Problems in Communication Between Popular IT Frameworks?

I been lately working in IT Service Management (ITSM) and Enterprise Service Management (ESM) field. I also been working with change and learning. I decided to write this post as an opener to series of posts about ESM.

I been introduced to multiple different IT frameworks and I had hard time patching them together exactly for a long period of time. TOGAF, PRINCE2, ITIL, COBIT and many others make some sense from their perspectives, but they all failed to capture the whole picture. What I will describe next does not either capture the whole picture, but a little bigger part of it.

I recently attended a course by Ben Kalland who I should contribute the picture below for helping me gain better understanding of four key aspects of IT and how they are interconnect to each other. I’m now trying to relay this information with some of my own additions to you.

Four Points of View

Key aspect of TOGAF is in planning and gaining a whole picture of organization, its parts and their interactions. Key interests are in what should be planned (what the business wants) and how those plans are taken into action (execution).

Key aspect of PRINCE2 is in implementation and different tasks you should do and remember when implementing something. Key interests are in what are the limitations (boundaries of what we can do) and how they will change and fit in service production.

Key aspect of ITIL is in running the operational organization and within those processes. Some people might say ITIL is a lifecycle model and I would agree on this part. However I would also say that transition and operation are its most used parts and with many other parts its point of view is from service production even in earlier lifecycle. Key interests are in what’s coming to service production and what are important for customers and business.

Key aspect of COBIT is in the control and auditing. COBIT has generalized business needs based on a research to around 20 generic needs like: increase profitability. Key interests are related to what the business needs and what this will mean for IT. Which processes IT should do and what kind of plans for future architecture, capabilities and software you need.

Now What?

So what can you do with this information? First of all it gives perspective on how different bodies are measured or what is usually their source of inspiration. Also it gives perspective on how people with understanding on a specific framework think and what kind of language, sense making and examples you might want to use. More than that it gives you possibility to have meaningful discussions and ask the right questions.

In practice:

• Green could represent the way CIO thinks: What are your business needs, what kind of processes we need to work on and what it will mean for future architecture?
• Gray could represent Enterprise Architects and how they think: What is the business going to do in the future and how it will affect our roadmaps and architecture plans. These roadmaps need to be put in action.
• Blue could represent PMO and how they think: What are limits in where we can work, can we build this on SPARC-architecture? What will we transfer as finished or updated services to service production.
• Orange could represent IT service production and how they think: What are the processes we need to run operations the way customers want us to? What processes should we focus on and what new services and changes are coming to service production?

I find many of the frameworks I have studied include useful information. They are all toolkits and you should pick what tools you find useful from them. On some cases you might only want to take ideas and ask what’s the agile way or lean way of doing it. Point I’m trying to make is taking them as they come is an error. Benefit of having a common language and understand the language some one else is speaking is also one of the key benefits from all of the “best practice” frameworks.

The way these frameworks are implemented and seen is also a big problem. I find that many people understand processes and parts from the frameworks and perhaps the technical implementation of them with tools. At the same time very few understand learning, change management and leadership required to change things in organizations in a sustainable way. How to create a working process? I think this is the reason to many failed implementation of programs and projects taking inspiration from one of the frameworks.

Lean, Systems Thinking, Complexity Thinking are all aspects you can look at the whole or its parts. That’s something I might write at a later date.

I hope this gave a small clarification on how people with skills on specific framework might think.

What is wrong with Finland and how to fix it – a case example

We are living interesting times here in Finland. On one hand Finland is one of the best places in the world. We have high living standards, good public services, low income differences between social groups and a peaceful society in general. On the other hand we have lost much of the industry over the last 10-15 years that has allowed us to build this wonderful society. Combine this with the general downfall of the global economy and the Russian sanctions and the end result is that we are facing some very tough questions about how to finance our current way of living or to choose which parts of our current systems should we “trim” to cut expenses.

I’m very glad that we have finally found the courage to face some of these issues and are having a political discussion about how to make these adjustments. That’s the positive side. The negative side is that it seems the way are looking for solutions is very traditional and not innovative at all.

To me, as a casual newspaper reader, it seems that the discussion is revolving around two questions

1. How to finance the current services in new ways?
2. Can the level of service be reduced with acceptable consequence to our society?

In many cases these questions are probably good ones, but I would really like to see more innovation driven questions like:

1. In what other ways can we provide the same “function” as the current service?
2. How can we reduce costs while at same time raising the level of service?
3. What underused resources can we discover to provide the services?
4. To what other functions/services can we integrate the service into?
5. How can we change the systems in such a way that the service is no longer needed?

These innovation driven questions will also lead to lower costs and create innovations we can also possibly use as exports. This is a much better end result then can come from the cost cutting questions, where the best outcome is lower costs, and the much more likely outcome is just transferring costs to another part of our society through local optimization.

