by Kim, Gene
Then he tells about the miracle of having identical twin boys, only to have complications, and having to stay with his wife in the intensive care unit for three months after they were born prematurely. And spending night after night, praying that they would be okay, and not wanting one twin to live his life without the other when they were destined to be able to understand each other in a way that no other person in the world could.
And how this experience taught him how selfish he was and his newfound desire to be unselfish.
To my surprise, I blink back tears, seeing Chris’ earnest aspirations for his kids’ future. I furtively notice others doing the same.
“Thank you for sharing, Chris,” says Steve solemnly after a moment and then looks around the room. “Who’s next?”
To my surprise and relief, Wes goes next.
I learn that he’s been engaged three times in his life, and at the last minute, called off each one. And when he finally does get married, he quickly got divorced because she was tired of his maniacal car racing habit.
How can a guy who weighs nearly 250 pounds race cars?
Wes has four cars, and even if he weren’t a Parts Unlimited employee, he would be one of our most fanatic customers. He spends most of his off-hours working on his Mazda Miata and old Audi that he races competitively almost every weekend. Apparently, he’s struggled with a life-long battle to lose weight, even as a young child. He talked about being the outcast.
He still battles his weight. Not to make friends or for his health, but to try to keep up with the skinny Asian teenage car racers half his age, even going to weight-loss camp. Twice.
There is a long silence.
I’m too nervous to laugh.
Steve finally says, “Thanks for sharing, Wes. Who’s next?”
I purse my lips together and am again relieved when Patty raises her hand.
We learn that she was actually an art major. She’s one of those people I’ve made fun of all my life? But she seems so reasonable!
She tells us what it’s like growing up being the “smart girl with big boobs and glasses,” trying to decide what to do in life. She switched majors five times in college, dropping out to become a singer-songwriter in Athens, Georgia, spending two years touring clubs around the country with her band. She went back to get her MFA but after confronting the potential poverty of making a living as an artist, applied to work at Parts Unlimited. She almost didn’t get the job because of a civil disobedience arrest that was still on her record.
When Patty stops talking, Steve thanks her. And then smiling at my discomfort, he says, “Thank you. That leaves you, Bill…”
* * *
Even though I’ve known this moment is coming, the room seems to fade out.
I hate talking about myself. In the Marines, I was able to create a persona where I could just yell at people and tell them what needed to be done. I got paid to keep my people alive by being slightly smarter than they were and having great vocal cords.
I do not share my feelings with work colleagues.
Or with almost anyone, for that matter.
I look at the notepad in front of me, where I’ve been writing down ideas of what to share. All I see is nervous doodling.
The silence is nearly absolute, with everyone now looking at me expectantly. Not impatiently, I see. Instead, they seem patient and kind.
I see Patty’s expression turn sympathetic.
I purse my lips together for a moment, and then just blurt out, “What influenced me most? When I realized that my mom did everything for us, and that my dad was completely undependable. He was an alcoholic and when things weren’t going well, all my brothers and sisters hid from him. But it got to a point where I finally had enough and ran away. And I left them behind. And my youngest sister was only eight years old.”
I keep going, “You know, getting arrested was one of the best things that ever happened to me. The alternative was having to go home. So instead, I joined the Marines. That introduced me to an entirely new world, where I learned that there was a totally different way of living your life. It taught me that you could be rewarded by doing things right and taking care of your fellow soldiers.
“What did I learn? That my main goal is to be a great father, not like the shitty father I had. I want to be the man that my sons deserve.” I feel tears starting to fall down my cheeks, which I wipe away, angry that my body is betraying me.
“That good enough for you, Steve?” I say with a lot more anger than I had intended.
Steve nods with a half smile, saying slowly, “Thank you, Bill. I know that was as difficult for you as it was for all of us.”
I exhale slowly. And breathe deeply one more time, trying to regain some equilibrium that I hadn’t realized I’d lost.
The uncomfortable silence goes on.
“I know this isn’t my place to say, Bill,” Wes says slowly. “But, I’m pretty sure your dad would be incredibly proud of you. And he would realize what a total piece of shit he was, compared to you.”
I hear laughter around the table, and Patty says quietly, “I agree with Wes. Those kids of yours are luckier than they’ll ever know.”
Wes grunts in agreement, and Chris nods at me. And I find myself crying for the first time in over thirty years.
* * *
Embarrassed, I pull myself together and look up at everyone.
I’m relieved to see everyone shifting mental gears and turning their attention back to Steve, who looks around the room.
“First, I’d like to thank all of you for giving of yourself and doing that exercise with me,” he says. “Although it’s nice to get to know each of you better, I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think it was important. Solving any complex business problem requires teamwork, and teamwork requires trust. Lencioni teaches that showing vulnerability helps create a foundation for that.
“I know it’s unrealistic to think we’re going to leave this meeting knowing exactly what we need to do, with priorities and owners assigned,” he continues. “But I would like to have a joint vision as we move toward a solution.”
