Reports – You Can’t Live Without Them. Or Can You?

In the parody movie Office Space there is a report that serves as a catalyst  for the plot.  It is of course the infamous TPS Report.  It is a MacGuffin.  The viewer it never finds out what it used for.

Do you have any like that?

Reports are like government agencies.  They most likely were created for a good purpose and served an important role once.  But as people, technology, and your clients or patients change,  your existing reports just keep getting generated and become less and less relevant.

And many of these reports are e-mailed, clogging up a an already saturated inbox and making everything harder to find.

One of the following situations then develops:

• Life goes on with outdated reports that no one reads.
• Reports are added to, making them more bloated
• Existing reports are replaced, or worse, supplemented, with a whole slew of new reports that are recommended by a vendor without a significant amount of vetting.

None of the situations is ideal.

Ideally, you have one report that you can access it via a link or a favorite, which contains all of the information you need and nothing else.  Or possibly, a very small number, but all located in the same place.

You can get there.

There is a wide array of reporting and automation tools that can accomplish this for you.  They are not hard to find.

And you should be able to drill down into reports, to be able to go from high level to details by clicking into graphs or links to make it easy and quick to look up supporting data.

But how do you evaluate what reports you want?

There is a simple tool called the 5 Why’s that can help do this very quickly.  Just call up your 5 year old self and start asking questions:

• Why was this report produced originally produced?
• Why is this data important?
• Why was this report created?
• Why is this analysis relevant?

The key is to keep digging down to figure out how that report makes a difference in your life.

There may be pieces of reports that you want to keep, so this does not have to be an all or nothing approach.

We are overwhelmed with data.  We have the ability to slice it up and present it in a myriad of formats and interpretations.  By distilling information and reporting on only what is truly valuable and then taking that step to automate it, as I wrote about in my last post, you can develop a powerful set of tools that is very easy and quick to use, saving time and focusing efforts on the important aspects of your work.

It Is Always The Season For Gray

“Shades of grey wherever I go
The more I find out the less that I know
Black and white is how it should be
But shades of grey are the colors I see.” – Billy Joel, Shades Of Gray

Have you ever worked on a project where the lines of responsibility were extremely clear?  Projects on which there was never any doubt as to who was responsible for every different part of the project and exactly who would accomplish which task.  If you have, it was probably because you were the only one on that project.  But in real life, that never happens.

We can start with the project plan.  Everyone on the project needs to contribute to that, but the amount of each person’s contribution will not be clear until it is done.  As you go forward, decisions will need to be about tasks needing to be accomplished.  Some or most of them will be very clear who has responsibility and who is accountable.  But any time there is work that crosses a boundary from one person to another or one team to another, then the project has entered the grays zone.

If you have read earlier posts, like this one about team interactions, or this one about handoffs, you will see that the gray zone is a happy, powerful place to be.  You’ll also see that it is a potentially dangerous place to be.  These are the places where your communication skills are most needed and the place where you need to make sure your team members are communicating and collaborating fully.  This is where you need to get involved in the details, the follow-up, and all the things that you do to help your team members in your project manager role.  You may not be writing the process documentation or the work plan, but you are reviewing it very thoroughly.  This means you need to have enough knowledge to do that intelligently.  This might mean there is a  research burden on you here.

With a good team, the people working in the gray areas will work together and figure out their individual roles and tasks.  Everyone involved will accept responsibility for those areas.  With a newer team, or one that is not used to sharing as well, it is going to be up to you to work with them to turn them into a good team and make sure everything is getting done, reviewed, and cleaned up.  You have more communication responsibility, but that is just part of the zest of being a project manager.

Don’t be afraid of gray areas.  Dive right into them.  They are a big reason why you are involved, and this is where a project rocks or fails.  Yours will rock!

Huddle Up!

Have you ever watched a football game where the offense did not huddle before each play?  At least long enough for the quarterback to call a new play?  If you did, you probably a watching your kids play in the backyard.

The reason for the huddle is that the players all want to be running the same play.  You don’t want them running back to think he is getting the ball when he is not and have two receivers going to the same spot.  That is a recipe for failure.

If this method of communication is good enough, even necessary, for the best athletes in the world, why are you doing it?

