Lack of Trust and the Irony Thereof-A Tale from the Project Management Jungle(tm)

The project I worked on immediately after the one called “Three Letter Agency” (see Blog 4) we will call Project X. Project X was my “reward” for the success of the TLA project. “A new challenge for you, Doug!” my VP said.

I worked for a division of Motorola at that time. That fact is key to the story, or I would have masked it in addition to labeling the project “X”.

We were responsible for a computer/radio subsystem within a larger system.

We were the sub to another company (called the “prime”), who was a sub to us on a similar competing contract. The prime contractor and the government customer on Project X suspected us of trying to ensure the project our company was prime for would somehow ultimately win out over Project X, so they looked on everything we did with skepticism. Needless to say, this made my job as PM less than a barrel of laughs. It is when I learned a person can function with a chronic headache, and where I learned many of my diplomatic skills. Feeble attempt at humor…

Even though we worked for Motorola, we had designed an Intel 486 into the Engineering models. The customer always wondered why we didn’t push for one of the Motorola 68000 series microprocessors. We were engineers, we had no agenda other than technical. The Intel processors were better matches to the overall system requirements. Might sound weird, but that is the truth.

Then we heard about the Pentium. Without using much (any?) emotional intelligence, I allowed the enthusiasm of our engineers to talk me into creating a demonstration of the functionality in the system of what was at that time a brand new Pentium microprocessor. Without asking the prime contractor or otherwise announcing what we had done, we showed it to a visiting Government customer when he stopped by.

The Pentium was so much better than the 486 (although it used more power) that it seemed obvious to us that a change to the Pentium should be made NOW, and we pushed for that with the Government customer, who then went to visit our Prime contractor. Of course, all Hades broke loose, because there was no trust on the team.

I know I should have worked through protocol, through the chain of command. I can only say we were incredibly busy and I have always had a blind spot when it comes to asking for permission when something seems obvious. That comes across as arrogance sometimes, something I have tried to modulate over the years. Not too successfully, I suppose.

Somehow, they imagined a plot to reopen the debate on the microprocessor choice for Project X, and thought we were maybe going to try to push a Motorola processor into the project. WHY we would use the Pentium as the wedge to make that happen still seems a bit weird to me, but there you have it.

After a whole bunch of blustering, screaming, hurt feelings and otherwise testosterone-based chest pounding, the change was made to the Pentium. From a technical standpoint, it was beyond a no-brainer.

The message phase of the story (requested by a prominent member of my editing team):
(1) The effect of the lack of trust on the team is what I am trying to demonstrate. I will discipline myself to not comment on how the weirdness of such a contractual situation might have exacerbated the situation.

(2) We were overly focused on technical detail. As PM, I particularly did not act very smart (maybe still numb from The Three Letter Agency contract). Also in my role as PM, I suppose I was point man for political conniving, but I wasn’t conniving at all when we showed the demo to the customer. Too smart by half, or something. Maybe too dumb by half.

(3) The irony of the whole thing is beyond my power of description, and still amazes me to this day.

All rights Reserved, Executive Team Leadership, LLC, 2008

Building a Successful Team Culture (part 1)

I am turning a bit more serious for this blog, no funny stories this week. In many ways, the first eight blogs I wrote were meant to set this one up, an “op-ed piece” as Esteri Hinman—an ex-colleague at Intel--used to teasingly refer to some of my fierier communications when I was there.

The stress on knowledge worker teams in the workplace has never been greater. In a down economy, the drive for increasing profits is unrelenting. Product development cycles grow shorter, the projects themselves are increasingly more complex with shifting and uncertain requirements, projects are multi-sited around the world and companies find it increasingly more difficult to get enough of the right kind of people. And yet only 10% of knowledge worker teams are high-performance*.

Meanwhile, many good workers--having had enough of the pressure and the demands--are leaving the workplace, taking their experience and wisdom with them. Many more demoralized and unhappy people stay.

To be sure, there are a lot of people trying to help with these problems. There are literally hundreds of management and leadership books on the shelves at your local Barnes & Noble. I tried to count them once, and got as high as 300 before stopping. The large increase in the numbers of executive and business coaches is another sign of this.

