ManageWithoutThem Blog

Blog has moved

2008-09-24T18:23:00.000-07:00

The new entries can be found at http://www.managewithoutthem.com/blog.

Twelve leverage points - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2007-02-15T12:05:00.000-08:00

Twelve leverage points - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "Twelve leverage points"

Example delivery roadmap summary visual

2007-01-28T15:50:00.000-08:00

note that the delivery roadmap (above) is not isomorphic to the solution architecture (below)

Outsourcing info from Gartner

2006-08-21T20:29:00.000-07:00

Some interesting - if slightly obvious - information on outsourcing in this podcast from Gartner:
http://www.gartner.com/it/products/podcasting/asset_143953_2575.jsp

I particularly like the host's usage of the word 'architecture' in a sense which matches my own usage (where I define architecture as 'deliniated shared understanding' and management as 'what collaborating individuals share').

The host also makes some interesting asides about a more structural view of 'service-oriented architecture' (as opposed to the IT view of S.O.A.); an area that I'm currently also drafting some notes / diagrams for.

Unfortunately, the guest uses the word 'seamless' which you all know I hate with a passion. :-)

First draft of new article

2006-03-21T15:44:00.000-08:00

Move along - Nothing to see here

How workflow management at all levels can keep things moving even when the 'big picture' hasn't been fully thought through, is unseen, or is unknowable; and how market-making collaboration technologies might be able to 'seamlessly' add insight while you work.

I've been thinking a little about the relationship between different types of workflow management. Within the broad category of workflow management I include personal workflow management, managerial workflow management, and organisational workflow management. I've always had a bit of a problem with the idea of workflow management, but in the last couple of years I have developed an appreciation of the skills and practices of workflow management in each of these forms. So I thought it was time I expressed some positive views about an area of management science, for a change. Though I'd still like to draw attention to the risks of potential excesses in their application. Particularly, as these were the basis of my original concerns with the technique.

Workflow management, as a set of practices and either individual or organisation behaviors, is another example of management as a technology. One of the core concepts the ManageWithoutThem model is to recognise that management itself can be viewed as a technology. Like any other technology, management has a number of characteristics: it can be measured by its degree of usability, it must be learnt and used by all participants in order to add value, it may benefit from network effects, and it can be improved or made obsolete by other technologies. Workflow management is an evolving paradigm of organising and collaborating technologies that provides a pragmatic mechanism for moving forward and creating flow, without getting bogged down in over analysis, excessive planning, or overly vision-driven collaboration. It won't always be the most appropriate tool - but increasingly I'm starting to believe that it should always be part of every organising toolkit - it is necessary if perhaps not sufficient.

I've often cynically suggested that 'management is the art of complaining that nobody is seeing the big picture even when there isn't one'. I was referring to the tendency for management as a profession to use their unique perspective across the organisation to exclude and manipulate rather than to enlighten. As a manager, if you find yourself saying 'you're not seeing the big picture' it's likely that you've failed to communicate or otherwise engage your staff I in a manner which highlights that perspective. If somebody was to pause and actually ask 'well what is the big picture?' you need to ask yourself if you could actually answer them and would you even be willing to spare the time to do so?

What does this have to do with workflow management? A lot, if you understand that I've always striven to see and articulate the big picture in all projects I've worked on. As an information or delivery architecture I have tried to ensure everybody knows how information or delivery processes respectively relate and flow through each other. This sort of work suits the analytical and architectural aspects of my personality but I'll be the first to admit that secret is know when to stop. The boundaries of architectural analysis - like the liberation idea of limited government - are what provide for effective allocation of resources, and release professional freedom and responsibility. My popular comments on the folly of 'seamlessness' in systems still stands and is also reflected in my analysis of management teams as cartels. It is the specific seams that you create in your delivery architecture which determine it's operating characteristics.

In many ways workflow management is the opposing and complementary force to architecture. To give a simple example of somebody I would call a workflow manager, picture a person who comes to a regular meeting you have been having for years. They proclaim to not know much about the work you are doing, and really can't provide any insight into how you departments or projects fit together. They seem almost proud of this absence of insight which immediately (and in a way rightfully - but we'll get to that another time) makes you hostile and cautious. Yet you know they have the support of the senior management team and a reputation for 'getting things down'.

But from the moment they start talking all they seem to be doing is creating work! You're already busy or at the very least don't see the value of the new and vague 'action items' you are receiving. But let's step back a little to this idea of 'creating work'. While nobody likes to do work that isn't of value there is a sense in which managers are in fact responsible for 'creating work'. Too much is often made of self-direction and taking personal responsibility. Indeed the ManageWithoutThem philosophy is a deep and practical manifestation of a market-based management model within firms. But at the end of the day it is more important that your management mechanisms have integrity. That is, beyond any particular management model what is most important is that the model is made explicit and the roles and responsibilities that cover both managers and non-managers are open and have actionable authority. It is that integrity which makes your operating model transparent and embeds the spirit of your claimed organisational values into your collaboration processes.

The implicit agreement between the workflow manager and the rest of the team is that the workflow manager is 'creating work' so that those 'doing work' can just focus on getting that work done. The implication here is that as long as people are doing the work that has been created, and doing it in a timely manner, they don’t' need to worry about the big picture. They don't need to know how everything fits together and they can leave at 5 o'clock each afternoon with no guilt and no unfinished business. This approach to work may not suit everybody but it certainly has a place in everybody's work life. After all, if you want to stay at work all-night you probably want to be working on your own pet projects anyway.

In the above example we are talking about managerial workflow management. Below the level is personal workflow management and above that level is organisation workflow management. In managerial workflow management it is the willingness for the workflow manager to take responsibility for the end-to-end result that makes this managerial workflow management. In managerial workflow management the manager is actually putting a process and themselves between other individual's performance and the end result. In fact, this sort of action is the hallmark of managerial workflow and management in general. To allow others to do 'work' without knowing the big picture adds tremendous value in complex environments.

	What is interesting is that Franklin was able to schedule hours of time labeled simply 'work'. Pre- my discovery of personal workflow management I would have found it pointless to schedule a vague activity like 'work' in my diary.

All this talk of 'work' as a tangible activity brings me to personal workflow management. Managerial workflow management adds value through separating the end results from each individual's performance. Personal workflow management does something quite different but related. I recently stumbled across references to Benjamin Franklin's daily schedules. These show how Franklin broke up his time during each day. What is interesting is that Franklin was able to schedule hours of time labeled simply 'work'. Pre- my discovery of personal workflow management I would have found it pointless to schedule a vague activity like 'work' in my diary. It would have meant nothing more than being at work. However, personal workflow management such as Getting Things Done means there is always something to do to 'create work' or already pre-created work that you could be completing. In Getting Things Done language there are always next actions for the context you are in or at least projects and lists to review.

Where the benefit of managerial workflow management is that you don't need to know the big picture in order to contribute, the benefit of personal workflow management is a little more, well, personal. David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, talks about 'mind like water'. He says the benefit of writing things down into his/a system is that you aren't thinking about the items when you should be doing them (as he said in his Cranky Middle Manager interview - 'there is a inverse relationship between on-your-mind and getting-done'). The accumulated benefit of this system is that you are always doing what you should be doing at the moment. All of this organising effort means that you can relax and just 'work'.

To make it even more personal than that, say you're at a point in your life where work isn't particularly important. Say you're burnt out, need a holiday, don't like your current assignment, have family problems at home you need to deal with - but need to work to pay the bills. Personal workflow management will allow you to get lost in work and get things down without being particularly interested in work. All of the office bickering, politics, and things you always wanted to change about work can actually be put on hold and ignored. This can be done for as long as you like - particularly if you give yourself time to record grips that you might one day want to fix in SomedayMaybe lists). You might even find that you like working this way or that it helps you meet career goals that have otherwise alluded you.

Before I move onto organisation workflow management I want to mention my objections to personal and managerial workflow. Managerial workflow annoyed me because the people seemed proud of not knowing technical issues (even when they actually did know), they created work, and they didn't offer anything in terms of a better fundamental understanding of the situation. Personal workflow to me seems like over organisation and seemed to reduce some of the passion and personal professionalism I felt about work. In both of these cases the grips I had are actually also the post powerful features of these two types of workflow. However, they are both potential negatives if workflow management is used exclusively without also applying architectural thinking and skillsets.

Finally, let's consider organisation workflow. This is workflow across multiple departments and even organisations. Because of its grounding in information technology minds this sort of workflow is often implemented as form/document management systems with associated approvals, business process orchestration, and integration with various computer systems. I love the idea of integration between systems but this all starts to sounds a little like automating a managerial and command-economy. Without the injection of a market-based coordination mindset organisation workflow becomes automated bureaucracy. Rather than market indicators and allowing the market to increase the transparency of your organisation, the over-litigation of existing organisational workflow management thinking may in fact cause the creation of workflow 'black markets' which drive effort off the systems and therefore reduce organisational transparency. IT systems should have their usability measured in terms of it being easier to use the system to do your job than it is not to use the system to do your job.

Social and collaborative web 2.0 sites such as Flickr, 43Things, myspace, etc give better clues as to what organisational workflow management should look like than say middleware software. I call these systems market-making technologies where the Web 2.0 terminology has become social networking technologies. I would suggest that social networking technologies are a subset of market-marking technologies.

The advantage of thinking of management as a technology means that you can apply criteria such as usability and enabler-of-transparency to improvements in that technology. Web 2.0 style tools that support workflow management processes at each level would enable more transactions to be carried out 'on the market' and therefore allow better information about the dynamics of the organisation to be gathered and published.

As the sophistication of automatic ontology generation tools improves, and as they better allow for additional manual explicit categorisation techniques and visualisations which allow architectural knowledge to contextualise the data we'll have somewhere to throw this market knowledge we are silently creating as people go about their daily work.

Cranky Middle Manager

2005-10-10T16:04:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note to let you know that I appear on The Cranky Middle Manager Podcast with Wayne Turmel. After I have a listen I'll try and do a post of all the interesting stuff I wish I'd also said :-)

Thanks Wayne! It was fun.

Epic Advisers

2005-08-27T07:57:00.000-07:00

Just found Steve Banhegyi's blog. He mentions a leadership model (well part of it, I presume) with the acronym EPIC ADVISERS:

Emotion
Power
Inspiration
Charisma

Authority
Drama
Vision
Intention
Storytelling & Journey making
Experience
Role Modelling
Self-Perception

http://www.emerging.co.za/transformblog/index.php?entry=entry050224-155811

The MWT Model basically says 'What's so special about Leadership?' in a quite sarcastic way indeed. But that isn't to belittle the concept. What I'm saying is that the important thing is to be able to tell the difference between Quality leadership and... well, rubbish.

I'm not sure EPIC ADVISERS is 'particularly African' as Steve describes it. But I mean that in a good way in that it seems more universal to me. Sure, it's just a bunch of words. But it appears to be the right words for a change. There is a certain balance to this list of attributes which to me seems like it would be difficult to fake this type of leadership.

UPDATE: More detail here (pdf).

I'll comment after I read it... But it's gotta be good

2005-08-25T05:19:00.000-07:00

Economic Development: An Individualist Methodology

Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants: XP debate

2005-08-22T07:32:00.000-07:00

http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blog...

Traversing the spec without a spec?

[Matthew De George] August 22, 2005 10:31:00 EDT

I'd agree that XP is a response to an organisational problem; but that is not all it is. I think just because it only solves the software organisation's problem doesn't mean it isn't part of the solution for larger organisational problems.

I'm trying to solve the larger organisational problem (at http://www.managewithoutthem.com) by starting with market-based management within firms. I think Scrum can be an example of this because it provides the sort of 'market indicators' required through things like burndown charts.

My theory is that when you are looking at an architecture (read 'delineated shared understanding') of the *solution* you shouldn't suppose that the best way to build that solution is to follow the same structural elements with which the solution is broken up. That is, the structure of the final solution and the structure of the process to get to that solution (the 'delivery architecture') are not isomorphic.

Actually, I'd go one step further than that. I'd suggest that the delivery architecture is exactly the opposite of the solution architecture. This is partially just saying that process is more important than product. Or that process is more important than planning (which is certainly a market-focused approach). But I think there is more to it than that.

More importantly, if this is true - if you are trying to find a delivery architecture which is equally opposite to any possible solution architect Ã‚Â– then why try to describe/specify the solution at all?

We have to change the way IT and clients interact certainly. IT systems are not just software programs. IT isn't just a shared service. IT is *structural*. An IT system is a part of your organisation just like a human resource or a partner or an org chart. There really needs to be a better understanding of this. I'm always confused when an ERP implementations biggest advantage appears to be that the finance department doesn't have to answer accounting questions anymore because the IT department is supporting the finance processes...

Seeing the big picture. Showing the little picture.

2005-08-10T08:26:00.000-07:00

Some thoughts in the back of my mind as I develop estimates for a project I’m currently working on. All these numbers, contingencies, and risks. While I’m promoting market-based management and should be against ‘planning’ what I’m really all about are the mechanisms for separating good planning from bad planning (sort of). I'm also concerned with exposing what limited information, what limited controls and enablers, are actually defined by a schedule and a resource plan.

But as limited as a schedule and resource plan are, they are many orders of magnitude more interesting than an estimate. With all the effort to reduce (or at least record) ‘Assumptions’ an estimate is still, by definition, filled with assumptions. An estimate IS an assumption. I’m fortunate enough to be able to use some baseline productivity metrics which allows me to ignore huge chunks of the dynamics within the project for the purpose of my estimate. But one assumption I shouldn’t make is that people will in some way ‘follow’ the estimate.

When the estimate is complete it should be locked up in a box. Nobody needs to see this estimate. There should be 3 degrees of separation between this estimate and anything that 90% of the people on the project are doing at any particular time. If the project takes more resources than the estimate suggests the estimate is wrong - and yet, the estimate doesn’t manage the project at all. Nor does it offer any hints at all on how to manage the project. This breaks The New MWT Hierarchy but I’ll leave the risk analysis to the reader.

Some may ask “Shouldn’t you show people the estimate so that they can ‘see the big picture?’”. Certainly not. The estimate doesn’t show the big picture. Like I said it actually contains very little information. If you have a ‘big picture’ of your business model, or your project’s delivery architect, or a well crafted contract then these things should be published. In fact you are obliged to publish them to your employees. But an estimate is simply an assumption.

Management needs to show people the small picture. I’ve decided that this wonderful technology we call management is failing if people have nothing more than an estimate or a deadline at their disposal when they sit down to focus on their work. It’s also failing when they have a thousand contradictions in their head all relating to the same task. Like I always say “it’s easier to tell 10 people what to do than to be told what to do by 10 people”.

I’m all for big picture thinking and I really do think that an overall view is a vital component of management (these are the delivery and collaboration architectures I’m always going on about after all). But what I’m saying is that management is failing if that is all it has to offer.

