Donna Fitzgerald

As part of the “new normal” everyone is redefining how things get done in order to reduce the number of people it takes to do the work.  Normally I’d say that’s a good thing because I’ve always believe Robert Heinlein had it right:

“Progress doesn’t come from early risers — progress is made by lazy men looking for easier ways to do things.”

If you didn’t grow up reading science fiction the quote might lose something in translation because Heinlein wasn’t advocating either sloth or hedonism.  He just felt that there was so much to do in life that anything that could be simplified should be.

Now on to my point; I’m not seeing the increase in creativity or innovation I would be expecting as part of our changing economy and I’m not sure why.  I’ve got a gut instinct that says we’ve cut too far and adopted too much of an attitude that if we have enough process than any trained monkey can do the work.  The problem is that trained monkeys don’t innovate.

Part of my concern comes from a recent personal trip I took.  Almost everyone I spoke with in my travels was angry, over worked and stressed almost to the point of breaking.  Stress kills creativity.  It also kills productivity over the long haul (though not unfortunately in the short run). 

So here’s what interests me.  How do we as managers and leaders identify when we’ve crossed the line?  I’m sure most of you reading this will be saying – “I’m on the receiving end of this – it’s the folks in the c- suite who make decisions” and my answer would be that we don’t help them make decisions if we can’t show them facts or if we don’t have facts at least a cogent model that makes a case that we have to do something different.

I really don’t have a definitive answer to this problem especially since I think the surface, easy answers you’ll hear advocated on television aren’t right (and here I’m including pundits on both side of the political equation).  I’d love to know what the rest of you are thinking and more specifically what you as a manager think YOU can do to help turn the corner on this issue.

If I were still managing I know I’d be doing everything I could to get the stress level down and I’d probably be doing that by talking to my people and seeing what work we could eliminate… And maybe, just maybe if we eliminated some work we’d find we made some progress…

Comments?  Agree?  Disagree?

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Category: New Normal Organizational Development     Tags: Leadership, Productivity, Stress Management

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I had a call last week that helped me connect the dots on a situation I’d occasionally found frustrating, but hadn’t really known why. Every once in a while a client will call and ask for information they can hand to their boss. For support personnel that is a completely valid request but if the person on the phone is at a manager level or above the request generally means a missed opportunity on their part to increase their value to their own organization. Essentially treating any request to provide information from a superior, without having a plan to also include a recommendation for next steps is a waste of a golden opportunity.

In my world a request of information is always one of the first ways that any individual can begin to prove their leadership capabilities to an organization. If the boss says “Can you ask Gartner about X? Can we improve it, reduce it, change it, etc?” then what should come back is an answer that includes the requested information AND a well thought out recommendation as to what the organization should do to actually make good use of the offered advice (which by the way we are always happy to help you prepare if you are a client). In my experience the people who get ahead in organization have all these recommendations. Even if they weren’t accepted, there’s generally often unspoken credit for effort. The rule of thumb is usually that while the first time doesn’t have to work, the goal is to figure out why the proposal was rejected and how to use the next opportunity that presents itself to provide recommendation that are a little closer to the needs and desires of management until the stars align and the proposal is accepted with a “looks good, why don’t you run with it” response.

If you are a senior manager, then I suggest that you owe it to your staff to make sure they understand that they will ultimately be judged by their willingness to contribute solutions, not just effort to the organization. If you are having trouble getting this point across, because you let them upward delegate too much then get a copy of Managing Management Time: Who’s Got the Monkey? by William Oncken and Kenneth H. Blanchard. It’s been out of print for years BUT it’s the single best guide I’ve ever found for solving this problem. If you aren’t yet a senior manager and you’ve passed up opportunities to prepare these recommendations then I suggest you also get a copy of the book. A little bit of initiative doing what’s important to management rather than just what’s important to you has never been known to hurt a career.

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Category: Organizational Development PMO     Tags: Leadership

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I’ve been doing my imitation of a headless chicken recently so it was only this morning that I had a chance to sit down and go through my god-son’s pictures from his summer program in Japan.   Let me begin by saying that I’ve never been to Japan.   6 years ago when we supposed to go, work just got too crazy and flight availability was iffy to say the least.