There is much talk about the innovation society. Our current economic situation is a great opportunity to turn that talk into actions if we have the courage to shift our perspective and look for untraditional solutions. Innovation starts with the ability to think AND act differently.  Like Albert Einstein famously said:

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”

A case example – monitoring environmental permits

A good case example is the issue of how to finance effective monitoring of environmental permits. A few troubling environmental incidents have brought attention to fact that due to budget cuts the officials are unable to effectively monitor companies. The proposed solution to this problem is that companies should pay the government to monitor the permits. I really dislike this “solution” because of several reasons:

1. The companies are already paying taxes and adding other payments will make Finland a less appealing investment place when compared to other countries
2. It is a “solution” that does not encourage any innovation around the issue.
3. It encourages not improving the current solution because the costs will be transferred to third parties

Although I’ll admit I’m definitely no expert on the topic, I think we should be able to better. We should try to find solutions that cut costs AND improve the service, NOT just find another party to pay the bill. If the task sounds too daunting perhaps we can find solace in the fact there are good innovation tools, like TRIZ, to help us in this endeavor.

Here’s a few ideas I came up after thinking about the issue over a cup of coffee using some TRIZ tools:

• Make the high level executives personally responsible (the fines come from their own pocket) for the environmental issues – Brazil has done this successfully in the finance industry
• Make all the audit and reporting publicly available. Engage volunteers and environmental groups in auditing the data
• Whistle blower programs with potentially high rewards for employees who turn in their employer. This has been done for IT licenses for example
• Create quality circles between companies – this has led to better quality for car supply chains
• Make an cluster collectively responsible for each other’s environmental issues
• Offer tax benefits to companies with an excellent record if they are willing to mentor other companies
• Use peer review between companies as an auditing system
• Open monitoring for competition, ie it can be done by certified companies – analogous to book keeping
• Make the next generation corporate leaders environmentally responsible by incorporating the topic into university and high school training in an effective way
• Help companies design their processes in such an way that monitoring controls can be embedded into the actual work, instead of being an separate activity
• Is it possible to substitute environmental permit monitoring by monitoring other available data that correlates strong with environmental issues (like safety and continuous improvement) and monitor them instead
• Imitate the US tax system where audits are random, and the consequence severe if you get caught
• Sell consulting to companies, not monitoring
• Make the audits Lean, ie trim every part that does not create real value
• Partially automate the data collection and monitoring activities and utilize big data analytics
• R&D support for innovative ways to reduce environmental risks
• High fines for offenders to cover monitoring costs. Those who do it by the book do not have to pay

Many of these ideas are just about improving monitoring, which probably isn’t even the right question. Most companies probably don’t set out to intentionally damage the environment. Rather it is a consequence of a lot of mistakes and carelessness. If the government could help companies fix these problems by helping them to implement an effective and empowering continuous improvement method like Toyota Kata  it would be truly a win-win scenario. Finland would benefit from better environmental responsibility and companies from higher productivity from improvements and more engaged employees. In this scenario the companies wouldn’t mind paying some extra fees.

Toyota Kata – Workshop at ITSM.fi Top 10 Conference

Last friday I held a Toyota Kata – workshop at the ITSM.fi Top 10 conference with the help of my colleague and friend Tomi Lamminsalo. The conference was a great experience with good presentations and a very active and knowledgeable audience. I really enjoyed myself and learned some new interesting things in the process. My one take a way was the ISM – method.

I was a bit worried about how active people would be in the morning workshop because of the previous nights party. Luckily my worries proved to be unfounded and the workshop participants were very active and we had a very interactive session. It was very nice to observe how open to new ideas everyone was even though some of the participants had a lot experience in quite different  ways of working.

The slides can be found at SlideShare:

Toyota Kata Presentation for ITSM.fi TOP 10 Conference from Teemu Toivonen

The agenda for the presentation was:

• What is a learning organization
• What is Toyota Kata
• Theory and examples of Improvement Kata
• Improvement Kata exercise
• Theory of Coaching Kata
• Coaching Kata exercise
• Introduction to A3-templates
• A3-templates and organizational learning
• Summary

This is pretty much my regular agenda with the exception of adding the short “What is a learning organization” – module to the beginning. This was a experiment in which I tried to give the audience a clear context for Toyota Kata and get them curious. I worked much better than I had even hoped and I will definitely include this module in the future as well.

The gist of the module was to introduce the capabilities that set the top organization apart from other according to Steven Spear’s research (I wrote on the topic previously) and reflect how Toyota Kata fits into that picture.

The feedback we got from the audience was astonishingly positive. I think the only constructive criticism  we got was from that our slides were in English even though the presentation was in Finnish.  Some quotes from the feedback we got (translated from Finnish):

A very interesting presentation with well thought out exercises.

The best take a way in the conference! Thank you!

A very interesting presentation and which gave me good ideas. I will definitely try to implement it at  our organization.

An interesting and down to earth approach. I will try in practice without a doubt.

Thank you for a great presentation. I can’t think of anything to complain about.  PS. Keep up the good work.

If any participants from the workshop are reading this post (or anyone else who wants to learn more about Toyota Kata) I strongly recommend this video by Mike Rother:

A Concept Design Idea for a University Student Dashboard

Recently I have taken a small detour at work back into service design from my current work. You can read more about the circumstances in this blog post. I have been working with Juha Martikainen and together we have designed one possible concept for the future Aalto student portal.  I have enjoyed the experience very much, and Juha has been a pleasure to work with.