I guess this is just another example of ‘the riddle of the stones’; where management thinking has become so muddled that it craves generalists such that the structure of the organisation doesn’t really matter. Preferably, mythical generalists who can apparently do just about anything with equal efectiveness but for some strange reason stay where they are put – and do what they are told. Much like a stone.

There is a contradiction here if I don’t add one other point. How can I be advocating market-based management and then suggest that the management system of an organisation needs to be responsible for the muddled thoughts of an individual sitting down to do work alone? But there is not contradiction. I’m just repeating, as always, that we are all a part of this management process. While that unavoidable hierarchy of responsibility always flows up, we are all integrated.

Too often I see layers upon layers of management and months of planning reduced to asking a strange little man in the corner who only got the task this morning why he isn’t finished yet.

The McKinsey Quarterly: From push to pull: The next frontier of innovation

2005-07-28T19:18:00.000-07:00

I can't read this without membership. However, this is a very important part of MWT. This is like 'you are responsible for your own communication' (see core concepts in the 'MWT Model' area). Subscribe models are also important but first need to push something that can be subscribed to... The McKinsey Quarterly: From push to pull: The next frontier of innovation: "From push to pull: The next frontier of innovation

* Most companies now mobilize resources by deploying push systems, in the mistaken belief that they promote efficiency.
* Push systems—characterized by top-down, centralized, and rigid programs of previously specified tasks and behavior—hinder participation in the distributed networks that are now indispensable to competitive advantage.
* More versatile and far-reaching pull systems—characterized by modularly designed, decentralized platforms connecting a diverse array of participants—are now starting to emerge in a variety of arenas.
* As pull systems reach center stage, executives will have to reassess almost all aspects of the corporation."

Josh Kaufman: Inside My Bald Head: The Personal MBA 40

2005-07-23T22:09:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the Personal MBA could be converted to an Open-MBA... Josh Kaufman: Inside My Bald Head: The Personal MBA 40: "Great list!

I would also add Mintzberg's The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning. So glad you included Economics in One Lesson (it's certainly on my recommended reading list but you'd expect that with my market-based ManageWithoutThem model).

Perhaps Mises' Human Action could be in the Doctorate programme. Adding some other classics like Bastiat's The Law might make it an open-MBA...?

Posted by: Matthew De George at July 24, 2005 01:07 AM"

Management Teams as Cartels

2005-07-23T00:45:00.000-07:00

In addition to The New MWT Hierarchy I'd like to introduce the management team transformation slides. I've always had a slight problem with the idea of a 'management team'. To me the same economic analysis which applies to a cartel applies to a management team.

Before: Management Team as Cartel

After: Management Team with Governance

Annotations coming soon...

Harry Potter Book 7 Revealed spoilers

2005-07-22T19:46:00.000-07:00

I haven’t read any of the Harry Potter books, but I have seen two of the movies and read a review of the latest book that contained ‘spoilers’. So it’s painfully obvious to me now what the final book will be about and what J.K. Rowling’s ultimate plan for our children actually is.

Before I get to what will appear in the final book let’s look at the cunning precedents that Rowling is establishing in our hearts and minds which will allow her to achieve her ultimate goal. Which it is now clear, is the corruption of children everywhere.

Look at how each new Potter release is accompanied by increasing amounts of security and miscommunication about details of the plot. For the final book it is expected that this secrecy will have been perfected. No reliable details of the plot will be available until half the world's children have already completed reading the book.

False rumours and extracts will appear on the Internet weeks before the release. It will be denied by Rowling but these rumours will have been started by Rowling herself. They will serve to render the impression that this is just another harmless children’s story that only a Pope would have objections to.

So why is this secrecy so important to Rowling. Because in the final Potter novel Harry’s true character will be revealed. Currently, the goodness of Harry rests on the fact that it is set up against the evil of “You-Know-Who” (Voldemont). You-Know-Who allegedly killed Harry’s parents when Harry was still a baby.

When I read that Dumbledore had been killed in the latest book it all became clear to me. Some may think that Dumbledore will just come back again in the next book like he did when he died in the Lord of the Rings movie – but I’m sorry Dumbledore is gone for good.

In fact it is Dumbledore’s death that finally draws Harry to the dark side. Yes; that’s right Harry will convert to the dark side of the force in the final book! He couldn’t save his parents, then he couldn't save his godfather, and then he couldn’t save Dumbledore. Only the dark side give will give him power over death. This is a power that he can’t live without.

But who really killed Harry’s parents? The story is that You-Know-Who couldn’t kill Harry. Why is that do you think is? We know now that it’s because You-Know-Who IS Harry. It was indeed ‘his mother’s love’ that saved Harry. His mother who helped turn Voldemort into Harry (making Voldemort ‘disappear’ except when Harry is around). Harry’s internal struggles being depicted in the physical world when Harry ‘fights’ Voldemort.

I wont spelt the rest of this theory out in detail because it’s actually quite obvious. But it should be noted that Harry has often been referred to as ‘the chosen one’. Those in the know believe that Harry will save the [re]public from dark magic. We all know that such prophecies can be misinterpreted...

Anyway. Enough of that. This is what Rowling has planned for your children to read…..

:-)

MWT Book Extract - Governance, Hierarchy, and the Delivery Architect

2005-07-22T08:15:00.000-07:00

Unavoidable Hierarchy of Responsibility

Hierarchies are powerful organising constructs. One of the assumptions people often make about the MWT Model is that if it is market-based it must also be against hierarchical organisation. This is not true as hierarchical organisation is an important feature of corporate governance. Without the overriding principle that the CEO and Board are ultimately responsible for the organisation’s performance (and the organisation's overall impact on society) there can be no corporate governance. The unavoidable hierarchy of responsibility draws a line from each employee, through their managers, directly to the Board.

It is the unflinching burden of this hierarchy of responsibility that often causes the best-seller lists for management books to be dominated by what are essentially self-help books for people in positions of power and responsibility. Indeed, much of the management profession has been developed to push this burden of responsibility down the hierarchy. This is different to delegation. Delegation, or rather the correct distribution of decision rights, is by definition always a positive contribution to the organisation’s effectiveness. Distribution of decision rights is in fact enabled through the hierarchy of responsibility. If a manager is ultimately responsible regardless of delegations then there is no point restating the managers responsibilities and calling it management. This is what subtlety occurs with Single Point Management (see Chapter xxx). In a sense, when I say 'management is the process of determining which decisions don't have to be made by consensus' I am also saying that management is the process of determining which decisions don't have to be made by the manager.

Management should always involve the organised delegation of responsibilities. You will often hear that you can delegate responsibility but not accountability (or something like that). This management truism is indeed true. What it is saying is that the manager is always accountability even though they have given the task to somebody else. The problem arrises when the one class within an organisation (in this case that class is the management class) has both the right to delegate and the right to judge capability. This violates the MWT principle to ‘make management one step removed from measurement’. Too often I have seen managers attribute their failure to 'unskilled resources' and too often this is the case when those same resources have been working for the manager for months or even years. Though not always the case in well matrixed organisations and project, managers are responsible for the capabilities of their people – so blaming your resources for failure is not an option.

Market-based management partially solves this problem by providing mechanisms for people to choose their managers. However, this is not an ideal solution as it will mean that truly challenging endeavours will never be resourced. Also, as discussed in Chapter xxx, competitive differentiation and alignment to strategy would be ineffective under a strictly market-based management model. In order to resource truly difficult endeavours and maintain a strategy of differentiation, you have to strictly follow the rule that if a subordinate is responsible then the manager is also responsible.

Due credit should be given to organisations who try to solve this governance problem with such mechanisms as '360 degree' assessments and other elements of a comprehensive performance management processes. In fact, even the very existence of a human resources department is supposed to provide a mechanism for resolving problems with managers who have taken advantage of the largely political relationship between the manager and the managed which allows their own failings to be exploited and reframed as leadership. However, the problem with 360 degree assessment and reliance on a separate human resources department is that these involve interventions. As mentioned in Chapter xxx, any management model which relies on interventions cannot improve corporate governance because managers control resource allocation and therefore they control which interventions are resourced. So in effect they control which interventions occur. If those resource allocations are ineffective (from the organisations perspective) the interventions simply wont occur and the risks to effective corporate governance will not be managed.

The New MWT Hierarchy

The New MWT Hierarchy reinforces the idea of an unavoidable hierarchy of responsibility. More importantly is provides a more comprehensive explanation of the forces which are already acting within the management hierarchy. The New MWT Hierarchy should be considered a management pattern (in the sense of Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language as discussed in Chapter xxx). In the diagram for this pattern each of the olive green components are a different person performing a different role. It is important that these are physically different people. It is only then that the correct incentives are in place for the pattern to work.

However, some will correctly note that this is overkill for smaller organisations or projects. It is true that this pattern evolves too many people to be suitable for small organisations. However, it does more effectively represent the forces which need to be in place to govern the hierarchy. It is only because the risks are smaller in smaller organisations that roles can be combined into less resources. It may even be possible that the roles are combined into a single manager. This is of course exactly what the traditional view of a management hierarchy would suggest. But I believe that in all cases where the roles are combined a risk is introduced. It is only because management practices have developed an unquestioned value proposition unto themselves that this idea of risk management within the management model will be unintuitive to many. This is why risk management within the management model is such an important component of the MWT Model.

Note also that it is not just the size of the organisation that indicates the roles should be separated into different people. Other risks such as the combining of diverse capabilities with a new collaboration / delivery architecture also indicate that separate people in each role should be used. Also, any time when an independent project management firm is used to manage other firms the roles should be separate people (or perhaps separate firms).

It might also be the case that a strong general manager will require a separate delivery architect to supplement their general management skills with domain or task-specific skills. There is a long standing argument about whether a good manager can manage anything. The answer to this is 'it depends'. An understand of The New MWT Hierarchy allows the decision to be made by assessment of the managers skills in relation to the domains they are managing. The discussion on the relationship between the manager and delivery architect will make that clear.

The individual components of the diagram are introduced in the section below. As for all MWT collaboration architectures (as The New MWT Hierarchy is simply a generic collaboration architecture) in addition to the component descriptions a set of traversals across components will also be provided.

<--- continued --->

New MWT Hierarchy

2005-07-12T17:27:00.000-07:00

New MWT Hierarchy
Originally uploaded by MatthewD42.

I'm developing the general MWT hierarchy. This introduces the domain-specific delivery / collaboration architecture which supplements the 'plans and events' focus of general [project] management. The MWT hierarchy is also driven by the core concept to seperate management from measurement.

Naturual Law and Order

2005-07-10T03:54:00.000-07:00

Hans-Hermann Hoppe is always interesting. Sit back and listen to a great introduction to natural law, property and easements, and the evolution of natural law into the order provided by feudalism. It's a facinating trip through history. Unfortunately he runs out of time before he finishes the lecture.

Even if you don't enjoy the content you could make a drinking game out of he number of times he says 'So to speak' :-)

Found in Mises media.

Why are programmers supposed to know everything?

2005-07-08T21:55:00.000-07:00

Interesting rant called Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All. My immediate reaction was to see this as just another example of people being upset that programmers don't know everything.

To wish that programmers knew everything is generally a waste of time (how could they?). But I think this guy is onto something - I just don't yet know what it is. There is certainly something wrong with the way many IT people think the world works which comes out when they try to manage.

David Crow: Why software development is not only programming

2005-07-08T21:48:00.000-07:00

There is a void between programming and software development. In the absence of good software development management the struggles of that void are taken up by the programmers. Unfortunately, when that struggle becomes too much of a burden for the programme to bare the programmer is taken to be incompetent when in reality it is the unmanaged void that was too blame... David Crow: Why software development is not only programming: "Successful software development is so much more than programming. Or maybe better put programming is so much more than being able to write code."

Sarbanes-Oxley and Internal Markets

2005-07-04T23:07:00.000-07:00

Something I've never commented on in the Blog before (though it appears in the MWT Book manuscript / notes) is the relationship between Sarbanes-Oxley and the technology-enabled markets which are one of the foundation pillars of the ManageWithoutThem Model. I'm not a lawyer. So nobody should take my opinions as legal advice. In fact, anybody trying to Google for legal advice should be very careful indeed...

Sarbanes-Oxley is all about the retention of records. It started because some audit company is supposed to have shredded the audit records of one of their clients. If you look at the Mises Blog I think you will find one of the few references to the fact that the charges against the audit company have seen been dropped (Is this right? Check Mises Blog). However the ruling still exists and organisations are scurrying to comply with it.

The thing is Sarbanes-Oxley doesn't just stop at retention of records. The intension of the ruling includes both retention of records and assurances that the records are accurate. This bit is important and interesting. It means that audits are required at some regular interval to ensure that the records are accurate.

Let's take a simple example of asset records. Just as most organisations are struggling to keep simple records of the assets that they own, the Sarbanes-Oxley ruling says you have to audit the records to make sure they are accurate. So every three years you have to collect all the information about your assets again.

I have to be clear here; you can't just download the information from your asset register. The purpose of the audit is to ensure that the asset register is correct. So you need something to compare the information in the asset register to. So every three years you have to ask everybody in your organisation what assets they have - even if you think you already know. This is the only way you can make sure and prove that you already know.

While the intension is arguably good this is clearly ineffective. I also think it's not sustainable. Also, I think the risk here is that organisations can still fudge the audit. To take an extreme example, the organisation could fake all of the collected records by writing a small script which takes the asset register and turns it into emails. The script could throw in some mismatches so it looks realistic, the mismatches could be resolved, and the organisation would have compliance.

So in a way the law doesn’t really guarantee real compliance. This menas that eventually one of three things will happen. The most unlikely is that the government will decide not to interfere anymore. Alternatively, the intent of the law will be made more clear and additional laws will be created to cover individual cases of fraud (the typical approach of law propagation). Or lastly, the courts might shift the focus from ‘reporting requirements’ (what you have to submit) to ‘operating requirements’ (how your organisation actually has to work).

I'm betting on the last scenario where 'operating requirements' are imposed. And this is where technology-enabled markets come in. The scenario I'm going to describe is 5 to 10 years into the future. Even though the technologies largely exist it will take that long for the law, and our transition from command-based management models to market-based management models, to catch up.

A technology-enabled market approach to enforcing impending 'operating requirements' with the same intent as Sarbanes-Oxley would look like this...

--- To be continued ---

Aloha! What's in a name?

2005-07-04T07:27:00.000-07:00

This is a quickly typed response to Rosa’s comments on my comments about the ChangeThis manifesto which accompanies her book ‘Managing with Aloha’. In my comments I might have accidentally kinda sorta let slip that I didn’t like her title. Actually, I think close to half of my comments were either ‘I haven’t read it all’ or ‘I don’t like the title’. Oh, and then I went on to talk about me and what I think... Oops :-)

From what I’ve read ‘Managing with Aloha’ sounds like a great way to manage. There is nothing I don’t like about it yet (Mind you I still haven’t finished reading even the ChangeThis manifesto. And don’t yet own the book.). I think if a manager learns its lessons and genuinely adopts the principles they will become a better manager - simply because the principles represent a better way to manage. I hope the book is very successful (perhaps it already is).