My business is based on the belief that people need team cultures: (1) that support them and validate them as individuals and members of the team; (2) where they are told the truth and feel comfortable speaking the truth; (3) where everyone knows their role and is held accountable, including project and senior management. As a leader, create this kind of culture and your teams have a much better chance of being in that 10% of high-performance teams.

I use the three words integrity, transparency, and accountability to encapsulate that mental construct. I call this the culture of integrity, and I am going to spell out the basics of that culture in the next few blogs.

Helping people understand how to turn these abstract words into the concrete actions that are required to successfully manage complex teams requires more than a few blogs, so I have created a 45-minute slide set chock full of anecdotes and helpful hints that I am currently scheduling (for free, of course) with organizations around Austin. I will be glad to do so in Phoenix, Folsom, Carolina or the DC area as well in the coming months.

There will likely not be a blog next week, as our son Matt is having rather complex foot surgery on Tuesday June 10. If you are so inclined, please include him in your prayers.

*Contagious Success, Susan Lucia Annunzio, 2004

All Rights Reserved, 2008, Executive Team Leadership, LLC

An Example of Trust

I have recently been reading a wonderful book called Contagious Success by Susan Lucia Annunzio. Ms. Annunzio and her colleagues surveyed 3000 knowledge workers across the world (including some from Intel and Motorola), and have several conclusions on how to build high-performance teams and spread that culture across the corporation.

Some of Ms. Annunzio’s key findings are that in order for knowledge workers to work at peak performance they have to be treated well and trusted and that they have to have input into how their work is structured. Seems obvious to me, how about you? How true it sounds, but how rare that really is! According to Ms. Annunzio, only 10% of knowledge worker teams are managed in a high performance way.

I was musing on just how true this has been in the projects I have been involved with when I remembered a funny story that illustrates some of this from when I was a co-op student in a South Carolina paper mill while in engineering school at Clemson University. Co-op is short for cooperative education, wherein a student alternates semesters at school with real-world experience. I spent four semesters at this paper mill.

This wasn’t just any paper mill that I worked in. At the time it had the largest (widest) Fourdrinier in the world. Per Wikipedia, the Fourdrinier is “the basis for most modern papermaking. The Fourdrinier accomplishes all the steps needed to transform a source of wood pulp into a final paper product.” These machines run verrry fast and are very wide, generating huge economies of scale. Fourdrinier’s are the microprocessors of the paper mill world!

But one of my first tasks was not with the sexy Fourdrinier; it was to design the new control panel for a totally different part of the paper mill, the wood-sorting yard.

I was a 19-year old college sophomore. I had been to a sum total of six states at that time. I had never even flown in a plane. My best friends from the time may disagree, but I am pretty sure I’d had one girl friend by then. And I certainly did not know how to design a new control panel for the wood-sorting yard.

The wood-sorting yard in a paper mill is the front end of the mill, the area of the paper mill where all the logs are sorted by size, quality and whatever other criteria are used. The logs are dumped in the top of a bunch of conveyor belts and then it looks like the log ride at Six Flags or any other amusement park, except these are real logs that would easily crush you if you somehow fell into the sluices. I honestly used to have nightmares about that kind of thing while I worked there. And we won’t even talk about the wood chippers…

But anyway, how to approach this job of designing the new control panel? I started by finding the sorting operator. Sorting operators in wood-sorting yards are pretty much about half crazy. Imagine eight hours per day, five days per week of sitting in a noisy, scary and wet environment, with head phones on to prevent deafness, hitting buttons constantly sorting huge logs all day, occasionally having to use huge gaffe hooks to untangle jammed logs.

The sorting operator acted like he didn’t see me for a while, but eventually got somebody else to take his task and followed me into the quiet room right off the sorting floor. He glared at me, clearly not at all impressed with this “college boy”.

“I’m here to design your new control panel,” I started hopefully.

“Uh huh,” my start clearly not improving his attitude about me.

I showed him the current drawing from the engineering files. “This is the current drawing.”

He glared down at the drawing. “That ain’t riht,” was what it sounded like he said.

“Oh.” I said.

With the most dismissive and derisive tone possible, he said, “Follow me,” and he went back out to the floor. He picked up a broom and I thought quickly of the movie “Deliverance” but I managed to maintain my professional demeanor.

