Complexity anyone?

John Biaz, a mathematician rather than a project manager, asks some provocative questions from time to time that are of interest to us. The latest in his post on complexity:

What can you do with just a little information?

• Bill Gates’ first commercial success was an implementation of a useful version of BASIC in about 4000 bytes;

• The complete genetic code of an organism can be as short as a few hundred thousand bytes, and that has to be encoded in a way that doesn’t allow for highly clever compression schemes.

This from Wikipedia:

Recent computer hardware advancements include faster processors, more memory, faster video graphics processors, and hardware 3D acceleration. With many of the past’s challenges removed, the focus .... has moved from squeezing as much out of the computer as possible to making stylish, beautiful, well-designed real time artwork

On the other hand, Baez's friend Bruce Smith produced this video (sans hardware infrastructure) in 4KB (that's a rounding error on a rounding error in most programs today). So, don't say it can't be done; don't accept bloat; be lean!

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Keep calm and carry on

Mike Clayton has a suscint post built around this WW II poster--which, itself, has an interesting history--that summarizes ten ideas for stress management (my editorials added; for Mike's annotation, click on the links):

1. Build in planning time
Of course, if you're not a natural planner, this is toughy, and you may actually be comfortable with the stress of deadlines.

2. Give yourself some contingency
Essentially, #1 operationalized

3. One thing at a time
If you are a natural at multiplexing, go ahead. I, for one, have three books that I am reading in multiplex format

4. A problem shared...
Nothing quite like the sounding board of a creative partner

5. Get up and walk around
What works for me is to change venue. Sometimes I take the laptop to a coffee shop. When working in a corporate setting, sometimes I go to an empty conference room.

6. Tidy up 
Or, don't. It depends on if 'tidy' adds comfort or stress

7. Smart snacking
This one never works for me, so I don't keep any snacks around, except fruit

8. Have a rant...
... but choose your timing carefully
Actually, this one's not for me, either in person or by email (horrors!). Better left unsaid that which you can't afford to live with

9. Stress is a part of success
Yes, it is. Everyone needs stress to function; it's a matter of degree

10. Focus on your achievements
Yes, this is a good one from time to time.

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Think like a beginner

"Think like a beginner!"

That's the big take away from an interview with Salesforce.com CEO Mark Benioff. And, what exactly, does that mean, and what does it mean for project management?

Benioff was pontificating on why some established organizations can't get on the page of destructive innovation, and why they can't seem to get past a one-trick success. His take: they don't think like beginners... they don't think like they did when everything was a blank story board and they had no legacy to preseve and no install base to keep relevant.

Example: According to Benioff, failure to think like a beginner explains, in part, why Microsoft missed the mobile market. According to Benioff, who was a Apple guy when Jobs was there doing the Mac, the genius of Jobs was his ability to constantly think like he was starting over. Thus, Apple came in and destructively innovated the mobile market, unlike MS, in spite of both having a large legacy install base of personal computers and PC applications.

And, this is not first time Apple was willing to throw away the legacy, in spite of customer angst. Apple was the first to throw away the "A" drive at time when people had hundreds, if not thousands of records on 1Mb floppies. Instant obsolescence of the installed base. Apple's reply to customers: "get over it!"

So, what about projects? In most cases the project manager is not the product manager, not even the product owner. (Owner vs manager: I'm making a distinction between an inward looking manager and a outward looking manager, the latter having the larger portfolio (scope)). The project manager pretty much builds what the product owner wants, especially if the agile mindset is followed.  There isn't any doubt that Apple project manager's developed what Jobs wanted.

So, is there a place for the project manager to indulge in "destructive innovation"? Yes and no is the indefinite answer. To restate the obvious: anyone can have a good idea. But of course, not everyone takes--or can take--responsibility for consequences. That's where project management comes in: the PM is accustomed to accountability. If there's a good idea--requiring everyone to think like a beginner--there's no beginning if someone does not step up to the opportunity. Someone has to be the risk manager--and guess what, there's no doubt who that is: PM every time.

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December 7, 1941

December 7, 1941: A day that will live in infamy!

To see how this ends, I suggest reading Max Hastings' brilliant history of the Pacific war  for 1944-1945, entitled appropriately, "Retribution"

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Kahneman and Tversky

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have written notable papers about the biases that infect and affect project estimates, the business case, and all communications with executives and stakeholders. These papers are simply nothing other than "must reading" for every project manager.

I've posted about these guys and their ideas before.

Kahneman won the Nobel prize for his contributions, and if Tversky had not died in 1996, four years before the Nobel award, he would have been in Stockholm with his colleague for a joint award.

Now, Kahneman is out with a new book, some 500 pages--perhaps best read (or sampled) on an e-reader--to explain another idea. This idea is about how we think and what drives decision-making. Entitled "Thinking, Fast and Slow ", it posits a System 1 process and a System 2 process. System 1 and 2 are not new inventions by Kahneman, but his tour-de-force through the concepts is a work worth reading.

The idea is simple on the outside: System 1 is nearly unconscious thinking--effectively nearly instant reactive thinking. Everything from survival to instant analysis, like finding an open receiver downfield. System 2 is conscious analysis, slower than System 1, though not necessarily slow. These two ideas inform the title of this tome: Thinking, fast and slow.

Kahnenman writes: "Much of the discussion in this book is about biases of intuition.... my aim ... is to improve the ability to identify and understand errors of judgmenet and choice ....by providing a richer and more precise language to describe them."

And, here's one we can all identify with: "Unfortunately, professionals' intuition does not arise from true experience", indeed, executive "... judgments and decisions are [often] guided by feelings of liking and disliking, with little deliberation or reasoning". For the quantitative manager, decision making driven by such intuitive thinking is the height of frustration!

Summary: it's a tome to be sure, but it's a good read, and worthy of scanning and sampling--highlighting and bookmarking in an e-reader (there are many free ones for laptops and tablets).



Now,

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To think first

“It took a year of thinking before we built any prototypes,”

Serge Montambault,

Mechanical engineer with Hydro Québec’s research institute

And, to top it all off, his project to build robots to inspect high power transmission lines is a business success.

It's remarkable what thinking will do. And of course, take note that from thinking, the next step was prototypes, not full scale development.

Remember the spiral method? It's a prototype-first idea from the last century, inspired by Dr. Barry Boehm of then-TRW. His idea: you can't be sure of which direction to step off when faced with technology feasibility issues, so take the time to experiment to find the right direction.

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Why plan

It's agile! Why plan?

Do we really need to answer this?

Yes, we do!

If there are no plans, any outcome is acceptable; if there are no plans, there is nothing to estimate; without estimates, there is no reason to measure.

Without measurements, there will be no benchmarks, no improvement, and no answer to the questions of where are we? and what are we doing?

In fact, without a plan, anywhere and anything will do.

"Project management the agile way: making it work in the enterprise"

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