 Looking at Daniel’s pictures I was struck by how many things had changed.  Going to Japan just seemed like a big deal to me in 2006.  Today it’s just one more long airplane flight.  In 2006 I knew lots of people who had been to Japan but seeing their pictures would have been a process of going to their house, waiting for them to find them and then flipping through the hard copies.  Today tweetdeck offers me a personal slideshow, delivered to my family room 24 hours a day, and Daniel isn’t even back from Japan yet. As far as its come, technology isn’t completely ubiquitous yet.  We loaded Skype to Daniel’s computer the day before he left only to find out that there isn’t any Wi-Fi available in his dorm room.  Our assumption that it would be there is almost laughable but it reflects how we all see the world today.

So what does all this have to do with PPM?  Two things; the first is our potential project staff really is global and we need to begin understanding how to work effectively with a geographically dispersed team (especially those of us in the United States).  If this sounds like old news, I’m not sure it is.  We all went international years ago but I think we did it with our eyes closed.  We just treated everyone the same and tried to adjust for time differences )or at least that’s how I handled it).   Now I think we owe our team members a little more personal touch (which means a little more travel on somebody’s part no matter how grueling).  The second point is back to my refrain that PMs are luddities.  We need to not just embrace communication and social networking technology.  We need to lead because we’re the ones on the front line.

I know we’re all busy, but our professional lives are not completely defined and bounded by the PMBOK.  To be perceived as leaders in our organizations we should be looking for areas where we can establish leadership naturally and I think collaborative technologies and the fine art of managing in a global world is a golden opportunity that is being handed to us on a platter.

Thoughts?  Opposing opinions?

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Category: PMO Technology     Tags: Collaboration, Geographically disbursed teams, Leadership

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I’ve just been through about 100 plus views of the future.  The really important thing I learned reading all these comments is that 95% of individuals commenting indulged in blatant wishful thinking.  My comment here isn’t intended to be critical.  I was just eye opening to me to see how littel ability we have to separate our more rational thought processes from our hopes.  I believe that most of the individuals commenting also live their lives committed to making many of the changes they prognosticated which made their views much more understandable (after all you can’t get up everyday and work to change things if you have predetermined that you are going to fail).

The problem with these perspectives is they make for very bad decision making.  I can wish with all my heart that things will be sweetness and light in the future but I’m not going to build my company’s 5 your plan on those assumptions.  Of course I say that but the other learning I got from reading all these perspectives is how hard it is to be completely objective and rational.  Robert Handler has some forth-coming  reasearch called “Why People Make Irrational Decisions, and How PPM Leaders Can Deal With It” that I think pertains to some of the issues here.  We often think we’re being rational and we’re not.

Of the 5% that seemed to have any grasp of the subject of future trends largely devoid of wishful thinking I noticed that they all kept their views very close to the near term and essentially said  “here are the problems we need to deal with somehow.  The way we deal with them (the problems) will drive the future”. 

 So at the risk of finding myself indulging in the same unconscious errors I pointed out with others here is what seemed to make sense from what I read  (as filtered through my possibly equally biased viewpoint)

• Health care costs driven by an aging population and the increased demand for expensive treatment at all ages, further exacerbated by diet and lack of exercise- which is exacerbated by what we do for a living (driving and sitting at desks) and the rate of stress all conspire to create a vicious feedback loop of increasing cost that we can’t afford in the progressively nearer term future.
• Debt everywhere which will have to be paid somehow
• A small number believe that the US is now under educated and over confident which will lead to a further economic downturn in the US as “creative jobs” are moved to other economic zones.  This problem will be further exacerbated by the increase in the cost of education which may in turn be the “next crises” in the US. 
• One or two individuals mentioned a possible increased cost of energy as a significant future driver.

Obviously there are no solutions here and I’m certainly not going to posit any.  From a perspective of scenario planning it’s critical to remember that solutions do NOT need to be either positive or socially desirable.  Society can chose to solve problems though wars and repressive social policies just as easily as it can though trade and collaboration.  My interest at the moment is just in suggesting as a baseline that future planning is just a tad harder than it may look from the outside.