So what don’t I like about the title? Fact is, I don’t dislike the title quite as much now I’ve (almost) read the manifesto. And the reasons are touched on about a third of the way through the manifesto. I didn’t know the real meaning of ‘aloha’. So when I read the title of the book I think I subconsciously read it as ‘Managing with jolly and mindless enthusiasm’. Now I’m all for enthusiasm; but when I read the title it sounded like another quick fix. So I’m glad I read further because it’s made me realise something.

What it made me realise is that there is a place for quality management books for people who genuinely want to be better managers. Books for people who aren’t just interested in being ‘more successful’ managers. What I realised is that I probably under-estimate the number of people who genuinely want to become better managers just for the love of management - and that’s unfair of me. I tend to be very hard on managers (though some would say I’m a little ‘soft’ on people who actually report to me - unless they are managers).

My focus in my research for my book (and the way I tend to read organisations) is only partially about looking at what managers are individually doing. Like I said in the original post about the Aloha manifesto, my thinking is part technology, part economics, and part values. So when I think of a management model I think of not only of what individual managers are doing but also what mechanisms (or ‘institutions’) exist in the organisation to ensure that the best management behaviours are the ones that are rewarded and encouraged. In other words, my definition of management actually touches on governance - that is, what managers the managers?

When I read the title ‘Managing with Aloha’ I immediately thought it was going to be a shallow effort with little to offer management science. Something similar the Fish! philosophy (sorry Pike Place Market). That is, harmless enough but adding little to the science of management or the theory of what makes organisations effective. But the content in 'Aloha' doesn’t appear to be like that. ‘Managing with Aloha’ really does sound like the mentor-in-a-book it claims to be - directed at people who have decided to personally become better managers. And why not stop there? My problem is that I want to change the world - and I’m sure Rosa does too. I’d hate to see a poor manager faking the ‘Managing with Aloha’ messages. Hopefully I can contribute in a way that means managers who are ‘Managing with Aloha’, 'Managing Without Them', and similarly-styled managers are the ones that get the resources.

So perhaps I would have been more interested in the book if it was called ‘Managing with unconditional love’. I at least would have understood the book more intuitively from that title. But I probably still wouldn’t have bought it! Or at least I would have had to buy it with a copy of ‘Business Leadership the Marine Corps Way’ just to keep my street credibility (And this is me talking. The only Australia who doesn’t love sport and who owns two Jewel albums).

Lastly, I don’t think I’m the only one who has misread the title. Take a look at the first comment at the bottom of Slacker Manager Bren’s post on the manifesto:

Updated: I have the manifesto open in front of me now and would also like to say I agree entirely that the ‘premature and faulty condescension’ Rosa sights around the whole leadership versus management issue is disturbing. For the same reasons but also a different one. I agree that we need both leaders and managers and they are different skills. However, this is also related to the expanded scope I apply to ‘management’. I say ‘What’s so special about leadership?’ as we are still left with the same problem: What mechanisms decide who are the genuine leaders? Without the right levels of transparency within the organisation the criteria isn’t always effectiveness...

ChangeThis - Managing With Aloha

2005-07-02T23:46:00.000-07:00

I haven’t read it all yet but the 'Managing with Aloha' ChangeThis manifesto is excellent. I was never interested in the book because I really don't like the title. But now I'm interested.

Actually, the MWT book is part technology, part economics, and part values. Aloha seems to cover the values side with the same approach I am.

Requirements Ridicle - the other requirements denial

2005-06-29T17:42:00.000-07:00

There is another type of requirements denial. I've noticed this in the past but I didn't know how common the phenomenon was. I think I'll call it Requirements Ridicule. It's probably an indication of more substantial communication issues between the client and the vendor but Requirements Ridicule is a symptom that is easy to spot.

Requirements Ridicule is when the client requests a requirement and the vendor, rather than try to under the drivers for the requirements and work through any communication issues, immediately interprets the requirement as the most ridiculous nonsensical self-contradicting statement that the client could have possible meant. The vendor then immediately says the requirement doesn’t make sense.

For most IT projects, where the client isn't an expert in requirements analysis or software development, this practice is entirely inappropriate. The client will still want the requirement to be met; but it's likely that it's either not the true requirement or has been misinterpreted by the vendor. As the vendor isn’t trying to determine the real requirement what is actually implemented will most likely be ridiculous.

Not only is the implementation of the requirement likely to be ridiculous but the vendor will be out to prove that the requirement is ridiculous. Developers will decide they are not responsible for implementing this requirement with any degree of quality because it is inherently ridiculous. In fact the long suffering developer (who in large projects isn't to blame because they didn't collect the requirements) will tell their manager that the requirement is probably not what the client really wants but the manager tell them to develop it anyway.

In the end, developers wont consider that deadlines apply to the implementation of this requirement because it is so inherently ridiculous that of course it's going to take a long time to implement! I'm not blaming developers here, by the way. I rarely condemn developers as they have already been condemned to a life of confusion and frustration working for bad IT managers.

A business transformation checklist

2005-06-28T06:38:00.000-07:00

From an unlikely source perhaps (the 'Army Enterprise Integration Oversite Office') we see an interesting high-level checklist for business transformation. The fact that it is in a circle doesn't really add any value but it's pretty. And it's a good starting point for planning a business transformation programme in a government organisation...

It also provides an interesting quote about where the risks might be for enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementations:

In a survey of CEOs who had recently implemented ERPs, 73% identified cultural and organization factors as the risks (high or very high risk), compared to 41% identifying business and process factors as carrying an equivalent risk, and 27% identifying the same level of risk for technology and system factors 22. These results reveal the importance of investing budget and resources for transformation management services for all phases of an ERP or CBPI program. An effective transformation management program increases the likelihood that a project will be completed successfully and anticipated benefits are delivered.

"Requirements Denial"

2005-06-23T22:05:00.000-07:00

"Because no-one takes an independent view of whether the user requirements have been correctly stated, and whether the project [as] built is going to satisfy them, many projects contain a huge but undefined and unrecognized element of risk. This doesn’t mean that they will all fail, but when they do, the results can be spectacular... This failure is known as 'requirements denial'"

Top-Consultant.com - Global Opportunities in Consulting

Darrell Norton's Blog [MVP] : Modeling Artifacts (different ways of modeling)

2005-06-22T08:14:00.000-07:00

Darrell Norton's Blog [MVP] : Modeling Artifacts (different ways of modeling): "Modeling Artifacts (different ways of modeling)

Scott Ambler has a great page that lists 35 modeling artifact types. The page links to summary descriptions of a wide variety of modeling artifacts. Each page describes the artifact, provides an example or two, and provides links to suggested resources. In this list he also indicates if the technique is simple enough for stakeholders to learn, whether it is usually a paper-based artifact, whether he suggests creating it on a whiteboard, and what type of software he would consider using to create and maintain it. "

Single point management #2

2005-06-22T06:37:00.000-07:00

I’ve never really been a fan of what I call single point management (SPM). This is where a manager thinks that just because they have responsibility for something that means that everything relating to that function must ‘go through’ or ‘be approved’ by them.

This approach is okay for taking control of a situation or assessing the current state but it doesn’t really do anything for the organisation or the advancement of management theory.

But my main problem with single point management isn’t that it inefficient and completely ignores advances in communication tools (or even legacy communication tools like CC’ing emails). My main problem with the single point management approach is its effect on governance.

I tend to define governance in very simple terms as ‘what managers the managers’. Under this definition of governance the single point management approach gives a manager the opportunity to avoid responsibility.

Take for example the case where a quality manager says ‘I’m the quality manager so all work products must come to me for review’. In the event that a defective product is released into production or to the marker the quality manager is, by definition, responsible. However, by using a single point management approach the quality manager will undoubtedly have a way of avoiding responsibility. The chances are that the quality manager can point to an instance where a work product was not submitted for review and approval. Alternatively, the quality manager can claim that they didn’t have time to review and approve all the work products being sent to them.

So while the single point management approach might be an effective strategy for the individual manager it is actually bad management. In this case the forces that are actually managing the organisation (eg. ‘what collaborating individuals share’) are those of poor governance.

Like I’ve said ‘Management by inspecting - Governance by sampling’. Managers must ensure they met their responsibilities without reviewing all work products.

Cities as Information Management; Management as Information Management

2005-06-18T20:39:00.000-07:00

I’m finally getting around to reading Steven Johnson’s Emergence. I understand I’m late to the party here but I figured Emergence would be something that I would agree with too much for me to learn anything from. I tend to agree with (though not always follow) the Jason Pettus Healthy Reading Pyramid (TM) in this regard.

Emergence has turned out to be very agreeable reading. Not just because I agree with most of it intuitively already, but because it’s so well written and the examples it uses feel classic and timeless.

There are also lots of things in the book that relate to ManageWithoutThem core principles. In fact, back when I was tinkering with these ideas from a management perspective, Johnson was actually writing his more general book on Emergence!

I want to quote a couple of paragraphs from Emergence. They are not the most interesting or enlightening but they are the most related to ManageWithoutThem. Specifically they relate to:

Organisational Usability. This come from idea that people need to use the resources provided by the organisation just as much as the organisation uses the people in the organisation. This applies to both people using the organisation externally and internally. Organisational usability takes the metaphor of good web design (for example) and apply them to the organisation. Use or frame, consistency of branding, ‘related items’ links, recommendations, etc all have a metaphor in actual organisation of companies.

Information management IS management. This refers to the fact that while we tend to trying to find new things that we need to manage all the time – i.e. WHAT we manage (people, risks, issues, knowledge, customers, supply chains, etc) - we don’t often change HOW we manage. ManageWithoutThem focuses exclusively on that transformation of HOW we manage. One important component of that is the need not to manage information but to manage BY information.

The passages below, taken from Emergence, touches on both of these ideas from the perspective of cities. They also show how Emergences is all about the same self-organising forces that drive the ManageWitouthThem model.

There are manifest purposes to a city – reasons for being that its citizens are usually aware of: they come for the protection of the walled city, or the open trade of the marketplace. But cities have a latent purpose as well: to function as information storage and retrieval devices. Cities were creating user-friendly interfaces thousands of years before anyone even dreamed of digital computers. Cities bring minds together and put them into coherent slots. Cobblers gather near other cobblers, and button makers near other button makers. Ideas and good flow readily within these clusters, leading to productive cross-pollination, ensuring that good ideas don’t die out in rural isolation…

And another from the same chapter...

The nieghtboorhood system of the city functions as a kind of user interface for the same reason that traditional computer interfaces do: there are limits to how much information our brains can handle at any given time. We need visual interfaces on our desktop computers because the sheer quantity of information store on our hand drives – not to mention on the Net itself – greatly exceeds the carrying capacity of the human mind. Cities are a solution to a comparable problem, both on the level of the collective and the individual. Cities store and transmit useful new ideas to the wider population ensuring that powerful new technologies don’t disappear once they’ve been invented. But the self-organizing clusters of neighbourhoods also serve to make cities more intelligible to the individuals who inhabit them – as we saw in the case of our time-travelling Florentine. The specialisation of the city makes it smarter, more useful for its inhabitants. And the extraordinary thing again is that this learning emerges without anyone being aware of it. Information management – subduing the complexity of a large-scale human settlement – is the latent purpose of a city, because when cities come into being their inhabitants are driven by other motives, such as safety or trade.

Emergence is recommended reading for any manager.

No ID for IT

2005-06-17T17:28:00.000-07:00

Australian IT - Tech courses in trouble (Simon Hayes, JUNE 14, 2005): "Bond University decided last week that the faculty of information technology had to go, and it was dumped with little fanfare and even less publicity."

I spend my working life implementing systems that support businesses or government organisations. Don't get me wrong - I do understand that information technology must support business or government activities. In the commercial world there isn't a lot of room for technology for technology’s sake. And although it’s rarely managed well, the business world already understands research and development, and commercialising innovation, so there is already a place for ‘pure’ IT in business.

However, the thought of universities removing the IT faculty altogether and making it 'part of business' is ridiculous and risky. Even before this move I have noticed a trend towards second year IT students being unable do perform simple programming tasks. University courses are already filling their information technology courses with business subject at the expense of IT knowledge.

There is tremendous room for improvement in IT courses. But giving up and simply teaching business or general management is not the answer. IT courses could benefit from aligning to the huge diversity of IT roles already within the IT industry that aren't addressed by their courses. There are few IT courses that will help you be a 'solution architect', 'delivery architect', 'enterprise architect', 'business analyst' (at a senior, business-industry-focused level), 'Programme Director' (with specific IT industry knowledge), etc...

The article I've linked to references a trend downwards in enrolments in IT courses. Other reports are showing an increasing demand for IT professionals. While this might the result of a phase shifted demand and supply cycle that isn't the only interpretation. My guess is that the already existing trends of dumbing down IT to include too much business or General Management for Dummies actually means that non-IT graduates are more valuable to the market.

If universities are serious about taking on the challenge of providing enough skilled resources to the IT industry they can't give in just because nobody wants to enrol in their courses. To met their obligations to society the universities need to ensure their courses are of a high enough quality to make students want to enrol. Part of a student’s assessment of quality is if the course gives them more of a chance of a fruitful IT career than hours of tinkering and a couple of IT contracts won on the strength of their web site.

Lastly, the strict discipline of separating (and yet aligning) responsibilities that is required to successfully implement information system is actually something that the business world could learn from. I call this discipline 'architecting' but even within IT circles references to 'architecture' tend to be taken to be technically focused. And this is even more reason to allow IT to have it's own faculty. We have no much to learn.

The Management Benefits of Telecommuting

2005-06-13T03:12:00.000-07:00

“We're empowering them to be as close to being their own boss as someone can be and still get their paycheque. So when that person begins self-supervising the manager now is relieved from a lot of the hour-by- hour, day-by-day direction. I mean they’re still in touch with these people by phone and email and occasionally in person but they really see a dramatic change in just the simple issue of how they spend their time during the week. Their spending less time fighting fires, less time running into people in the hallway, and more time doing the kinds of advanced planning and thinking that presumably draw on the skills that got them into that manager's job.

The other thing that I often here from managers – and this is kind of a revelation to them – even the most anti-telecommuting managers end up coming back saying that managing people from a distance has made them better managers of the people who are in the office. In the sense that all the management 101 skills that we've said for years managers should be doing. That is, setting standards, giving feedback, doing development plans – all that basic stuff that managers could avoid through the luxury of close contact - they now have to do when they are managing remotely. And once they begin doing it with their remote staffs they can't help but doing with their in-office staffs as well.

