Adventures in home working

I love the reforming project management blog,  it has some great insights.  As an architect/solution manager who has dabbled with project and programme management for 15 years I have found that all too often project managers get tricked into managing the project and not managing the people.  A great example of this is a list of project management steps which lists 16 steps of essential project management.  Hal then crisply points out in his comments:

It’s not a bad list. If you only followed Lee’s advice, then you would do ok with your projects. However…the author misses a central aspect of projects. Project participants are autonomous. They have the opportunity to say, “No,” even though they often go along saying, “Yes.” They also are likely to misunderstand what they are asked to do, just like you and I misunderstand what we are asked to do.

Projects require leader-managers who care for the project participants. The leader-manager sees that the participants are acting as a team — taking care of each other. Success depends on those relationships to avoid misunderstanding and to create a project setting where intervening in each others’ work is not seen as meddling.

I like to think of successful project management as all of the above, but also the management of the soft areas of team dynamics:

• Co-development
• Co-operation
• Co-decision
• Co-ordination
• Commitment

I have often noticed that the most impressive people I work with are the ones who ask the best questions,  Hal has some hints on how to do this on Reforming Project Management.  His key insight is to use the following two questions, in addition to the traditional who, what, where, when, why and how:

Here are two more revealing questions.

1. Why do you say that?
2. What possibilities are opened (or closed) for me (us)?

The first question is an invitation for the speaker to say more about his/her statements/opinions. The answer to the question reveals how the person sees the world. The question is encouragement for the speaker to continue speaking.

He also adds some useful advise though, because great questions can be pretty scary!

Be careful…adopt a stance of curiosity when asking the question. Otherwise, the speaker may interpret your questioning as an inquisition.

In my experience I found the – What possibilities are opened (or closed) for me (us)? – question to be very clever,  one of my customers once asked me to answer it for the fixed price project we were delivering too them,  by making a great answer to the question mandatory they essentially forced me to go beyond full disclosure,  requiring me to get the whole team to think of every pro and con that we could, and discuss and debate it with them,  it was a great tool to bring customer and supplier closer together.

The idea seems to be to use a single client to manage all of a teams interactions around a specific activity.  It seems like a great idea in principle,  although I have a few concerns about how it will work in practice:

• I am worried that the process of publishing to the team the few steps in a process that need to be shared will be a bit of an overhead,  I favour a publishing process thats as seamless as possible (like adding a tag or ticking a check box)
• That trying to do all of this within the confines of a single application will be difficult with the screen real-estate available to most people, however maybe eclipse supports multiple monitors (then I will be happy) but laptop users will really struggle
• The tool will be a jack of all trades and master of none
• I will not be able to interface with the server infrastructure using standard protocols, like RSS, and will be forced into using the IBM client,  this will be a real pain because no matter how good the tool is its very unlikely I will be using it for all of my projects and certainly not for all of my research and storage
• That the team view of the world will be optimised at the expense of personal productivity

What I liked:

• That the developers do seem to be building the solution to support real business scenarios and not just features
• Online and off-line support
• A rich client, thats flexible and customisable

Here is a screen shot, and I recommend you take a read of the full article if you are a current Lotus Notes user.

I recently came across a quite amazing offer from AxoSoft,  that allowed me to get a 5 user version of their project management software OnTime for just $5 rather than $495, even better the $5 was donated to the Red Cross!  I have been struggling to find a project/task management solution thats flexible enough for my needs so I thought I would give it a try.

You can get access to the offer from here,  there is no link on the web site,  so the only way is through the blogsphere.  At the time of posting they had taken 645 orders and raised $3225 for the Red Cross.

5 minutes later my activation key arrived and I was up and running.  You need to install MSDE, but once thats done you have a 5 user system that is really powerful.  Here are a few of the highlights:

• It’s designed to support defect, feature and task tracking/management,  but its very easy to re-configure it. In my case I changed Defects to Activities, changed a few field names and removed a few others and I now have a project management and task management solution, instead of a bug tracker!
• It’s client server,  it has a great web client that connects to an SQL server or MSDE database
• They say that MSDE can easily support 50+ users
• It has a web client as well that’s broadly equivalent in functionality
• It allows you to build a hierarchy of projects, and browse your tasks at any level in the hierarchy
• It allows you to sort, group, filter and search items
• It allows you to store a description, notes, attachments (linked or embedded), work logs, emails and more against every item
• It’s wildly configurable,  the descriptions of pretty much every field and view can be changed to suit your needs and pick lists like status, priority etc can be customised
• It allows you to create emails, from items
• It allows you to automatically monitor any number of pop email accounts, and auto-process the emails that arrive in them.  In my case I created a number of email accounts and associated them with the activity and task lists.  Found that I could then automatically create an archive of emails associated with each task,  just by forwarding or cc-ing the email accounts I created and placing the task number in the subject field, (for example adding [#44] anywhere in the subject would attach that email to activity 44.
• You can create custom fields, add them to forms and and then group by them,  which is great for GTD users,  although you already have severity, status, priority fields as standard, but you can add fields for different places and different categories.