Comments?  Suggestions for what the future might hold?

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Category: Organizational Development Strategic Planning     Tags: Future Trends, Scenario Planning

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I was just doing some research on change management and I had another light bulb moment.  The article I was reading said you needed to make a business case for change, and my immediate gut reaction was “on what planet?  Nobody ever makes a change for the sake of change.”  In my experience most organizations, change is a by-product of acquiring something else that is deemed to be valuable.  Let me try and be more specific – if there’s a bright idea by some process wonk that by changing action X, the process can be improved and nobody else thinks the process was broken – it’s a very BAD IDEA.  If the company needs to improve their logistics process because their lunch is getting eaten by the competition and everyone in the company knows it; making a process change is a very GOOD IDEA.

 When I was much less experienced than I am now (reader younger) I routinely came up with good ideas of how we could improve the way we did things.  I had two ways of handling these good ideas.  In some cases I’d go walk around and talk to the people in the chain and say “are you on board with this if I implement it?”  If they said yes, I never asked permission I just did it.  These tended to work out quite well.  The problem was always with my big ideas that involved spending money or getting other business units to change where I didn’t have a personal network.  Generally I’d have to go to management and 99% of the time they’d say “Good idea, but not now” and sent me back to my office.  Most staff professionals get very angry and very frustrated when their ideas get shot down but I found it left me more curious than anything else. I knew they had a reason for making the judgment they did – I just didn’t understand it – hence the light bulb moment.

 What I now understand is that contrary to most literature, incremental change imposed by somebody with a bright idea is VERY EXPENSIVE and largely unnecessary.  Joe Proctor, a former CIO of Intel, gave me the best advice on the subject I’ve ever received.  His question was “who else thinks this is a problem worth solving right now?”  Sometimes Joe and I didn’t see eye to eye but that question was profoundly brilliant and is 90% of the threshold condition for making any change (the other 10% is what I call the burning building test — but that’s a subject for another blog).

So a proposal that does not have advocacy from a broad range of people is simply too expensive to do because it creates unnecessary change AND change has a price.  (see my blog The Unfamiliarity Factor is Critically Important in Change Management).  The more I think about this the more I understand why I’ve looked at some of the “level 4 continuous improvement” literature and shuttered in horror (and NO the Gartner maturity model for PPM does not have a continuous improvement level).  I believe in continuous improvement but it absolutely has to be from the ground up.  If it’s top down it needs to be so clear cut as to why it should be adopted that people are literally beating on management to let them do it.  

There’s an old book call Up the Organization by Robert Townsend that had another piece of advice that I immediately knew was absolute wisdom the moment I read it.  Townsend’s contented that it was essential to never introduce a small change unless people were so busy and so stressed they would accept the change with open arms because it was going to help them (he was talking about adding staff but the advice is extendable).

I hope by sharing my insight that I can possibly help reduce the frustration I know many of you feeel about the fact that your organization is refusing to follow your lead and get on the formal project management process bandwagon.  After all top management asked you to make the change and then they (senior management) refused to force people to accept it, leaving you feeling like you are banging your head against a stone wall.  But feeling frustrated isn’t worth your time.  The answer to the problem is actually very simple if you can’t sell it bottom-up and there’s no burning building to drive adoption top down — go back to the drawing board and rethink what you are doing.

Thoughts?  comments?  Violently disagree???

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Category: Organizational Development PMO     Tags: Change Management

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I was sitting on the plane last week trying to get some writing done and as it always, one thought lead to another until I realized I was contemplating why organizations fear shades of gray.  All the incredible emphasis on process is designed to eliminate human judgment and ensure consistency but if we’d ever stop kidding ourselves, the truth is all this emphasis on process isn’t actually getting us the result we claim to want.  Every time I think about this topic I imagine a closed tube being squished flat.  There is a 100% guarantee that the tube will spring a leak and that the contents will ooze out until the tube is flat.  It’s the same thing with most business processes.  Since the process is always under pressure there will always be a leak somewhere.  By encouraging people to “follow a highly prescription Process” (and capital P processes are always highly prescriptive) there’s nobody who believes he or she has the authority to either relieve the pressure in the first place or at least take the cap off the tube and catch what squirts out.

