critical. It is not surprising, therefore, why project managers always relate to the risk domain when procurement domain is involved because non-delivery per contract or non-performance of contracted work leads to the risk of resource overloading.

When one doesn't take care of their personal health properly by following quality policies (such as dieting or exercise), challenges arise such as a heart attack. The same concepts apply when the team compromises on technical excellence in design or addressing quality by design principles in their workflow. The escaped defect therefore represents the heart attack or an emergency trip to the hospital.

When the team members in the team fail to work together, that leads to failure. For instance, the block within heart system causes to resistance to smooth flow. Similarly, resistance to agile practices and lack of the team's self-organization introduces the risk of failure.

When the team is not self-organized or demonstrating high levels of team maturity, the scope compromises in velocity demotivates the team. Although the heart is much more resilient, overwork or imbalance introduces anxiety and stress, and people react differently. Similarly, lack of product vision or constant changes to iteration backlog compromises the team's ability to deliver. Many business challenges can impede the team's ability to deliver as well and become a high-performing team.

Such challenges, when go unchecked, impact the team's ability to deliver over a longer timeframe. The emergency visits to hospital leads to a loss of trust for caretakers requiring external intervention in the form of medicines or medically recommended rest. Stakeholders can lose confidence in the team's ability to consistently deliver on the strategic product roadmap when costs increase more than the benefits realized. Customer satisfaction fatigue can be seen in the voice of customer feedback and lack of adequate referrals.

In summary, I can see how this simple ECG waveform that we can all relate to proves to be emphasizing how risk is pertinent to everyone's health in daily life. If every day is a project, then, every heartbeat is an iteration which has the seeds of risks. The warning triggers must be understood and appropriately managed even in an agile project.

Thoughts? Please share with me.

Agile Iterations also involve cost

I was recently facilitating a class on digital project management and bringing references to both agile and traditional frameworks. While the concepts of fixed scope within the time-boxing principles was readily understood, many people in the digital media class mentioned that agile projects don't involve cost or have principles of cost baseline! The students didn't resonate with risk management also in agile iterations. These misrepresentations of agile framework continue to surge and are not accurate representations of agile approaches to project management or product development.

For instance, consider that an agile team is made up of 9 team members. The product owner, agile coach or scrum master, and the development team spend time and are compensated by their performing organization. So, when these 9 members spend approximately 6 hours per day (at 75% commitment to the project), they spend 54 hours (9 members x 6 hours) per day. Considering a 10-day iteration, the team has spent 540 hours (54 x 10 days) with one iteration. By allowing this iteration to continue with this agile approach to meet the strategic objective, the performing organization has, therefore, spent 540 hours; this time represents the opportunity cost of the organization choosing to allow these resources to work on this initiative compared to another initiative. So, how could an agile iteration not cost anything to the organization?

Let us drill a little more here. Often, people are unable to come up with the cost of an iteration. Now, this may be associated with the fact that agile doesn't favor big upfront planning. In traditional approaches to project management, we come with the WBS with the breakdown of activities worked on by specific resources and associate resource-level pricing. It is therefore possible to come up with a cost. Similar logic can still be done in an iteration easier because agile is all about team level commitments. Instead of looking at individual resource level pricing (such as what's the hourly rate of product owner?), the agile team can work with the finance department to come up with a blended resource-loaded rate. The financial units within many organizations have such a blended rate and I have received immediate responses to my requests in my experience from the financial department for such a blended rate. Now, assuming the blended rate is $100, one can easily apply this blended rate to the 540 hours in our previous example and come up with a cost of $54,000 (540 hours x $100). So, the cost of an iteration can be found out easily.

Using other heuristics or analogous experience of delivering multiple iterations, one can also come up with a cost of a story point. Now, it must be mentioned that a few iterations should be done before we can come up with a reasonable and consistent velocity as the team matures. Assuming a median velocity of three iterations, if we hypothesize that the team must deliver approximately 150 story points in every iteration, then, the baseline cost of $54,000 can be divided by this hypothesized 150 story points to come up with $360 ($54,000/150). When the team misses out on completing a 3-point story because of not proactively identifying and addressing the risks, managing stakeholder communication, or promoting the daily collaboration between business and technical users, then, the missed velocity in that iteration costs $1,080 ($360 x 3 story points) of non-delivered value.

By monitoring velocity delivered per iteration against this baseline projection, one can evaluate the CPI (Cost Performance Index). Again, extending the example above, the baseline projected velocity is 150 story points (with $54,000 or actual cost). When the team didn't deliver 3 user stories, the value delivered (Earned Value) is 147 story points (147 story points x $360 cost per point = $52,920). Since CPI is computed as a ratio of Earned Value/Actual Cost ($52,920/$54,000 = 0.98). This means the team is not delivering 2% of the committed value. Agile teams compute this as the Burn Rate, which is the reciprocal of CPI (1/0.98 = approximately 1.02). This burn rate represents how the agile team is meeting the projected budget and since it is >1, it indicates the team requires 2% more budget at a minimum for this iteration. Since agile uses time-boxing principles, as each iteration fails to deliver the minimum required velocity, each iteration costs more money towards the end in meeting the minimum viable product (MVP).

Hope these points are clear in explaining why and how agile projects do not exclude cost. It is critical to understand these concepts and subsequently have a plan to quantify value delivery using good return on investment principles.

Thoughts? Please share your comments.

Feedback should be FACT driven

As the impetus for increased levels of communication is felt by organizations, the need for being able to address project failures leading to schedule slips, quality compromises, cost overruns, and scope creeps become the sine qua non for effective project managers! Is this communication effectiveness limited to project management? Absolutely not! Agile approaches to product development and project management also constantly seek people to communicate. Even the recent state of agile claims increased transparency has not resulted in increased software quality and some contributions come from being able to communicate.

It is true that one needs to engage in several types of communication, but communication is a one-way street if there is no engagement from the audience! While I did my doctoral studies, I learned about dialogic communication (Innes, 2007) of staying the ground while holding the dialog but consistently practicing active listening to use experience in knowledge creation. This ability to come up with ideas of one's own is critical without which we only support others (like piggybacking on someone's experience, seconding another person's thought, etc.) This is also the reason why I emphasize communication is a 1-way street whereas collaboration is a 2-way street. 

During corporate training as well as in classroom facilitation, I find that the lack of engagement from the audience makes it difficult for the facilitator or speaker to create a dialog around concepts. Therefore, the collaboration between two or more people is inexorably critical for communication to be effective. And there lies the challenge in continuous engagement because people must be open to feedback.

Recently, I heard in one training that one group (say Group A) was following agile and releasing features for the internal teams. But many of the internal teams asked for features that Group A claimed are already there. When asked for better communication of these updates from Group A, the response was reading the release plan documents or seeing the dashboard. In a world of high-tech dashboards, the need for communicating updates in the language that others understand is equally important! Otherwise, communication has failed. High-Tech is not a substitute for High-Touch and people should be open for feedback.

So, I present my "FACT" driven feedback as a quick check-and-balance. I am not just referring to numbers and stories in the FACT approach. Instead, I am suggesting that feedback be frequent, accurate, constructive, and timely.

1. Frequent feedback means both parties can get incremental updates faster. The context of the challenge is fresh in people's memory to make corrective actions.
2. Actionable feedback relies on evidence-based data rather than opinions that the listener can use to make changes. This element avoids the halo effect from colored thoughts that are not actionable but shifts the focus on the truth with an actionable mindset. 
3. Constructive feedback is focusing on the continuous improvement mindset with actionable outcomes that the listener can implement as either proactive risk mitigation steps or corrective actions to exacerbate the problems.
4. Timely feedback centers around the ability of the person providing the feedback to feel the sense of urgency to elevate the feedback faster than relying on status or standup meetings.