The double benefit is not only this notion of the gift of free time but they become more disciplined managers, and more effective managers of their office workers as well.”

Gil Gordon interviewed on ‘The Cranky Middle Manager Show #2’

Additional notes on the 'Mythical Management Team' book chapter

2005-06-11T21:44:00.000-07:00

Another problem with the idea of a management team is that they will determine rank order priority for activities within the organisation. This is actually perfectly reasonable behaviour and not necessarily harmful to the organisation. After all, some projects or business units will necessarily require priority at some point in their lifetime.

The problem is that the management team operates in terms of allocating ‘the best’ resources. They simply don’t have the time or inclination to focus on any others. That is because conflict in resource allocation will tend to be over the best resources. The management team is unlikely to be able to make as accurate decisions around fitness of resources – that is fitness to purpose.

So the management team, by placing projects or business units in ordinal priority will tend to move the best resources from assignment to assignment with little regard to finding the best fit for resources. One outcome of this are that the best resources tend to develop behaviours that match their transient work life (including ignoring important feedback loops). There is a second more damaging outcome.

The second result of an organisation which focuses on allocation of the best resources – which is the natural result of a ‘cohesive management team’ – is that resource allocation will tend to be at the expense of other projects or business units.

You might say that this is always the case. I start this book with the observation that doing one thing is necessarily not doing another. This is the opportunity cost lesson from economics. However, economics also teaches us about comparative advantage.

So resources should be put to use in the work that they are comparatively more effective than other resources. Applying ‘the best’ to each situation is like assuming that the man on the island (in the above description of comparative advantage) doesn’t have an incentive to work with the second man. In reality the organisation will perform better if the concept of the best resources is replaced with the concept of ‘the best fit’.

As an aside, the focus on the best resources is actually the result of personal risk management behaviours which are developed by the management team. By focusing on the best resources there is a change that the most appropriate work allocation wont occur. It is also likely (as I’m trying to prove) that the organisation will suffer. However, the risk that an individual manager might make an allocation which is seriously flawed is actually much lower. After all, the best resources should be able to perform better than average in most situations within a particular industry.

The problem is a management team cannot make these types of decisions day-to-day. But if they are forced to work as a team what else should they do. In fact, if you are trying to be a team player and you are in a management team you need to be willing to share your resources. Even if you know the that the best fit is for a resource to stay with you it doesn’t matter. You must be seen to give up your best resources for the higher priority problem. This is another case where management fads such as ‘teamwork’ work for everybody except groups of managers.

Priorities change. This is true because of legitimate changes in the competitive environment. But I have a feeling that there is another force at work. Priorities change because as inappropriate resource allocation continue other projects / business units are put at risk...

It all comes together with leadership and ethics

2005-06-04T04:40:00.000-07:00

In an unmanaged environment the difference between leadership and dissent is a matter of position. In an unmanaged organisation there is no mechanism to tell the difference between a good manager and a successful manager. Without good management there is no ethical way to distinguish between competent and incompetent employees.

Create or be created!

2005-05-29T07:20:00.000-07:00

Even before reading The Fountainhead I half understood the importance of trying to create rather than just consume. The book, and Ayn Rand’s philosophies in general however, turn this into almost a religion or a least a moral obligation. Her relentless pontificating, coupled with some inconsistencies in her life and her complete failure to include any happily married couples with children in her fiction, ultimately stopped me from believing that her philosophy was exactly the easy answer that everybody needed to know.

This is old news. It was always difficult for me to not have all the answers to everything. I really do wish I knew it all. I’ve come to instead be content with a level of uniqueness in what I do know. I don’t know many of the things ‘everybody should know’. I don’t know last week’s football results, and I don’t remember the details of history (though I do recall the dynamics). I also think that everybody should know some of the things that I know - but I’m learning to accept that they don’t have to. Even when I’m right.

But today I remembered how important is it to create. This is a lesson from The Fountainhead (and life in general) that should not be ignored. To illustrate this, think of your favourite television programme, movie, play, book, billboard advertisement, brand, or song. Think of the joy it gives you and how much you receive from making a connection with it.

Now consider all the joy you receive from consuming those items and imagine the even greater joy you would receive if you knew you had created them yourself. Imaging being able to reflect on a thousand people who were uplifted by your work when they took a chance to rest and watch your movie, read your book, or work in the organisation you created.

Human beings are actually born to create. I fact, I don’t believe they can help themselves – they must create. And this is where a very interesting problem arises. If you don’t create you will become bored with your life. This has happened to me so I know it to be true. If you don’t create then your life itself will become your canvas.

Many people will tell you that using your life as a canvas is the pinnacle of existence. They will tell you that your life should be a drama; and that this drama is more important than any desire you might have for simple joy and happiness. But using your life as a canvas is the final sacrifice of a human being desperate to create.

Using your life a canvas is the last resort when you have dried up your well of creativity and have nothing left within yourself to inspire you. This is what happens when you are empty and need a drama to kick-start your creative energies again.

In reality, it may be the best way to kick-start your creative energies. Which is why it is so popular and why it is proclaimed as a general purpose cure-all for all of life’s troubles. But it’s not the only way and it can also be an addictively simply solution. Much like Ayn Rand’s childless philosophy.

With your life as your creative canvas their will be all of the exhilaration of a great novel. But there will also be all of the tragedy and all of the loss. In fact the simple quite pleasures of life and love may be lost to this adventure. With this path you will never love until it is too late. Though people will envy your adventure you will only be envied by those who create nothing. Those who have chosen to create on other canvases will not even know of your existence.

(I have a favourite poem. It’s by Matthew Arnold and it’s called ‘The Second Best’. I think it relates to this post. But I can’t find it on the Internet so it almost doesn’t exist.)

Blogging on the margin

2005-05-02T04:07:00.000-07:00

I find it interesting to note the types of blog posts that I feel like writing as I get more and more and more interested in work. There have been times when I have had very little to do at work (that I was interested in) and blogging (or prior to my blog, simply the type of writing which now ends up as a blog entry) seemed very important. Blogging seemed like something I should be making time for. Something I should be putting aside time for regardless of any other goals I might have.

Now I've found something more interesting to do (eg. fix up a project at work and learn how to effectively fix up future projects) I'm blogging on the margin. Blogging actually interfers with the other things I want to get done so I need to make a choice. While I used to write (or a least draft) a blog entry when what I really wanted to do was talk to somebody, I don't have time for that now.

It makes me think that the best blog writing probably comes from having something to say. More importantly, the best blogging is actually a commentary on a life outside blogging.

Introducing Requirements Management

2005-04-11T09:30:00.000-07:00

Tonight I'm thinking about 'requirements management' for work. I have to introduce a requirements management discipline to an existing project. I get the impression that requirements management is being seen a primarily about change control; or rather reducing scope creep. But I know that requirements management is so much more than that.

Requirements management is about coordinating the transition ofÂ high-level requirements into detailed requirements.Â It's about managing the inherent uncertainty of requirements specification and coordinating the transition from uncertainty to specifications (or in low risk or repeatable cases - directly to code).Â

I'm trying to working out the main theme I need to introduce the discipline into the organization.

What has requirements?

A stakeholder (need)
The project (scope)
A component of the solution (detailed requirements)
A physical application (such as a package; requires platforms and infrastructure)
A platform (such as .NET; requires infrastructure)

You see, it's not just the project which has requirements.Â End-to-end (and layer-through-layer) requirements management includes the allocation of specific requirements to specific components of the solution architecture.Â This hooks the requirements management process into the project's design management, specification management (including modeling), and architecture management processes.

What types of requirements are there?

Detailed requirements
High-level requirements
Unmanaged requirements
Managed requirements
In scope requirements
Out of scope requirements
Positive requirements
Negative requirements
etc

Some requirements management tenets (these do or shouldÂ always remain true)

All requirements generated outside the project are 'unmanaged' until they are assessed
Without requirements management no separate assessment and requirements analysis can occur
Requirements cannot be assess without a requirements management process; in such cases all requirements must be simply assessed
Detailed requirements are the result of requirement analysis and must be managed
Detailed requirements must apply to a specific architecture component (see MWT Book on 'Detail without Context')
Specifications are not requirements
Specifications are output from design processes not requirements analysis processes (if the design process was unmanaged then the specification is of poor quality)

Specification of the external behaviour of the system (such as 'functional specifications') is not requirements management. These specifications tend to be an incomplete record of an unmanaged design process.

What does it mean for something to be managed?

You need to know how far through it you are
You know to know where you have made compromises
You need to know what you don't know (map uncertainty)
You need to be able to quickly size changes in inputs

What's important... to you?

2005-04-06T09:29:00.000-07:00

Bill Jensen forwarded me some extracts from his new book 'What is your life's work?'. You can read them too - they are available here.

The book contains many letters Bill has gathered over the years. The letters are the output of a meme where you write a letter to your loved ones which expresses with 'absolute conviction and clarity' what is important to you - 'your life's work'. But these aren't just letters about finding some ideal job or having a positive attitude at work. It's possible to fake the trappings of the dedicated employee. These letters aren't about being successful at work. These letters are about finding out what is important to you and doing that.

Another important theme that comes up in the extracts is the importance of doing less at work. The obligation to do less at work, in fact. There are two sides to this obligation which are really the same thing. Bill generally appears to come from the position that you should be doing less of what doesn't matter. He also touches on the position which I read into Slacker Manager's philosophy which is that you should be doing less as a mechanism forÂ improving your productivity. This is the position which I tend to take.

Reducing the amount of effort it takes to achieve the same result is the very definition of productivity. Bill appears to haveÂ always been an advocate of this type of philosophy and gives compelling advice on how to it create slack (in the sense of free time) in your work day through improved simplicity. In that space between your increased personal responsibility and when take on additional responsibilities what exactly should you be doing? With his new book Bill provides some interesting answers to that question.

How things can be related

2005-04-02T08:27:00.000-08:00

Erik Benson has created a list of how things can be related.Â This must already exist somewhere but it's still worth thinking about.Â To his list I would also add 'contains' (I would also rename some of his items).Â These are exactly the types of sterotypes which would be included in the visualisation tool pleaded for here.

Short men

2005-03-29T20:07:00.000-08:00

This is funny. It's a capture from a political video downloaded from http://www.libertarian-tv.com/an_american_revolution_ref.mov. It clearly shows the candidate telling a photographer to tilt the camera so he doesn't look too short.

Now I realise that neither of these guys is particularly short. But it amuses me greatly that this appears as part of an inspirational montage at the end of the video. Most candiates would surely prefer to show a bit of extra baby kissing than this tilt-the-camera moment.

By the way, in addition to the great comedy this guy has lots of good stuff to say. Worth watching.

Blythe

2005-03-29T02:42:00.000-08:00

Blythe
Originally uploaded by bonny1212.

This is a very creepy picture of a doll. Almost as creepy as the dolls in the 'Dolls that are actually ex-babysitters' episode of the new Twilight Zone series they show at strange hours of the night here.

What this really is is a test of the Flickr to Blogger feature. Works like a treat.

Slacker manager talks about the license to manage

2005-03-01T07:25:00.000-08:00

Referring to 'Slacker Manager's discussion of a HBR article on the possibility of making management a licensed profession. I'd argue for other advances in corporate governance before I argued for a 'license to manage'.

Other real professions such as accountants, lawyers, and doctors successfully use systems like licensing because they generally operate small firms or practices. Managers proper, and in particular those at the executive level, face greater resource coordination and allocation challenges than those professionals running a practice.

Executives take responsibility for large pools of resources which they often don't directly control. This is a challenge - and I would suggest that the issue of the best way to do this hasn't yet been solved. In fact, I would argue that the way we look at management is all wrong. I prefer to think of management as a 'technology' and not a 'profession' at all.

As discussed in the original HBR article, the idea of a management license relies on a 'Common body of knowledge resting on well-developed, widely accepted theoretical base'. I've long argued that the management 'profession' doesn't yet have this body of knowledge. For one, I've argued that the time for firms to be seen as an isolated command economy within the the greater market economy is well and truly over. That organisations continue to operate as command economies internally, when all around us the failures of such a system at the level of the nation has been exposed, is a blunder of cosmic proportions.

What's more, the specific failings of command economies are also interesting. Hayek's 'Road to Serfdom' illustrates well that in such a system 'the worst rise to the top'. Now I have nothing against successful people. In fact, I have a great respect for those that reach success through creating value and serving customer desires - that is, through perfectly legitimate means. But the driver for managerial licenses appears to be the rise of the worst. Where this has been the case it is more a reflection of failures in corporate governance than poor individual management. What were these people on top? is a more important question than Why did they behave how they did once they got there? Though both are interesting.

Part of this is the confusion between the success of an individual manager with their effectiveness. In the absence of good corporate governance an effective manager is equated with a successful manager.

One of the implied benefits of a management license is the ability for the license to improve the actions and behaviors of individual managers. This benefit logically can't be realised if the position of power implied by the very concept of management means that behaviors aren't effected.

Benchmarking 'Mankind When Unmanaged'

2005-02-23T07:24:00.000-08:00

David Maister presents the following figures in his talks (available here). They are a guess at categorising types of people as they are currently behaving within a professional service firm:

Dynamos 23%
Cruisers 60%
Losers 17%

He presents his own definitions but the only one that isn’t particularly intuitive is his definition of ‘Loser’ where he recognises that we can all be losers at some type in our lives.

I would suspect that many people would suggest that this is a good guess of the percentages in each category for their organisation.

The really interesting thing is that David is, during this talk, is trying to make a ‘case for management’. He says ‘those numbers are probably about right for mankind when unmanaged’. So if these figures seem about right for your organisation then you a performing like an unmanaged organisation! Your management function (nothing personal here – jus the system itself) is not meeting the case for management presented by David.

Using the analogy of giving up his own smoking and over-eating habits David says ‘If you leave me to find the energy solely on my own the odds that I will do it purely because it’s logical and purely through self-discipline are in fact quite low’.

What an interesting question. How does your management system compare against the benchmark of ‘mankind when unmanaged’?

Structure and risk

2005-02-21T07:23:00.000-08:00

Examine a standard project management policy around risk management and you are likely to find reference to a risk management process which looks a lot like this:

Invite stakeholders to a risk management kick-off meeting
Brainstorm risks and record in a risk register
Categorise the risks using attributes such as Likelihood, Impact, and Owner
Perform simple analysis which (usually) plots impact and likelihood to get a risk exposure
Aggregate all of the risks into a single 'bubble chart' which gives a the projects risk profile

Now there is nothing inherently wrong with any of those activities (with the possible exception that the last 2 steps are more about analysis than management). Project management needs to be both generic and actionable regardless of the context. The above activities are certainly that. There value, like most of the project management process, lies in the fact that they allow the project manager to act - even when faced with uncertainty. This is the most powerful part of the project management discipline which consistently delivers value. Many of the other benefits of project management derive value more from other skills of the individual project manager rather than the project management process itself. However, even the value of enabling action is limited. This is action at the personal level and does not necessarily equate to effectiveness at the organisational (read ‘project’ in this context) level.