Don’t get me wrong – I believe in process (with a lowercase p). So why do processes work when Processes don’t?  The answer is actually rather simple.  A process (small p) says begin by establishing if the thing that is happening is abnormal in any way.  If so go into problem solving mode immediately.  Apply judgment, knowledge and experience until it’s fixed.  If it isn’t abnormal – follow the standard practice.  Anthropologically this works very well because human beings are hard wired to do very rapid problem identification.  If you tell them there are bad things in the proverbial bushes they will keep their eyes peeled.  At this point some of you are probably saying “But that’s what I’m afraid of…  When they take independent action they just make things worse”  and my answer would be,” possibly true”.  And here is where we come full circle.  If you reserve problem resolution to management (as defined as those individuals who get paid to think about what they do”) then all the problems are going to come to your desk anyway, so tell me again what the big P Process actually accomplished? 

By the way I should mention that the litmus test on what’s a big P process is always the fact that somebody somewhere feels the need to do a compliance audit to ensure adherence to the Process (not success in creating the results of the process but adherence to the Process itself.)  I understand that for many people the advantages of compliance auditing for adherence to process boarders on religious faith and I am normally open minded enough to entertain that there are many paths to the same outcome BUT I absolutely draw the line on this one when it comes to PPM processes. 

I should say very clearly that this is MY OPINION.  It is not a Gartner Position.  There are lots of folks inside the company who feel just as strongly in the other direction.  My reasons for airing the issue are that I think we as a community need to discuss it.  My objection is that we are wasting time, money and  people, none of which we can afford to waste now or in the future.  On the other hand, there’s always an open mind hidden beneath my diatribes and if there’s a middle ground I’d love to find it.

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Category: Agile Organizational Development PMO     Tags: Decision Making, PPM Process

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Just got off the phone with a great client and as usual when I talk with great clients I realized something that I should always have known.  The problem with a hierarchy, when it comes to culture change, is that we somehow think the people down in the lower levels of the org chart “aren’t us”.  By that I mean we start unconsciously thinking about them as if they were children we can train to behave better.  This thinking flaw is very subtle and the only reason I caught on to it was that as I listened to my client I found myself unintentionally thinking along those lines. 

It’s been years since I’ve really devled into the subject of how to change a culture, from a analytical perspective and it’s probably time to add up all the bits and pieces I keep learning.  Carol Rozwell (see Carol’s blog here) has taught me the role and value of storytelling and of working the social network.  Helping organizations become more agile has taught me some harsh lessons about the role of the carrot and the stick (all carrot and no stick is simply a waste of time and energy).  30 years of working with C-level staff has taught me the important lesson that all culture change is a two sided transaction.  If management wants me to change then they need to hold up their end of the bargain (which is always interesting since in my experience management rarely even acknowledges they have an end to the bargain).  That “do what I say — not what I do” probably doesn’t work any better in corporations than it does in raising children.  And the final single most important element I’ve learned after way, way too many years of being a manager (and my thanks to everyone who has ever agreed to work for me in teaching me this lesson) “Who you are speaks so loudly, I can not hear what you say.” 

It’s not about messaging.  It’s not about metrics and it absolutely is NOT ABOUT PROCESS.  It’s about modeling desired behavoir.  I got lucky somewhere along the line.  I’ve never been smart enough to be anything except hopelessly transparent.  Even if I’m smart enough to keep my mouth shut occassionally – I still think my opinions so loudly everyone hears me anyway.  The disadvantage of this trait is obvious BUT the advantage is that I suffer less from having discognizant mental models than others might.  In my world there is only one set of rules and I get to live by them just like everyone else.  With this personality failing, people who work for me have always known where they stood and exactly what types of behavior would get them shown to the door.  Occassionally, there would be some honest miscommunications (”if you ever use your knowledge of what someone else in the company makes to justify your own raise again you will be terminated on the spot”) but they were truly few and far between.  This isn’t to imply I was the worlds best manager (a truly laughable proposition) but only that I instinctively stumbled on the recipe for creating a culture of high performing teams.