He stood in front of the current control panel, rusted as it was. The panel was several feet across, with one hundred or so buttons. “I have to take this here broom and start the GD thing like this.” He used the broom with his right arm to simulate pushing a button far away from where he was pushing other buttons with his left arm. “That’s what the last college boy left me,” he said with another glare. “He dint have the furst idea how to design GD anything anybody could use.”

I don’t know why I said the following, but it made total sense at the time (even more so now). “Well, how would you like it designed?” I asked.

“What?” he yelled.

“Why don’t you tell me what you want it to look like,” I said.

Another glare, and a jerk of the head back towards the control room. I followed him and we started designing his control panel. After a couple more sessions, it was done. A few weeks later he had a brand new stainless steel control panel. And no more broom.

The moral is amazingly simple to me. Just trust your people. Please! Good things will happen. And they can’t be any harder to work with or trust than that guy was!

Enjoy your Memorial Day holiday.

All Rights Reserved, 2008, Executive Team Leadership, LLC

Learning From My Failures: Twenty Years Ago Today (with a nod to the Beatles)

It’s in all the books on leadership, be they on sports or business: “We learn more from our failures than our successes.” I am here to tell you today it has been true for me. This is the first of an occasional series on my failures and what I learned from them.

So far, these blogs have been about success. That makes sense, right? You might not read the blogs otherwise! We may learn (hopefully) from our failures, but we don’t talk about them much, do we?

Almost twenty years ago to the day (how many got the Sgt. Pepper's reference?) , I managed my first project for a commercial enterprise. I was made project leader of a long running production project, building a large number of complex electronic boxes for a US DOD customer. The project needed refreshing, its quality had never been good and now its profits were drooping as the team continued to use old methods. First the success part: I was able to cut hours of assembly per unit by about 30%, made the monthly output more predictable and increased quality. This translated into a large positive dollar impact for my company.

So where was the failure? It was in the way I did it, the horrible way I felt afterwards, and how I was without a follow-on position for a few weeks.

I used classic command and control management: trusting no one, trying to keep track of all the minute detail of what everyone was doing. Why act this way? I didn’t trust them, and was trying to catch them doing something wrong. They weren’t going to cause me to fail!

The team had little affection for me to the point where it was uncomfortable and I was actually removed from the project because I was so overbearing! Recent coworkers uniformly express disbelief when I tell them that part of the story, I suppose because I seem so otherwise now.

It ultimately all worked out, as I moved on to another part of the organization, where the projects I worked on had great success over a number of years, including a six-sigma-quality manufacturing project. But the experience left me battered and bruised, and I am sure a number of the team were, as well. Some of them had been friends at the beginning of the project, and no longer spoke to me by the end.

I was also angry and frustrated that the “success” I created within that team was not better appreciated and that I was “put on ice” for several weeks by management. I am sweating a bit right now as I remember those experiences. And who knows what would have happened to my career had I not been “picked up” by the new project team. I doubt I would be writing these blogs.

What did I learn? It took a while, but that was the planting of a seed on how to manage people right and be successful at the same time. On subsequent projects, I was more aware of my impact on people and their feelings. Slowly over time, an approach emerged that allowed my desire to win and my driving nature to sublimate itself into a team environment, and I became viewed as a good people person. It did not happen overnight, far from it.

And ultimately, it was probably a good thing that I was not made to feel successful by my management. Had they done so, I may have been vindicated in my approach and have continued to manage that way to this day, which would have been a real shame.

All Rights Reserved, 2008, Executive Team Leadership, LLC

Tales from The Project Management Jungle(tm):The Gang That Could Schedule Straight:

A semiconductor division, which had struggled to use project management methodology in an effective and productive manner, brought me into one of their design teams. The team had two key projects coming up in the next year to eighteen months that simply had to come in on time. Their customer had products in a highly competitive marketplace waiting to be incorporated into a higher level product and they brought a lot of pressure to bear. It didn’t help that the historical relationship between the overall customer and my new division was poor.
The team’s previous projects had been late and, while the group had created schedules and held project reviews, they seemingly had little positive impact on the projects. The project personnel and management viewed the reviews as time wasters.