We have been working in a quite limited time box. We spent about 3 hours coming up with our initial concept design and Juha spend a few hours refining it into a more presentable form (I will post pictures of both). I think this type of limited time approach works well because the field in question is very familiar to us, otherwise more time would have been needed.

Before I can go into our concept design I have to give you a little bit of background information to set the stage…

The Context

This is very simplified representation of the context in which we designed our concept for the “Aalto personal gateway” service. It will hopefully give you enough understanding about the related systems to help you understand our solution.

OTM

“OTM” is the working name for the next generation student registration and student credit system. It will allow students to registrar to be preset for the semester plan their studies and register for courses at the beginning of the semester. It is also the system where the teachers will submit the credits and grades the students get from successfully completing a course.

AVLE

AVLE stands for Aalto virtual learning environment. It is the place where students do most of the day to day online learning activities like:

• Download reading material for courses
• Do online activities like complete course questioners
• Submit personal or team assignments
• Read news items related to course like “There is a new assignment for course X”

Other Tools

There are of course plenty of other online tools that are used to facilitate and support learning like email, calendar and collaboration tools (like wiki’s and Office 365).   It is not important to single them out. We just need to understand that they exist, and there is a quite a few of them.

APG – Student Dashboard

APG stands for Aalto personal gateway.  It will hopefully offer students:

1. A personalized and unified view into all the important study related news  and calendar events
2. Act as gateway and offer links to all the other study related systems
3. Offer shortcuts to my currently active courses
4. Motivate students by offering visualizations of a few key  measurements related to their personal study progress
5. Offer a simple and pleasant user experience

Our Concept

Now that we understand the context it is time to share our initial concept design. After a few hours of working at the whiteboard and documenting our work with PowerPoint (hey, what else it is the Swiss army knife of modern work;)  our idea looked like this:

Although picture is worth a thousand words, I will never the less briefly explain the most important elements of the user interface. Hopefully this will clarify their purpose and what information they will represent to the user.

Event calendar

This element will visualize all the important study related events for each individual student. It has two sub elements: 1) Todays events, 2) Upcoming events.

The following list illustrates what type of events will be shown in this interface element:

• Registration deadline for semester
• Registration deadline for the course in my study plan
• Upcoming exams
• Upcoming deadlines on my courses (for example exercise DL)
• Majors school events

News feed

This user interface component offers students a personalized study related news feed that is collected from the “AVLE” and “OTM” systems.

• News feed from OTM
  • Registered successfully to semester
  • Registered successfully to course
  • New credits from course X registered

•  News feed from AVLE
  • New material/deadline/assignment in course X
  • You completed assignment X with score 7/10
  • Tomorrows lecture is canceled/change of venue

Study progress meter

The purpose of this component is to motivate the student by visualizing their progress by three key measures. The visualization will compare their results with the average of other students and the university “targets”.  This elements represents our initial ideas for utilizing gamification for student motivation.

• Activity in last 30 days
  • “Speed meter” type of visualization of activity in last 30 days
  • Activity sources
    • What I have done in AVLE (completed assignment, commenting on page, etc)
    • What I have done in OTM (course registration, new credit points for completed course, updated study plan)
    • Speed meter result is own activity/general activity scaled to 0-100

• Study progress this year
  • How many study points do I have this year
  • How many study points is the average this year
  • How many study points is the target

• Overall study progress
  • What percentage of my studies have I completed
  • What is the average completion in the same time
  • What is the target

My course list

This element offers a list of links to the courses that I have registered to. Each course  in the list has a link to:

• The OTM page for the course
• The AVLE page for the course
• Optional other link? – teacher preference  is OTM

Links (personal and general tools)

This component consists of two sub elements:

1. “My links” – List of my personal links (can be added/modified/removed from this user interface). Examples:
   1. Facebook
   2. Student guild X
   3. Hobby link Y
2. “General links” – links to the tools that the university offers the students.
   1. Top tools
      • Email and calendar
      • Course registration
      • Course work
      • Collaboration tools
      • Chat

      Other tools… (expands to cover other tools)

Although this pretty well documents our ideas Juha spent a few hours with Photoshop to make our design a bit more presentable and came up with this image:

Additional Ideas

I discussed the concept design with my wife Lotta and she had an interesting contribution. She had recently read that although gamification techniques in general work quite well there is a risk in comparing peoples results to the average result. It can cause “regression to the mean” for the top performers. I guess this is based on unconscious thinking like “Oh, I am doing a lot better than the average so I can take it a bit easier”. Fortunately Lotta also had a solution. By using a more advanced gamification ideas like badges for excellent results we can also motivate the top performers. This “badges for excellence in different areas” thinking offers significant potential for the student portal in other areas as well, but I won’t go further into the topic in this blog post.

Juha also had an excellent idea about integration the presence information of the university IM-system into the student portal, but we agreed to keep it out of the initial design in order to keep it simple.