This is a truly amazing tool for the small project team,  but really excellent for a single user as well.  Unfortunately the 5 user for $5 trial may soon be over, but don’t despair because the 1 user version – which is functionally the same – is FREE of charge.  Here is a sample screen shot:

A few other notes:

• You will want to backup your database,  to do that I created an ODBC connection (in control panel) to my database and then added the following command to the batch file that does my regular nightly backup.  (onetime is the name of the ODBC connection)

OSQL -E -n -D onetime -Q “BACKUP DATABASE onetime TO DISK = ‘D:\Steve\SQL server\master.bak’ WITH INIT”

• There are some really great screen cams that show you how to use it,  start with the overview to get an idea of the power
• I found a bug in the pop email account monitoring service,  it doesn’t seem to download attachments, which is a real shame.  They are working on a fix.
• This is not a great solution if you need to keep your tasks in sync with your laptop, desktop, PDA etc.  However you can use the automatic email processing to allow you to create tasks by sending the appropriate account an email, which is pretty easy.  In fact as many of my tasks are initiated by email in the first place it’s often pretty natural to do it that way.  There is a feature request in to create Outlook sync.
• Check out the support forums for more bugs and issues

I thought I would share another of the ways that I use mind mapping, to create a project plan.  Mind Manager (my tool of choice) really lends itself to this because you can export a map to a Microsoft Project and synchronise changes.  Although I don’t use the sync feature that much I find it far better for creating projects than Microsoft Project for the following reasons:

• Mind maps encourage you to think about the structure or shape of the project,  it really is trivially easy to visualise even very complex projects and to merge and re-structure them as your understanding evolves
• If you are brainstorming a project,  its MUCH easier for other team members to keep track of what you are doing in Mind Manager than it is in Project
• Mind maps use screen area much more effectively that one dimensional outlines so you get to see at least twice as much content,  without suffering from information overload
• Its easier to jump around the mind map for example to show the whole map and then tunnel into an area of interest, and to resize the map so it fills the screen
• You can add icons, images etc,  that provide visual queues to help you relate to the content,  and you can add icons to represent additional dimensions to your map,  for example priority, or to flag problem areas
• Its much easier to add rich text and link documents to your map,  without adding clutter.

In summary as an Architect/Solution manager I tend to use mind maps to define the content and structure of a project,  once that’s been brain stormed and reviewed, we export the map to Microsoft Project, add dependencies and resource types and then hand ownership over to the Project Manager who adds resources, milestones and administrative tasks.

I have just posted about how impressed I am by the OneNote team,  and I especially like it when they share details of how the team uses the product themselves to push the boundaries of their processes.  In this extract of a long post,  Chris describes how they use the next version of OneNote to help with the planning and estimating process:

For our last milestone we used OneNote 12 and created a shared notebook, using several sections but one especially held a page for every proposed feature. We put a table at the top of each page, and embedded the spec document in question. The table also had a place to list the devs, testers, comments, unanswered questions (marked with note flags), etc. Everyone on the team could see the notebook at any time, even on the bus ride home. You could see which devs had started making comments on which spec. Two devs could comment on the same spec at the same time. We could query the whole notebook to see how many unanswered questions there were and what they were.

There were some neat side effects too. For example, previously we used to put these specs out and dev would say they would estimate them. Now we could actually see that they didn’t start estimating them until the following week (with an integrated development team it is gold to know what is really happening, not just what is supposed to be happening). Some PMs took advantage of that knowledge to put up an updated spec that had more detail – something we had been asked not to do in the past as devs had often started estimating the spec unbeknownst to us.

The most amazing thing was that we were done with the whole exercise and had higher faith in its being well executed in a matter of a week – usually it takes a month. This underlines one of the selling points of this approach – it makes your organization more agile. I was talking to a law firm the other day which is interested in OneNote. I asked them why a firm that charges by the hour is interested in time-saving productivity tools? The answer: law firms that engage in litigation are more interested in winning the case than in hourly fees. Anything that allows them to put a case together and move faster than the competition increases their chance of winning. The CIO told me that he learned something from a General when he served with the military: winning is all about not waiting your turn.

In some recent discussions I have been introduced to the concept of “productive friction”, which is an effect that’s created when team members with a diverse background get together.  It happens for example when people from different cultures or academic disciplines or companies work together to solve a problem and it increases the level of innovation.  John Hagel describes it in his book The Only Sustainable Edge and in his Article in the Harvard Business Review.

This recent article in Newsweek describes the effect,  and gives some practical and simple advice on how to take advantage of it in your projects:

What they found was that the most successful teams did two things right. First, they attracted a mixture of experienced people and those who were newcomers to whichever field they were in. That’s not surprising–the need for fresh blood has long been recognized as an important ingredient in success. The second criterion, though, was far less obvious. What successful teams had in common was at least a few experienced members who had never collaborated with each other. “People have a tendency to want to work with their friends–people they’ve worked with before,” says Luis Amaral, a physicist at Northwestern and a coauthor. “That’s exactly the wrong thing to do.”