When these four elements of feedback can be learned by both parties in a dialog, then, active listening is at its best. This is when collaboration happens for communication to be efficient and efficient.

Thoughts?

References

Innes, R.B. (2007). Dialogic Communication in Collaborative Problem Solving Groups. International Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning. 1(1), 1-19. 

Requirements Management: A Value Mapping Exercise

The requirement management exercise is very closely related to the needs assessment producing the required artifacts while documenting the decision-making. It is critical to understand how the value, benefit, and output get mapped in a few critical documents namely the business case, charter, roadmap, and benefits register.

In a nutshell, the business case is the first point of entry in the requirement management. In this document, the accountable stakeholders for product strategy or the business strategy justify the company’s decision to take up the strategic initiative and formally declares the benefits expected out of the initiative. This decision is supported by documenting the specific short-term and long-term benefits by executing the initiative, the extent of market research to justify the need for this initiative, the amount of funding and funding schedule required to carry out the initiative, and finally the specific measures such as the payback period, net present value, to justify return on investment and future opportunities.

When such initiatives are rolled out, these initiatives could be done as a program containing multiple projects because of the extent of management and control required to integrate the benefits gathered from carrying out this initiative as an integrated program rather than as a set of stand-alone projects. Either way, this is when the program charter or project charter is created appropriately. This document names the program or project manager confirms the decision to execute the project outlining the high-level outputs and outcomes, and the authorizes the use of the company’s resources to carry out the work.

Now whether one is developing a product roadmap or program roadmap, you can think of the roadmap as a visual, hierarchical and powerful representation of the what high-level functionalities make up that initiative, dependencies among functionalities or projects within a program, and how the product will grow over time, how to acquire the required funding to support the product or program, and how to align the various stakeholders to ensure the required benefits are realized.

Finally, the benefits register is an artifact that lists all the planned benefits expected to be delivered at various points in the releases or iterations or program and its component projects. 

Having talked about value so much, I have come up with my own way of categorizing value. I call these CVA, BVA, TVA, PVA, and NVA.

The first category is the customer value add. For instance, what does the paying customer want? And what exciting things can we add to keep the customer with us?

Then, we move to the next level of business value add. Examples could be looking at the types of documentation required to sustain the business or training needed for internal and external users.

This business value-add can also manifest as a technical value add. Here, we look at technical debt maintenance. On the hardware side, we can look at keeping the infrastructure current to avoid any risk from using any product beyond their shelf-life. On the software side, we can look at ensuring the code is stable, manageable, and scalable by refactoring the code, automating areas that could benefit from automation, etc.

Another way the business value add can manifest is on the process value add. The processes themselves should act as a catalyst for transforming the inputs to outputs but not add too much overhead. The efficiency improvements through continuous improvement and effectiveness augmentation through operational excellence become the focus here. 

If it is not the customer, business, technical, or process value add, then, most likely this leads to a non-value add. The requirements in this category are to be avoided as they are contributing to some type of waste. In lean management, we discuss the uneven demands or overburden of resources that may lead to eight types of waste (Rajagopalan, 2016).

What are your thoughts on this blog article?

References

Rajagopalan, S. (2016). Management Debt: Costs of Non-Delivery. http://agilesriram.blogspot.com/2016/10/management-debt-costs-of-non-delivery.html

5A Principle - A mindset about managing change

As organizations strive to increase productivity and reduce total cost of ownership, the reasons to jump on the “agile” train expecting it to solve all challenges seem to raise. Social media has scores of posts questioning agile practices. In my mind, agility is simply a “mindset about managing change”. At the end of the day, if one is truly nimble about embracing the right change at the right time the right way, then, agility should result in a) increasing value to the customer, b) increasing quality to the product, c) reducing speed to market, and d) reducing cost to operations. To achieve these goals, I propose a 5A principle to truly being ‘agile’ These 5A’s are “Awake, Arise, Adopt, Adapt, and Adept”. These stages are cyclical in nature. Let me illustrate these in the sections below. While reading this, think of the “change management framework” in mind rather than treat this as a methodology to implement agile.

Awake

Change is the only constant today. All the five competitive forces suggested by Michael Porter are a reality today.  The potential entry of new players, competitive pressures of the consumer, global market refinement and product differentiation of existing players, innovative distribution channels, and intense rivalry among competitors are making the famous economist, Schumpeter's notions of "Creative Destruction" a reality. In addition, disruptive innovation suggested by Clayton Christensen is taking industries over with ideas opening new avenues of doing business. Unless we wake up to smell reality, we will eliminate ourselves.

Arise

John F. Kennedy once asked people to think of what they can do to the country instead of what the country can do to them. Most of today's workforce is still expecting their employers to train them and tell them what to do. People fail to take their future in their hands and wait for the right opportunity. An anonymous quote reads, “If opportunity does not knock, build a door.”  Successful people are those that are not only awake but arise by training themselves with the required knowledge and volunteering to gain the required experience for the right opportunity to knock.

Adopt

Many fear that if they will make the right decision and stumble to move forward. If we walk back on our memory lane in the past, are we all certain that we always made the right decision? If we did, we wouldn’t have the expression, “In hindsight, vision is 20-20.” No one can predict what the future can bring. If fear had ruled, would anyone of us now know the depths of the ocean or the height of space? What we are today is the result of overcoming fear and not yielding to it. So, don’t worry about making the right decision but proactively work towards making the decision right. We can do that by adopting individual strategies that meet our goals.”

Adapt

A wise man once said, "Show me a person that has not failed, and I will show you a failure." Life is not about what happens to us but how we react to it. If one has learned from failure and applied the lesson learned from such failure, then, one has turned failure into success. Did you know that Walt Disney was fired from his job for lack of imagination? It was only thousands of failed attempts that got Edison to get us the light bulb. Failure is not when you fall but when you don’t get up again. So, adapt to the trends, refine your approach, and create your voice.

Adept

No matter how much you know there is room for growth. The wise also shares the responsibility to train the next generation. The value of knowledge lies when it is shared. Many people claim luck is the special ingredient available only to the privileged. I always used to say, LUCK is also "Labor Under Correct Knowledge." So, find a mentor to enrich your knowledge, spread your knowledge by training and coaching others, and better yet become adept at being a student of knowledge. The more you know the more you understand how little you know. That awareness awakes you to a new reality where learning continues.

I have used this 5A principle during my training and teaching and have found my proprietary 5A principle is a good reference framework for people to improve themselves personally and professionally.

Share your comments and let me know if you would like to hear more!

Growing Leadership Talent: Four Practitioner Lens

I was fortunate enough to engage in an independent short engagement to work on talent management for an organization. Many talent management initiatives focus on roles and responsibilities grouped under levels and bands for career enablement and growth opportunities. The focus of this talent management initiative was that leadership belongs to everyone. I firmly believe in such principles and put together a framework based on my experience. To grow leadership talent across the organization, I created four different lenses that one can use to grow leadership.  

Depending upon the personal preference to career growth motivation and subsequent on-the-job performance (Managing Talent - 9 quadrants), I came up with four practitioner focused leadership lens. These lenses are visually represented below.

"People Enabler" and "Process Leader" may have some blind spots. These areas may impede their ability to become a value strategist as both people and process dimensions need to be delicately balanced. So, effective talent management for leadership development should focus on both areas. For instance, the process leader (Star Performer) must be trained in people dimension like emotional and cultural intelligence, conflict management. Similarly, the people enabler (High Performer) must be trained in process dimensions such as market research, risk management, opportunity and sunk costs, etc.