Please give us feedback and share your ideas about how to design a good student dashboard and remember that this is just an initial concept design for one possible solution.

Risk Management Tool: Pre-mortem

I’m going to write about risk management and more specifically about intervention tool called pre-mortem.

Short Introduction of Theory

Pre-morten, like the name hints, is a tool that you use to write a short story about why the project failed, but you do it before. The style is quite frankly the same that most of the time you spend on analysing why some things went wrong. The emphasis is on story telling. This will allow people reading it, make up the holes and wake up to the reality that something needs to be done.

This leads me to the use cases where you should use this:

• Your not getting your voice through for one reason or another, a risk is being talked down in the project board or by project owner.
• You as a project manager are worried that something really bad is about to happen, but it’s something vague. You can clear your mind and do the bullet before this.

It’s quite powerful so use it wisely and think of this as a tool that’s used once-per-project for hardest risks or times the project faces.

Example

“The project had great chances of being succesful project and the project team was glowing with energy in the start. However something weird happened, I’m not sure which order, but all contributed a little bit to failure of this project and it started to sink in a spiral of death:

• Project owner was not really interested when the project went well and this lead to situation that he/she wasn’t able to really make distinction when it was going bad. We all wanted well, but we didn’t have the time.
• This leads to second issue, the project portfolio was piling up and we accepted more than we could finish, project being a lower priority project lead to situation where most of the project managers time was spent on trying to get scraps of work done by the team here and there. The team was doing exactly like the organization wanted, prioritize the work. However visibility to the whole amount was lost and even though organization did want also this project to finish on time, it was unable to see what was happening.
• Project was subject of reactive decision making of all dependencies of the project, which lead to re-designing of project many times over, even with excellent JIT-method, it was still too much, combined with the last bullet when only member of the project group who could contribute was the project manager.
• Finally the nail that killed the project was another more important project that was issued to project manager.
• Most stakeholders did not share the idea of how the learning should be done (actually how learning happens), thus creating situations where some of the stakeholders were wondering why we are spending so much time on this and the other half thinking why we’re not doing as much as we should and we’re actually sawing our own leg.

What really happened? We wanted to do a project that frees up resources that was not done the way it should have been. Thus the situation afterwards was worse, having to do with less resources.

The End

Now I hope you’re thinking this virtual project and reading this like this all happened in the past, 6 months ago. Talks in the coffee tables are dieing down, but still some people wonder why it failed.

Now consider you got this in an e-mail designated to the whole board of the project when the project was half-way in and you started seeing the first clouds yourself. How would you react as a board member?

Just in Time

I wrote about resilience some weeks back. This time I’m going to tell about philosophy and how you can manage resilience on change trips like projects.

This technique requires good skill on estimating work amounts and understanding dependencies to pull it off with decent predictability. You see, having good work amount estimating skills and techniques allow you to do anything just in time. Having poor skills means you will always be late.

Just in Time is originally a philosophy developed by Toyota. It means they build something just in time (JIT) to minimize logistical, mineral and warehousing costs.

How it Works in Practice:

Most projects meet a lot of changes, due to high number of projects, changes and requirements all emerging and happening at the same time.

So instead of building something ready 2-3 weeks early will lead to higher probability of doing waste (something that’s not necessary and nor useful). Needs and requirements might change at the late our and then we get the reaction of “oh my God, this is how I planned it” and having more trouble of changing the idea of, well this is how we will run it now.

Don’t get me wrong, not everything needs to be reactive, but building things just in time allows you to have better view on what actually needs to be built that it will fit the needs better.

So instead of plan in detail and rehearse a workshop or a teaching session 2-3 weeks early, do it ready 2-3 days before you actually need it. Also start with something small and something that’s safe to fail.

I’m sure you notice you hit more on target and do less re-engineering within a project if you start applying this.

It’s not just about talent and effort – how you work matters a lot

In this day and age there is so much knowledge about how to work effectively in different circumstances that surely there isn’t anything left to talk about. There is Scrum for projects, Lean for just about everything and pommodoro to help us pace our work in a way that is optimal for our brains. So writing about the topic is kind of like beating a dead horse right?

On the other hand being good at something is not about knowledge.  I’m sure there are a lot of people who actually know a lot more about basketball tactics than Michael Jordan, but there is no one who can even come close in making that knowledge come to life in a basketball court.  It takes a lot practice to turn that knowledge into a useful skill (and habit).

I feel that we are in a place right now where there is a lot of information about how work effectively and a growing amount of awareness. Yet we are not applying this new knowledge into practice is widely as we could be. Understanding why this is the case is a very complicated topic.  Instead of trying to write an all clarifying answer (which I can’t do), I will reflect on an example which happened to me recently.

A service design example

I was invited to participate in a meeting/workshop to talk about the service concept for a new IT system.  The meeting was very cross functional and all the relevant departments had one or more representatives. As a consequence of this the meeting was quite large (about 15 people).  The meeting started out well with the chairman recapping the purpose and positioning of the new service and we had a very lively (and productive) discussion about the “big picture” and design principles. The participants were very motivated and wanted to contribute.