It is really easy.

Every morning, yes, every morning, whether you work in a software company, a service industry, a factory, or anywhere else, this will benefit you.  Gather your team together for as little as two minutes, go around the group and ask people to contribute two things.

The first thing is what they will be working on that day, if there will be challenges, any impacts from their work that might affect others, or any assistance they might need.  This is a great way to prevent duplicate work and to make sure people are not working at cross purposes.  It is amazing how often those both happen, from a simple lack of communication.

The second thing is any news they have that might affect the rest of the team.  If they were talking to someone in a different departments, a customer, or heard some big news events that they think might affect their coworkers, the group, or work, this is the time to bring it up.  This is not the time to discuss rumors.

Other things people might mention is if they are going to have an unusual schedule, like they have a lot of meetings or will be gone for part of the day, or will be out of the office on subsequent days.  This can be grouped under news that will affect the team.

There does not have to be a lot of discussion, but if you should encourage your team to ask questions of each other to clarify issues.  If it looks like a longer discussion is needed for a subset of your team, ask them to handle it after the huddle.

Huddles are not meant to cover strategic, long-term goals, but rather immediate issues facing your group.  Discussion of bigger issues should be the topic of more structured team meetings.

And one more thing about this meeting.  Don’t call it a meeting.  Call it a huddle, a stand up, a daily status brief, call it anything except meeting.  For some reason, maybe because people have been to too many bad ones, there is a negative stigma attached if you say you’re going to have a meeting every day.  And if you are facilitating them, make sure they are quick and that people stick to important topics.

These are great for any kind of team whether you are a manager or a project manager.

So make sure everyone is on the same page of the playbook, clear away any short-term issues, go out there and score a touchdown every day.

Célébrez La Différence

Dr. Egon Spengler: I have a radical idea. The door swings both ways, we could reverse the polarity flow through the gate.
Dr. Peter Venkman: How?
Dr. Egon Spengler: [hesitates] We’ll cross the streams.
Dr. Peter Venkman: ‘Scuse me Egon? You said crossing the streams was bad!
Dr Ray Stantz: Cross the streams…
Dr. Peter Venkman: You’re gonna endanger us, you’re gonna endanger our client – the nice lady, *who paid us in advance*, before she became a dog…
Dr. Egon Spengler: Not necessarily. There’s definitely a *very slim* chance we’ll survive.
[pause while they consider this]
Dr. Peter Venkman: [slaps Ray] I love this plan! I’m excited it could work! LET’S DO IT! – Ghostbusters (1984)

You have an idea.

No!

You have a great idea!  It is revolutionary.  It will change the way things are done.  It will stand your existing processes on their heads, make them do one of those super complicated yoga poses, and bring enlightenment.

You present your idea to your team, coworkers, friends and their response is…meh.  But you know in your heart that this is a great idea.  What is going on?

Something to remember when talking with others is that, just like I mentioned in a previous post, no two people think the same way.  No two people will do things the exact same way.   And the ability to harness these differences in thoughts and actions is a tremendous skill for a project leader or team leader to have.  But just like any other thing in life, there is a potential downside, which is that that if you explain something in a way that makes sense to you, there is only a certain probability that’ll make sense to others.  Depending on background and the concept being discussed, this could be very high or a could be very low.

We all remember teachers in school who were very good at explaining concepts and others who sometimes spoke or taught at a level that was the students were not ready for.  You probably think back on the first group with more fondness.

It is the same thing that you need to be as a project or team leader.  You need to break down concepts into pieces that are easy to understand and look at them from the point of view of your audience.  It is great to have a computer infrastructure solution that saves hundreds of thousands of dollars, but if you cannot explain to your front line users how this actually helps them, they are going to be lukewarm on the idea at best.

On thing that I find, along with making sure you introduce relevance for your audience, is that using analogies is a great way to impart understanding.  Your analogy is don’t have to be perfect but a close analogy can really help.  I used the the flow of customers in a bank lobby to describe why users are getting slow response times from their computers.  I have compared triage nursing to database indexing.  You can probably guess is that I was trying to explain technical concepts to a nontechnical audience.  And it worked!

