When talking w/ Michael Krigsman (podcast here), I spent some time trying to drive home my belief that customers must own their projects more.  IMO, part of the problem is driven by the confusion between accountability and responsibility.

Wideman’s invaluable Comparative Glossary of Project Management provides definitions of accountability that are useful:

Accountability:  Being answerable to one’s superior in an organization for the exercise of one’s authority and the performance of one’s duties. OR Being answerable for results.

“Being answerable” gets to the ownership that accountability is all about. Unfortunately, many definitions of responsibility muddy the waters:

Responsibility: The duties, assignments, and accountability [emphasis mine] for results associated with a designated position in the organization.

Throwing in “accountability” contributes to the confusion many have. In some ways including accountability in responsibility makes it sound, well, less-than-accountable.  Here’s how I try to keep it simple:

• Responsible = Those who do the work in question.
• Accountable = The one who signs off on the work that “Responsible” provides.

When managing vendors and integrators, we have to remember that as customers we need to make sure that we’re always the “A” in the RACI.

Yesterday, softwareadvice.com tossed Don Fornes’ post on SAP’s SME solutions over the Crossderry transom.  All-in-all it is a good overview, with a couple of caveats:

1. Industry coverage of the SAP Business Suite and All-in-One is depicted as equal and that’s a stretch.  Perhaps I need to brush up on my SAP release strategy, but I recall that industry solution coverage for All-in-One is not nearly as extensive as that of the full Business Suite.
2. I like that Don highlights the NPV calculations you need to make for on demand vs. on premise.  It is easy to forget that what looks cheap now ain’t so cheap after you’ve been paying for a few years.  However, he’s not clear what the $27,416 NPV represents.  It looks right per user (at $149/month and using his assumptions of a ten-year life for software and a 6% discount rate).

Here’s the promised link — Enterprise IT: Inside an SAP customer — to my recent podcast w/ Michael Krigsman.  I’ll elaborate a bit on f these themes in future posts.  As I mentioned earlier, the interview stoked my blogging fire again!

Michael Krigsman and I had a chance to chat last week — he recorded a podcast w/ me that will be up on his blog before too long — and thankfully the chat got my blogging mojo going again. 

I don’t want to steal our podcast’s thunder, so I’ll focus on a tangent from our call — SAP’s innovation problem.  Michael himself has hoped that SAP’s leadership change would help to bring more innovation to market.  Ray Wang put it more bluntly in his take on Leo’s ouster:

[T]he issue is not sales. It’s products. Snabe and Vishal will need strong product vision to right SAP and point it in a forward direction. Engineering and products need more attention to bring out trapped innovation at SAP.

“Trapped innovation”… that’s so much of what I saw at SAP.  There are many cool technologies floating around, but they don’t fit in the “margin now” mindset that has pervaded the company.   The company is stuck in the classic [successful]  innovator’s dilemma:

By only pursuing “sustaining innovations” that perpetuate what has historically helped them succeed, companies unwittingly open the door to “disruptive innovations”.

Even worse,  SAP had deluded themselves into thinking they were responding appropriately — what was marketed as real innovation was simply new wine in old skins.  Exhibit 1 — 2007-2009 versions of Business ByDesign.

Look at me, look at me, look at me now!

PMOs too often get painted as the dour “project police”.  Our willingness to deliver results without demanding attention and praise is one of the more attractive character traits of project management culture.  But as noted in Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin’s post on The Million-Dollar Question: What’s the Value of a PMO?, delivering results quietly can be a trap:

[O]nce the systems for executing strategy through well-run projects are in place, it’s tempting to think you can rest on your laurels. But, no such luck. When project and program management is working well, it’s invisible: nothing bad happens. And the PMO becomes, apparently, a line item of overhead.

Jeannette notes that many PMO leaders shy away from marketing their PMO after it has been established.  During the PMO project itself, we all seem to understand the importance of stakeholder management and communications.  But when we become a function, we forget that lesson or think it unseemly, inappropriate, etc.

I’m not suggesting we crassly broadcast our successes.  Perhaps “narrowcasting” is the better idea — a discreet word with the CIO about identifying a poorly-priced deal ripe for re-negotiation, a walkthrough of high and low profit projects with a sales manager, etc.

Here’s an old column I’ve meant to comment on for a while.  Dan Woods’s Jargon Spy is almost always a good read, and his take on The Myth of Crowdsourcing punctures some of the more cherished notions of social media and its power to create.   He goes right for the granddaddy of them all:

Wikipedia seems like a good example of a crowd of people who have created a great resource. But at a conference last year I asked Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales about how articles were created. He said that the vast majority are the product of a motivated individual. After articles are created, they are curated–corrected, improved and extended–by many different people. Some articles are indeed group creations that evolved out of a sentence or two. But if you took away all of the articles that were individual creations, Wikipedia would have very little left.  

Human innovation is the history of porting “applications” from one language, media, platform, or form factor to another.  In tech, we’ve moved app after app from pen and paper, to microcomputers, to PCs, and now to mobile.   Crowdsourcing “innovates” in much the same way, leveraging an existing paradigm but not really creating one. 