To further illustrate what roles mean and how they map to the classical job-based roles, I have tabulated my thoughts below.

Lens	Description	Classical Roles
Domain Expert	The people in this role are individual contributors with no direct reports. However, they may have deep domain knowledge in one or more areas. This role aligns with the "Core Performer" in the 9-Quadrant approach.	Engineer, Designer, Script Writer, Line Worker, Tester, Help Desk Support Analyst, Data Analyst
People Enabler	The people taking on this role deliver through people. They could be team supervisors or managers. This role aligns with the "High Performer" in the 9-Quadrant approach.	Test Leader, Engineering Manager, Project Manager, Business Analyst, Product Owner, Line Supervisor, Marketing Manager, Operations Manager
Process Leader	The people taking on this role collaborate with more people across the company. Their focus is not projects but also holistic policies, processes, and procedures to ensure outcomes are integrated for benefit delivery and sustenance. This role aligns with the "Star Performer" in the 9-Quadrant approach.	Director, HR Manager, Program Manager, Portfolio Manager, Product Manager, Agile Coach, Scrum Master, Data Scientist
Value Strategist	The people taking on this role are senior leaders of the organizations. They architect the vision and mission paving the foundation for values, direction, culture, alignment of the entire organization. This role aligns with the "Effective" in the 9-Quadrant approach.	Vice President, Senior Vice President, C-Level Executive

  

What are your thoughts? Would you agree with this thinking? Please let me know.

3 Basic Things to know about Copyrights

In one of the classes that I was facilitating, I saw people putting images from other sources in the discussion questions. Sometimes, people don't even credit sources and think citations (APA, MLA, IEEE, etc.) are not overhead and useless. It is these practices in the academic and volunteer work settings that continue in professional practices where such practices frequently attract risks that impact the project schedule or sometimes company reputation.  

Little do people realize the importance of the basics of intellectual property protection. In fact, in one of the projects that I managed around 1997, a developer used a 3rd party shareware to build a spreadsheet like grid within a Windows application! The challenge was that the developer of the 3rd party shareware required a copy of his physical book to be purchased for every runtime machine! We were glad we identified the risk before releasing the application as the legal department required us to remove the shareware and rework the logic completely! It put the project behind schedule, but it is better to be safe than sorry. Right? 

Considering the discussion that came up, I am documenting five important things that I consider basic information about copyrights. Now, I am not a legal representative or a final authority on this topic and so please consult your own legal counsel regarding intellectual property protection.  Copyright is only one of the approaches to intellectual property protection. There are many other things like patent laws, trademarks, and service marks. The implications may vary based on jurisdictions and country. The following are basic things to keep in mind based on my exposure to project management. 

1. The copyright gives exclusive rights to the authors. These may involve an innovative idea, a reference framework, detailed drawings, graphical design, music production, translated work, and the list is endless. Copyright provides the authors the rights for them to use their work and protects the author's reputed connection with others.  For instance, the scholar and economist, Schumpeter came up with the word, "Creative Destruction" and is considered a seminal author on the topic. So, the two words when used together is protected (granted copyrights are also controlled by a timeframe). So, when in doubt about utilizing some work like logo, pictures, or music in your work, be careful and ask.

2.  The copyright may not necessarily be registered. While it is optional for the author to register the work, it is not required. As soon as an original idea is published in a book or reputed publication, it is protected. For instance, music created by Sony, or the characters created by Disney are protected.  For instance, Daniel Goleman introduced "Emotional Intelligence" and while concepts of multiple intelligence and social intelligence exist, the concept is associated with Daniel Goleman. The exclusivity sometimes may run out (such as a patent protection for a drug running out in 20 years). So, sometimes, the products (like scotch tape belonging to 3M being used more commonly) and concepts (like Google it! Xerox it) may be used without any citation but that doesn't remove the original ownership.

3. There are always exceptions and limitations. These discussions often lead to the 'fair use' condition. The idea here is to engage in a scholar-practitioner debate on questioning some work or extending ideas without completely infringing on the original author's copyright rights and provisions. Fair use often includes the purpose of use, the type of copyrighted work, the extent of original author's work taken (this is why we recommend that if any more than 3 words in succession are taken from one's work, they should be cited) and the planned use of the copyrighted work in a targeted market. 

Technology has made it possible for anyone to publish a page on the Internet. So, just because something is in a public domain, it does not mean that we can forego the appreciative enquiry required to do enough research. So, don't assume anything from any place can be reproduced anywhere. Protect yourself and the authors. After all, in writing new work, you are becoming an author too!

What else do you think we should call out for basics of intellectual property? Share your thoughts.

Identifying Stakeholder Groups in Projects, Programs, and Portfolios

I am sure many recognize that there is a stakeholder register where important characteristics of stakeholders, such as the power, influence, interest, tolerance, threshold, engagement strategy, and communication preferences are captured. Sometimes, I find that both practitioners and students only identify individuals or external members identified. The concept of stakeholder groups, like the service operations, marketing, data analytics, are missed. 

But why is stakeholder group important? Simply put, assigning stakeholders into groups helps them classify the optimal type of communication that can suit a group of stakeholders. Additionally, such a stakeholder grouping can also help see patterns of relationships among the stakeholders within that group to engage these stakeholders within that group more effectively. This group's ability to influence can then be very effective for the alternative generation and problem-solving, enabling the decision-making due to the power of the plurality. This powerful decision-making not only helps in project management but also in the strategic and operational governance at the program management and portfolio management.

So, stakeholders can also be grouped by other characteristics based on their ability to exercise such influence. Hence, to assess the influence within the stakeholder groups, some powerful questions to ask are: 

1. What types of members are generally required for the governing body? 
2. What are the tolerance and threshold levels for the various stakeholders in the governance body towards specific decision-making criteria (like increasing revenues, reducing costs, increasing customer satisfaction, accelerating cycle-time reduction, improving operational excellence, and augmenting knowledge retentions?)
3. How frequently do people require information?
4. Who is looking for more quantitative metrics and qualitative metrics? 
5. Can stakeholders be categorized also as thought-leaders, early adopters, risk takers, change resistors, or comfort-zone-conservatives?  

While there may be other criteria based on the product or service the project delivers, outputs, outcomes, and benefits the program produces or the strategic value the portfolio generates, these starter questions make one think of the stakeholder groups differently so that one can come up with an effective communication plan to effectively manage the stakeholders.

Do you have any thoughts? Please feel free to share.

Agile Metrics Proposal

The Chief Product Officer in my company was asking me what metrics can be used to measure value delivery in any Agile project. He approached about measuring time logged by the individuals and the amount of story points, number of user stories, etc. I felt that such a metric driven mindset is an anti-pattern to self-organization and working agreements in a team. Recalling what Einstein said about not measuring everything countable as they won't count, I emphasized that we should measure what matters. 

Agile projects are predominantly characterized by the iterative nature of delivering incremental value to the customer by a self-organized team. So, it is important to measure value delivered through the iterations and releases rather than measuring individual contributions. I proposed four categories so that we can unearth the rationale behind them and not use the metrics to count against the team. 

Efficiency: This category is tactical in nature and aims at measuring how well the team is delivering value to the customer. Some example measure include:

1. Team Velocity - Work done by the team over sprints
2. Cycle Time - Conception to Value
3. Burn Rate - Rate at which releases are consuming backlog

Collaboration: This category is self-organization. With the growing popularity of virtual and remote teams, it is important to measure the collaboration among the team members. Some measure include:

1. Number Retrospective Items in Backlog - How many retrospective items identified are included in backlogs?
2. Processes Improvement Rate - What types of processes are improved as noted by training, documents, and continuous improvements?
3. Backlog Growth Rate - How much and what types of stories (Customer Value, Business Value, Technical Value, Process Value) are being added to the backlog and refined?