The second challenge you have with people thinking differently is that the members of your team all think differently.  And you as a project manager are responsible for making sure people understand each other.  This is more people management.  You need to be scanning the roomm, asking questions, making sure people are involved and responding, and generally making sure that the level of communications is as high as it can be.  This is much easier if you are all together in one place than if you are on a conference call.  But even then, there are tricks to make sure that communication is good.

So, remember, differences in how people think about things are a huge, huge asset to your team.  But it is very easy for that to become a problem as well.  Stay alert to make sure that understanding is happening and watch your team crush it.

Project Management Means People Management

When you are managing a project, your responsibility is not to find a solution and meet all the goals of the project.  Surprising, right?

Your problem is making sure that the project team meets all the goals and finds solutions.

Yes, you have to put together schedules and keep documentation and do the myriad of tasks that a project manager is responsible for.  But your huge, secret, overarching task is to make sure your project team is exactly that, a team.  And that means always paying attention to team a group dynamics.

For instance, in a meeting you are going to have a different types of people with different ideas about how to do things.  That can lead to friction.  And that is OK.  In fact, that is great.  You need to keep those ideas flowing and make sure people are discussing things openly and honestly.  But this can be trickier than it seems.  You have to watch for several things that can either derail your project or limit the effectiveness of your team.

• Lack of open and honest communication – This can stem from many issues and is probably the root of all of the issues you might have.  You may have a loud group, or you may have a quiet group, but you need to make sure that everyone is participating, contributing, and respecting each other.  I am not going to go into all the potential causes is in this post,  but there has to be an air of respect and openness in your team.
• Group think – It seems like it would be good enough for everyone agreed on everything.  Because then you can make great progress getting things done.  If you find your team is being too agreeable, that is a big warning sign.  There should be a lot of discussion of alternatives and potential issues.  You may have to push people by asking probing questions.
• Endless discussion/ Inaction – You want open and honest discussion but you don’t want it to go on forever.  At some point you need to tell people to end the talk and make decisions.  Ideally, at the beginning of a project you will have set up ground rules around how you will make decisions, break ties, will determine when it is time to move on to a new topic or a new task.  If you set those expectations at the beginning of the project, this becomes much easier to avoid.
• Bad team members – Let’s be honest, sometimes you have someone on your team who does not work well with others, even if they are good people.  Maybe they don’t share or they don’t do anything.  I believe that efforts should be made to work with this person, talking to them about what you need and expect from them, but don’t be afraid to talk with your project sponsor about replacing them, if it comes to that.

In comprehensive data analysis at Google, among other places, it has been demonstrated that the biggest key to a successful project is not who is on your team but how that team works together.

So, think of teams like the A-Team.  They might bicker occasionally, but they make their plan and (with a lot of help from special effects) work together to get things done.

Living On The Edge

Yesterday I alluded to the fact that people in structural holes, according to Dr. Bert, are the people most likely to have ideas.  Instead of hole, I like to use the term Edge, which is widely used to describe a place in nature where two different ecosystems meet.  For instance the boundary between a forest and a field or anywhere water meets land.  In and near that boundary area, there will be a huge diversity of species and a riot of growth.  There will be small trees, shrubs, ferns, tall grass, and a disproportionate amount of animal life.  Food, cover, and nesting materials are all very close by.  Animals have access to the resources of the field and forest right nearby.

This edgy area between the forest infield is analogous to and edge between departments.  All of those small trees, shrubs, grass, vines, birds, animals, those can all be considered a new ideas.  And that is a very fertile place for them to grow.

You can create these edges on your project team or in your business very simply.

Find ways for people to interact and share ideas.  Obviously, meetings are one way to do this, but make sure that meetings are set up to discuss ideas and encourage the free exchange of thoughts and experiences.  If you do that correctly, you’ll have amazing ideas and solutions to problems.

Try to create as many edges as you can.  If people and departments don’t normally interact, give them a reason to work together.  Often, it is helpful to include someone on a project that is not impacted that project.  This person creates a value by contributing from a point of view completely different from anyone else involved.  In terms of edges, just including this outside person will create a significant number, because of the new, unexpected interactions with the other members of the team.