Back to our generic risk management process, the problem with this approach is the lack of a reference architecture. The entire process relies on risks being identified by somebody. This brainstorming part of the process, which the rest of the process is based on, is actually completely subjective. Risks exist as inherent attributes of the endeavor which is the project. The risk management process must be able to find these risks - not simply focus on the activities and analysis which occurs after they are identified.

Structure, both organisational and the methodological structure, is actually the first step towards effective risk management. A collaboration architecture, or rather the generative process which ensures the true 'delineated shared understanding' which defines an architecture, ensures that risks embedded in all components are examined. More importantly, the collaboration architecture acts as a reference architecture to show where stakeholders haven't been identified or analysis hasn’t been performed. What this amounts to is a better understanding of the areas of uncertainty - an important component of an effective risk management process.

You might suggest that other parts of the project management process provide the structural components which support the risk management process. For example, before you hold your risk management kick-off meeting you have ‘defined scope’ and ‘documented roles and responsibilities’. The only problem with this is that, in the absence of a reference architecture, the project management discipline by itself doesn’t help you identify the right scope, or the right roles and responsibilities. The correctness of the components becomes a quality issue – not process quality in this case, but product quality. The product being the ‘scope’ or the ‘roles and responsibilities’. But unfortunately, within current management thinking, once an activity becomes a management activity it quickly become immune to the organisational checks and balances which naturally improve the quality of that activity (see ‘Management with an uncontested value proposition’ in the MWT Book).

Of course, it's also not all bad news that risk identification in the original process is subjective. You, if you wish, can look at risk management as providing a complete risk profile of the project. Alternatively, you can see the risk management process focusing on actionable risks. If nobody is identifying the hidden risks then they probably don't have an effective strategy for dealing with them (I say dealing with them and not 'mitigating' as this is only one approach to dealing with risk. Others might include 'ignore' which is definitely not mitigation). If you don't have an effective way of dealing with the risk then why manage it?

The problem only comes when you aggregate the data. If you presume that this is a complete picture of the risks you are wrong - unless you present with a reference architecture. Aggregation of incomplete data must be performed carefully. Without a reference architecture the areas of uncertainty (unknown data) will be lost in the aggregation. Where aggregation is striving to produce a complete ‘big picture’ of the data it often closes up the areas of uncertainty in the name of maintaining a cohesive structure in the presentation. To avoid this the presentation must be cohesively structured before the data is overlaid onto it. This often doesn’t mean pre-structuring the representation – rather evaluating the structural goodness separate to the data.

All methodologies embody some world-view of where the risks exist. A customised, comprehensive, and task-specific methodology - and by this I don't mean a cumbersome and monolithic methodology - can actually reduce the need to go back to fundamentals for all risks. After all, task-specific methodologies are developed in response to known risk indicators inherent in the task. Unfortunately, by the time most methodologies are 'rolled out' all sense of the drivers behind the components of the methodology are lost. In effect, the process of pre-preparing methodologies disconnects the methodology from the risk mitigation drivers which formed it. This in turn causes another cross-discipline disconnect - this time between the domain specialists promoting the methodology and the project management perspective.

New Blog Engine

2005-02-18T07:22:00.000-08:00

My web hosting provider now provides a free Blog engine (based on WordPress, I believe). I've converted over to this engine so I have comments and trackbacks. The old entries remain at: http://www.managewithoutthem.com/blog/home.asp.

Update: I've since converted everything to Blogger. As you can see.

No rugby jokes, please

2005-02-17T07:21:00.000-08:00

I was lucky enough to attend a presentation on Scrum by Joseph Pelrine in Sydney last night. More importantly, I was lucky enough to have dinner and beers with Joseph and some other people from OOSIG afterwards. A big thanks to Alex for organising this!

I found some interesting similarities between Joseph's presentation of Scrum and my ManageWithoutThem philosophy. This being my only real experience with Scrum I don't have any idea if I was connecting with the Scrum process itself or something more that Joseph bought to the presentation. He certainly did bring much more so I suspect the latter.

Specific comparisons with the MWT model include

Joseph introduced Scrum with a brief discussion about the differences between Empirical processes and Directive processes. Of course, every time I try to explain MWT I start with observation that economics recognises that there are two different types of economies, planned economies and market economies. If you understand the differences in both cases I believe you'll agree they are different in the same ways.
Joseph used but never never really defined this concept of 'simple design'. I presume this is because I was already supposed to know what this was about from eXtreme Programming. I suspect it is similar to the MWT concept of Organisational Usability. I don't really like the word 'simple' because it implies that simplicity is something you decide and then do – rather than the result of a process (understood or otherwise) that you must constantly evaluate the output of to determine if it is simple. To many times I have seen too many IT managers hide behind 'I just want a simple solution' when what they are really saying is 'I have nothing to contribute'. I like the organisational usability analogy better because it begins to give a criteria for simplicity.
A general discussion Uncertainty and Agreement and there relationship to complexity. I'd like to hear more about Joseph's views of slide xx of his presentation. When I saw the slide I immediately thought that each activity would have a real position on the graph and a position dependent on how accurately the real position was perceived. If activities were managed as though there was less uncertainty and/or more agreement than there actual was then this would push that activities position on the graph in the direction of chaos. Joseph went many steps further and described 'a whole factual' of positions. It appears he had much more to teach about the dynamics within the 'complex' part of the graph than the big empty yellow mass implied. Excellent! Give me more!
Joseph defended specialisation. I've often defended specialisation (I have a chapter heading, if nothing else, called 'In Defence of Specialisation') and consider it a sorry state for the science of management if it has to resort to 'I wish everybody was a generalist' when the whole point of management is the coordination of different specialists!
I need the slides to continue this comparison. I'll post an updated entry when somebody posts the slides.

I felt three connected responses to Joseph's presentation. Firstly, when I recognised some of the ideas he was presenting as similar to my own I was a little disappointed that I wasn't quite as original as I thought. I sometimes feel like the John Nash depicted in A Beautiful Mind – driving himself mad in the search for a truly original idea (I also like a quote that my memory attributes to David Weinberger when he describes himself as 'an idiot savant without the savant part'). As I get back into writing the MWT book I really don't want to be held up by this kind of thinking.

Secondly, I felt vindicated. It was actually nice to know that I was right about a number of things. I've been struggling lately to continue to live under the delusion that there is value in the hideous and tedious processes that large IT consulting companies use to develop software. I actually already knew that these processes were not the optimal way to create software. However, I was willing to allow the process to keep occurring all around me. What's more, I was allowing it to exist. Often I would find myself preparing the immense plans, misguided and ambiguous functional specifications, wasting developer's time even, to produce a set of documents that 'fit the process'. All the time knowing that this wasn't how the software was going to be built.

I was, at least, honest enough to realise that a whole underground process was going to need to be developed for each project I was on. The process that would actually get the software developed. Often, some of my highly paid colleagues wouldn't admit to this. They thought the functional specifications were actually getting the software written. They thought that if only the plans were perfect next time then the software would be better. Be denying that the process was broken they were effectively allowing huge amounts of project effort to go unmanaged. They were never going to take control of the system in any confident and effective way because they were ignoring what was actually occurring in the system.

Thirdly, and lastly, I realised that there was a kind of zen-truth to all of these ideas. When Joseph started talking about the 5-6 things you can do to try and change a complex systems – something that intrigued me but went a little over my head at the time (he could probably see this in my eyes but was polite enough not to notice) – I was instantly reminded of Christopher Alexander's 15 properties, generative sequences, and structure preserving transformations.

This last realisation brought it all together for me. When you are heading towards a truth perhaps you shouldn't expect it to turn out to be a truly original idea. The truth should ultimately be familiar to us and connected to everything we do. This is partially the reason that certain people can come to the same universal conclusions through the mastery of different things. Joseph doesn't think of himself as a Smalltalk developer any more. He says he is exploring organisational complexity – or complexity in general. The fact that people can still 'mistake' him for a guru-status Smalltalk developer is a testament to the intellectual place he finds himself and the universal truths he has uncovered and is learning to incorporate into his behaviours and life.

Of course, I only spoke to Joseph for a couple of hours so I'm not even really talking about him. But isn't that the whole point...?

Believing their own PowerPoint

2005-02-16T07:20:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately, large bloated IT consulting companies have no interest in developing software cost-effectively. Now it's important to understand that I'm not proposing that there is some sort of conspiracy to make software development projects cost more than they have to. It doesn't have to be that IT consulting companies are purposefully developing methodologies that make software development take longer. It is simply, in the absence of transparency and competition, the companies that cost the most are the ones that will be the most successful. Basically, they'll make the most money.

Again, I'm all for companies making more money. I don't actually have the chip on my shoulder about so-called corporate greed that so many people appear to have. All I'm saying is that in the absence of competition (or more importantly – diversity) and transparency there is no incentive for big bloated IT consulting companies to convert to more efficient methodologies for software development.

Now this is a worrisome state for the IT industry to be in. But it's even more worrisome when you consider that for a young generation of talented (or rather intelligent) recruits into IT consulting these methodologies are the only way of developing software they have ever know! Born and breed in an environment which sells the approach through a bastardised definition of risk management and fear mongering about software failures, these talented graduates learn to justify and sell the approach until they actually start to believe their own PowerPoint presentations. All the while, by ignoring the alternatives, they are paying only lip service to risk management and quality by turning these processes into a disconnected series of reviews and lists.

Real software quality, at reduced costs, is available to organisations through improved software processes. Monolithic software processes which require feats of great prediction and hundred's of hours of b-grade consulting to implement are not the answer. These process success only in ensuring value is delivered as late in the process as possible.

MWT Book Extract - Broken Collaboration Contracts

2005-02-15T07:19:00.000-08:00

Part of one section of the MWT book is available below as a pdf:

MWT Book - Extract - Broken Collaboration Contracts

I will be taking a month off very soon where I will be able to progress the book further. I have, unfortunately, been too busy to write over the past 12 months.

The Organising Power of Science Fiction

2005-02-14T07:18:00.000-08:00

I'm currently reading Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe and it has inspired me. He has me thinking of the management potential of good science fiction writing and the vision it presents.

A few months ago when I was reading the doctor's first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, I thought I'd discovered him. However, he appears to be gathering quite a following in science fiction circles and publications. This is much like when I thought I'd discovered on-line journal writer, author, and sometimes science fiction fan Jason Pettus a few years ago at a time when the AvantGo version of his on-line journal had over 10,000 subscribers!

I used to read science fiction as a teenager. I bought more of it than I actually read, mainly because I'd often buy a whole series only to be disappointed by the first few pages of the first book. I recall many types of science fiction; but much of it offered no more than the combination of some other genre with new technology and a slightly exotic location. Western with laser guns, soap opera on another planet or in a space-station, love story with tragic death born of alien invasion. That sort of thing.

Cory Doctorow doesn't write that sort of science fiction. Cory writes pure vision. He reminds me of Stanislaw Lem but I don't really recall the details of Lem (it's been 15 years!) so I fear I might just be comparing them based on a generic 'goodness' rather than any specific qualities. Lem is worth checking out regardless.

Back to Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe. My Palm e-book reader tells me that I'm only 17% into the book and already I'm intrigued by the novel's vision of the future. In particular, in the novel's incorporation current and evolving technologies into new social structures. It also has a focus on technology offering competitive advantage at a individual level.

You can feel (though no explicit mention has been made of them yet) the micro-payments swishing about as intelligent agents query information, verify documents, and raise alerts - all from wearable personal computers. You call also see evidence of technological 'arms races' as individuals and organisations each use increasingly technical solutions to counter the other's technologies.

All this amounts to a powerful vision. Management has been fond of vision for years now - but corporations are sadly lacking in technical and organisational (and organising) visions.

Why not outsource visioning? Perhaps Doctorow (who is already actively looking for alternative ways to grow rich from his writing), and other authors of his caliber, can hire themselves out to write novels which explore the potential of a corporation's products and services. Or even, after spending a little time hidden within the corporation's corridors ï¿½ acting as an employee, perhaps ï¿½ write a vision of how the corporation might operating internally or with its partners.

I'm not talking about propaganda - not even marketing - but a vision. Perhaps the vision completely destroys the corporations value proposition. Or perhaps two alternative visions are offered. There is no implication that the novel would be something you would want to show the shareholders. Should be a vision in the sense that it is a horizontal organising mechanism - a vision in the practical sense of an enabler of collaboration and organisation.

Interestingly, between the time I downloaded EST and the time I started reading it and typing this blog post, it appears that Vodaphone has made reference to the novel in one of its market-facing publications. Vodaphone obviously already see some of the commercial potential of Cory's vision.

Doctorow is already exploring the question of 'Eastern Standard Tribe coming true?' on his web site. He is also well aware of the need to experiment with alternative models for embracing and exploiting his creative talent ï¿½ offering multiple distribution options for his work, including free Creative Commons licensed download being part of this. What he also needs to explore, and what people will pay big dollars for, is the potential for his writing to actually create, rather than just predict, the future.

Update (01/07/2005): I've been feeling kinda silly giving Cory advice (even if not directly). His name keeps coming up all over the place. He's certainly been doing a hell of a lot more than I suggested - and he's been doing it for years!

Mindmaps

2005-02-09T07:17:00.000-08:00

Alternate Definition of Management #532

2005-02-06T07:16:00.000-08:00

Management is the art of deciding which decisions don't require consensus.

Happy Birthday Ayn Rand

2005-02-01T07:15:00.000-08:00

Article on Mises.org.

Falicious planning

2005-02-01T07:14:00.000-08:00

I believe there is an old Dilbert comic that shows Dilbert's pointy-haired boss asking the development team to 'design everything you can think of so I can choose which one I want'.

This is the problem when management is seen as simply decision making (or worse, as deal making) rather than allocating scarce resources and assuming responsibility.

Of course, everybody knows this. Everybody can say they are pragmatic. However, there are still many fallacious arguments made disguised as pragmatic management.

While I see management activities and expertise as something that is inherently task-specific I still tackle every management challenge as a general management challenge. Part of this is recognising when planning is being faked.

Take an example that I often hear from test managers. Test managers try and tell me that they will prioritorise which test cases they are going to produce and/or execute by listing all of the possible test conditions that could be tested and then assigning a priority to each one. On other occations the test manager doesn't even intend to take responsibility for the prioritorisation of the test conditions. In these caes business stakeholders are asked (after they have already prioritorised features and other requirements) to do the prioritorisation for the test manager.

Now the problem with the extreme version of this approach ï¿½ where business stakeholders do the actual prioritorisation ï¿½ is that it gives up responsibility for testing. Give up responsibility and your really can't say you're managing anything.