Effectiveness: This category is strategic and focuses on business value. Some measures include:

1. Velocity Variance - Planned (Committed) to Actual (Delivered)
2. Value Delivery - Measure Value in terms of Customer Satisfaction and Business Benefit
3. Technical Debt - Quantify Value of work not done in the interest of pushing customer value stories

Quality: This category aims at how good a quality is produced as sprints evolve and should be evaluated at multiple levels for continuous improvement and optimization. Here, we can go into more detail. Some thoughts include:

1. Automated Test Cases: Number of test cases that are automated
2. Defect Detection Rate: Number of incidents detected in a release
3. Test Case Reusability: Number of modular test cases reused within the test steps
4. Test Case Coverage: Number of requirements that are covered by test cases excluding summary use cases

These quality specific metrics can be further broken into additional areas for ongoing optimization and improvement, such as the following

Metrics at the Test Case Level

1. Test cases created for each user story
2. Test cases reworked (based on clarification of requirements)
3. Defects reported against the requirements (called defect density)
4. Defects reported against the test case for modification of test case
5. Test cases executed by passed, failed, blocked, etc.

Metrics at the Defect Level

1. Defects by Severity (Show stoppers that impact the release or client)
2. Escaped Defects (Indication of Internal Failure)
3. Defect Reopen Rate
4. Defects unidentified by internal users and clients
5. Number of Exploratory or unscripted testing in an iteration or release

What are your thoughts? What would you remove or add? 

Reflections on a Group Discussion: 4 Fs of Success

As the Vice President of Proposition Delivery and Operational Excellence, I was part of a major program initiative to revamp product management for emerging healthcare products. Several senior members of the organization along with some technical delivery members were present in multiple discussions over the last three months defining value delivery and success. Some of these definitions seemed generic and appeared applicable for any person, team, or business entity. Deidentifying some of the information and reframing them in simple terms, I am synthesizing my thoughts here as 4 Fs of Success.

1. Firm and Flexible

We live in a VUCA world. As technology becomes more accessible to customers and consumers, we should be willing to unlearn and relearn continuously. Sometimes, our 'bitterness of failures' may close opportunities that may otherwise be available for us. At the same time, our earlier 'sweetness of success' should not embolden us to avoid proactively looking at risk management. While balancing these two ends of the spectrum, one should also evaluate what one should stand for. Not all requests can be handled, and we should also know where our boundaries stop and when we should reevaluate opportunities.

2. Focus and Feedback

"Prioritize and Deliver" on agreed commitments! Often, we play the victim of attributing failure to methodology. Agile, Project Management, Scrum, Product Management, XP, or DSDM, for example, themselves do not fail because they are frameworks. Everyone needs to demonstrate leadership in delivering on their commitments. "Walk the Talk" is not reserved for the leaders at the top. As we have our commitments, it is important for every one of us to be accountable for the experience that we allow our customers to feel. If there is any potential adverse impact, be willing to give feedback. Risks and Quality are everyone's responsibility. So, stop playing the victim role based on framework!

3. Fostering and Feelings

A nurturing team environment is not an after-thought. For teams to own the commitments, they need to be part of creating the team charter where working agreements are made. Instead of forcing team behaviors, mentor and coach people to think customer value. Actively listen to others, practice empathy, and build an environment where people can "fail forward" fearlessly! Confidence and Competence develops only with commitment in a nourishing environment. Apply systems thinking concepts to let everyone see the future. 

4. Follow Up and Follow Through

Be both transactional and transformational as the situation warrants! This is where follow-up and follow-through come along. Follow-up is about seeking ongoing updates. Having a conversation about an issue is a follow-up but does that conversation alone guarantee completion? As the famous saying goes, "A person that won't read is no better than a person that can't read," one needs to see issues to closure. That is the definition of done and not leaving anything partly done or inadequately addressed. Therefore, follow-up is more like communication (one-way street like broadcasting) but follow-through is more like collaboration requiring one to take on initiatives to ensure that the items are complete and marked "DONE". This is why follow-up is transactional management mindset whereas follow-through is transformational leadership mindset. 

What do you think? To what extent do you agree or what would like to add/remove? 

Coaching Essentials: Helpful Guide

I have spoken in a few places and have got good feedback. Being a non-native English speaker and as an immigrant trying to land some comments and jokes incorrectly, I felt I could do better in terms of delivery. So, I worked with a coach in mid-2017 to help me become a better public speaker. He always made me comfortable as part of the initial discussions concluding with asking me permission to engage in the coaching activity. He continued to emphasize that he would only expand on what I discussed seeking clarity as I spoke. Then, the discussions focused on activities both of us should in the engagement and then the specific problem to resolve. As we continued to discuss how to be a better speaker, we both explored alternatives. It was a great engagement!

Recently, I attended a meeting within my company where there was an external speaker who was helping us with brainstorming ideas to bring a more concerted effort to product management within my company. This speaker laid out in one of the slides the following five steps to coaching us as a group. 

1. Get Permission to be a coach
2. Ensure Psychological Safety
3. Agree on a Common Goal
4. Converge on a Specific Problem
5. Evaluate Alternatives

Oh my God! It dawned on me only then that my coach from the year before was doing exactly those five steps except that he didn't specifically mention that. As an Agile Coach, I knew mentorship and coaching differed fundamentally. However, this group coaching engagement made me I realize the power of powerful questions in coaching for deeper appreciative enquiry based on open-ended dialog requiring active listening where the coached controls the charter and the coach guides the coached. I connected coaching as a leadership skill based on transformational leadership (individual consideration and inspirational motivation are critical here) and situational leadership (the four levels based on the extent of team maturity and direction needed). These thoughts connect with the curiosity, compassion, and courage paramount in a coaching engagement. 

I have done my best to capture some of the questions that I remember being asked for the benefit of the larger community. You can see from the questions that coach believes that the coached has answers and focuses on bringing these answers to the forefront making one to think beyond the blind spots. As the coach focuses mainly on the future, they shouldn't be judgmental (avoid all biases) and promote accountability.

Get Permission

1. Are you willing to work with a coaching engagement?
2. Do you give me permission to work with you as a coach?
3. What do you plan to achieve in our time together today?
4. What are you planning to walk away with from our discussion today?

Ensure Psychological Safety

1. How do you want me to work with you so that you can best contribute to our discussion?
2. What is distracting you from discussion and why does it bother you?
3. If there is one thing that we can do differently which you are willing to discuss openly, what would that be?
4. What is the best thing I should do to best support our discussion?

Agree on Goal

1. What would you like to discuss?
2. What is eating your mind (figurative way of saying what's bothering you)?
3. Among the topics you mentioned, what is the one thing we can discuss in more detail today?

Converge on Problem 

1. How does this problem bother you? (Understand the impact)
2. What makes this problem rank the highest? 
3. What is the benefit of addressing this for you? 
4. Can you give me an example?
5. Tell me more how this impacts you?
6. What have you tried that is working or not working? 
7. What have you learned from these attempts or problems?
8. What does success look like?
9. What would you like to see happen instead?
10. What do you think is the cost of taking any action or not acting on it?
11. What comes in your way?
12. What are you willing to give up resolving this problem?
13. What impediments, obstacles, blockers, or issues stand in your way?

Explore Alternatives

1. What else can we do?
2. How do you feel about the options we have discussed so far?
3. What options have we not talked about that you think we should?
4. What are you learning towards? Why? 
5. What do you plan to do before we meet again?
6. What would you like me to do before we reconvene?