Edges are not just important, edges are critical.  This is where most ideas and all of your solutions will come from.  And how people work together at the edges is where you find out if you have a team or a bunch of individuals.

So cultivate the fact is create more edges and be ready.  The hardest part will be trying to figure out which things to do first.

 

So You Want To Be An Innovator

Watch and listen.

Of the things you need to do in order to become an innovator, those are number one and two on the list.

Number three is to I think about how you can apply knowledge from one area of your life or ideas from a department or group to another department or group.  If you are observant of the different situations in your life, then this will naturally occur.

Number four is to start making changes, start talking with people about them, and start seeing how well they will apply.

Congratulations, you have just become an innovator.  You will now have the reputation end of “thinking outside the box” and “bringing something new to the table”.

Sociologist Ronald Burt, from the The University of Chicago Booth School of Business argues just this.  Creative ideas are not usually new ideas, but ideas that are cross applied.  He states that, “People who live in the intersection of social worlds are at higher risk of having good ideas.”  This is true in my life.  I have cross applied ideas from gardening to my work at a bank and from software development to customer service.

And one of the best things about this is that these ideas do not even have to be yours.  The application of the idea will be yours, but the idea can come from someone else or somewhere else.  And the great thing about that is that there are roughly seven billion other people out there to provide these ideas.  And each and every single one of them thinks differently.  Not just differently from you, but differently from each other.

When you combine that broad array of knowledge with all of the interactions that people have with each other, whether listening to them, watching them, reading an article, watching a video, or even reading a blog, you have the opportunity to take that idea, give it a twist and put it back out as something brand new.  Because it really is.  No one else in your group, or department came up with that idea and applied it in the way you doing at.  So even though the germ of the idea what they have come from anywhere, you own it and you should be proud of it.

So, the next time you think, “Hey, that is a good idea”, write it down or have some other way to remember it because chances are you’ll be able to apply it somewhere else.

And always, always credit your source.

Feedback – Enjoy The Noise

I am sure you have experienced the kind of feedback you get when someone holds a microphone too close to an amp.  It can be very annoying and occasionally even painful.

That is not the kind of feedback I’m talking to go up about though.  This kind of feedback is one of the sweetest sounds you have ever heard. I am talking about all of the opinions and ideas and criticisms that people have about your project.  You want to hear all of them.

In fact, you want to go out of your way to make it easier for people to get feedback to you.  You want to encourage it, you want to solicit it, you want to work with them so that they feel as if that if they don’t give you feedback they are doing something wrong.

You want to start this from day one of your project, even before you know all of your project goal.

This seems like a lot of extra work.  It might be.  But if it is, that is because you have some holes in your project.  And the more work you do up front in the beginning to fix them and anticipate what problems you might have down the road, the less work you’re going to have overall.  It is also a great way become an innovator, working with people to apply their ideas to your project.

No matter how long you have been an a position, or doing a job, or whatever kind of experience you have, you are one of tens or hundreds or thousands or millions in that field.  And you don’t do everything, even if you own your own company.  Everybody else that works with you and for you is getting a full year of experience with every year they work.  And they are seeing things that you don’t see, hearing things that you don’t hear, and vice versa.  So if you are encouraging feedback and constructive criticism, then relationships with those people (read: everyone) are going to be extremely valuable.

So set up multiple ways for people to get that feed back to you.  It does not have to come directly to you but it needs to rise to a level where it will be taken into account.  If all of the members of your project team are doing the same thing, you will have an awesome project.

Encourage it, build it, reward it.

The Voices – Not Just In YOUR Head

Every idea that someone in your organization has is valuable.  But those ideas will never reach you unless you actively solicit and respond to them.  I am not talking about multi million dollar projects.  Or even 2 hour process improvements.  These are within the scope of project management.  But so are the small ideas, the ones that make people’s days a little better, make them a little happier, make them feel like the ratio of rewarding work to tedium goes up a little.

At every company I have worked at, there has been an undercurrent of voices.  These are what is heard during breaks, when people stop to talk in a hallway, or when work is a little slow between customers or patients.  These conversations tell you a lot about the company and the work environment.  And these conversations are worth listening to.  I have been at places where these were angry, frustrated, or scared conversations.  I have been at places where this was a mix of minor frustrations and discussions of the good things that we’re going on.  It is much better to work at one of the second places.