Steve puts both hands in front of him, and says, “Just to get the ball rolling, I’d like to propose that one of our main problems is that we blow every commitment and schedule that we make. People outside of IT are always grumbling that we miss whatever expectations we set. By a mile.
“Which makes me think,” he says, looking around the room, “that we’re probably not good at making internal commitments to one another here within IT. Thoughts?”
Uncomfortable silence.
“Look, I don’t want to split hairs,” Chris finally says defensively. “But if you look at the actual metrics, my group has delivered almost every major project on time. We make our dates.”
“Yeah, just like you hit the Phoenix date, right?” Wes says, jeering. “Now that was a huge success. I heard Steve was really proud of your performance last week.”
Chris turns red, raising both hands in front of him. “That’s not what I meant.” He thinks for a moment, adding, “It was a total disaster. But, technically, we did hit the date.”
Interesting.
“If that’s true,” I say, digging in, “there’s something really wrong with our definition of what a ‘completed project’ is. If it means ‘Did Chris get all his Phoenix tasks done?’ then it was a success. But if we wanted Phoenix in production that fulfilled the business goals, without setting the entire business on fire, we should call it a total failure.”
“Let’s stop pussyfooting here,” Steve interrupts. “I’ve told Sarah that Phoenix was one of the worst executed projects in the history of our company. What’s a better definition of success?”
Thinking for a moment, I finally say, “I don’t know. But this is a recurring pattern. Chris’ group never factors in all the work that Operations needs to do. And even when they do, they use up all the time
in the schedule, leaving none for us. And we’re always left cleaning up the mess, long afterward.”
Chris nods understandingly. “Well, you and I are fixing some of this. Part of it is a planning and architecture issue, which you and I have talked about fixing. But you’re underestimating how much of a bottleneck your group is. We’ve got a bunch of other applications that need to be deployed, but because your team is tied up, all the other deployments waiting in line get delayed as well.”
He adds, “On any given week, we’ve got five or six application groups waiting in line for your group to deploy something or another. And when anything goes wrong, everything gets stacked up. No offense, but when you guys are late, it’s like an airport that closes down. Before you know it, you have a bunch of airplanes circling, all waiting to land.”
Wes grumbles loudly, “Yeah, well, that’s what happens when the airplane you’ve built crash lands, totally destroying the runway.”
Then Wes raises a placating hand. “Look, I’m not blaming you, Chris. I’m just stating a well-known fact. When deployments don’t go as planned, whether the plan was written by your group or mine, it affects everybody else. That’s all I’m saying.”
I nod, agreeing with Wes’ characterization. And surprisingly, Chris is nodding, as well.
I reply, “Erik has helped me understand that there are four types of IT Operations work: business projects, IT Operations projects, changes, and unplanned work. But, we’re only talking about the first type of work, and the unplanned work that get’s created when we do it wrong. We’re only talking about half the work we do in IT Operations.”
I turn to look at Steve, saying, “I showed you our project list. On top of the thirty-five business projects, we’ve got another seventy-five or so Ops projects we’re working. We’ve got a backlog of thousands of changes that apparently all need to execute for some reason or another. On top of that, we have an ever increasing amount of unplanned work, mostly caused by all our fragile applications breaking, which includes Phoenix.”
I say flatly, “We are way over capacity, given the amount of work in front of us. And we haven’t even counted properly the big audit finding remediation project yet, which Steve says is still top-priority.”
I see the understanding start to dawn on Steve and Chris.
Speaking of which…
I look around, puzzled. “Hey, where’s John? If we’re talking about compliance, shouldn’t he be here, too? And isn’t he a part of the IT leadership team as well?”
Wes groans softly, rolling his eyes, saying, “Oh, great, that’s just who we need.”
Steve looks startled. He looks at the index card he was holding earlier. Then he runs his finger down a printed calendar in front of him. “Shit. I forgot to invite him.”
Chris mutters, “Well, we were getting so much done. It was probably a blessing in disguise, right?”
There’s more uncomfortable laughter, but people seem embarrassed that we’re making fun of John without him here.
“No, no, no, that’s not what I meant,” Steve says quickly, looking most embarrassed of all. “Bill is right—we need him here. Everyone, let’s take a fifteen-minute break. I’m going to have Stacy track him down.”
I decide to take a walk to clear my head.
* * *
When I return in ten minutes, I see the strewn remains of a corporate meeting in progress: Styrofoam cups half-filled with coffee, plates of leftover food, crumpled up napkins.
Across the room, Patty and Wes are having an animated discussion with Chris. At the other end of the table, Steve is talking on his cell phone with someone, while Erik looks at the pictures of automotive parts hanging on the wall.
I’m considering joining Patty and Wes when I see John walk in the room. Underneath his arm, of course, is the black three-ring binder.
“Stacy said you were looking for me, Steve?” he said. He makes a point of looking around slowly at the evidence of a meeting started without him long ago. “Did I miss a meeting notice? Or did I just get left out from yet another one?”
As almost everyone goes to extraordinary lengths to avoid eye contact with him, he says even more loudly, “Hey, it smells like people just had sex in here. Did I miss anything good?”