Hope this helps! Let me know.

 

Managing Talent - 9 Quadrants

Managers and Leaders are always facing the dilemma of attracting, retaining, and managing talent. The cost of recruiting a new candidate and the cost of onboarding the candidate makes a huge impact on the organization's ability to deliver value and the project's ability to maintain flow of benefit. As a result, even project managers and program managers, who may not have the authority to hire talent based on the PMO structure must maintain a diligent focus on managing talent. 

In my capacity managing five direct employees who have a span of up to 5-10 people besides the various stakeholders as part of the projects and products they manage, I have taken on this role of talent management. Bringing my scholar-practitioner outlook of servant leadership that has four ways of categorizing talent (D1 to D4) and similar quadrant approaches in the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) for product management, Ansoff Matrix for product diversification, and Blue Ocean Leadership for thinking big, I have created an approach based on one's job performance and their potential for the organization. Accordingly, I have iterated on this approach below and am sharing it.    

This is not a recommendation and may have to be modified as the situation warrants. 

Here are a few thoughts to keep in mind.

1. I consider the green middle quadrant to be the "Meet the expectations" (like a 3 out of 5). These people will be hungry for reward and recognition. The responsibility lies with their manager to evaluate (accountability is with the individual) potential versus performance and move them to be a high-performer or star performer. Recommendation is always to focus on people skills  (high-performer) than strategy skills (star performer)
2. The lower and top quadrant on the low performance scale indicate process problems in not hiring the right talent or not providing the right environment for them to perform. But, if there is a clear people problem (not a team player, performing things that are clearly against the professional code of ethics or demonstrating competence to perform), then, think of eliminating the person but tighten up the processes (never waste a failure). If the candidate has high potential but is not performing for various HR reasons, then put them on PIP (Performance Improvement Plan) or move them to a better role/department where their potential can be advantageous for them and the organization.
3. The lower quadrant on the high-performance low potential means they are efficient in doing things assigned to them but lack motivation or demonstrate a lack of career development (comfort zone). If they have comfort zone issues, they represent a potential flight risk, and the manager must be relentless in backing that individual. If the person is having career promotion interest but a lack of motivation, dig deeper to find out. Assigning mentors and advisors to support them in addressing their blind spots (weaknesses) is good. Focus on leading with their strength as it gives them confidence and is a morale booster.
4. The top quadrant (high performance, high potential) is an efficient leader. Now, this is based on competence and capability; therefore, be careful in premature promotion. One has to spend time coaching this individual. 
5. The yellow quadrants require managerial intervention. The individual may not be at the level to articulate their career ambitions clearly. So, this is where the manager truly shines in bringing them up to the level of competence required. 
6. The orange quadrants require managerial supervision.   According to the situational leadership, these areas may represent directing, supporting, delegating, and coaching depending upon the maturity of the person and the extent of direction needed. Frequently, these areas require the manager to serve as a coach. 

Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any comments.

Global Leadership and Project Management

I am currently in Paris, France. As I was strolling through as part of my regular walks, I was particularly struck by the number of construction initiatives and establishments with several technology companies, hotels, fast food chains, fashion accessory companies, etc. I could not help starting to think of all the types of projects and leadership involved in such projects establishing these companies across the globe. I saw the same establishments in Vietnam, India, and the US.

While still upholding global branding, these companies and establishments need to cater to local markets leveraging funding options specifically relevant, yield to local laws and regulations, and show demonstrated leadership in each of these projects. It was at this time that I also saw announcements about tariffs from the US on steel and aluminum. These external influences emphasize the need to understand PESTLEED approaches to analyzing SWOT further.

As project and program managers start working on global initiatives introducing change, it is pivotal to understand that global leadership is beyond just understanding cultural diversity. Global leadership must extend to working in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world where project and program managers need to understand all the ten knowledge areas of project management but also go deeper in understanding the program management domain in strategic alignment and the benefit delivery lifecycle.

This generation of focus on value maximization is the foundation of glolocalization, i.e. global leadership with a localization that much beyond just culture and diversity.  In other words, “think global, act local” philosophy integrating leadership and management needs to be woven into grooming upcoming talent as well as existing talent.  Several strategies have failed when people didn’t think globally factoring cultural conditioning.  Let us learn from these lessons and avoid repeating the same failures. As I always say, “Fail forward!” 

Characteristics of Effective Written Communication

Having facilitated several training courses, particularly in project management training and in graduate level project management classes, I often find that people fail to effectively communicate. When it comes to effective communication in writing, truly understanding the basics of the communication model is critical.

The communication model involves a sender passing information through a channel with the goal that that this is received and interpreted by the receiver. Now, right in that communication model explanation lies the important requirement of communication - It is not about what the sender planned to send but what the receiver interpreted from the message.

Consider, for instance, the difference between two messages that I heard from my math teacher several years back while I was preparing to enter college. Both messages A and B have the same number of words in the same location except for the placement of the comma, which changes the entire meaning of the message. Although my Math teacher was teaching this to construct the right mathematical equation by placing the mathematical symbols correctly, he also communicated the powerful message of the importance of punctuations.

Message A: "Hang him not, leave him"
Message B: "Hang him, not leave him"

So, as we write anything, let us not read from what we wanted to communicate but read our thoughts on how the reader will interpret. When you are not present next to the reader to interpret the message, what areas will you focus on?

1. Use of correct "Grammar and Spelling" will be a simple critical building block. Even if you use a spell checker, proof-read words like "their" and "there" will not be caught by spell-check utility unless you have advanced grammar checks also built in. Proof-reading will also help in ensuring the right use of the subject/verb agreement.

2. Say it concisely - Your message must be concise and yet comprehensive. If I were to use my agile mindset here, if you were to remove all the words from your idea-tank and add only the required words, how many and what words will you add to ensure that you provide enough information concisely and yet provide the required context.

3. The coherent flow of ideas - Have you read your email or report after a day or attempted to read it from the bottom-up? Does the introduction properly give the required backdrop based on the conclusion drawn? Does every paragraph or bullet point really add-up.

4. Clarity in purpose - What's the action you want the reader to take? Is it informational, promotional, directional, or action-oriented? If you are not clear what you want the reader to do, how would you ensure that the reader can understand your written report? Focus on "who does what by when" as a minimum criterion and discuss the "why" for not only doing it but also the impact of not doing it. Depending upon the content of the written communication, you can add details about "How."

5. Control the flow of ideas - Sometimes, additional data or words will be required. If one example has proved the point, then, additional examples are irrelevant as the communication will take the reader's attention. If the example provided is inadequate, then, perhaps that's not the right example. Similar thoughts can expand to using diagrams to better support your ideas and using some legends and footnotes for the charts for better interpretation.

I have always found that these five simple areas are critical to communication! It not only puts the sender responsible for correct and complete delivery of the intended message but also put the onus to ensure correct interpretation of the delivered message. It also puts the recipient equally responsible for ensuring complete delivery of the full message and the acknowledge the correct interpretation of the message. It is great to see Project Management Institute (2017) acknowledge these 5Cs of effective written communication in its latest version of the Project Management Book of Knowledge.

Have you ever considered these 5C's of effective written communication?

References
Project Management Institute (2017). A guide to project management book of knowledge. 6th Edition. New Town Square, PA: Project Management Institute.

PICTURE your way to understand Program Manager responsibilities

Frequently, people keep asking what the role and responsibility of a project or program manager is. While the project manager focuses on generating the outcomes contributing to the benefits for the organization, the program manager focuses on integrating the benefits towards the strategic value. Therefore, both the project and program manager should understand the strategic focus of their role in tailoring their responsibilities. 