To quote someone who worked for me early on in my career.  “I know what’s important to her, and she works so hard to make it happen, it’s not a lot of skin off my nose to help her accomplish what she’s trying to do.”  I knew then that I had been handed a pearl of great price (and John, where ever you are, thank you) .  I’m not sure how much sense this will make to anyone reading it.  I’ve always believed that by sharing unvarnished realizations — even if they are somewhat rough and ill formed — it’s possible to trigger a similar line of thought in others interested in the same subject.  Lot’s more to explore here but I’m interested in hearing from others as to whether or not they agree or what your experience has bee in building a high performance culture.

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Category: Agile Organizational Development PMO     Tags: Change Management, Corporate Culture

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I recently had two calls both of which centered around the need for real change management.  In both cases there was a problem that needed to be solved, and in both cases the original suggestion was to just establish new rules and then enforce them.  The only problem was that in many ways the old rules were just as good as the new rules as far as it went. Which said to me that nothing was going to change.  After all  when people are already doing what makes sense for them to do, they probably won’t really change their behavior just because the new rules say “now we really mean it”.

To get a changed business result, PEOPLE actually need to have some context and possibly some amount of practice modeling their new behavior.  They also need to know how their future problems (whatever they end up being) will be addressed in the new system and what the actual goal (other than because it’s a dictate) is for the change.  I don’t believe people are change resistent.  I just believe that human beings are wired to conserve energy and that change for the sake of change is considered a waste of energy. 

 So what’s the answer if you are leading a project or program that will result in significant change?

1) Always do a phased implementation.  Grass-roots and good public opinion are your friends.  If you can’t do that then do a large conference room pilot and let “influencers” come in and experience the new reality
2) Understand the social network of your organization.  Know who people turn to for help, advice and leadership and ensure they are either on board with your project or that they have agree to at least adopt a wait and see attitude.  (Dealing with powerful, vocal detrators is a subject for another blog.)
3) Understand the power of storytelling.  Corporate messaging is good BUT the story people tell themselves about the change is what really matters.  In many ways it’s the storytelling that fuels “the last mile”. 

On the last point, I was watching the movie the “3:10 to Yuma” last night and was captivated by the plot thread of a criminal who ws willing to get on a train headed for jail just to help create the myth of the single man with the courage to do what no other man was willing to do.  Watching the movie I was struck by the fact that we often under value the human ability to participate in something bigger than ourselves for no other reason sometimes than it’s the right thing to do and there in lies the first secret. 

True change is never about rational decisions impossed upon an organization.  True change results from people joining in the change because it’s the right thing, at the right time and the right place.  You don’t need 100% of the people — you just need enough to tip the scales and you get that through creating a shared vision that appeals to both the mind and the heart.  And therein lies the second secret  — you have to believe in the change passionately yourself or you can’t lead anyone where you yourself are unwilling to go. 

I’ll end this with an open question.  We’ve recently (in the last 10 years) moved complete ownership of the vision to the sponsor and made the project manager just a coordinator.  We as a PPM community must have had some reason for abdicating our resposibility for vision and I’m curious 1) why did we do this?  and 2) Can we undo it?  or 3) Is is fine the way it is?

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Category: PMO Program Management Project Management     Tags: Change Management, Storytelling

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My first research note (in a planned series) on the Enterprise Program Management Office (EPMO) was published a couple of weeks ago.  See

The Enterprise PMO: An Emerging Force in Strategy Realization   
http://www.gartner.com/resId=1382324 

(Obviously this is free to clients and will have a fee associated with it for non-clients)

I’ll be discussing some of the concepts in future blogs but to summarize, the role of the EPMO is to help the organization make sure that strategy (real strategy not just words on paper) is realized through investment in projects and programs.  If you are tempted to say “Come on, Donna — that’s what we do now” then you are either in the 5 to 10% of companies where it is true or you are mistaking the concept of “strategic alignment” for strategic realization.  One says I’m somewhere in the general vicinity of the strategy — the other says I have direct line of sight to the strategy and can tangibly show how this project or program contributes. 