Chris, Patty, and Wes break off their conversation, and with exaggerated nonchalance, grab their original seats.
“Ah, good, you’re here. I’m glad you could make it,” says Steve, appearing completely unfazed. “Please grab a seat. Everyone, let’s get started again.”
“John, my apologies for not sending you an invite. It’s completely my fault,” Steve says, as he makes his way to the head of the table. “I organized this meeting yesterday at the last minute, right after the audit committee meeting. After recognizing my part in making all the IT problems worse, I wanted to assemble the IT leadership team to see if we could agree on a general direction of the solution to the issues we’re having around projects, operational stability, and compliance.”
John looks at me questioningly, lifting an eyebrow.
I’m curious at Steve’s omission of the vulnerability exercise and all that. Probably he figured if he can’t redo it, he might as well not even bring it up.
I nod reassuringly at John.
Steve turns to me. “Bill, please continue.”
“When you brought up the word commitment, it reminded me of something Erik asked me last week that stuck with me,” I say. “He asked on what basis do we decide whether we can accept a new project. When I said that I didn’t know, he took me on another tour of MRP-8 manufacturing plant. He took me to Allie, the Manufacturing Resource Planning Coordinator, and asked her how she decides on whether to accept a new order.”
I flip back to my notes. “She said that she would first look at the order and then look at the bill of materials and routings. Based on that, she would look at the loadings of the relevant work centers in the plant and then decide whether accepting the order would jeopardize any existing commitments.
“Erik asked me how we made the same type of decision in IT,” I recall. “I told him then, and I’ll tell you now, I don’t know. I’m pretty sure we don’t do any sort of analysis of capacity and demand before we accept work. Which means we’re always scrambling, having to take shortcuts, which means more fragile applications in production. Which means more unplanned work and firefighting in the future. So, around and around we go.”
To my surprise, Erik interrupts. “Well put, Bill. You’ve just described ‘technical debt’ that is not being paid down. It comes from taking shortcuts, which may make sense in the short-term. But like financial debt, the compounding interest costs grow over time. If an organization doesn’t pay down its technical debt, every calorie in the organization can be spent just paying interest, in the form of unplanned work.”
“As you know, unplanned work is not free,” he continues. “Quite the opposite. It’s very expensive, because unplanned work comes at the expense of…”
He looks around professorially for an answer.
Wes finally speaks up, “Planned work?”
“Precisely!” Erik says jovially. “Yes, that’s exactly right, Chester. Bill mentioned the four types of work: business projects, IT Operations projects, changes, and unplanned work. Left unchecked, technical debt will ensure that the only work that gets done is unplanned work!”
“That sure sounds like us,” Wes says nodding. He then looks firmly at Erik, saying, “And it’s Wes, not Chester. I’m Wes.”
“Yes, I’m sure you are,” Erik says agreeably.
He addresses the rest of the room. “Unplanned work has another side effect. When you spend all your time firefighting, there’s little time or energy left for planning. When all you do is react, there’s not enough time to do the hard mental work of figuring out whether you can accept new work. So, more projects are crammed onto the plate, with fewer cycles available to each one, w
hich means more bad multitasking, more escalations from poor code, which mean more shortcuts. As Bill said, ‘around and around we go.’ It’s the IT capacity death spiral.”
I’m smile to myself at Erik mangling Wes’ name. I’m not sure what kind of mental game he’s playing, but it’s amusing to watch.
Uncertain, I ask Steve, “Are we even allowed to say no? Every time I’ve asked you to prioritize or defer work on a project, you’ve bitten my head off. When everyone is conditioned to believe that no isn’t an acceptable answer, we all just became compliant order takers, blindly marching down a doomed path. I wonder if this is what happened to my predecessors, too.”
Wes and Patty nod slightly.
Even Chris nods.
“Of course you can say no!” Steve replies heatedly, with a look of genuine irritation on his face. He then takes a deep breath before saying, “Let me be clear. I need you to say no! We cannot afford to have this leadership team be order takers. We pay you to think, not just do, goddamnit!”
Steve looks increasingly angry, saying, “What’s at stake here is the survival of the company! The outcomes of these projects dictate whether this entire company succeeds or fails!”
He looks right at me. “If you, or for that matter, anyone knows that a project will fail, I need you to say so. And I need it backed up with data. Give me data like that plant coordinator showed you, so we can understand why. Sorry, Bill, I like you a lot, but saying no just based on your gut is not enough.”
Erik snorts and mutters, “That’s some pretty nice, soaring rhetoric, Steve. Very moving. But you know what your problem is? You guys in the business are punch drunk on projects, taking on new work that doesn’t have a prayer of succeeding. Why? Because you have no idea what capacity you actually have. You’re like the guy who is always writing checks that bounce, because you don’t know how much money you have and never bother opening your mail.
“Let me tell you a story,” he says. “Let me tell you about what that MRP-8 plant was like before I arrived. Those poor bastards would get these manila envelopes that would just show up, containing all sorts of crazy orders. The business would make absurd commitments to ship something at some impossible date, oblivious to all the work already in the system.”