As the program manager is also held accountable for the operations as part of the benefit management, the primary value the program manager offers is their readiness to adopt strategies to optimize the delivery of benefits to the performing or sponsoring organizations.

Have you heard of the saying, “Picture speaks a thousand words?” So, I used PICTURE as an acronym to describe a few key responsibilities of the role. 

P – Program Definition. This covers the key elements of formulating and planning the program.

I – Interdependencies among program components including operation
C – Communication with the right stakeholders at the right level at the right time facilitating governance

T – Tailor the program management activities and processes by evaluating the outcomes against planned benefits and adapt as frequently as necessary.

U – Comfortable around Uncertainty 

R – Resolve challenges and constraints using a proper governance structure

E - Empower team by enabling them to deliver

How do you relate to this acronym to understand the program manager responsibilities?

If Data is King, Data Analytics is the Queen

In concluding one of the project management classes, where I had to assess the understanding of the process stability using control charts with some design of experiments requiring data collection and data analysis, it became quickly apparent to me that amidst the many types of classifying and categorizing data, the fundamental characteristics of data itself is not adequately understood. While people look at objective and subjective data of details collected from the documentation, surveys, interviews, and observations, there is not a strong understanding of the classification of data as continuous or discrete, categorical or numerical, nominal or ordinal, interval or ratio, etc. On top of it, the datatype as mentioned in programming and database systems, such as the integer, float, double, Boolean, string, varchar, identity, and datetime have added enough murkiness for many middle management roles to delegate their responsibility of understanding the data to subordinates, such as the data analyst, business analyst, etc.  

As I pondered over this dilemma, I found out that even professionals were unavailable to differentiate the three critical things in any descriptive data analysis. The measures of central tendency, symmetry, and dispersion were not readily coming up in one of my talks touching on the house of quality. If the business is collecting so much data, how can the lack of understanding of the classification, categorization, and type of data be taken for granted? If the information contained in data is meant to be serving the management to make decisions, then, how can the lack of basic data analytics be an optional criterion in the job descriptions for roles managing products, projects, programs, and accounts? 

According to Standish Report (Hastie & Wojewoda, 2015), the number of failed projects is decreasing, but the number of projects challenged from inception to closure has increased while the number of successful projects has remained flat. The same story is entirely different if we take the size of the project into account where a higher proportion of large size projects embrace failure. With so many tools available for middle management, such as earned value metrics, failure mode effect analysis, and six sigma, why is the attention to detail missing? While such a detailed review is beyond the scope of this blog article, brief research on data and business intelligence (n.d.) from QGate provides a compelling summary of data may be speaking but we may not be understanding.

We don't stop at addressing this complexity with more mandatory education and training on understanding data and using data analytics for business solutions. Instead, we compound it further by introducing big data with its own value, volume, velocity, veracity, and variety. Press (2014) notes twelve different definitions for big data that one can choose from which doesn't address the fundamental requirements of how to systematically identify the right data to look at, analyze it, and make proper decisions using hypothesis testing, regression analysis, etc. 

There is a world outside with data analytics focusing further on multivariate analysis, ANOVA studies, factor analysis, and selecting various distributions to choose from based on how the samples represent the population. While such advanced requirements may be referred to data analyst professionals, can we not mandate a good understand data (classification, categorization, and type) and fundamental data analysis (central tendency, dispersion, and symmetry)?

After all, if we all agree data is King to business, data analysis is the Queen of business operations. Both the King and Queen are critical to making the right decisions, sustaining the proper business operations, and maximizing the right business opportunity. With the explosive growth of data due to the advances in technology, as noted by Ginni Rometty (2016), CEO of IBM in her speech to World Health Congress, digital [data] is becoming the foundation and data analytics so is the basis for subsequent cognitive understanding. 

References

Data and Business Intelligence (BI) (n.d.) QGate. Retrieved February 27, 2018, from https://www.qgate.co.uk/blog/data-speaks-but-do-you-understand/

Press, G. (2014, September 3). 12 Big Data Definition: What's Yours? Retrieved Feb 18, 2018, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2014/09/03/12-big-data-definitions-whats-yours/#7a5f1f813ae8

Hastie, S. & Wojewoda, S. (2015, October 14). Standish Group 2015 Chaos Report - Q&A with Jennifer Lynch. Retreived February 24, 2017, from https://www.infoq.com/articles/standish-chaos-2015

Rometti, G. (2016, April 12). Ginni Rometty Speech Archives. Retrieved January 31, 2018, from https://www.ibm.com/ibm/ginni/04_12_2016.html

Meetings: Tool for Managing Benefit Realization and Stakeholder Engagements

Every organization uses the meeting as a tool to accomplish many things. This concept of a meeting has become so mundane in today's business context. Whether we are leading a project, designing a product, coordinating a program, or supporting the operations, there are meetings galore on everyone's calendar! Meetings exist to collect & share information, review progress and risks to delivery, updates to management or team such as kill gates, management checkpoints, or health check reviews, manage changes to the projects or programs or problem-solve a technical or management challenge among many other reasons to have a meeting.

However, when you ask the question of how effective the meetings are in accomplishing the outcome the meetings are supposed to address, there is a wide spectrum of comments and objections one can hear! How often is the organization or even a project using the meeting as a stakeholder engagement tool? 

There are several books, blog articles, and training guides on conducting effective meetings. Then, why are some organizations advocating against meeting free days (hickey, n.d.) or email free days?  Synthesizing major recommendations of many of these recommendations come down to three things: 1) have an agenda, 2) involve the right people, and 3) have an effective facilitator. Let us look at these principles a little closely.

The first recommendation espoused was the golden principle of having an agenda to begin the meeting. This recommendation emphasized the focus on the purpose of the meeting.  I am sure some of us can relate to not attending any meeting without an agenda. However, despite having a written agenda published several days back, how conclusively we can agree that all these effective meetings had an agenda and so were efficient? The fundamental root cause is that productivity is associated with outcomes. A mere attendance at the meetings or raising a viewpoint doesn't accomplish anything except burn people's time! The goal of every meeting is to have clear outcomes that advance towards the benefits to be realized for the benefit of the project, team or organizational objectives. This means there should be decision points agreed on and actions items articulated with a clear accountable and responsible owner and with a definitive timeline to provide an incremental update on the action items! Meetings are an effective source of productivity loss (Rajagopalan, 2014a) if there is no laser focus on outcome management.

The second recommendation we listed involved the right people! In a world that appreciates "less is more", is involving too many people in a meeting appropriate use of people's time especially if the meeting's purpose is not to disseminate information (multicast)? A successful meeting is the one that has carefully identified the right parties with the decision authority to advance completion of the agenda/objectives towards an outcome or take accountability to follow up with an action item to close (Rajagopalan, 2016). Meetings are also an effective stakeholder engagement tool because unengaged or non-participating members are also contributing to the cost of a meeting (Rajagopalan, 2014b)! These members can be released from the meeting completely or early on so that they can be productive in what they do the best! Not managing this rightful audience and measuring the contribution effectiveness of the delegates in a meeting is a leadership failure on the organizer/facilitator of the meeting.

The third challenge we noted was having a good facilitator! Especially in meetings where participation from meeting attendees is required, this facilitation is critical. While we need to allow innovation, creativity, and problem-solving to continue, we also need to make sure that we allow tangential discussions and gut-feel thoughts that derail the meeting. Depending upon the value of such ideas, the organizer may have to put this parking lot, or delegate or seek the support of a leader with the decision authority to address that right away. Having another person to be a scribe (meeting notes taker) or a scheduler to keep up with the time is also an important element of facilitation, particularly considering today's virtual meetings where the facilitator may be presenting on the screen and can't have the luxury of taking notes! Not having a timebox to ensure that outcomes are identified, or action items are listed is a disservice to the other members who are attending the meeting.