The previous team’s schedule was very detailed, well over 500 tasks. It resided in my PM predecessor’s office updated frequently but unable to drive action on the project. My predecessor had spent much of his time haranguing the engineering managers to update the schedule and then actually doing the updating himself, its very detail defeating him. He had very little time for anything else and thus had little impact on the project team. The project itself was woefully late.
I spent a couple of months just getting to know the team while the earlier project finished. Most importantly, the senior design manager, Brian B, and I hit it off. Without the support of Brian and the overall design center VP, I am sure we would not been able to create the success that ensued.
Our customer dictated a due date. I convinced Brian to let the team build a detailed milestone schedule with no predetermined end date, but with an end date as tight as the team could commit to. Brian trusted the project functional managers and knew the requested project scope and tasks very well, so he was able to call them out if they tried to pad tasks. And he and I were effective tag-teaming them in a good cop/bad cop way to drive out pad in the schedule.
Finally, we finished the schedule. But our schedule finish date was a couple of months beyond the demanded date. I convinced Brian that he would never be stronger than this and to hold firm no matter how hard the pounding. “They won’t kill you now, but better to die now than to live through a disaster and then be killed,” I told him. For some reason Brian agreed.
Brian and I were called into meetings with the customer PM, who demanded repeatedly and loudly (but not unkindly) we move the date. We politely refused, stating that in good faith the team could not commit to finishing sooner.
We were then called into a meeting with the number 2 manager in our organization--a VP--to talk some sense into us. I thought I would be fired for driving such weird behavior (he actually subsequently hired me for a higher level job roughly 2 ½ years later).
We told him we weren’t trying to be stubborn, but this was the best we felt the team could do. Then we told him we would gladly reduce the schedule wherever he could identify fat. We spent several hours with this VP and at the end of that time he agreed our date was fine.
We then were called into a meeting with the top manager in our design organization, a man who in the past had articles written about him in the Wall Street Journal. We listened to a lot of talk on how to run development projects successfully, but at the end he didn’t direct us to shorten the schedule either.
Then we were off and running. We had a meeting with the senior functional managers on the project, then a kick-off meeting with all project personnel. We showed the milestone schedule (it never changed) and the project management process we intended to use. We showed clear roles and responsibilities for all levels of the team, including senior management. This started the process of driving accountability.
It also started a process of transparency on the team. We only ever had one set of books, i.e., the schedule we showed them was the schedule we showed the customer and management. There wasn’t one schedule for the team and one for management, which is often the case. Everyone on the team saw the original schedule, in the beginning and as we progressed. So did management.
Brian and I told the team (looking straight in as many eyes as possible) that a big part of our jobs was to remove roadblocks for them. The VP for the design center was there for the kickoff and echoed that statement. Later we did exactly what we promised, taking several issues to senior management and getting what was requested. This, of course, added greatly to the trust of management on the team. The leaders on teams create the culture around them by modeling the correct behaviors. Others began to act with more trust and it spread.
We ultimately successfully managed this development project to the advertised end date with only a 200-line schedule updated weekly by myself, a simple earned value system, and a short list of key project risks. That way, the key project managers were appropriately involved, but did not have to devote an enormous amount of energy to the project management details.
The task managers did have more detailed individual schedules which we did not look at. We did, however, ask them each week in our project team meetings to each show a one slide summary of any impediments to hitting the next handful of key project milestones. This data drove our overall risk list and top-level schedule.
Much discussion ensued in the weekly staff meetings. Engineers (all knowledge workers, really) are very busy, hate to waste time and like to work alone. Getting engineers (knowledge workers) out of their offices/cubicles and discussing things not in their functional area was the goal. This occurred once they understood that the other managers/functional teams could impact them. Peer pressure drove accountability on the project.
We continued to be transparent to the team and management on our progress, risks, and any help we needed.
We continued to hold the team, ourselves and management accountable for needed actions.
We continued to trust and expected to be trusted in all discussions.
And we finished on the exact day committed to. It was disappointing when our part of the overall project then sat on the shelf for almost a year as the overall product customer dealt with his own typical delays, he himself missing his “firm” date by a wide margin.
Were we lucky? I cannot say, but this was done a total of 7 times over roughly the next 3 years with the teams in that organization. Many people, including myself, progressed in their careers as a result. That kind of luck I will personally take any day. 