Soon the discussion started to move more towards the details of the new service concept and we started covering topics like:

• What high level functionality should it have?
• Do we understand all the needs of the different user groups?
• What is our mobile strategy?
• How configurable does the system need to be to fit all the different preferences of potential users?
• How do we integrate it into other systems and what information is available from them?

I noticed myself getting a little frustrated for two reasons:

1. It is very difficult for everyone to contribute in an effective way. Usually a few people take over the discussion and many good ideas are not discussed. The discussion can also very easily get stuck in meaningless details. Without excellent facilitation the energy levels will inevitably go down.
2. This type of design method will also very easily lead into a service that has “all the bases covert”, which usually means that the important parts (from a user point of view) are hopelessly lost in the jungle if “important” features. This is almost inevitable results of the simple fact that everyone wants to contribute something to the end result and usually this something comes from their functional viewpoint.

A user interface designed by a commitee

I interrupted the meeting with a suggestion about a different working method:

1. Split up into teams of 2-3 people
2. Each group has a week to design a wire frame prototype of the service. The prototype should reflect what in the teams opinion are the 3-4 most important elements in the services
3. Meet up and present all the different prototypes to the group and discuss their strengths and weaknesses.
4. Design a couple of new prototypes by combining some of the best ideas from the previous rounds
5. Seek empirical validation for the most promising prototypes

The suggestion got a good reception and we decided to proceed accordingly. “All is well that ends well” – we decided as a group to utilize an effective working method for the situation (at least in my unbiased opinion!)  and hopefully that will be reflected on the end result.  Except for the fact that I was left with the distinct feeling that perhaps we got lucky and we just as well might have chosen to proceed using the “committee design approach”.

Analyses

I could of course pat myself on the back for being smart and saving the day, but I don’t think that would be very honest. I think there were a lot of different things in the meeting dynamic that let to this positive end result and luck also played a large part. I think that there were also certain “forces” that could have pushed us into a more undesirable end result. This list is by no means comprehensive and only reflects my initial thoughts on possible reasons why a group would not utilize good working practices:

• Not enough knowledge about good working practices for the situation (the obvious one, but perhaps not the most important one)
• Will I look foolish if I suggest something new and the others don’t support it?
• Will I make the “chairman” look stupid and cause him to have negative feelings towards me?
• Will I look like a smartass?
• Someone else must have thought about it before and there must be a good reason why we are doing it this way
• Time pressure – it’s just easier not to try a new way
• Risk adversity – what if the new way does not work
• Not my role/job
• The new method is cool, but does not suite this context / our business culture
• If I make a suggestion I should be an expert in the method
• If I make a suggestion I will be responsible for the results
• Let’s not rock the boat
• The others won’t go for the new method (prejudice)
• This has worked for us in the past, so it will work this time as well (no need for new methods)

Help me make this list better by telling me: 1) what’s not on the list, 2) what are the most important reasons in your opinion. I would also love to hear your strategies to overcome these obstacle to new and better working methods.

What is a learning organization?

Most of us understand that being really good at something is not static in its nature. In all walks of life (sports, governments, companies, etc.) the best always seem to be able to adapt faster to changing circumstances than the rest. And adapt better.  This is an increasingly valuable trait in our times, because of the ever increasing speed of change.

All organizations learn at some level, because we as individuals always learn from experience to some extend (it is our nature). Unfortunately for most organizations this is where it stops. Very few organizations are good at learning on the organizational level (generalize and leverage the individual learning).  Another  way of saying this would be that in general we lack the skills to turn personal learning into institutional knowledge.

Learning on an organizational level is a widely researched, but not well understood topic.  The best model (in terms of clarity and usefulness) that I have come across is by Steven J. Spear from his book “The High Velocity Edge”. Through his years of dedicated research into the best performing companies around the world Steven has managed to identify the dna of these world class companies.  Based on this extensive research Steven J. Spear claims there are four distinctive  capabilities that set the best apart from the rest:

Learning organization – Steven J. Spear

Capability 1: System design and operation

The capability to design and operate systems in the right way is at the core of a learning organization. System design should always start with clarity about the purpose of the systems. What is the value which is produced by system and who is the customer? The answer can vary from very concrete (a car made to the customers specification)  to quite abstract (gather information for strategic decision making), but the principle is the same. We should always understand who the customer is and what is valuable from their point of view and design the system output accordingly.

Once we understand what system output  should be we can proceed to design the rest of the system from an outside in perspective by the following design steps:

1. Design the workflow – what steps are needed, what is done in each step and by whom.
2. Design the interfaces between the workflow steps. What material and/or information is transferred and in what format. It is also important to define the triggers for exchange (e.g. time or request based triggers).
3. Design work methods for the individual workflow steps (how the work is done in each phase).

A key aspect of system design is to do it in such a way that the system highlights any problems that occur. In other words the system should make the gap between what is expected and what actually happens very clear. This allows problems to be noticed and solved.

