Managing In Difficult Times November 14, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.Tags: Leadership, Project Management
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Difficult times call for exceptional leaders. It’s easy to lead when times are good. Plentiful budgets, lots of staff, willing business partners: who couldn’t be a good CIO in that kind of climate?
It’s when times get tough that real leadership shows itself. For lesser CIOs, the easy way out is to simply buckle down, cut back on everything, and ride out the storm. You manage to a reduced budget, defer all your projects, and hope to regain ground when the business climate improves. When the business complains, you can shrug and point to the economy, promising solutions when the managing gets easy again.
Alas, the easy way out is the wrong way. When times get tough, a good CIO focuses on how to keep moving ahead in spite of limited resources. In good times or bad, new challenges will constantly confront your company. You must respond to them, deliver solutions, and find ways to help your company succeed.
Instead of pulling back on everything, review each and every project in your portfolio. There will be a small group of projects that are mandatory, without which your company will fail or suffer dramatic setbacks. You must fight for these projects and ensure you have the resources to deliver them. In most cases, it is easy to make your case: corporate failure usually gets the attention of senior management. Some level of funding or support should follow; you’ll need to make do with what you are allotted.
Beyond the mandatory parts of your portfolio, there is a second set of projects that are not mandatory but that will deliver significant immediate value. These are the projects that you must embrace and fight for. Often, they fall by the wayside as budgets are reduced, lost in the clutter of projects that really can be delayed or canceled. In fact, these high-value initiatives are the ones that will help your company succeed in difficult times.
A good CIO will find a way to sell these projects on their merits, justify the investment, and deliver on the results. Especially in tough times, those new tools and processes that reduce headcount, improve efficiency, and drive value to the bottom line are critical to your, and your company’s, success.
Proactive portfolio management is the key to delivering this kind of value. Even when times get better, be aware of those projects that are the real winners. You’ll be able to respond to business needs faster and react to changing conditions more effectively. And that makes you and your organization more valuable in good times and bad.
There Are None So Blind November 12, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.Tags: Best Of 2008, Process Improvement, Users
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Sometimes the hardest part of solving a problem is getting the user to see your solution.
Many years ago, when I lived in Florida, a new mom-and-pop video store opened nearby. This was before the consolidation by big chains like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video, and little video stores were fairly commonplace.
Their inventory management system was simple: when you rented a movie, they wrote out a receipt on three-part NCR paper. One copy was your receipt, one copy was their receipt, and a third copy went into the “out on rental” stack. This stack was used to account for movies as they were returned.
The first time I returned a movie, the girl behind the counter walked over to the rental stack and began to flip through the stack of slips. After a long while, she located my rental slip and marked my movie as having been returned.
Always alert to process improvement opportunities (even then!), I was compelled to offer a better solution.
“You know, if you alphabetize that stack of rental slips, you’ll be able to find a customer’s slip much faster when they return their movie.”
She looked up at me, and then back at the slips. She thought a bit, looked back at me, and replied, “But the customers don’t come in the store in alphabetical order.”
No. No they don’t.
I didn’t say anything else. There wasn’t much else to be said.
A High-Contact, Low-Touch World November 10, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership, Networking.Tags: Best Of 2008, Interaction, Networking, Twitter, Yammer
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All these social networking tools are supposed to increase our interaction and communication with other people. For long-distance relationships, this is certainly true: I am sharing thoughts and ideas with people that I otherwise would never interact with on a regular basis. From that perspective, social tools are improving those relationships and bringing depth and detail that would otherwise escape me.
For those folks that I see every day, tools like Twitter and Yammer can paradoxically create distance where it didn’t previously exist. A coworker recently complained about this, pointing out that Yammer offers yet another way for people to hide in their office and text to each other, avoiding real, live conversations. She’s absolutely right, and I don’t quite know how to solve the problem.
On the one hand, the message stream that is captured and shared by Yammer and Twitter is really useful, and allows many people to experience a single train of thought as it occurs. On the other hand, people really need to look at each other and engage in actual interaction, as messy as it might be.
Sadly, the introverted world of IT makes this worse. I am in the distinct, tiny minority of IT professionals that are extroverted. Sometimes, I think the “I” in IT stands for “introverted.” The synthetic, predictable world of computers provides a safe haven for those who are shy and allows those folks to succeed without ever developing some really important communication skills. Don’t misunderstand: many talented introverts achieve great success in IT, and that’s a good thing. Were they to be thrust into sales or marketing, it would be painful and counter-productive. The wardrobe errors alone would be overwhelming.