And Brian told me he is still using these techniques, these many  years later, on projects he currently manages.

All Rights Reserved, 2008, Executive Team Leadership, LLC

Top 11 Leadership Tales Masquerading as Sports Movies

For my purposes, a leadership tale involves a leader who is presented with a large team challenge that is solved by creating a culture of integrity within that team. Trust and accountability--in various forms--are always part of that culture.

I have left out some great and sometimes inspirational sports movies such as "Chariots of Fire", "The Greatest Game Ever Played", "Varsity Blues", "Major League" and "Friday Night Lights" because they don’t meet this definition for one reason or another. You can comment on the blog-site with counter opinions.

None of the leaders are women. I am sorry for that, Holly and Bolly (Wood, that is) haven’t awakened to leaders within the other gender. If I missed such a movie, please tell me.

Now to the list of leadership parables masquerading as sports movies. First, the more well known ones.
--"Miracle", the story of the 1980 US Olympic hockey team and what their coach Herb Brooks did in order to bond them as a team.
--"Glory Road", the story of the 1966 UTEP NCAA championship basketball team, and how their coach Don Haskins build and motivated a team that--for the first time in NCAA history--started all black players to beat historically white Kentucky.
--"Hoosiers", the fictional story of a struggling high school basketball coach in a 1950’s Indiana small high school. Simply a classic.
--In many ways "Hoosiers" true darker equivalent is "Coach Carter". Samuel Jackson’s performance is awesome.
--"Remember The Titans" tells the story of how the first black football coach in 1970’s Richmond VA blended a team of whites and blacks into a championship squad.
--"Jerry Maguire". Super agent is fired because he is more honest and introduces a service-mentality approach into being a sports agent. He struggles--not to lead a team--but to define a way of doing business that has a large degree of integrity. I couldn’t leave this one out.

I am not including the totally great "Friday Night Lights", a true Texas story. The TV series of the same name is filmed a few miles from where I live. It is not included because the movie is not focused on the efforts of a leader who is facing a tough team situation. It is more of a pastoral piece about the town, the boys and what the football team means to the same. Sorry, Texan friends!

Now for some movies not so widely known.
--"Lagaan". An Indian film about a village competing in cricket (a game unknown to them) with the local English Army team to avoid crushing extra taxes (“lagaan” in Hindi). I warn you, this movie is a bit long and has the Bollywood habit of perhaps overly frequent song, but the hero is definitely a leader who builds a culture of integrity against great odds.
--"Believe in Me". An up and coming male coach arrives in an Oklahoma town to coach--he thinks--their boys’ team. He actually is assigned to coach the poorly funded and under supported girls’ team. His struggle to build a culture of integrity within the situation is a wonder to behold.
--"Pride". How a former black swimmer builds a winning swim team in a inner city Philadelphia recreation center that has been targeted for closing.
--"Chak De! India". Years after facing humiliating defeat on the field against Pakistan, former hockey (field hockey in the US) star Kabir Khan returns to the game as coach of the Indian women's national hockey team, striving to shape a ragtag bunch of female athletes into a true team.
--"Miracle at Oxford" . Almost unbelievable that a movie about the yearly Oxford vs. Cambridge rowing competition could be a leadership parable, but it is. With its prima donna American rowers (who seem a lot like some designers I have known), this movie clearly shows how the value of trust built with accountability, teamwork and desire can make up for lesser talent. If you only watch one of these movies, this is the best one you haven’t seen.

Last movie not included was "The Miracle Match", story of the 1950 US soccer team’s victory over then world-class England. To get the size of the upset, imagine a basketball team from someplace not at all known for basketball, like, say New Zealand beating the US national team. If the US had won the World Cup that year, I would have included it! Uruguay actually won the cup in 1950.

And then there is perhaps the best leadership tale that isn’t a sports movie, "12 O’ Clock High". But that is a subject for another blog. Companies, including Intel and Motorola, have used this movie in leadership classes.

Finally, my wife (not a sports person and who has fallen asleep repeatedly over the several nights I have watched all these movies) suggested a blog called “Chick Flicks Masquerading as Leadership Tales.” That one is going to take me a while. Any suggestions?