Capability 2: Problem solving

Although it can be very tempting to hide problems under  the rug, the best organizations manage to resist this temptation again and again. Instead they choose to treat problems as the gifts that they are. Every noticed problem is an opportunity to improve. Every problem left unsolved is a missed opportunity. Not only do the best companies understand that problems are opportunities, they also understand the there is a right time to solve those problems. The right time is of course when the problems are noticed. Elite companies understand the value of swarming problems when they occur and have the organizational capability (and slack) to do so. The culture you should be aiming for is lets fix it now and lets fix it right.

As important as swarming problems is it is still only half of the equation.  The other half is knowing how to solve problems in the right way. The right way means solving problems with a systematic method which creates knowledge. This is commonly known as the scientific method or PDCA problem solving. Their are many variants of the exact process, but they typically  contain at least the following elements:

1. Understand the situation and narrow down the problem
2. Formulate a hypothesis about the problem
3. Run an experiment to test your hypothesis
4. Adjust your actions according to the results of the experiment (formulate a new hypothesis, adjust your current one, or celebrate)
5. Stabilize the solution so that you won’t run into the same problem two months later in the same process

And remember that “speed is king”. The faster you can go through hypothesis – experiment – adjustment loops the faster you can learn.

Capability 3: Share knowledge

Having the capability to design systems and solve problems the right ways is very powerful, but the effects of the capabilities can be boosted by a adding a third one – the capability to effectively share knowledge. This is probably  something that most organizations think they already do quite well, but in reality this is seldom the case. Things like “best practice databases” or “lessons learned reviews” rarely work.

Fortunately some companies have managed to develop effective ways of sharing learning.  The key seems to not just to share the solutions. Instead the solutions need to be shared together with problem context and problem solving process.

When a solutions is described together with the context in which it was created it becomes possible to understand how our context is different. This in turn allows us to understand the adjustments we need to make in order to make it work for us.  Sometimes the contexts can be so different that a altogether different solution is needed.

Often the discovery process is more valuable then the actual solution. The discovery process often contains insights that can not be understood just from the solution. As the old saying goes it is better to teach someone to catch fish then to give them fish.  Another important aspect of sharing the solution discovery process is sharing the inevitable failures along the way. There is solid research that shows that it’s much more effective to share “worst practice” instead of best practice. In other words we are more likely to avoid the mistakes that you made than we are of utilizing your solution.

A good practice in knowledge sharing is using a pull based approach. This means the party who needs knowledge “pulls” it from other parties when they need it, instead of the knowledge being pushed by the people who already have it to those who do not.

Capability 4:  Managing by developing capabilities 1-4

Now that we understand what are the most important core capabilities of learning organizations, we need to have some way to develop them withing our own organization. One solution would of course be to sent everyone to the appropriate training courses and be done with it. Unfortunately it is not so easy.  Although it can be a good start, sending people to training courses does not develop  the required skills.  An interesting insight in Stevens research was that the companies who were really good at capabilities 1-3 had management who spent a lot of time developing these capabilities in the people they were responsible for.

Developing these competencies in the people you are responsible for puts a lot pressure on you as a manager. Not only do you need to be sufficiently skilled in these capabilities (don’t worry you don’t have to be the best), but you also need to have the coaching and mentoring skills to help others learn. Now that’s a tall order, but that’s how the best do it.

By taking personal responsibility of developing these capabilities in your organization you can also sent a powerful message about their importance.

Rap up

My apologies in advance to you Steven in case I did wrong to your research in my brief explanation of a complicated topic (and thank you for the insights).  Buy the book. It is definitely worth the read. The book also contains fascinating examples from different organizations like Toyota,  the US Navy and Alcoa.

Understanding the dna of elite organizations allows you to know what are the right capabilities to develop in your organization beyond the immediate requirements of your business sector. This can be the thing that sets you apart from your competition and gives an sustainable edge (a rare thing indeed).

I have found this model really useful and insightful. Hopefully you will too.  I have been playing around with my own “learning organization house” – model and plan on writing about it in the near future.

As a finishing note I would like to add a word of warning:

“All models are wrong, but some are useful” – George E. P. Box

Estimating Work Amounts (Beginners)

We managers usually want to know as soon as possible how long something takes. At the same time complexity is increasing when we are implementing changes. This leads to a weird contradiction:

1. You want to know as early as possible as accurate as possible how long something (project, task, etc) takes.
2. At the same time, things usually are so complicated that you know a little bit more after you experimented with something (you know what’s really needed after you try something out, guessing usually is like playing a lottery).

So there we have it, today’s problem: Work estimates

Why Do We Get it Wrong?