Blogs and social networking tools help people establish the essential connections between experienced people with different perspectives, and this is one of the main reasons why I keep a public blog, and long for an internal blog, or an alternative mechanism:

The study also suggests a role for technology in bringing seasoned people together. Tacit Knowledge Systems, a start-up in Palo Alto, California, is marketing a computer system that links people with similar professional interests. The system monitors e-mail in a corporation or other large organization and keeps tabs on what employees are interested in. If a worker is looking for somebody to collaborate with, he or she can query the system to find somebody appropriate. Tacit is developing a new version that actively forges connections by prompting employees when it finds people who, on the basis of shared interests, might make a good team. Finding a way to maximize creative potential is one of the most pressing problems in corporations. Knowing what makes one team more creative than another is an important first step.

If you want to find out more,  but don’t have the time or the money to follow the links above,  I recommend you download and listen to these two interviews from IT conversations.

In this IT Conversation Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with John Hagel, who with co-author John Seely Brown, has written “The Only Sustainable Edge,” a new perspective for business.

In this IT Conversation, John explains why he considers web services to be a “deceptively disruptive technology” and why he’s an advocate for web-services strategies that focus on the edge of the enterprise rather than lower-return internal integration projects. “Companies are losing opportunities by not thinking systematically about the technology,” he says.

Andre has this simple and easy to interpret model for classifying people in business:

1. Builders – At the front of every train you typically have the entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs are all about ‘what could be’. They envision the world the way they want to create it and then set out to make that vision a reality. Entrepreneurs are typically described as both visionary or charismatic.
2. Executers – In the middle car you have those that were born to execute. Executers might not brainstorm your next innovation, but once an idea is hatched, they can execute the heck out of it.
3. Protectors – At the back of the train you have the protector. Neither innovation nor execution mean anything to a protector, who is motivated only to protect and guard what’s already been won in terms of assets. Protectors are better at saying “no” than anything else, for fear that any movement might somehow diminish or dwindle what’s been harvested by those before them.

It’s a lot easier to interpret than many models I have seem.

Although I am more of a solution manager than a project manager I have managed 30 odd projects in my time and a fair few programmes.  I have gradually developed a dislike for formal methodologies and templates because of their tendency to prevent the team from thinking.  That said I think there are some key management skills that every project team needs, but I have rarely seen described very well.  This book looks like it is my sort of style,  it in my Amazon favourites in case anyone wants to buy it for me.

This is a great interview with Tim Marsland who is a distinguished engineer and CTO for the Operating Platforms Organization in Sun Microsystems.  In the interview he talks about the approaches Sun takes to the process of test, integration, compatibility and shipping Solaris.  It gives some great insights.  I particularly liked these sections.

First they use daily builds and eating your own dogfood (but don’t use that term) ,  I really like the daily build concept as I have described in previous posts:

We also use the previous night’s build to build today’s system, and every two weeks we put the latest build on the shared file- and mail-server for a large proportion of the operating system development group. We deliberately hold our own feet to the fire. Developers quickly got used to running their stuff on their own desktops and their build machines before integration.

Next a section to use when your manager asks you “why do we need to install the beta”

A few months later, we came up with another interesting idea: the Platinum Beta program. This is an idea where we say that we think our beta software is good enough for the beta tester—not just to kick the tires, but to put it into a production setting. This seems a gigantic risk for a customer to take; the way we made that possible is by giving the customer the support of a development engineer 24/7. Customers in the program get an engineer’s pager number and can call any time and rapidly get workarounds and fixes for their problems. The great thing is that there are customers who are keen on working with us that way because they value the relationship highly and welcome the ability to interact with the engineering group at that level.

This section is great,  it talks about the fact that “testing” in a controlled environment never finds all of the issues, and it also demonstrates the value of making the development team use their own software or the system they are designing to support themselves.  In Sun’s terms the development team become a sort of internal Platinum Beta programme.  I particularly like to make sure that the project and programme managers use the systems they are managing the development of.

When customers do that, they find a completely different set of problems than we do. Obviously, one of the things we’re concerned about is that all of our internal alpha usage is about the things that we do. If you ask “normal” beta customers to test things, very few of them deliberately put it into a place where they’re relying on it, and once they find their first bug, they often give up. The people who are in the platinum program are willing to press on and discover more, particularly if we can fix their problems quickly. The program isn’t very large, but those customers do a production deployment and the engineering team learns an enormous amount from the experience.

Of course when you do lots of real use testing with dedicated users who will help you track down the bugs quality goes way up, a great advantage that the Open Source development community have when developing tools that they actually use.

Once we started down that path, we realized that we were producing “beta releases” that were of equivalent quality to other companies’ production software. We didn’t arrive at that opinion by ourselves. Our customers told us that.

I also like the idea of incremental delivery,  very similar to the daily build concept of incremental development build delivery.  Both have the advantage that a large system evolves in small increments that work before the next increment is added.  At any point in the process you can stop and what you have works, or very nearly with just the last few small changes needing to be debugged.  If you take the big band approach you end up with hundreds of components that nearly work all having to come together at the same time and be made to work, MUCH MUCH more difficult.

That was the genesis of Solaris Express, which is the near-continuous delivery of new stuff. We argued that if we’re using the software internally as part of our production environment, then why not allow our customers who are interested in getting new technology to have access to that software, too.