 The EPMO as we’re discussing it is very different from what you’ll read in 90% of the books that discuss the EPMO in terms of a big centralized execution and process centric organization.  The model as we’ve conceived it advocates small, lean, mean and agile which seems appropriate for the times.

I’ve presented this model now at three conferences and I’ve found two completely different responses coming from attendees.  The first is “YES!!!  That’s where I’m heading and that’s exactly what I want to do.” and the second response is “Not sure this works for me because I don’t have anything to do with strategy. Somebody else worries about why we’re doing the projects.”

 Despite my enthusiasm for the first answer, there really isn’t anything the matter with the second answer.  Turns out which answer someone gives is generally related to how mature their organization is. The second answer is a classic level 2 while the first is generally from organizations at level 3 or higher.  Another factor that influences the answer is also the level of involvement of the CEO.  If the CEO wants better strategic results and sees projects and programs as a way to make this happen – there is a perfect opportunity and in fact a need for the EPMO.  If the CEO has other things on his or her plate then if generally isn’t a priority.

 As I said we’re just starting to socialize what we hope are concepts that will help our clients cope and better yet thrive in the face of economic uncertainty.  If you are currently running an EPMO I’d love to hear from you as to what’s been working and what has proven difficult.  Based on our research I’d say that politics and the magnitude of the change rate near the top of the list for difficult, while speed to results and positive emergence rate at the top for the positives. 

 Any stories?  Please share.

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Category: Agile PMO Project Portfolio Managemnet Strategic Planning     Tags: EPMO, Strategic Tactics

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I’ve used software package “A” (the product shall remain nameless since this is a personal opinion and not a Gartner MQ type of comment) since the first version came out on windows 3.1.  Originally is was cheap enough that I didn’t mind being a loyal customer and I upgraded faithfully.  Somewhere about 10 years ago the upgrade price started to get progressively more expensive but they still offered the occasional sale so they kept me in the fold.  For whatever reason, I simply draw the line at more than 100 dollars to upgrade software.  So at $149 they started losing me and at $179 (as I remember) I decided they were completely out of their minds.  I stopped using the software and I stopped recommending it entirely.  Fortunately for them — they do what they do (keep track of disparate pieces of information) better than any other software I’ve ever used.  So it was with a huge amount of reluctance I went out to the web site to see what it would cost to get a version that would run under windows 7.  Surprise, surprise they now offer it at $50 dollars a year.  I’ve never been a fan of not owning my software but at 50 dollars a year for the most current version there is only one alternative.

The exact opposite situation exists with software package “B”.  I’ve upgraded faithfully until version 7 and I’ve now decided I’m off the band wagon.  (I just WON’T pay $179 especially when I get 90% of the most important feature functions in a free version from somebody else).  Are the free/SaaS products as good?  Nope, not in total, but the question I’ve come to ask myself is do I care?  Do I get enough out of them to make them worth the price especially since it’s coming out of my own checkbook? I don’t like to change any more than the next person but I’m finding as part of the “new frugality” that this economic crises has engendered that I feel more secure saying to a vendor “I’ll pay for what I use” which is the concept that underlies SaaS.  

So why do you care about any of this, if you are in charge of a PMO or managing a project?  I think the answer is that the model underlying our software acquisitions is changing. What we need today may not be what we need tomorrow and the more rapid the possible change cycle the less attractive it is to invest heavily now in something that may have a very short life-cycle.  I also am a big believer in starting small and then seeing what I think before I spend real money (by recommending a purchase at my company or somebody else’s).  So today I’ve decided to go SaaS with too productivity tools.  I’ll report back in a year and we’ll see if it’s money well spent or if I think it was a mistake and why.

I’d  love to hear from other’s looking at the same issue either personally with applications you run to improve your own productivity or professionally with PPM software you’ve chosen to acquire for your organization.

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Category: Applications PMO     Tags: Future Trends, Productivity, SaaS, Software

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