First off I would like to introduce few ideas that lead to wrong paths and prohibit us from learning to do things right way:

• Work has a lot of different natures. The first problem is to have methods of knowing where you are. This is the case where we usually get it wrong, we guess instead of getting the knowledge because we’re in a rush. I will return on this subject on a later date, but for now it’s important to understand there are different ways you can approach situations and we usually guess and use intuition instead of skill.
• Uncertainty, is a big problem for human beings. We wish it would not be present and make assumptions based on these beliefs. This usually happens subconsciously, so that’s why we don’t even recognize it. This however is something that we need to unlearn and accept. In some situations where you only know where you are by taking a step into some direction (the first one might be a wrong one, so we need to keep searching the right path).
• Experience and Skills (experience on what I just wrote, not experience on guessing). Skills however are things which you can train with for example checklists and you can become better in estimating what usually needs to be taken into consideration. It’s similar with risk management. When we lack these, then we usually work the best possible way we can, which leads to noticing only part of the things we should be looking at. Using tools like checklists usually works for simpler domain of work.
• We don’t look back on estimates we used to do and learn from them. Too busy on starting the next thing on the queue. One of the best ways to get to a same ballpark is to guess if it’s around same size and complexity than something else. But you need to be able to compare, not think how would you do it. If you look back, you will be able to do this in a better accuracy because you can place work on a line compared to other work better.
• We don’t want to disappoint. Now here’s the funny thing: This is mostly just a communication problem. A person wanting to know when something happens wants to get the date accurate and early. So when we give it early, we need to be able to communicate the uncertainty. Even if we’re demanded accurate numbers we can tell the truth we have with the error involved. If you do this you won’t be in a situation where both are going through negative feelings; Person A feels disappointed that something didn’t happen on time and even worse might think it’s person B’s fault; Person B thinks he could have not gotten it right in the first place and tries to avoid situations like this in the future.
• We also don’t split the work into small enough pieces that would make us able to understand the complexity. And we don’t usually consider the dependencies.
• We stick to a plan even when we know it’s failing.

Linear Estimating

Here are few basic techniques you can try to avoid things I just mentioned.

Start with putting few things down on a line that you done in the past. Put the hardest and most work requiring thing in the right end and something you think is like snapping a fingers to left end. Then start filling the line with familiar stuff. Then place the thing you are asked to do between them.

After that you can tell that it’s harder than hard project X that we just did but easier than the nightmare project Y that we finished last year.

This simple forced thinking technique you to dig stuff from your history instead of going into “forced planning mode” too early.

Checklists

You can find a good checklist on almost anything using Google. Going on a trip, doing minor updates etc. This is a start, but it only works when you are in the simpler domain. So I would encourage to use this only on smaller things to get the “invisible work” like communicating (and all IT service management disciplines) that usually gets added later on the project plan or forgotten.

If you have something that’s small scale but bit unfamiliar, using groups to create ideas and tasks what need to be done with simple me-we-us facilitating techniques also work great on building your own short lists.

Conclusion

The problem of estimating is following:

1. First understanding where you really are and accepting the place if it’s not the one you wish it to be.
2. Communicating the uncertainty
3. Not using historical data to get the ballpark right.

This is simplifying the problem a bit, but should give you hints where to start first looking for better ways of working.

Budget deficits and innovation part II – using TRIZ (theory of inventive problem solving) to generate ideas

In my last blog post I wrote about the contradiction between cost savings due to recession and the need to be progressively more innovative due to market pressure. I offered one possible solution and discussed briefly the other prerequisites for innovation.

In this post I will take on the topic from another perspective. I will continue with the same contradiction and utilize TRIZ (theory of inventive problem solving) to generate ideas.

One basic recipe for innovation and problem solving (yes, I’m simplifying a lot!) with TRIZ is:

1. Define the problem
2. Find the contradictions in the problem
3. Translate the problem specific contradiction into a more general one (and to the language of TRIZ)
4. Lookup the problem in a contradiction matrix  and find the corresponding inventive principles
5. Utilize the corresponding inventive principles to generate relevant ideas

There are a few widely used contradiction matrices (the TRIZ40 site is a good free example) and I have chosen to use the “business contradiction matrix” (by Darrell Mann) for this case.  The problem definition can be found in last week’s blog post, so I will jump straight to the contradiction phase.

Defining the contradiction and using the contradiction matrix

The problem specific contradiction is:

In order to adjust to the recession organizations need to cut on spending and have lighter cost structures

VS

There is increasing pressure to innovate constantly and innovation requires people, resources and investments.

When generalized and translated into the language of TRIZ this contradiction becomes:

R&D Costs

VS

R&D Capability

Now we are ready to look up the general solution recommendations of the business contradiction matrix (from “Hands on systematic innovation for business and management” by Darrell Mann).  The matrix recommends we use the inventive principles 2 (taking out), 4 (asymmetry), 15 (dynamics), 38 (enriched atmosphere)  to generate ideas for our problem.  So now it’s finally time to get to the fun part… generating ideas!

Generating ideas using the inventive principles

In this chapter I will list relevant inventive principles for this problem (and their short explanations) and generate ideas based on them in a short workshop.

Principle 2 – Taking out

1. Separate an interfering part or property from an object, or single out the only necessary part (or property) of an object.