All rights reserved, 2008, Executive Team Leadership, LLC

Tales from the Project Management Jungle(tm): The MIC Story

This story shows the result when there is a lack of integrity within the team process. One of the many people I have gotten to know over the years is a PM buddy of mine; called Harry H. Harry swears this is a true story.

Harry’s boss had technical (not business) responsibility for all of the design projects for a division of a major technology corporation. He called Harry in one day and said, “Go look at the Project X schedule and see what date they can really make. We are meeting with MIC (Most Important Customer) next week and I want to know what to tell the staff before the MIC meeting.”

Harry found the team the next day. They were already in a schedule review. Harry spent a couple of hours looking at their schedule, which showed month “so and so” as the finish date. He asked a bunch of questions and they all agreed month “so and so” was “aggressive but doable.” Harry then this reported back to his boss.

The next week Harry was in a review that the division manager and his staff held in preparation for the meeting with MIC. When the project area business manager went through his summary foils on Project X the schedule commitment date he noted was two months earlier than what the project team and Harry had agreed to the previous week. He made no mention of that fact to the staff.

They all had text pagers at the time, so Harry started texting: his boss, the project manager he had met with, the assistant project manager, everyone. “This is the wrong date, right? We cannot make it,” Harry texted. No one would reply, so Harry stood up and said to the division general manager, “This date is not what was agreed to and is too aggressive, we won’t make it. You at least need to know that.”

Harry’s boss then paged him, “Let the politicians handle this,” after which much discussion ensued. Finally, likely angry with all of them, the division general manager assigned the area business manager an action to figure out what the correct date was and the meeting was adjourned. Harry then lost track of that thread, was excluded from any further meetings, and was not involved with that project any further, in any capacity. All he had done was tell the truth, correct? Didn’t people need to know or was Harry simply naïve?

Harry was unable to tell me for a fact what date they told MIC the next week. Harry did find out that the project eventually was several months late to even the date they had agreed to in the team review, much less the more aggressive date. And he also learned that the corporation subsequently lost the business of that customer, a huge blow.

And both his boss and the area business manager involved left the corporation unhappily within a few months of that event. What price truth? Pretty high for all involved.

The point to me is obvious, but let me state it. Who were these guys fooling and why did they not tell the truth--at least among themselves--much less to the customer? Had there been real trust, true accountability and a transparent communicative culture within the staff would the same results have occurred?

All rights reserved, 2008, Executive Team Leadership, LLC

Blog 2: Thoughts About Girl Scouts While Not Watching Duke in the Final Four

Many of you know that I am a nut about Duke University basketball. My Dad started this rooting for Duke thing because of all things, get this: When he was growing up in rural North Carolina, Duke was a major football power. Not so now, of course.

Duke hosted a Rose Bowl in 1942 (due to fears of West Coast invasion) and played in major bowls like the Orange, Cotton and Sugar Bowls.

This time of year I am usually avidly analyzing brackets and worrying/watching Duke’s basketball team, coached by a great motivator, strategist and leader of teams, Mike Krzyzewski.

But not this year. Duke didn’t make it out of the first weekend, their lack of an effective inside big man fatally taken advantage of. So I spent my next two weekends with the Girl Scouts. And was better off for it.

I believe in the Girl Scouts. Frances Hesselbein, the CEO instrumental to their renaissance a few years ago, was the keynote speaker at a Leadership Conference I attended two years ago. She spoke quietly and passionately of how they successfully implemented the goal of being “relevant” to all girls, not just the traditional suburban girls.

So I haven’t been surprised at the positive energy, diversity and creativity that surrounds the activities my daughter gets involved in. Most businesses would do well to motivate their employees half as well as are these Girl Scout volunteers.

First weekend, she and I went to what was called the “Best Beau Dance.” This is mostly an excuse for these girls to get together and scream while eating snacks, drinking lemonade, doing the limbo and dancing. Emphasize dancing. My daughter sure loved it. I have rarely seen her so happy. I must confess she enjoyed dancing with her fellow girl scouts the most. And disco was king when I was in college! Hard to figure. There is evidence, I have heard, that girls make better life decisions if they do 1:1 activities with their dads. Confidence and self-esteem are increased.