So, next time you call for a meeting or organize a meeting, think what outcomes the meeting should accomplish, what attendees with the right decision authority are present, how much are the meeting attendees able to delegate their work, and how you will facilitate the meeting to ensure that action item are identified to advance every meeting incrementally and iteratively towards realizing the benefits for the organization. 

References

Hickey, K.F. (n.d.) How to take back your productivity with no meeting Wednesday. Retrieved January 31, 2018, from https://wavelength.asana.com/workstyle-no-meeting-wednesdays/

Rajagopalan, S. (2014a). Enhancing productivity. Retrieved January 31, 2018, from http://agilesriram.blogspot.com/2014/03/enhacing-productivity.html

Rajagopalan, S. (2014b). Effective virtual meetings. Retrieved January 31, 2018, from http://agilesriram.blogspot.com/2014/05/effective-virtual-meetings.html

Rajagopalan, S. (2016). Agile or Traditional: Productivity management still has basic roots. Retrieved January 31, 2018, from http://agilesriram.blogspot.com/2016/06/agile-or-traditional-productivity.html

Governance: The seeds of Operational Excellence

I am sure many of us have heard phrases like "we are in a constant fire-fighting mode," or "Pick your battles to win", etc. Somehow, these phrases have become so much a cliche that they have become part of our core management DNA principles. Recently, I was in a training session when I heard participants claim, "we are so much agile that we don't have time for iterations." Ignoring to immediately respond by focusing on principles of agile, grooming the backlog, and planning for iterations on this paradoxical phrase, I started questioning further. Not to most people's surprise, my finding revealed the lack of governance structure in strategic execution.

As I played archery game with my younger son on the Wii-U, he was explaining that I need to pay attention to the wind and distance before I can release the arrow. "It is not just a focus and strength game," he reasoned when I kept missing the target. It dawned on me immediately why people were failing to pay attention to strategy in execution, while strategy from the steering committee tells the archer which target to shoot the arrow, the archer still needs to have a specific strategy on how to execute to ensure the benefits align to the expectations of the steering committee. It is, therefore, management's responsibility to ensure that there are metrics and measures in place to inform the archer to take appropriate corrective and preventive actions.

However, when the managers and leaders fail to provide the required tools for people to upskill or reskill their talents, then they inherently suck the oxygen out of operational excellence. So, for an organization to continuously improve, they need to learn from past lessons and face new challenges and problems rather than relearn the same lessons or revisit the same challenges. It is leadership's failure to put the appropriate governance framework to ensure that execution is constantly aligned with the strategy.

The essential factors for operational excellence may vary within industries but they all should be having five important facts that I would like to call with a mnemonic phrase, "Strategy coordinates complex deliverable optimization." Let me expand on these five keywords:

Strategic Benefits - The strategy should deliver more than PowerPoints that make it into high-level objectives in people's scorecard. The leaders are accountable to provide clear measurable benefits that the execution should deliver. One of the important artifacts from program management domain is the benefits register that leaders should produce as an outcome from their strategic planning.

Coordinated Planning - While top management may have the vision, only the middle management knows the challenges of execution. So, top management should identify groomable talents within the organization involving them in the planning exercise with actionable outcomes. One of the best tools that the program and portfolio management domains recommend is a roadmap that orchestrates when the incremental and consolidated benefits will be realized (remember I just didn't say delivered) to help with adequate prioritization of customer and business value-add.

Complex Interdependencies - Whether benefits are delivered incrementally or consolidated, the complex interdependencies among projects and the operations still must be conceived by leadership and management. The middle management should be empowered to reskill their competencies in such a way that they are able to articulate around the political, economic, societal, technical, legal, environmental, ethnic and demographic (PESTLEED) dimensions leading to operational excellence. The best way to hold the top and middle management accountable is to have frequent management checkpoints (besides the health gate reviews) to inculcate the risks to delivery and the costs of non-delivery as part of their program or project design including the considerations for transition and succession planning.

Deliverable Integration - Particularly when benefits are incremental, but also as benefits become consolidated, integration of several benefits is a change management exercise. Understanding how changes impact the organization and evaluating the sensitivity around it as the projects and programs. This may take the form of standard operating procedures and transition and succession planning agreements (note that I didn't say just a plan or meeting but agreement) but most importantly having a controlled approach to releasing both the products to production as well as people to other projects.

Optimized Pace - Having a closed eye to how people will stretch themselves to deliver when benefits are not prioritized with multiple high-level priorities with interdependent resources is waiting for accidents to happen with the hope they don't. The most important assets to replace are the people and not having the above measures in places increases the stress level. Allowing people to decompress by requiring them to work on personal stretch goals aligned to the strategic benefits will help them reskill themselves to deliver on complex initiatives. They can't firefight forever and choose different battles to fight leading to employee attrition in the absence of execution treated with strategic outcomes aligned to the organizational benefits.

These five elements, in my humble opinion, are the governance fabric that lays the foundation for operational excellence. What do you think?

Simple Definition of Leadership

Leadership - Much has been talked about it both in scholarly literature and professional circles. Job roles, such as the Team Leader, also requires one to take leadership of a team. Similarly, various functional roles and strategic business units advance the notion of leadership inherent in them. For instance, a product owner is expected to be a leader in understanding the strategic nature of the product although the role itself doesn't have any leader tag associated. Similarly, account manager to lead the client and project manager to lead the client, team, and performing organizations mandate leadership qualities in them - yet there is no tag "leader" associated.

In several training classes, such as PMP training and Agile training that I have done, classes that I have facilitated in the academic setting for adult learners, as well as in the corporate and professional circles that I associate with, the questions of whether one is a leader or not comes up! So, how can we define leadership in its simple form without attributing terms such as charismatic, transactional, situational, transformational, and servant definitions so that anyone regardless of any professional or personal role can relate to being a leader!

When I was traveling to Vietnam, I stopped by Hong Kong where I had to wait for the connecting flight. It is there that simple definition really clicked to me as I saw a picture of a flying character with the slogans written in Chinese. Now, I don't know what the transcription reads on that board but the definition of leadership as, "a superpower seeing the people beyond what they see themselves and supporting them to raise up to their capabilities!" came up in my mind.

Please see the video linked here to hear my thought! (If the hyperlink does not work, please visit https://youtu.be/YYE76ZQjEV0 ) Would you agree with this definition?  Share your thoughts.

Thanks.
Sriram

Using Time to manage Risks associated with Stakeholders

Often, in my project management experience, I see that people miss engaging with the required stakeholders proactively to deal with risks. When stakeholders have not engaged appropriately, then, risks go uncontrolled making it impossible to mitigate them. Based on my experience, I see three types of stakeholders that need a good project manager must identify to proactively manage.

1. Too much engaged to the extent that they suck up all the oxygen in the team. They knowingly or unknowingly give the indication to the team that their ways are the common-sense way and everything else is almost wrong. 
2. Missing in Action stakeholders are too busy never to be around but when decisions are taken without them, they appear immediately. They are the constant speed breakers, breeding distrust and sometimes fear.
3. Ambiguous stakeholders who are in between these two above extremes can never figure out what they want, changing the priorities repeatedly making it difficult for the team to progress or slowdown. 

All these three types of stakeholders bring several types of risks - business, technical, and people among the many risks. The most important thing is to "Taking Initiative Managing Energy" that I call TIME management. This energy can be translated into how we manage "expectations". This is the reason why the project management discipline uses engagement for "stakeholder engagement" but management for other areas like knowledge areas like "Scope Management", "Schedule Management", etc. When you look at prioritization, it is all about taking initiative managing energy!

