implementation. Next I will show those results to Luke and Kathy and they will gladly tell me just how far we are from the target. They still might not tell me where the target is, but if they just keep on telling me whether we are getting closer to the target or further from the target eventually we will get it. But I need help on this. I am going to focus on the people. I am going to enlist Mahesh to focus on the technical. In essence, I am going to exchange Vijay - one of the owners of this company for Mahesh - our newest employee. We will still have a managerial cube. But the three managers will be the personnel manager, myself and Mahesh.
Consider the parable told in Matthew 13.
“That same day Jesus went out of the house and sat beside the sea. Such great crowds gathered around him that he got into a boat and sat there, while the whole crowd stood on the beach. And he told them many things in parables, saying: ‘Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had no root, they withered away. Other seeds fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundred fold, some sixty, some thirty. Let any one with ears listen!’” (NRSV)
I cast the seeds of best practices in several prior organization but as soon as I left all of my work ceased. It was as if the birds came in and ate up all my metrics and all my processes. I came here to work with Greg to implement best practices. But, once we encountered resistance the effort was abandoned. Greg's desire for best practices fell on rocky soil, withered and died. Here my effort is being choked by thorns. The way around that is to find the good soil where these efforts can succeed and nurture that soil so that it will support the effort. Mahesh, Sanjay and Srinivas want to grow. They represent the good soil that can yield a hundred fold. If I can invest the time into teaching them how to make this work then they will carry that message with them to other projects and our success will grow. Now, by implication, that implies that Luke and Kathy are the soil that is choked with thorns.
“He put before them another parable: ‘The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the (workers) came and said to him, “Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?” He answered, “An enemy has done this.” The (workers) said to him, “Then do you want us to go and gather them?” But he replied, “No, for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them. Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.”'" (NRSV)
Luke, Kathy and Vijay are not thorns. They are just caught in soil that produces thorns. And any action that I would take to destroy the thorns is going to do harm to the wheat that they can produce. What I need to do is to continue to fertilize and water this soil and allow the thorns to grow along with the wheat. Later the harvesters will separate the wheat from the thorns. That is not my job. On the contrary, my job is to try to minimize some of the stereotyping that I see going on here. Even though the environment here is much better than it was when I worked a couple blocks down the road at their competitor's facility, there is a class structure here that corrodes the relationships. Employees consider themselves superior to contractors and contract programmers are superior to contract project managers. Similarly, on-site work products are presumed to be better than are products from offshore.
We create these environments. We nourish these ecologies. When I worked in construction, we rewarded workers for their muscle power and reinforced the stereotype that construction workers do not use their brains. In data processing we encourage people to focus on the technology and reward them with labels like geek and nerd. We reward people for distancing themselves from who they are. We amplify the feedback loops that cause people to abandon their efforts at integration and wholeness. Vijay is caught in this spiral. If he was the technical manager for this company then he would soon find himself challenged from multiple directions by people who are technically his superior in one narrow discipline or another. But as part owner of this company he is immune from those challenges. He does not get the feedback that would tell him that he needs to learn to listen and collaborate.
I have made a few allusions toward the barbarian behaviors of IT professionals. Here is the reason those behaviors exist. We reward those people for amputating their personalities and help them stunt their social and emotional growth. We treat programmers like a machine that can only produce one product and we work them twenty-four hours a day to create more and more of that same product. We need to change this.
I need to change this ecology and help these people grow out of the shells they now inhabit. I have some ideas, but today I do not feel like I have answers. Therefore I am going to first change myself and then try to change this ecology. I am going to water and fertilize this ecology and let time tell where the wheat grows and where the thorns dominate.
The first change that I need to make is to start running again. You might wonder what running has to do with resolving our project management issues. The connection is that I am not acting like an integrated whole. I have given up important aspects of my life in order to put more time into this project. But that is counter-productive. I resent the time that this project takes and I resent that I am putting time into this effort to the exclusion of other parts of my life. Tonight I am going to start running again and make it a point to do so at least five nights a week.
Re-Planning
It is time to go back and check my alignment with the goals that launched this journey. Please indulge me while I do a quick mental comparison of where I am now. After all, the reason for doing a case study is to assess whether or not the processes that I propose can survive in the real world. So here we go.
We need to start with a vision of what this project team can be. What I now see is that this system perpetuates negative behaviors. We reward people for seeking dominance to the exclusion of cooperation. We reward people for focusing narrowly on achievement to the exclusion of their own maturity. We freeze people out of the decision processes and then act surprised when they feel alienated. These behaviors are normal responses to the environment.
I believe that a properly defined vision has six elements:
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A concise expression of the vision.
A champion to embody the vision.
The vision must be aligned with reality.
For success, the vision must be bought into at three levels.
The vision must be focused and specific.
Implementing the vision requires hard work.
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When I started this project I thought that the vision was to do a proof-of-concept implementation of best-practices. The pattern I see repeated over and over is that people want someone to hand them a certificate that says they have achieved "best practices". They are willing to pay money for that piece of paper and there are lots of consultants willing to take them up on that offer. But sticking a plague on the wall that says "best practices" does nothing. Best practices are achieved through hard work. Greg wants best practices for this company. Does Vijay? Does Luke? If you want to live a life focused on best practices then you are going to need to do it yourself. Most of the people with vision have either already been defeated or they have turned their talents to the pursuit of short term rewards. If you want someone to define the vision and be the champion then you need to look in the mirror. If you want best practices badly enough to get this far in this book then you are the person who is going to need to make that happen.
I cam
e here to use the best project management tools and prove that they work on projects like this. Vijay and Luke see no value in doing this. My life would be simplified if I just gave up as well. Fortunately I had lunch with my good friend Jim this weekend and he told me about a project that he just finished. He started out doing all the right project management stuff and hit resistance. The culture in that company devalued meeting minutes, project schedules and other simple tools. Jim decided to go along with the culture and then found that he had nothing to fall back on when his project ran late.
My friend Rick told me a very similar story. Rick began work in a new company that impressed him with their commitment to project management. He created minutes, used a project schedule and created a work breakdown structure to help define the requirements. Then he found that the while the company proclaimed their adoption of best practices the culture in that company was actually hostile towards documentation. Rick kept creating all those documents anyway, but he learned that it was best to not distribute them. Then Rick, like Jim, found another job where people understood the value in using those simple tools. I plan to do the same. I am going to continue to track expenditures and create my
Workplace Ecology: A Case Study in Project Management Page 6