The more subtle problems come from the specifics of the testing problem domain. Testing is one of those unbounded activities that you can devote as much or as little effort as you like to. Within that there are also extremes of effectiveness with regards to that effort which essensially represents the quality of your testing.

By taking a brute-force approach to prioritorising the testing effort you are ignoring the test design process. You are still designing test cases ï¿½ but you are not tracking (managing) the effort. Worse still you are taking a 'default' design which is the default result of the unmanaged process you have ignored. If this is your approach there is no guarantee that your actions will result in higher quality activity than would have been performed if you were there.

The problem is that this behaviour doesn't have to be on purpose or malicious to occur - it simply has to be the behavior encouraged by the organisation.

Truest thing I've read on TechRepublic for a while...

2004-11-15T07:10:00.000-08:00

Interesting comments on IT project planning appear here.

And my reply (Here and below):

I agree that software engineering, all the way down to coding, is largely a design activity. In fact, even if we mature enough to be able to construct systems from components that 'construction' will still be largely a design activity.

The interesting thing about design processes are that they aren't actually all about requirements. People tend to miss this. I agree with the idea that software projects should be driven by business needs.

However, I don't agree that IT project management should actually be driven by requirements. The reason IT projects should be defined by business objectives is so that scope changes don't have to be made for every functional requirements change. i.e. you define a project using business objectives so that the project can take responsibility for the proper gathering, management, structuring, and formalisation of requirements.

I'll say that again. You want to take MORE responsibility for functional requirements of the system. It's insane to think that you are reducing risk by demanding a 'detailed' set of requirements before you start an IT project. All you are doing is reducing your control over how business objectives are met by technology. Success will depend on control.

An approach which relies on 'detailed' business requirements also makes it difficult to implement higher order enterprise IT architectures which use leveraged infrastructure and component-based application architectures. Much of the work involved in implementing software solutions is in how components relate to one another across all levels of the solution; it's not all about meeting one business context (this is 'necessary but not sufficient').

Lastly - back to the design focus of software engineering processes. More mature engineering disciplines such as that used for build environment construction have realised that architecting solutions does not just mean meeting requirements.

Christopher Alexander's Oregon Experiment basically concluded that a solution which is isomorphic with requirements is inadequate.

Again, DC_Guy, well put!

2004-11-11T13:44:00.000-08:00

You're really better off going to:

http://www.managewithoutthem.com/blog/

Anybody think in graphs?

2004-11-11T07:09:00.000-08:00

Welkin: A General-Purpose RDF Browser... is yet another meaningless graph-based viewer.

Nobody I know thinks in graphs. My wife reminded me last night that I only really know about 4 people (and to be fair a couple of them might actually think in graphs) but I'm pretty sure *I* don't think in graphs.

What I really want to see is a browser with some sort of 'plug-in's for relationship type visualisations. The basic relationships I would expect to come out of the box are 'Contains', 'Is followed by', 'Below', 'Peer'.

The next feature required is to be able to lock down some visualisations and relationships. For example I might define a framework containing a number of locked down visualisations (say some boxes to put stuff in) and some locked down relationships (give everything with a 'Type' attribute of 'Platform' a 'Contains' relationship joint to the locked down Platform visualisation I have placed on the framework).

The brower could then produce something a little more meaningful. Contradictions within rules could be shown with movement (alternate between the two contradicting relationships and redraw).

In the above example I could throw data at the framework and it could sort it. Then I could overlay the graph-based representation as used by this Welkin thingie. Because items would already be constrained I'd be able to actually get some meaningful information from the damn visualisation!!!

Innovation and Methods

2004-09-15T09:08:00.000-07:00

Industries have standards. Professions have methods. Management is all about coordinating the activities of separate individuals to meet shared goals. Simply ignoring the standards and methods those individuals are familiar with shouldn't be mistaken for management innovation.

Book Cover

2004-09-01T09:05:00.000-07:00

The book cover has been designed. Still plenty of work left arranging all the words inside. Click here to see the cover.

Democratic management?

2004-08-15T09:04:00.000-07:00

Some may ask why can't a manager be like a politician? What they are asking is for political democracy to replace traditional managerialism. They want managers to be elected. Ignoring, for a moment, the fact that electing the particular person who will perform the functions of management doesn't, in itself, solve the problem of determining what the right functions are, let's examine this idea futher.

Those that argue for democracy of this sort within organisations forget to consider the possibility of being in the minority. In an election for the leadership of a country it is possible for up to 50% of the population to disagree with the choice of leadership. Under some election rules an even greater percentage may in fact disagree with the ultimate winner.

What allows such a system to work is not the process of allowing the people to vote. Rather, it is the fact that the government does not have total power ï¿½ regardless of who wins. It is tools such as constitutions, which limit the power of government, that allow such a democratic system to work.

What organisations lack is not a voting system; rather these other institutions which form a democratic society. Organisations, with few exceptions, have no constitution, no free-press, no opposition party, etc. When combined with the absence of any organisational price system the absence of these components do more harm than the absence of democratically elected managers.

In fact, democratically elected managers would, in the absence of these missing components, be granted a dangerous legitimacy. They would be free to perform any function ï¿½ whether good or bad for the organisation ï¿½ on the grounds that they were elected officials.

Sound familiar?

There's not conspiracy (#2); Aka 'valuing managers on the margin'

2004-08-11T09:03:00.000-07:00

Management is not an evil thing. MWT is not anti-management. In fact, in half a MWT organisation there is more risk than in a normal organisation (or a full MWT organisation, of course). If you see MWT as risky you are only seeing half of the MWT solution.

Traditional management tasks have been designed with one purpose in mind. They have been designed to allow somebody no more competent than any other person to manage other people.

In any other situation the cost of managers would be too high. If managers were valued 'on the margin', such that any particular manager (as opposed to management skills in general) was more highly valued than an other manager, management costs for an organisation would simply be too high.

In a (full) MWT organisation managers really are valued on the margin. Management tasks aren't valued in themselves; so good and bad managers are more likely to be distinguished. Once the organisation can make this distinction managers can be paid differing salaries.

The problem with half a MWT organisation is simply the risk that the organisation cannot yet properly distinguish between good and bad managers and yet there is a wide range of management salaries.

Beware of being half a MWT organisation...

Markets within Firms

2004-07-10T09:02:00.000-07:00

There is some discussion on markets within firms at Marginal Revolution.

This isn't really the types of markets I was thinking of. This is workers trading futures contracts on product sales, product success etc. In essence creating a market to gather information already contained within the organisation.

Presumably, traditional managers would then act on that information. So the approach is still intervention-based. The actual coordination mechanism within the firm doesn't really change. I'm looking at markets within firms that actually act as the coordination mechanism.

Still interesting though... As most things at MarginalRevolution are.

Absent Praise and Abortive Clarity

2004-06-18T07:09:00.000-07:00

I've just finished reading Richard Dawkins' The Blind Watchmaker. I must have been reading this book on and off for about 5 years. Each time I've moved houses it gets packed away in a box somewhere and I don't get back to it for months. I'm notorious for taking years to read books anyway and at this time can count no less than 12 bookmarks within even the small selection of my books that currently have a place on my shelves.

My discontinuous wander through Dawkins' fascinating book has probably furthered the effect on my thinking it has had even beyond the considerable influence of its brilliance. I thoroughly enjoy Dawkins' written style. I don't know the nature of his friendship with Douglas Adams; though I could speculate upon the qualities that drew them together. But even without such speculation their friendship seems to just feel right considered only on the strength of the pleasure of reading their written works.

Enough of this absent praise! What I'd really like to acknowledge are two important contributions Dawkins' books have made on my theory of organisation. Dawkins argues in The Blind Watchmaker that the 'unconscious, automatic, blind yet essentially non-random process discovered by Darwin' is the only theory capable of 'explaining the existence of organized complexity'. However, even when I first started reading the book all those years ago it was organisational complexity I was reading it as an explanation of.

This is because I'd already read The Selfish Gene... Hold on; I've just added another book to my shelves such that there are now 13 books with bookmarks on my shelves. So I should say that I was reading The Blind Watchmaker with organisational complexity in mind because I had already read half of The Selfish Gene.

Reading The Selfish Gene I became fascinated with the idea of evolutionary stable states. The concept that there were states that a complex evolving system could take which were more stable than others. A simple concept I must admit; but one which to my mind automatically implied the possibility of states which would promote run away change in a particular direction (a concept actually explored in The Blind Watchmaker under 'Explosions and Spirals').

Actually, it's a little difficult to explain how this relates to my theory of organisations. I hope one day to get my thoughts more in order. It's something to do with organizations rewarding poor quality management... The other contribution is something to do with the environment in which publicly owned firms exist and the effect this has on how they are managed. Oh I'm too sleepy.

The day I woke up and didn't hate marketing

2004-06-09T07:07:00.000-07:00

It's interesting. As a youngster I was like the characters in Dilbert. Always complaining that the marketing department was selling things that the engineers didn't know how to build.

As I get older that concerns me less and less. Some of my greatest frustrations come from the lack of a mature, diverse set of service offerings to deliver.

In a sense, it doesn't matter if there is nothing behind the service offerings to back them up. It doesn't matter if the organisation doesn't know how half of them are going to be delivered.

I know how to deliver. I know how to implement. I know how to manage. I have enough experience in the IT industry now to be genuinely confident. I'll link the service offerings to the delivery capabilities I have access to and make all those grandiose service offerings a reality. That's my job.

When I see a mature, well-organised set of service offerings like those presented by Unisys (just a random example) I see it as a thing of beauty. I don't cynically wish it were actually true that they had a fully-developed delivery architecture behind them. I just start wondering how I could deliver them.

Well, of course it is!

2004-06-09T07:06:00.000-07:00

ZDNet today reported on a study that found that IT moral was at an all-time low. It suggests the reasons are primarily 'continuing lack of job growth' but that doesn't sound like a reason to me. It sounds more like a symptom of an industry gone mad.

Apparently the report says that 'fewer employees, fewer dollars for projects, and the perception that there is not need to focus on retention' will also not help productively in the industry. I can't agree more with the first two â€“ particularly in software development where they are basically the same thing â€“ because being able to use fewer employees and allocate fewer dollars to projects is a sign of increased productivity not a cause.

I don't think the IT industry is engaging in particularly challenging projects. Sure the Internet makes the results of some projects more visible to customers and commentators; and the consulting industry does keep coming up with new names for the same stuff â€“ but the industry is still engineering software, integrating systems, and building infrastructure.

So if the projects aren't any more challenging why should they still be allocated the same number of dollars? And the reason is that the IT industry isn't becoming more productive â€“ it's becoming less productive.

Now some notes on why;

* there are too many non-IT people in the industry; people without the aptitude for the industry who a simply looking for the 2o percent higher wages the report also speaks of

* the IT industry suffers from the strange perception that having certain skills means that you are incapable of having other skills; for example if you are a 'techie' you can't manage

* combining those two points, it's the non-IT people who are managing the industry. This is justified specifically because they DON'T have knowledge of IT; not based on any particular skills that they DO have

* therefore management of the IT industry is performed out of context. so it's dominated by the types of management Mintzberg refers to in 'Managers Not MBAs' (which is, incidentally the type of management that MWT does without)

Back Links

2004-06-03T07:05:00.000-07:00

I'm proud that a reference to ManageWithoutThem has made it into the world of business education:

Johnson C. Smith University
Business Administration - Management (Subject Guide)
http://archives.jcsu.edu/library/busmanag.htm

I'm not mad

2004-06-03T07:04:00.000-07:00

Well, other people agree with me:

Against Management: Organization in the Age of Managerialism
by Martin Parker

Nice review here.

Finally, The Big Picture

2004-06-02T07:03:00.000-07:00

Check out new article in the Articles section called 'Finally, The Big Picture'.

From the Mouths of Babes

2004-05-05T07:02:00.000-07:00

I was shocked recently when my wife, Heidi (the 'babe' in this example :-), suggested that I was 'anti-business'. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Anti-management I would understand. Often people don't quite appreciate that I'm making a distinction between good and bad management. I'm only against bad management â€“ or management for management's sake. I'm against command-based coordination and for market-based coordination.

Heidi's anti-business remark was a flippant comment â€“ she actually knows me better than that. But what it does show is that to some people â€“ even exceptionally clever and attractive ones â€“ management and business are the same thing.

Management and business are bundled together into the same thing in the minds of the masses because, to many employees, they represent the unknown. Also, management tends to justify just about any decision on the basis that it's 'good business'. This is, of course, regardless of the quality of the decision, its real motivation, and its effect on the business.

The reality is that managerialism and business are almost opposites. Management as a profession refers specifically to the practice of using people who are not the business owners to run a business. This might get muddled when people start talking about ownership of options and shares for senior executives. But these are incentive mechanisms and don't alter the basic nature of managerialism.

To be anti-business I would have to be anti-entrepreneurship and anti-capitalism. If that was the case I wouldn't keep referring my readers to Mises.org and Ayn Rand novels.

Business is about trading, contracts, exposing your services to a market, and trusting that market to determine the value of your goods and services. In business, if an activity has no value you will continue doing it at your peril.

Compare that to the command-based co-ordination reflected in managerialism. Task allocation is performed without a real trade, management activities are not exposed to the market, and any activity that can be designated a management activity no longer needs to justify its existance by showing that it delivers value to anybody.

In truth, after years of muddle-headed thinking and false assumptions, management consists of quite a few activities that you would not purchase from a business if they were offering them as a service.

So, let's not confuse business with management.

Words to live by

2004-05-03T07:01:00.000-07:00

This is a philosophy I've developed over the years. It's too close to anarchy to be of any value as an organisational management philosophy (i.e. think of the brand damage) but I'm still glad others agree:

"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences."
- P.J. O'Rourke (can be found here)

I'm Not a Technology Person II

2004-04-27T07:00:00.000-07:00

Further to my I'm not a technology person article I found this:

WHAT IF PEOPLE BOUGHT CARS LIKE THEY BUY COMPUTERS?

General Motors doesn't have a "help line" for people who don't know how to drive, because people don't buy cars like they buy computers -- but imagine if they did . . .

...

HELPLINE: "General Motors HelpLine, how can I help you?"

CUSTOMER: "Hi! I just bought my first car, and I chose your car because it has automatic transmission, cruise control, power steering, power brakes, and power door locks."

HELPLINE: "Thanks for buying our car. How can I help you?"

CUSTOMER: "How do I work it?"

HELPLINE: "Do you know how to drive?"

CUSTOMER: "Do I know how to what?"

HELPLINE: "Do you know how to drive?"

CUSTOMER: "I'm not a technical person! I just want to go places in my car!"

- www.sweenytod.com/funny/joke15.html

Of course, all this tells us is that people don't actually value IT support; not that it isn't valuable.

I agree that technology must become more usable. But in order for that to happen we must value the processes and skills that are required to produce more usable technology.