This past weekend the entire family attended what was called “Thinking Day,” one point of which was to hear about the diversity of Girl Scouts around the world. Each troop dressed up in native garb, prepared food and presented facts about a particular country, during which all girls had lines/roles. No one was left out.

Values of inclusion, appreciation for diversity and other cultures, self-confidence and self-reliance were displayed, providing a foundation for the girls to be happier people and more able in the future to drive their own agendas at work and home.

I noticed as we left how good everyone seems to feel when leaving these activities. Contrast that to how I feel when Duke makes an early exit from the NCAA tourney. But I hear they signed a great 6’10” big man, so next year should be a different story!

All rights reserved, 2008, Executive Team Leadership, LLC

Blog 1: What Are these Blogs All About?

Integrity, Accountability and Transparency in a team context are the basis of my executive coaching business, Executive Team Leadership, LLC. Yes, I realize that many executives, small business leaders, leading technical contributors and project managers (my target markets) look on abstract words like these with disdain.

Yet it is exactly these words--when turned into actions that yield quantifiable results within teams--that have generated the best successes in my 25 years within engineering, manufacturing and product development teams.

Clearly, the challenge is in showing the value of these words in action. How to approach this? Certainly through personal interaction via power-point briefings and the like. If you know a business or technical group that would like a free talk on this theme, let me know. And I will also spread the word through my website.

But most importantly, the word will be spread through these short blogs, no more than one page of text (“stories from the project management jungle” blogs may be a little longer). Ultimately they will be posted on my website, currently under construction. Please feel free to pass them along to interested parties.

I hope to be the center spoke of a community of people who are interested in reading and commenting on these blogs. So please send your comments and ideas.

I intend to thread several themes throughout these blogs. They are:
--Leadership in its various (good and bad) forms. Leadership (IMO) is one of the single most overused and misunderstood words in the business world.
--Teams. Business, sports, family, political, spiritual and other team types. Nothing much gets done in this complex world without teams, yet people struggle mightily in the business world and elsewhere to find functional teams to help them meet their dreams and goals.
--Diversity. In an increasingly global business world, we all need to be more aware that the best solutions come when a myriad of viewpoints are included in the decision making process. Sounds so simple…
--Balance. Achieving excellence in all key aspects of life: work, family, self, with significant others.
--And, of course, Integrity, Accountability and Transparency will be there.

That’s a wrap for now! Hope you enjoy the blogs and can participate.

All rights reserved, 2008, Executive Team Leadership, LLC

Tales from the Project Management Jungle(tm): The Three Letter Agency Story

When I had been a Program Manager for only a couple of years I was assigned an interesting project as part of a corporate joint venture which brought together capabilities from different parts of the corporation to create a solution requested by a major three letter agency (not the one you think).

We were given a contract, after much discussion between the agency and corporate VPs, always with the admonishment from the customer that “there isn’t anymore money, don’t ask for more money.” I was brought in only after the contract was awarded (first warning flag) and told to “hit schedule, budget and maintain scope.”

As I was new to being a Program Manager, I was very motivated. I weekly charted to the hour the tasks each person was working on, and did other things trying to see how the project was really going. We kept the headcount down and the people motivated by a variety of positive mechanisms. The two key designers were junior engineers and they could get some OT pay--they didn’t really have anything else to do--so they were happy enough.

But, with several months to go, I could see we were going to run out of money before we finished the agreed-to scope. My personal analysis was beyond that of the standard contractual reports. The standard reports showed everything was ok. This is not at all unusual. Engineering task managers tend to be overly optimistic and the last 15% is notoriously hard to predict in development work.

Some of my conclusion was based on intuition, some from knowledge gained by working on these kinds of development jobs for several years, and from knowing about that last 15% of a project. I talked with my management, convinced them this was the reality.

Development work brings high risk. As the contract was a cost plus fee agreement, my corporation would not ask for fee on any overrun but also would not “eat” the overrun itself. I knew the customer would be concerned but thought they would at least appreciate being told the truth early enough to do something about it. After all, they could cut scope or would have the time to find more money. I thought the worst thing to do was to wait until the end when it would be obvious and then they would not have time to react or make any decisions. As they were the customer, I felt they had the right to know “now” and to make decisions.

So I called up the contract manager and told him. Thus “detonation” number one occurred, i.e., he turned the telephone line blue with his frustration. Within a few days I found myself in their headquarters building in Washington, DC.