Anyone managing in an environment like this needs to know what those conversations are about.  The tricky thing as no one is going to tell a manager directly unless you have a great culture and work environment.  So, to get things started, you need to use some other kind of tool.  You need something like suggestion boxes, online forums, an e-mail address, or other ways to communicate, ideally with the ability to do it anonymously.  It does not really matter what the mechanism is.  Because they are all good.

But not great.

To get to great, employees have to know that they’re being listened to and responded to.  That means that if they have ideas that are good they need to be enacted enthusiastically immediately.  Some of the ideas will not be feasible or realistic.  Communication has to made as to why the suggestion is not being implemented, so those employees know they are being taken seriously.

Now the feedback look starts.

Now you start getting to great.

In this scheme of all the things that your department, business, or organization is trying to accomplish, this seems like minor stuff.  After all, these kinds of suggestions and little tweaks don’t add anything to your bottom line or improve customer service, do they?  I would argue that they do.  Again, I will use Google as an example.  They asked for employee feedback, got hundreds of ideas and thousands of votes on them.  They were little things, mostly easy to implement, and people loved them.  (Work Rules!, Lazlo Bock, p 51.)  The same thing happened at Alcoa.  In Smarter Faster Better, Charles Duhigg write about how Paul O’Neill took over as CEO in 1987 and started focusing on safety.  This is not a bottom line investment.  The short story is that safety got better and as people learned that he was taking safety suggestions seriously, other suggestions, big and small, were submitted.  People were rewarded, profits went up, and the company did fantastic through the 1990’s.  If you have a work force that is inspired and involved to make changes and do a better job than you’ll get the most of those people.

So, listen to those voices.  They are telling you what you need to hear.

 

Transparency – I Can See Clearly Now

I can see clearly now the rain is gone
I can see all obstacles in my way (lyrics by Arthur Baker and Anthony McIlwain)

In today’s world communication is the key to completing projects.  I have covered that at length in earlier posts.  And a key to effective communication is transparency.  I had a high school teacher, Mrs. Joann Mullen, who would often, as one of my classmates was stammering, tell us, “say what you mean and mean what you say.”  This should be true in all of your verbal and written communications. But there is a level beyond that you should aspire to.

Your entire job should be transparent. A good example of transparency is a Kanban Board.  There are variations, but generally on that board are listed:

• Work waiting to be started
• Work in progress
• Completed work

Anyone is interested in knowing what I’m doing and what my priorities can just look at the Kanban Board.  If she feels that they have something that is high priority or needs immediate attention, they are welcome to discuss it with me and have it prioritized. It also make it very easy for my boss.  But when she walks away, she has a very clear expectation of when work will be done and why it is prioritized they way it is. This sets expectations very clearly for both myself and that person.

This is important because usually that person has little idea of what other projects or tasks that I have to complete. I have little idea of her priorities.  Now we have discussed it and both have a better understanding of each others’ worlds.

I want to be clear that I am not advocating sharing confidential information that might be involved in your work.  But if your task is to determine benefits for employees for next year, that is very helpful for other people to know so that they understand that a reimbursement for $28 is not your highest priority.

Another advantage to transparency is that anyone from your team can immediately help out with any of your tasks or vice versa. With the work clearly outlined, it is no trouble at all for team members to assist one another to help customers.

Another significant benefit of transparency is accountability.  If people know what I’m working on and I know what other people are working on that makes it very easy to where the buck stops. And since you are doing one heck of a great job, it means people see all the work you do.  That only adds to appreciation for each other and the jobs you do.

As far as I am concerned, there is no downside to transparency. The more you share the more you can help and be helped by other people. The more your function as a team and the better job you will do.

Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind
It’s gonna be a bright (bright)
Bright (bright) sunshiny day
It’s gonna be a bright (bright)
Bright (bright) sunshiny day

Oh, yes I can make it now the pain is gone
All of the bad feelings have disappeared
Here is that rainbow I’ve been praying for
It’s gonna be a bright (bright)
Bright (bright) sunshiny day