Generated ideas:

• Break down barriers between departments – have the operations department (and others) participate in R & D whenever they have the extra capacity to do so. Also give them basic training in R & D so they can effectively contribute.
• Limit the number of concurrent R&D projects. This will decrease the lead time (less money tied  into unfinished work)  and improve general productivity of the people
• Is your R&D process too heavy? Does it contain extra bureaucracy or other waste? Can you make it leaner?
• Can you analyze what really matters to you customer and focus your efforts in those area instead of trying to develop everything?
• Can you reduce/eliminate fear and uncertainty in your employees? This will increase creativity and productivity.
• Can you estimate when you will need the new features and utilize JIT (just in time) in your R&D (requires predictable process)
• Can you “outsource” some of your R&D efforts to your customers? Some customers love to be testers of new technology and some will happily spent their time developing new feature/concept ideas for you.
• Have a small and capable R&D team that is separated and protected from the rest of the organization and it’s processes (skunkworks)
• Utilize technology effectively in the R&D process – software for customer feedback and automated analyses of how (and what) customers use your products/services
• Eliminate unneeded handovers from your R&D process they usually cause ineffectiveness and lower quality.
• How many roles do you need in R&D? Can you reduce the amount of roles and keep the same amount of people (more general skill and work profile).
• What technology do you need to develop yourself and what can you buy cheaper?

Principle 4 – Asymmetry

1. A. Change the shape of an object from symmetrical to asymmetrical.
2. If an object is asymmetrical, increase its degree of asymmetry.

Generated ideas:

• “Outsource” some R&D efforts with a profit sharing agreement -> get the technology now and pay when it generates profits.
• Share profits of products with employees and offer lower base wages.
• Maximize team effectiveness by carefully considering team dynamics in addition to needed skills when constructing R&D teams for projects
• Start a lot more projects than you will finish and aggressively kill projects in their early phases if they don’t show promising results. This will allow a higher success rate on the more expensive later phases of the R&D process while maintaining a high variety of initial ideas.
• Don’t be an equal opportunity budget cutter – give more money to well performing and strategic areas and cut aggressively from other areas.
• Validate your new products and services as often and early as possible – and react quickly by changing direction or cutting unpromising ideas. Do this especially in the early phases when change is cheap.
• Invest in cheaper/more light weight R&D methods
• Collaborate with “complementor” organizations (and organizations from other industries with similar problems) to share R&D expenses.

Principle 15 – Dynamics

1. Allow (or design) the characteristics of an object, external environment, or process to change to be optimal or to find an optimal operating condition.
2. Divide an object into parts capable of movement relative to each other.
3. If an object (or process) is rigid or inflexible, make it movable or adaptive.

Generated ideas:

• Change people between different parts of the organization dynamically according to need (eg. switch people between operations and R&D based on seasonal or weekly variation in workload)
• Empower  people to use a little bit or their working time for development projects and allow the whole organization to become the R&D department
• Use students or interns to handle peaks in R&D capacity development
• Masters thesis’s are a cheap way to do R&D
• The market demands change quickly so check every few months that your R&D projects are still relevant to the customers.
• Be agile in R&D because the windows of opportunity can be small. There are plenty of situations where a quick solution to the market now is better than a really good one six months later. This approach can also cut expenses.
• Divide large R&D project into smaller ones. This reduces the risk and the capital tied into unfinished projects.
• Make your R&D process flexible so that it fits well into different R&D scenarios and rigid procedures due not cause unnecessary waste.

Principle 38 – Enriched atmosphere

1. Replace normal atmosphere with an enriched one.
2. Expose a highly enriched atmosphere with one containing potentially ‘unstable’ elements.

Generated ideas:

• Use outside experts or consultants for special R&D activities that are not very common.
• Utilize creative tension – for example have an internal competition to see which team can come up with best solution to an important problem and limit the time the teams can use to come up with solution.
• Utilize maverick types in the organization “outside” the normal process/structure to come up with competitive ideas.
• Have a release early policy on all R&D projects and base decisions of additional funding purely on customer reactions.
• A high number of small projects can reduce risk compared to a few large R&D efforts.
• Create a startup culture and possibilities within the company and spinoff new ideas into small new daughter companies with very limited funding. You can also seek additional R&D funding from venture capitalists for these spinoffs.
• Give “junior” people a shot at the spot light – highly motivated people will move mountains.
• Have someone play the role of “kill the project” – monster in portfolio meetings to make sure that “bad” projects get killed.

Rap up

I spent about one hour generating these ideas. So as we can see TRIZ is an excellent source of ideas. Of course getting started with TRIZ does require some work, but in my opinion it is well worth the investment. There are some very similar ideas generated by different principles, but I did not remove the duplication to illustrate that different principles can lead to similar ideas.

When trying to generate ideas on how to cut R&D spending we should always consider the innovative principles 6 (universality), 10 (prior action), 22 (continuity of useful action), 25 (self-service) as well  (source  = “management contradiction matrix ” by Darrell Mann). These principles seem to point in some interesting directions, but that’s a story for another day.

I hope this blog post gave you some ideas about minimizing R&D costs without compromising the R&D capability of your company. Perhaps it even made you a little bit curious about TRIZ. Good luck and remember to search for innovative ideas in whatever you do!