New Draft Article

2004-04-22T06:57:00.000-07:00

A new draft article is available called 'PMs will thank me: Anti-Anti-Management I'. It starts to describe how MWT is not anti-management. It also shows that current thinging on organisations actually is.

It is available at on-line here.

Nature Law and Management

2004-04-21T06:53:00.000-07:00

One of the differences between the ManageWithoutThem management model and the type of management we are used to is that MWT is based around 'rule by law' and that nasty management you are used to is based on 'rule by man'.

The difference is actually greater than this. When Austrian economists such as Hayek speak of 'rule by law' they often qualify it with standards around what makes a good law. Without such standards 'rule by law' is essentially the same as 'rule by man' â€“ only the laws have been codified.

Organisations almost understand the need to transition to 'rule by law'. This is evident in the emphasis in processes. However, organisations are yet to understand the next step.

The standards which make a good law (or at least one perspective on this) come from a body of theory around 'natural law'. Check out James's Liberty File Collection and particularly his introduction to nature law.

Butler and IT Governance

2004-03-09T04:50:00.000-08:00

I attended the Butler Group IT Governance Master Class in Sydney today (9 March 2004) and was disappointed. It showed a real lack of innovation in IT Governance thinking.

The problem was that even though 'Business/IT Alignment' was cynically referred to as just as important and elusive as it always was â€“ their entire analysis served to separate rather than align.

I think it starts with an often held assumption that the entire IT functional should be run as one big service. I know how popular and well intended this thinking is (it must 'serve' the business to it must be a 'service') but it simply isn't valid. Butler based much of their analyst on this assumption.

Business Transformation is a service. If that transformation is technology-enabled that is also a service. But once the IT is embedded in to the organisation it should be managed and costed as simply another part of the organisation's capabilities.

Take ERP. If an organisation requires an enterprise-level resource planning capability that capability should be managed and costed as such.

Just because an organisation's enterprise-level resource planning capability has been implemented in an ERP system doesn't mean that it should be considered an IT cost.
(I'm not defending ERP costs here by the way. In general, I think ERPs are evil.)

What is needed is a view of organisations which is capability based. With just as much attention paid to the IT features that make up the capability as there is to the non-IT resources that make up that capability.

Once this view of the organisation is established basic management principles can be applied. Those responsible for delivering true IT services (such as database, network, and file services) will have sufficient control over how those services are delivered to enable them to meet the businessâ€™s required service levels and costs (through appropriate use of leveraged services).

The Butler Master Class didnâ€™t bring us any closer to that situation at all...

That said; the best comment was from a member of the audience: "We always say that the business should understand IT more. This isn't really true. We want the business to understand IT Management more."

ManageWithoutThem Drinking Mug Available!

2003-12-28T04:43:00.000-08:00

In association with CafePress I present the first ever piece of lame ManageWithoutThem merchandise!

Actually, I think it looks fantastic. The first item available for order at the MWTShop at CafePress is a quality drinking mug with the ManageWithoutThem logo and the words "I'm Sorry... Is my work interfering with your management... again?".

Stay tuned for much less cynical (but perhaps less fun) items in the near future. The mug is available at:

http://www.cafeshops.com/mwtshop

Oldie but a goodie

2003-12-01T04:43:00.000-08:00

An oldie but a goodie. Again, from our secret corespondent 'Sparkles'...

To: MWT
From: Sparkles

A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced his altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."

The woman below replied, "You're in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You're between 40 and 45 degrees north latitude and between 9 and 60 degrees west longitude."

"You must be in Information technology," said the balloonist.

"I am," replied the woman, "How did you know?"

"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is technically correct, but I've no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help at all. If anything, you've delayed my trip."

The woman below responded, "You must be in Management."

"I am!" replied the balloonist, "but how did you know?"

"Well", said the woman, "you don't know where you are or where you're going. You have risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise, which you've no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it's my fault."

Innovation and the Cost of Experiments

2003-10-15T06:42:00.000-07:00

Listen to the excellent interview with author of "Experimentation Matters", Stefan Thomke.

Available from Economist.com here.
(Real Audio required)

Quotes:

"I ask them if they experiment and they look at me and start nodding. If I ask them HOW they experiment... they often shake there heads... Often projects become experiements after fact... they try something out and it doesn't work and of course it was an experiment..."

"new technologies... are making it easier than ever to conduct experiments...as a result we can do that sort of experimentation at a tiny fraction of the cost... that creates this potential to do something differently...faster... at lower cost... "

His book is available at Amazon.com:

Experimentation Matters: Unlocking the Potential of New Technologies for Innovation

Discipline-based Productivity vs. Managerial Productivity - Part I

2003-09-01T06:40:00.000-07:00

Much has been said about productivity improvements in organisations. It can be seen in an organisation's top level reporting that productivity improvements simply aren't occurring. However, if you ask individuals you'll see that their personal productivity is improving all the time. Actually, whole disciplines are becoming more productive every day. So why not organisations?

(Part 1 of a 3 part article)

The effort it takes to create a software application is less than it was 10 years ago. Let's take an example of a simple application to store names and address. It would take about 30 seconds to create such an application today.

To create that software application now we simply open Microsoft Excel and type the word "Name" at the top of one column and the word "Address" at the top of the other. The reason it is easier to create this software application is because technologies exist to help us with this.

Critics of the IT industry will immediately suggest that while this is a solution to the problem it isn't very useable. More importantly it requires users of the application to already have some knowledge of the product in which it is build (i.e. Microsoft Excel).

What the critics don't acknowledge is that the situation is not unique to the disciplines of information technology. As any discipline, be it engineering, craft, marketing, or even management, builds up a toolkit of generally accepted tools they at once increase their productivity and constrain the use of their products and services.

If we take an example outside the IT-based disciplines we see the more general situation. Even as the medical profession adopts a toolkit of drug-based relief to medical conditions it makes it more difficult for those seeking natural remedies to get relief the same medical conditions.

It should be noted that even if the drug-based approach is better than any other approach there will be dissatisfaction from those who have a different need or opinion than the medical profession. Equally, even if the drug-based approach isn't better than other approaches, it will be make the medical profession more productive - by at least some measures.

Again, I'll assert that individual disciplines actually are becoming more and more productive all the time. Whatever your profession, you'll find yourself confronting similar situations again and again as you progress through your career. Over time you'll develop skills and adopt behaviours which improve your ability to respond to those situations.

If you're keen, you'll look to other people in your chosen field to help you identify and adopt those skills and behaviours more quickly.

Every profession does this. Clerical staff. IT Consultants. Computer Programmers. Actors. Authors. Mechanics. Sales People. Marketing People. Managers.

So everybody is getting more and more productive. But not organisations. Why?

More in Part II.

Monopolies, Governments, and Operating Systems

2003-09-01T06:38:00.000-07:00

I was just reading in the Sydney Morning Herald that "JAPAN, China and South Korea plan to develop an original operating system in a bid to challenge the domination of Microsoft Windows."

This consortium is also planning to "develop their own unique application software programs, including those for word processing and spreadsheets".

Sure; the countries are expected to do this by improving an open-source operating system like Linux. But the first suspicion should be raised around the idea of improving Linux. The open-source model itself already improves Linux.

The way a government would contribute to the improvement of such an operating system would be to create incentives for organisations to channel resources to the improvement and use of such an operating system; not to "develop an original operating system".

The fact is, in terms of consumer choice, privacy of information, open data formats, etc; what is the best alternative? That a large corporate monopoly force an operating system down people's throats, or a government monopoly force an operating system down people's throats.

We want governments to use open source operating systems (file formats, etc) for reasons more important than because some of us think Microsoft is a monopoly.

Andrew; please tell me what to think (at morenews.blogspot.com).

Cynicism from "Sparkles", our secret corespondent in the field

2003-08-22T06:37:00.000-07:00

I think she's being a tad unfair. I think many managers have good intentions but are merely doing the wrong stuff. However, Sparkles is not alone with her sentiments...

To: MWT
From: Sparkles

Thought you might like my latest insight into current
senior management trends ..

"I'm thinking that when you become one of the big boys
you've gotta adopt what I call the "bad apple
stategy". You see you can buy an apple that looks
quite good - and it isn't until you bite into it that
you realise that you definitely don't want to eat it
and there isn't much worth salvaging. But you can
still slap a bit of wax on the apple and make it look
really appetizing! In fact you can brag to everyone -
look until I slapped the wax on the apple it looked
pretty average - but now it looks great!! Now the
trick is to get rid of the apple before is goes so bad
that it looks bad from the outside as well. That way
when things go bad you can claim that they were good
when you were in charge!"

I love it when ancient Chinese proverbs quote me...

2003-08-09T06:36:00.000-07:00

The first step towards wisdom is calling things by their right names.

--Chinese Proverb

(found here)

Start Business Modelling Now!

2003-07-19T06:31:00.000-07:00

Your organisation needs a business model ï¿½ right now.

Actually your organisation already has one. Even if you don't have a business model defined explicitly, your organisation is still operating based on an implied business model which you don't understand.

Before roles and responsibilities, before scope, before strategy even, you should be documenting your business model right now!

Already done that? Well communicate it. Do your employees know it? Proceed to Step 2...

Step 2... Even better than documenting your business model is modelling your business model.

A working model of your organisation is not only a great communication tool but will also aid in formulating your business transformation strategies.

Does business modelling sound to 'old school' to you? You're wrong. It's important to every type of organisation.

So, if your organisation is zany and creative try modelling with Logo Serious Play:

http://www.tayfundemiroz.com/
New_Economy/Play/index.htm

If you're all engineers at heart perhaps you could try something like Top Modeller:

http://www-rcf.usc.edu/
~majchrza/topmodeler/

Pick one (or find something better); just start now!

Organisational Systems have a life-cycle?

2003-07-18T06:30:00.000-07:00

Author Jason Pettus tells an interesting story about the inevitability of organisational systems turning feral:

http://www.geocities.com/
jpettus.geo/fp03/0702.htm

Perhaps there is no conspiracy here. Perhaps organisational systems have a life-cycle? What does this mean for management and organisations?

What is a Solution Architect?

2003-07-15T06:28:00.000-07:00

The purpose of a Solution Architecture is not just to ensure a technically superior solution. An effective Solution Architecture enables the distributed design of a technically superior solution.

As such, a Solution Architect is not simply a senior technical designer. An effective Solution Architect combinations the skills of a technologist, business analysis, and change agent to visualise and drive the delivery of the overall solution.

The term 'solution' implies a fit within a particular business context and challenge. The Solution Architect needs to define that business context (and the required business transformation) with the same rigor as the technical components of the solution.

Once the layered solution architecture is defined, the Solution Architect switches to change agent mode ï¿½ ensuring the delivery programme contains the most effective set of projects and work streams to ensure successful delivery.

Is Cutter. Is Good.

2003-07-15T06:27:00.000-07:00

Cutter has always had interesting things to say about IT project management and development processes.

Agile Project Management
http://www.cutter.com/workshops/22.html
(pair programming is still a dump idea)

Agile Requirements
http://www.cutter.com/workshops/11.html

KM response

2003-07-11T06:35:00.000-07:00

I had a chance to read through your knowledge management synopsis. I think we can twist a few of the ideas on there head and perhaps extend them further:

When you say 'a lot of knowledge is being held by the senior staff' I'm wondering is this is a cause or a symptom. Are these people senior staff because of their knowledge? Have they been promoted because of there knowledge? Or is the knowledge flow in EDS such that knowledge flows upwards more than it flows down?

It appears, as you have identified, that the value system which manages our organisation values our senior staff having knowledge rather than enabling its flow.

If these senior people are subject matter experts their specialist knowledge should be rewarded. EDS needs SMEs, they are a vitally important part of our business.

A senior EDSer with a lot of knowledge is an SME. If that knowledge is about the multitude of EDS processes they are an EDS Processes SME.

EDS needs to reward our SMEs. EDS needs to retain SMEs. EDS needs to develop more SMEs.

But an SME is not a manager.

A manager will never be measured by the knowledge they have; only for the capability of their team. Measurement of managers will always be like this. It will always be 'one step removed' from the management itself.

You will never hear a real manager lement that their staff don't know enough - because a real manager knows that they are responsible for the knowledge of their staff.

The essence of effective measurement of management activities is to always measure things one step removed from the management - thing that can't be directly controlled or manipulated. Numbers can be manipulated. People can be manipulated.

In this way management measures are more like market indicators. But to have market indicators you need to have a market. Most organisations already do.... But we'll get to that later.

Doesn't this mean that SMEs and specialists should be just doing what they want? Absolutely not! Specalists have all sorts of industry standards of practice that they have to follow.

When correctly applied this professional standards of practise might be called 'best practices'. But this term almost has no meaning anymore...

But we already know that employees should follow best practices don't we? It common knowledge that best practices are the way to go - this is true by definition. The best way to do something is the best way to do it.

Principle number ?; if something is bloody obvious. The simplist most logical thing to do. Then why isn't it being done? Easy. Because organisations do name operate on logic. They are social and they are political but they are not logical.

Two principle are at work to solve this. Firstly, 'time spent doing one thing is time not spent doing another'. Best practices are driven from listening to peer. To comparing the results of competing processes, behavours, and value systems.

If SMEs and specialists are going to learn 'best practices' (either from experimentation or from others) they need to stop doing something that they are currently do in order to spend the time developing capability....

What to stop doing? Easy. Stop listening to their managers telling them how to do there job. Stop listening to their clients when they tell them how to do their job. Seriously.

Christopher Alexander often inspires me. I've never read a single book of his or seen anything he has designed. But each quote I read is fasinating.

That the time he was trying to design a process that would allow anybody to design a building project in Mexico (remember Chris is on a misson to save the world from a bad built environment - and he realises that he simply can't do it himself).

When he design the process for this project in Mexico he basically said 'you get all of the requirements, making sure you really do cover all of the requirements [don't wanta miss any of those requirements] and then build a solution that is isomorphic to the complete set of requirements and [da da!] you have a solution.

You know what happened. The buildings sucked! Or at least they failed to impress Chris. They really did meet all the requirements but they were different to anything else. No differentiation. Ask Micheal Porter. That means death.

When our clients demand more innovation. From our proposals and from our solutions aren't they just saying 'don't simply meet our requirements'.

But they are responsible. That's what hierarchy means.

But what are managers left to do? Nothing. No way! There is plenty to do.

Schedules (but they are personal and not above deliniation. Because the sequence in which you do something is part of the competency!)

Resource marshling (but how can you marshing resources if nobody is allowed to leave you? If you get given 'responsibility' for them. But you can never be given responsibility for anything......)

They can be a type of architect too. A delivery architect. But they are measured by the particular architect soft and hard skills. No the vague 'manager' skills that have got us into this mess.

How do we start to make these markets?

* blogs:- not everybody will want one but; what does it mean when a manager never posts anything? if a subject mater expert never posts anything? if a manager posts a lot but nobody reads it? if somebody only collects links to everybody elses information (does EDS value this? should they?)?