Consequently, while principles like start list, wish list and stop list exist that have been further enhanced by MoSCoW principles like (Must, Should, Could, and Won't) to prioritize requests, tasks, features, etc., TIME management considers a few simple things that anyone can do manage the stakeholders. These are asking a few questions like the following to set the expectations with the stakeholders.

1. Is this required? Particularly when #1 and #3 types of stakeholders are involved, determining the customer or business value of any proposed technique would take these discussions far along in avoiding tangential discussions and focusing on value-added work. Including timeboxing principles such as a definite amount of time for every actionable outcome from every agenda item can further keep the focus and remove other discussions to the parking lot.
2. Can you help me solve this, please? This approach can be used in all the three types of stakeholders. By setting one-on-one discussions with the stakeholder to mention how their values are important but how their continued presence is eliminating any creativity from the team due to their inclination to agree with the stakeholder's views or long absences taking any timely decision making away from the team can take the stakeholder management very productive. 
3. What's the ROI? Particularly in the stakeholder #3 situation, refocusing on the efforts versus cost/benefits can bring a distinct focus back to the project's objectives. Refocusing on the opportunity costs due to the cost of the meeting in discussing features that may not be a value add unless the stakeholder can unambiguously quantify will require the stakeholder to think of the Pareto principle and focus on "DONE"!

In the end, engaging stakeholders is an art that any project manager must spend time on. Regardless of how well one is, without a kaizen attitude towards continuous improvement, such arts of engaging stakeholders depreciate exponentially with time. So, use TIME to manage risks associated with stakeholder engagement. 

What other thoughts do you have in engaging stakeholders productively? Please share/comment. 

Continuous Improvement: The link between "Strengths" and "Opportunities"

Many of us that have some exposure into management either by academic preparation or by practical experience know a simple technique called the SWOT analysis. It is an acronym that stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. This powerful technique is often delegated to management and leadership for major things like new product development, change management implementation, and sales & marketing. Its simplicity in personnel development as part of the individual development plan to rise above the competition is less understood and practiced.

For example, most people get exposure to specific techniques like programming, spoken language skills, design skills, communication skills and many others. One even goes to get certified by prestigious vendor neutral (e.g.: Project Management Institute, CompTIA) and vendor specific organizations (Microsoft, Oracle). Admiral pursuits like these give us the competitive edge in the form of strengths leading to opportunities like new job or promotion either laterally or vertically.

But, too often, not having the written SWOT analysis with SMART objectives for a 3-to-5-year strategy soon moves our own strengths into the weakness quadrant. This is because a lot of new developments happen. For instance, when I was in Vietnam last month, I saw ambitious projects like a tunnel from Vietnam to Japan being considered. Academic institutions had representation from a few countries teaching and training at their universities. Students traveled several hours each way to attend classes to increase their career potential. As globally several colleges prepare their learners to excel and several non-profit organizations provide numerous opportunities for volunteers to sharpen their competencies, the supply of such new skills and competencies is constantly increasing. So, unless someone awakens to the competitive reality, one loses the competitive edge they once thought they had!

So, how do we sharpen the saw? The best way to do this is to open the mind and have time for opportunities outside. Kaizen or Continuous Improvement is the key that is going to unlock the opportunities available by giving us a reality check on whether the skills are still on par with the market demand and allow us to gain competitive skills over time. For instance, project managers often think delivering on OBOSOT (On Budget, On Scope, and On Time) is the important metric. With the strategic talent triangle in place, the need for benefit realization is taking equal prominence in addition to OBOSOT needs. How will we ever know this if we don't attend professional networking events and certification workshops and gain guidance through mentors or coaches? 

I personally saw the six mega trends advanced by Vielemetter and Sell (2014) for leadership, such as globalization 2.0, environmental crisis, individualism and value pluralism, digital era, demographic change, and technological convergence. Don't let your skills get rusty. Refine, supplement, and augment them by sharpening them. Increase your competencies through volunteering and begin serving the ikigai that you are meant to. Opportunities only knock the doors of those that not only knock the doors but also build them of glass for opportunity to readily see and come.

Where is your SWOT and how are you preparing yourself for the future?

Ref.: Vielmetter, G. & Sell, Y. (2014). Leadership 2030. New York, NY: Amacom

Executives need to understand Program & Project Management

As a firm believer in continuous improvement, I have always been monitoring the external environment to find new trends and equip myself with this knowledge. One of these interests was understanding more about Program and Portfolio Management. Although I had executed successfully a few program initiatives and been part of the strategic portfolio management, my interest to pursue Program Management certification became strong with an announcement of Project Management Institute on Program Management Improvement and Accountability Act (President Barack Obama Signs the Program Management Improvement and Accountability Act, 2016). It was then I made a commitment to pursue PgMP certification which I passed successfully this month.

During the pursuit of this journey, I felt the inexorable gap in people in strategic leadership positions not truly understand the value of Project Management - let alone the program management. Many viewed program management that focuses on benefits delivery and benefits sustenance the same as project management that focuses on unique product or result. Mark Langley, the CEO of Project Management Institute, claimed how the lack of understanding project management culture among chief executives such CFO leads to money being wasted on projects failing to meet their strategic objectives or not having the appropriate structure for strong project management culture is a recipe for organizational failure (Langley, 2015).

If the culture of project management that touches on scope, schedule, cost, quality, risk, stakeholder, procurement, human resources, communication, and integration can't address servicing customers, delivering good quality products, and retaining talent, what other professional discipline can be part of the operational excellence that touches on all areas of middle management to address customers, products, and people? It is no wonder Ireland (2006) claimed almost ten years back why executive management needs more project management skills than technical skills or delegation skills to effectively lead the organization. Several years later, Gale (2012) reports on a few organizations as a case study to support the case for increasing role of project management.

As I went through the program management framework that lays the foundation for strategic benefits, coordinated planning, complex interdependencies, deliverable integration and optimized pacing, the role of program management in benefit delivery was conspicuous. The focus of programs not only dealt with incremental benefits delivered through component projects but also on the consolidated benefits through structured governance to resolve quin constraints aligning the program efforts to organizational direction, identifying and responding proactively to risks across the projects and into operations, and leading, coordinating and collaborating multiple work streams. When such a program level leadership role is not identified to go through a program delivery framework, lots of productivity loss becomes transparent to the organizations.

Organizations today are changing dramatically. The need to respond to changes rapidly is an essential fabric to maintaining market share amidst the political, economic, societal, technical, legal, environmental, ethnic, and demographic changes and competitive edge. So, the need for executives to understand the project, program, and portfolio management is not a luxury but a necessity.


References

Gale, S.F. (2012). The case for project management. PMI Executive Guide. Retrieved August 31, 2017, from https://www.pmi.org/-/media/pmi/documents/public/pdf/publications/pmi-executive-guide.pdf

Irelend, L. (2006). Executive Management's role in project management. International Project Management Association. Retrieved August 31, 2017, from http://www.ipma-usa.org/articles/ExecRoles.pdf

Langley, M.A. (2015, August 6). 3 Things CFOs Should Know about Project Management. CFO.com. Retrieved August 31, 2017, from http://ww2.cfo.com/business-planning/2015/08/3-things-cfos-know-project-management/

President Barack Obama Signs the Program Management Improvement and Accountability Act (2016, December). Project Management Institute. Retrieved August 31, 2017, from https://www.pmi.org/about/press-media/press-releases/president-barack-obama-signs-the-program-management-improvement-and-accountability-act