After all, Wikipedia is just another manifestation of an encyclopedia.  And who do we credit for that, the classic editions of the Encyclopædia Britannica, which were inspired by Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which built on Chamber’s Cyclopedia, and so on, and so on..?

As you may have guessed by the absence of performance reports, Operation Dunk 2010 was stalled for a bit.  I allowed the demands of work and family to get in the way, but we’re back on the beam.  Luckily, the damage wasn’t too great, as I have remained active. 

My balance and endurance has been clearly improving.  I believe that stems from my concentration on the obstacle course, as that contains a jumping motion and gives a pretty decent 2-5 minute workout per run.

Glen Alleman asks “Why is it so hard?” and focuses on one of the most difficult line items for IT projects to fund: project/program management, including contract planning and controls. 

I’ve had varying success in positioning these resources, so I’m still stumped.  Arguments that worked for one initiative failed for what should have been a similar initiative. 

So here are two questions to you all:

1. What arguments, research, findings, etc. have been EFFECTIVE in ensuring that your projects or programs have the leadership they need? 
2. Does these “effective” factors work better for one type of project over another?  In other words, do some types of projects lend themselves to “selling” project management better than others?

My in-laws just gave me the latest Malcolm Gladwell book – What the Dog Saw — and I’ve been grazing in it the last few days.  The book is a collection of his New Yorker pieces;  he also includes a few key updates and notes that bring the articles up-to-date.

I just finished his piece on the Enron scandal — the original New Yorker article is here — and he makes a distinction between puzzles and mysteries that I hadn’t seen before.  As regular readers know, complexity is one of my favorite topics (and key posts on the topic are collected here).  IMO, many of our issues with complex initiatives stem from a belief that all problems are puzzles and that just a little more information is all we need.

Gladwell attributes this insight to Gregory Treverton and explains it thusly:

Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large.

The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much. 

I don’t get over to John Agno’s Coaching Tip blog often enough, though I did make it over the other day and found this timely post: In Stressful Encounters, Rewire Yourself to Listen.  He points out that:

In a stressful encounter, you may have less than two minutes to gain control and salvage the situation. 

The paradox is that we need to be deliberate, calm, and open at a time when our instincts are screaming “react!”.  John’s tips — and those of Mark Goulston — are very practical. 

My only addition: cultivate the habit of mindfulness so you can access such knowledge and don’t default to merely emotional responses.

Long-time Crossderry readers may remember my concerns about the Golden Rule.  Michelle at Mission Minded Management — a blog I just found via The Daily Reviewer — re-states the pitfall of the Rule well here:

One of the greatest life lessons anyone can learn is that WE ARE NOT ALL THE SAME. When we treat others as we would like to be treated, it may or may not be well received. If it is not well received, we consider the others to be ingrates, and so the downward spiral begins.

Michelle’s post renews my belief in the wisdom of Karl Popper’s suggested improvement to the Rule:  

The golden rule is a good standard which is further improved by doing unto others, wherever possible, as they want to be done by.

My Feedburner subscribers may have noticed my monetization experiment –  I recently turned on Google AdSense for my feed.  Or perhaps they haven’t noticed.  I’ve earned all of $0.02 in two weeks.

My gratitude for my day job just went up about 1000%, however!

I don’t have the time to delve into the entire article, so I may be misrepresenting the thrust of Spyros Makridakis, Robin M. Hogarth and Anil Gaba’s Winter 2010 article in the MIT Sloan Management Review (full article here).   Or more properly, I hope that this Forbes excerpt — Why Forecasts Fail. What To Do Instead — misrepresents the piece.  For instance, what do the authors mean here?

Say you’re a publisher and have an unknown author selling her first novel. Publishers should look at the sales track records of first-time novelists in general. The uncertainty surrounding your author shouldn’t differ from the wider population of new authors. You should be able, therefore, to estimate how low or high the sales might go. That range probably covers 95% of all possible outcomes. The next step would be to take the estimated range and increase it. 

Wow…I guess the WAG now has the MIT Sloan seal of approval.  Or perhaps it is CYA that’s now approved.  Other than allowing a forecaster to say — “I told you so” –  is there really all that much use in simply increasing the range of estimates? 

Maybe we should spend our time learning how to distinguish the outliers quickly — e.g., from distinct initial sales patterns or unusually intense media coverage — so we can take appropriate action?

I found out that Crossderry was named to another one of those best PM blog lists (here).  Thanks Nicole…

One must, however, wonder about a list that has me listed above Glen, Bas, Rich, Elizabeth, and Craig.  I appreciate the mention, but I’m afraid my ranking may overpromise and I’ll underdeliver!

It has been a while since I’ve checked out my leadership counterparts on Alltop… I found some tasty posts from bloggers I hadn’t seen before.  Melissa Dutmers at Riverfork challenges us to not fall back on conventional wisdom:

…that the greatest contributor to success is “active and visible executive sponsorship” (this is corporate speak meaning high level executives are supposed to inspire and influence their people). I don’t buy it. I believe that the number one success factor for leading change is YOU (emphasis Melissa’s). 