* leave gaps for them

MWT/IT - Programme Definition Worksheet - Review 1

2003-07-04T06:26:00.000-07:00

MangeWithoutThem is largely a general management model. But it advocates the creation of 'collaboration architectures' which are task-specific. Because I'm in the IT consulting business, and because I claim that the management process should be more task-based than it is traditionally, whenever I get specific I'm likely to talk about IT management.

Even more specific than that, I'm likely to talk about the delivery of technology-enabled business transformation programmes. Sound like buzz-words to you? So be it. You'll notice IT content is designated MWT/IT. This content shows how the ManageWithoutThem model applies to IT consulting and may be skipped by those without an interest in this area.

The first collaboration architecture I'm developing is used to define the various projects, work streams, and delivery responsibilities within a technology-enabled business transformation programme.

This is a tool I have used for a few years now for trying to get clarify around how a programme is organised. The initial unannotated diagram can be found at:

http://www.managewithoutthem.com/
posters/Programme Definition Worksheet - TEBT.pdf
(AvantGo users will need to visit ManageWithoutThem.com)

I will be annotating this diagram and developing instructions for its use in the next few weeks; but any feedback is appreciated.

Phones and Clouds

2003-07-01T06:25:00.000-07:00

I recall when working in a recently (partially) privatised government department that the IT department manager's two young children come into work one day.

These were good kids, also very bright. They ran around good naturedly exploring the cubical-scape we all worked in.

In the middle of the floor was a whiteboard we never used and they managed to find some whiteboard markers that worked (I have no idea how ï¿½ I never could).

The picture they drew was quite simple. It was a field of telephones. All the telephones were ringing. In the top left hand corner there was an extra large telephone in a cloud. An arrow pointed into the cloud, labelled 'My dad'.

Beside each and every telephone, even Dad's, was a sad face. How would a child draw your workplace?

Random Selections of What I've Been Writing Off-Line

2003-06-23T05:07:00.000-07:00

"In the sense that the MWT philosophy incorporates not only what managers acturally do but also what processes, behaviours, and values select who gets to be a manager it goes beyond management to governance."

"The information in the MWT model lets anybody in the organisation audit the management practicies; that is, what values are actually managing the organisation. This sort of corporate scoutting can only improve governance."

"Analysis of corporate governance scandles has made one vital mistake. It has blamed either faceless entities like 'Enron', or the people charge.

What specificly is to blame is the mechanisms that put these individuals in power - not their actions once they were in power. Once they were in power they did what they always would have.

Sure, absolute power does corupt, and an MWT philosophy would limit absolute power in a very specific sense, but if all corporate position was corrupting there would be no good companies and I do not beleive that is the case."

"MWT is not agaist hierarchy. Hierarchy is a very natural form of organising responsibility. It's just not a good way of organising the type of information required for collaboration."

"This information includes even simple collaborative information like descriptions of service offerings or delivery processes."

"This book is not suggesting that all managers are bad (simply that what we think of as management is bad and good managers are doing things totally differently).

My workmates and I have had a number of fabulous managers to whom this book is partially dedicated.

However, my workmates often refer to the 'luck' they have had getting to work with such good managers. I hope that this book can take some of the luck out of that process.

More importantly, such exceptional managers are in demand. Much of your efforts will be in improving your own work so that they find you."

"Part 3 of this book is a guide to action. A simple handbook for organising your workgroups and hooking into high-level programs your corporation already has.

These are not notes towards a revolution. There will be no 'worker's states'; only leapfrogging the uninvolved to make your own work-life more satisfying. Or if your audits fail - give you the impetious to finally leave that doomed organisation and interview some others with your new knowledge."

WTC Design Artefacts

2003-05-01T05:04:00.000-07:00

Â Just looking at the WTC Site Memorial Competition. What's interesting is that the press coverage of this project will mean that millions of people will see these intriguing design artefacts:

http://www.daniel-libeskind.com/press/pressimages.html

So; Why am I so interested in architecting?

2003-04-22T05:01:00.000-07:00

This is covering some familiar ground but I was recently asked why I get excited by 'architect' roles?

Basically, it's because I think the whole concept of 'architecting' is missing from management theory (and therefore most organisations). I think architecting is basically creating a delineated shared understanding of how a bunch of people collaborate.

I see architecting as an alternative (more mature) collaborative model to the manager/managed relationship. We talk a lot about moving away from command-and-control organisations but it's darn near impossible to change an organisation by just saying what you're not allowed to do. You have to provide an alternative behaviour.

Economics tells us that the alternative to 'command' is 'market' but I don't think it helps organisations to go to a strict laissez-faire market model. I think the middle-ground is to build something I'd call a 'collaboration architecture' which structures the 'market' of ideas (and of activities). Such a collaboration architecture conceptually comes before the usual planning, monitoring, controlling steps of management. So you find that even the project manager starts to collaborate with the team (!) in terms of the collaboration architecture.

In a way this is just accelerating that normal storming, forming, and norming of team dynamics; but in a way which provides something tangible (and therefore reusable!).

I have a particular interest in the IT Services industry where these sort of roles are called 'systems architects' or 'enterprise architects'. While there might be lots of people in the industry with the right skills, what is always missing is the acknowledgement of the role itself (and how it differs from something you might call high-level solution 'design').

People with the appropriate skills need to think deeply enough about those skills so that they can be scaled to any sized endeavour.

So, think deeply!

Speaking of Visualisation

2003-04-14T04:59:00.000-07:00

I have started the process of visualising the ManageWithoutThem business transformation. The initial graphic (as yet unannotated) can be found by clicking the thumbnail image below:

(AvantGo users will need to visit www.ManageWithoutThem.com)

Collaboration Architectures and Visualisation

2003-04-11T04:58:00.000-07:00

The ManageWithoutThem model recognises that effective management requires a 'collaboration architecture' which transcends the traditional manager/managed relationship.

While researching for the MWT introductory brochrure I am currently writing I came across this thesis which should be of interest to all:

http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ziv/papers/baida_thesis.pdf

The introduction states:

'The goal of this research project is investigating how architectures can be visualized to support the decision-making process of business managers. The project focuses on three levels of architectures: enterprise architecture, domain architecture and system architecture.'

Notice the emphasis on the quality of decisions rather than just concentrating on who makes the decision.

Quote Me

2003-01-30T02:57:00.000-08:00

"Management is the art of saying 'Good Question' until you find somebody to blame"

- MDG

Limits of Subjectivity

2003-01-21T02:55:00.001-08:00

How about some interesting stuff on the limits of subjectivity rolled up in a presentation about how architecture (buildings and such) is like IT!??!

I quote (emphasis added by me):

"The essence of the experiments is that you take the two things you are trying to compare and ask, for each one, is my wholeness increasing in the presence of this object? How about in the presence of this one? Is it increasing more or less? You might say this is a strange question; What if the answer is Don't know or They don't have any effect on me? Perfectly reasonable! That can happen. But the resolution is easy. What turns out to happen is that if you say to a person ï¿½Yes, it is a difficult question, it might even sound a bit nutty. But anyway, please humor me and just answer the question.ï¿½ Then it turns out that there is quite a striking statistical agreement, 80-90%, very strong, as strong a level of agreement as one gets in any experiments in social science."

- from http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/ieee/ieeetext.htm

The possibility of an objective and universal sense of 'wholeness' is pretty cool, I think... Something like a person's 'wholeness' smells like mumbo-jumbo and yet here is somebody sighting 'striking statistical agreement' on what it is...?

Origins of Pattern Theory

2003-01-21T02:55:00.000-08:00

Just a link for now (handheld users will have to read it at their desks I'm afraid):

The Origins of Pattern Theory
the Future of the Theory,
And The Generation of a Living World

http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/ieee/ieeetext.htm

This is the author of the forthcoming book mentioned in the previous post. I'll try and make some comments in the next few days.

In particular the author talks about the patterns he developed for architecture (as in buildings and such) actually having a 'moral' component. He suggests that the next step to translating the concept of design patterns to IT will introduce this moral component.

I think he's right.

Steal Their Word, Steal Their Theory

2003-01-20T02:54:00.000-08:00

I talk about architectures all the time; and I therefore talk about architects - the people who design those architectures.

I'm stealing a word here - I'm not the only one. The whole IT industry also does it. So I'll admit I'm looking forward to this series (link to Amazon) coming out in July.

The first book in the series is:

The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe. The Phenomenon of Life, Book One
by Christopher Alexander

MWT talks about architect as the delineated shared understanding of a team of collaborating individuals. This shared environment could include anything, I guess - includes good old physical shared space - but I imagine the principles of designing such architectures are more universal than that.

The Amazon review says things like:

'Christopher Alexander, the humble messiah of good architectural design, invites readers to get comfortable with their inner judgments... thinking deeply about the nature of his work. Frustrated with the 20th century's reluctance to acknowledge human commonality and reliance on Cartesian mechanism, he urges us to rethink our understanding of space itself...'

The IT industry has already stolen the concept of 'design patterns' from people like this author - and that was for the better. Let's steal some more.

Human Warmth

2003-01-14T02:52:00.000-08:00

"When Josef Stalin was on his deathbed he called in two likely successors, to test which one of the two had a better knack for ruling the country.

"He ordered two birds to be brought in and presented one bird to each of the two candidates.

"The first one grabbed the bird, but was so afraid that the bird could free himself from his grip and fly away that he squeezed his hand very hard, and when he opened his palm, the bird was dead.

"Seeing the disapproving look on Stalin's face and being afraid to repeat his rival's mistake, the second candidate loosened his grip so much that the bird freed himself and flew away.

"Stalin looked at both of them scornfully. "Bring me a bird!" he ordered.

They did.

"Stalin took the bird by its legs and slowly, one by one, he plucked all the feathers from the bird's little body.

"Then he opened his palm. The bird was laying there naked, shivering, helpless.

"Stalin looked at him, smiled gently and said, "You see... and he is even thankful for the human warmth coming out of my palm." "

- taken from Rich Geib's Universe

Governance Silo

2003-01-06T02:50:00.000-08:00

Remember when everybody was complaining about stove-pipe organisations ï¿½ organisations in which all the departments were operating as silos?

Well I've noticed a new trend. The more I see 'governance offices' and 'programme offices' in action the more it is apparent that governance, monitoring, scheduling, etc, are starting to operate in their own silos!

If this isn't an indication that something is wrong with management I don't know what is. Anybody else noticing this?

Straight

2003-01-05T02:49:00.000-08:00

'When we started seeing each other, Miracle told me it was no big deal, that we were just friends who happened to be spending some time as lovers. Eventually, though, we moved in together and started a family. Seven years and three beautiful children later, she suddenly announced that she was leaving, that she had found somebody new. Between sobs I told her I felt let down and betrayed.

'Oh, come on,' she snapped, rolling those lovely, limpid eyes and shaking her head in disbelief. 'Don't give me all that. Are you seriously trying to say I wasn't straight with you?'

Anthropology

This guy is funny! Check out http://www.danrhodes.co.uk

The Importance of Philosophy

2003-01-03T02:47:00.000-08:00

Yeah, sure it's another Ayn Rand rip-off ï¿½ but it's quality content non-the-less. Check out ImportanceOfPhilosophy.com and in particular the section on Epistemology.

MWT has this theory which goes something like:

management is required because of the division of labour

in a knowledge-based economy division of labour equals division of knowledge (already recognised in Hayek's Use of Knowledge in Society anyway)

management of knowledge is therefore what management is all about (including both discipline specific knowledge and cross-discipline knowledge such as plans, strategies, etc)

add to that the concept that management isn't so much a discipline as a 'technology' for integrating labour

as a technology everybody must be actually using management for it to work

to 'use' a mental technology such as management is to simply have a shared understanding of certain things

The question is then 'what to share?'. This is where the Epistemology page mentioned above might be useful. In the section on 'Specifics' it lists Concepts, Definitions, Words, Emotions, Integration, Values, Certainly, Deduction, Induction/Abstraction, Focus, and Evasion.

That list overlaps nicely which what a MWT management philosophy for cross-discipline collaboration might suggest you focus a shared understanding on.

More Understanding

2002-12-24T01:42:00.000-08:00

In Our Own Time
Another Excerpt

"Why can't you be more understanding?" Kellie was yelling in whispers and trying to ignore Andrew. She cleared, set, and re-cleared all the tables that were sufficiently distant from any customers.

David watched the pattern of a familiar argument unfold. This time he was determined to intervene with what he considered final and conclusive answers; he stepped forward in assistance.

"You keep out of it!"

David figured she'd appreciate his input once she heard what he had to say. "There simply isn't any such thing as somebody who is 'more understanding'". David used his fingers to place the phrase in quotes, though it was hardly appropriate. "There are people who understand more, and there are frauds. You can't be more understanding unless you actually understand more."

"Michael is more understanding." Kellie clearly wasn't, thought David, as he continued.

"I think you'll find Michael is just as bewildered as Andrew is. His special 'understanding' lies in knowing what you want and giving it to you regardless of his level of comprehension."

"Yes! That's exactly right. What's wrong with that?"

"What's wrong with it is that it's fraudulent. It neglects that fact that people are more than just their relationships with other people. They have this intrinsic measure of how much they actually understand ï¿½ and surely this should be the primary factor in determining how understanding they appear to be."

"Well - intrinsically - understands Michael understand more."

"I doubt it. I'd suggest you ask him to explain."

Apparently, Kellie played that scenario through in her head. She retorted, "It doesn't make any difference!", with the implication that Michael's attempts at explanation probably wouldn't assist her argument.

"Maybe that's the problem. Maybe to you there is no difference. Maybe it doesn't matter to you how somebody actually feels about you, as long as you get..."

"Maybe you're afraid to show how you feel. Maybe you're afraid to actually do anything! You're all talk you know!"

Andrew was silent; but he was obviously keen to resume what he considered his argument. David, rather conveniently, finally chose to return Andrew his baton; there was a sudden desire to spend some time in the basement at the library.

Commanding Heights

2002-12-18T01:40:00.000-08:00

Readers in the US may have already come across PBS series 'The Commanding Heights'. Australian readers, I'm sorry to say, I've told you about it one day too late ï¿½ the final part was on SBS last night.

The series compliments the book of the same name (Both the book and the DVD of the series are available from Amazon. Christmas presents perhaps?)

The book is a history of the global economy over the past 50 years or so with a focus on the battle between governments and markets.

Remember 'The Incrediable Shrinking Management' MWT article? As the global economy changed over the last 50 years, so will organisational management in the next 50 (sooner, probably).

Just check out the Amazon reviews for the types of resistance you're going to get on the way to market-based management of the firm.

For more info try www.commandingheights.com.

As a bonus, the existence of the Commanding Heights book and series revives my faith in EDS. The production of the series was partially sponsored by EDS.