Let me set the stage. There were at least 10 three-letter-agency people at the table. And there was me, the only representative of my corporation at the table. There were two account representatives from my corporation sitting in the back of the conference room--not at the conference table—distancing themselves from the “mess” but still there to support their customer. I would turn around and wave occasionally for support, and if they couldn’t divert their eyes quickly enough they might wave or smile tight encouragement back at me.

Then I started. “We have done everything we can to hit the target number,” I told the room, then explaining what measures we had taken to control costs and manage smartly. General wary nods. “I thought you would want to know the following as soon as possible. Here is the data.” I explained what I had been doing and how I formed my conclusion. “I am sorry. We are going to run out of money before we finish…”

An explosion of voices interrupted. “Detonation” number 2. “Your VP said… Unacceptable… What about your monthly cost reports, none of them showed a problem. Your company can pay. I am going to talk to...” This went on for what seemed like a really long time but was probably only a few minutes.

I waited. I was solid in my belief that what I was doing was right. I was sharing with them the truth as I saw it.

When they finally ran down I started again, without emotion. “We are going to run out of money. Cannot change that. Thought you would want to know so you could something about it.” “Detonation” number 3. Even meaner and nastier than the previous time.

This continued on for a couple of hours. They would dive into the details of the data I had. They would bring up my VP’s name. They would accuse me of being a poor manager, not driving the team hard enough. They would frequently mention how important the project was to their mission. They even brought up our CEO’s name once or twice.

This went on for several more rounds. They continued to release their not unreasonable frustrations. I believe they were testing me for any weakness, any wavering of my story, and trying to see if I would commit my company to pay for any overrun.

I just stayed on the same points: “Here is the data. We are going to run out of money. What would you like us to do?”
It may have been at detonation 4 or 5 that one of the key three letter managers jumped up, cursed, and left the room. He had been key to the original contract agreement and felt the most ownership of the agency managers.

Only half jokingly I asked, “He’s not going for his gun, is he?” Some of these folks, including that gentleman, did have guns.

Only half-jokingly as well, they replied, “We’re not sure.”

Finally this concluded and I left. “Bloodied but unbowed,” as they say. The sales representatives even took me to lunch, patted me on the back and said I had “done about as well as could be expected.”

I left convinced I had done the right thing in telling the truth as I saw it. I knew we had run a good project. The budget was just too tight for what was being done, and the development task too difficult. I felt telling them the truth this early would give them the time to truly decide what was best for them.

I flew back home and after a few weeks the agency came up with the requested dollars. We finished the job for the amount requested, to the agreed scope and schedule.

About a week after the job concluded I went to my VP and said “Well, that was fun! Really learned a lot. How about a new challenge and customer?” He agreed and I moved on to a new contract.

A few days after that I got a phone call from the agency contract manager, “Doug, we hear a nasty rumor!”

“Yes, Joe (I’ll call him Joe, because I honestly can’t remember his name--blanked it out most likely--it might even have been Joe) it’s true. I am going on to another customer.”

“Well, gosh Doug. That’s disappointing. Was it something we said? Because honestly you’re the best PM we ever had at your company.”

I paused for a few seconds, nonplussed. Then I said, “Wow, Joe. I can’t imagine how you treated the bad ones!”

This story may seem humorous now, but it surely wasn't humorous in the least at the time.

The point is this. It is best to tell people what they need to hear even if they act like--at that moment--that they don’t want to hear it. This increases trust in the overall relationship and helps people feel better about the work experience. After all, when the project above was successful, the customer seemingly appreciated being told the truth. They would have been much angrier had I stayed silent until we ran out of money and then a mad scramble ensued.

Sadly in my experience people often don’t tell the truth. Instead they often tell others only what they are contractually obligated to say or tell people what they think they want to hear, or only enough to lead them to the conclusion they want them to arrive at in such a way that they can't be accused of lying later. Many corporate leaders who have fallen into trouble in the past few years try to toe this line. Maybe there are often very good reasons why people do these things.

But to me, integrity based decisions are solid (logical?) and allow me to sleep at night.

Was I naïve? What if things hadn’t worked out “well”? Did I risk my nascent career for “ethics”?

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