I agree.  The need for executive sponsorship is almost a truism; as Melissa notes, “you need the support of a high-level manager or executive to approve the idea”. 

But can a change leader stop at formal approval?  Are you content with leaving the “active and visible” part of executive sponsorship to the executive him/herself?  For example, do you bother to draft that announcement e-mail or put together talking points for the exec to use with the board?  Do you make the leadership the first part of the communications plan, not the last?

I saw a great post by Ron Ashkenas on how controls create complexity.  We’ve been struggling with this issue in our transformation program.  We have put stronger controls and more frequent communications in place.  However, these controls and communications shouldn’t create double or triple work.

Askkenas captures what drives these issues in his opening paragraph:

Have you ever noticed that organizations are great at creating controls and policies to prevent incidents that have already happened? Once the proverbial cow escapes the barn, they adeptly make sure it won’t happen again by, say, authorizing only certain people to man the exit and constructing barn-door status reports. 

Sometimes this needs to happen and usually it is straightforward to figure out what a “new normal” approach should look like.  But the rest of the program or business can get left behind and needs to be brought along to the new reports.  There is nothing more frustrating than reconciling “old program” status reports to the “new project” control paradigm.

As I closed my Q&A with Gary Cohen, I asked about working with oursourced resources.   Service and technology providers are integral parts of many projects, but too often I see them treated like arms-length vendors rather than true partners. 

• Crossderry: What kind of questions should we ask consultants and vendors to reinforce to them — and to other stakeholders — that we are all in this together?
• Gary Cohen: To encourage partnership with consultants, I recommend asking the following questions:
  * What risks are there to you if the project fails?
  * What opportunity costs are you giving up in order for us to work together?
  * What would like to hear me say to you a month after the project has been completed? What praise, in other words, would signify the optimal outcome?
  * What might prevent you from hearing that praise?
  * What can I do to help you achieve the optimal outcome?

Placing yourself in another’s shoes is one of the most effective ways to confront reality.  I particularly like  Gary Cohen’s take on how you can use the right questions to not only express empathy, but to also increase accountability (from my Q&A with Gary, author of JUST ASK LEADERSHIP: Why Great Managers Always Ask the Right Questions.

• Crossderry:  I like the distinction you’ve made between questions that answer “your” questions — i.e., questions where you own the decision — and asking questions that help others answer “their” questions.  Can you talk more about such questions and how they can be used to reinforce accountability?
• Gary Cohen: One of the most important questions leaders can ask is, “Whose decision is it?” When leaders allow job descriptions to determine decision-makers, not rank, decisions are usually made by the most informed party, and everyone must take ownership of their work. Blame and credit are easy to assess, in these instances. If, on the other hand, leaders make others’ decisions, they take away accountability from coworkers. Blame and credit are harder to assess, and it takes longer for new leaders to emerge because there’s less incentive to take ownership of their work.

Dennis Byron here gives the most succinct gloss I’ve seen on the challenge before Hasso:

Hasso Plattner wants to drive a great deal of technological innovation at SAP, and did not believe it could happen under Leo’s leadership, and without Hasso’s very direct involvement…. The product organization is full of conflicting technologies, conflicting interests, and conflicting agendas. Driving change in this kind of climate will be very challenging for Jim [Snabe] and Vishal [Sikka].

Hasso stalks the product halls?

There’s one more challenge: SAP hasn’t been honest about what is working on the product side. BYD folks walked around like the cocks of the walk long after it was clear that BYD was in deep trouble.  And the leadership let them…

Hasso’s right: Leo couldn’t call BS on the product side effectively enough.  From what I can tell, he’s the only one left in SAP who can meld innovation with the market AND is credible and powerful enough to actually do it!

Unfortunately, I can imagine that many on the development time think that they’ve won and happy days are here again.  Hasso’s back and it’s innovation for innovation’s sake at SAP!  What…monetize?  Isn’t that what sales people are for?

Continuing my Q&A with Gary Cohen, author of JUST ASK LEADERSHIP: Why Great Managers Always Ask the Right Questions…

• Crossderry: Coming from the other direction, how can senior leadership make it safe to ask and answer questions openly and honestly? Put another way, what distinguishes an organization that cultivates “approval-seeking” from an organization that rewards “truth-seeking”?
• Gary Cohen: While leaders should seek to cultivate a “truth-seeking” culture over one that’s “approval-seeking,” they must be mindful of whose truth they’re after. Too often leaders express disapproval when their coworkers don’t arrive at the answers they hoped to get. This disapproval prompts coworkers to fish for the truth/answer their leaders prefer. In this way, “truth-seeking” becomes “approval-seeking” in disguise.
• Gary Cohen (cont.): Leaders ought to ask questions from a position of “not knowing.” As long as their coworkers arrive at answers that comply with the organization’s ethics, budget, and needs, leaders ought to accept these truths. It’s extremely hard for leaders not to reveal their preferences, but they must not. How they respond to answers is as important as asking great questions. If they respond with a judgmental tone or, worse, share their answer, they undo all of their confidence-building work. They communicate the message that their truth is superior to others’. And approval-seeking is bound to follow.