Nonetheless, providing tools to these introverts that allow them to further withdraw and still be successful may be a mistake. Teams succeed by communicating. Good communication involves more than 140 characters of text and should include body language, voice tone, and facial expressions. The elimination of direct engagement first began when people began hiding behind email and later learned how to use voice mail and call screening to their advantage. The latest tools make it even easier to avoid other people and still get work done.
As leaders, and extroverted ones at that, we need to recognize that this is happening and force people to engage. I will sometimes intervene when I see an email chain go on for too long and insist that the communicants actually gather and meet. I also have a stock question when someone comes to me to complain about someone else: “Have you discussed this with this person?” The first step to solving problems is to talk about them, and we need to gently encourage people to do this, in spite of the cool tools that tempt us otherwise.
Software and… Elvis? November 5, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Leadership.Tags: Project Management, Software
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I once learned that some paintings are mass produced on assembly lines, with each person applying a single color in a single spot. At the end of the line, a complete painting has been “assembled.” Much of the art in hotel rooms is produced this way. The epitome of the genre is, perhaps, the Velvet Elvis: the perfect blend of kitsch, style, and subject that anyone would be proud to hang in their home. It may not be art, but it sure is a painting!
A lot of software is written in the same way. There is a common belief that you can completely control the development of software, planning each step of the process, deciding when the builds will be ready and the final product will roll off the line. We all work to such tight project deadlines that there is little choice but to manage the development process this way.
Unfortunately, writing software is not a process. Writing software is an art. Just like singing, dancing, painting, or sculpting, certain people are born to write beautiful pieces of code that other, lesser mortals simply cannot produce. For those who can dig in and appreciate a piece of code, there is true beauty inside the very best software.
Like any other art, beautiful software does not happen in predictable, scheduled ways. It happens in fits and starts, when the muse strikes. I can remember many times when the solution to some problem, the perfect algorithm or data structure, would suddenly pop into my head in the middle of the night. You can beat your head against a problem all day, but the elegant solution only arrives when it is ready to be revealed. Regrettably, it’s tough to put milestones like “Muse Strikes” into your project plans.
Now that I am on the management side of this process, I have true sympathy for the developers that struggle to deliver results when they know that the muse has not yet struck. Lesser programmers are content to produce a Velvet Elvis, a pedestrian piece of code that gets the job done in a brute force way. Programming artists seek to deliver art, something they and their peers will consider and appreciate.
As managers, we have to decide when we need art and when we need Elvis. All great artists can produce a Velvet Elvis with little effort, but their spirit will be sapped if they are not allowed to create true art every so often. Keep that in mind as you plan your projects and determine your schedules. Know who your true artists are, and make sure they get to produce that occasional masterpiece. And when you do, they will certainly come to you and say, “Thank you. Thank you very much!”
Another Ancient Artifact November 3, 2008
Posted by Chuck Musciano in Random Musings, Technology.Tags: Computing, History
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I had another “really old” moment with my son the other day. My first job out of college was with Harris Corporation, and I was explaining how Harris evolved from a company called Radiation. Back in the 1950s, Radiation got its start building telemetry equipment for the space program. I told my son that it was very clever technology for the time, capturing real-time data from rockets and recording it on magnetic tape.
And then I got the blank look. “Magnetic tape? What’s that?”
Certainly we haven’t reached this point with magnetic tape, have we? I scrambled for some common point. Finally I settled on cassette tapes. “Remember how we used to have those cassette tapes? The tape in them is magnetic tape. It’s plastic, coated with iron oxide, and you can record data and music on it. The telemetry was recorded on tape like that, but wider.”
My son nodded in understanding, but it was clear that this was a distant memory, at best. And why not? He grew up in the tail end of the CD era, the last physical media we’ll probably ever know. He manages his data online, shuttled between various devices via networks both large and small. He still likes to buy CDs for the cover art and liner notes, but immediately rips them to iTunes and puts the CD on his shelf.
I’m proud to report that I actually have a nine-track, 6250 bpi tape. (That’s bits per inch, by the way. Much denser than the old 1600 bpi tapes.)
When I moved from my first job at Harris (writing compilers) to my second (researching parallel computer architectures) I dumped all my mainframe programs to tape in case I would ever need them again. Fat chance! I’ve never read that tape, and I’ve never had a need for a crucial snippet of PL/I to complete a project. But I still have that tape because, well, you never know if the need will arise. Now, I just need to track down a nine-track, 6250 bpi tape reader. And a matching channel controller for it. And an IBM mainframe. And a 3270 console. Ebay, perhaps?
The Effective CIO 