Authority v authoritarian

A couple of issues have recently come into my frame:

• Authority that becomes authoritarian
• Institutional sustainment that subsumes mission

Re the first point: authority. We're not talking about moral authority here; we're looking at positional authority and the potential abuses of positional authority. Who in the project domain has such a position? There are two:

• Project manager (or portfolio manager, or program manager or executive, depending on scale)
• Governance board (the policy and control guys, to include the project sponsor)

Every leader and every manager wants authority to back up their responsibilities. The Principle of Subsidiarity says put authority with the lowest competent authority in the pecking order. Everyone I know buys into that idea. But, for purposes of discussion, let's just stick with the PM.

What's expected of authority?

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• Decisiveness: to include willingness and capability to make a decision, to make it timely, with to have sufficient moral authority that it has stickiness. (I hate it when it comes unstuck!)
• Order and protection: hold off the barbarians at the gate so that lean, effective work can be done
• One stop shopping: in other words, not a committee; and, the buck stops here and does not circulate in an endless do-loop of do-nothings
• Ability and willingness to say yes: (this is different from just making a decision) almost anyone in a bureaucracy can say no. That's what bureaucracy is for... to distribute and diversify the risk. Saying 'no' is the same as executing Plan A: Do nothing; often that is the low-risk thing to do. (See: Congress, US, 2012)
• Overcome the ankle biters: Closely related to 'saying yes', this is a little different: it means overruling all the staffers that say no.
• Keep your head when others don't: This is the pressure thing, and the antidote to panic. (See: Mann-Gulch tragedy)
• Transparency: this may be the meme of the day in the decision and authority business, but it's really code for fair and equitable treatment of all the constituents, though some will lose and some will win. It doesn't mean everybody gets a medal. And, this is different from lack of secrecy: Secret has its operational purpose in some spaces. (See: OSB, dead)

So, what happens when authority gets authoritarian?

• Intolerance for an alternate point of view.. that is, intolerance for decision inputs that are not convenient
• Intolerance for not adhering to doctrine... that is, our way or the highway
• Secrecy without operational purpose... no time to justify to the rif raff
• Panic decision making that leads to sacrifice of the little people
• Decision making without consideration of the sacrifice of the little people (See: Stalin, J) 
• No decision making at all... just stall
• No consultation because the decider is self-certain
• The inner circle is small... group think may be all there is

An interesting bit of trivia is given to us by Daniel Kahneman in his book "Thinking, fast and slow": in an authoritrian regime, people can be persuaded to accept a false message by the simple expedient of frequent repetition. Say it enough, and it's believed. And, you don't even have to repeat the whole message. Through a phenomenon known as "priming", the message is effectively repeated by just touching on the priming message.

What about institutional sustainment?

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Instutional sustainment is about survival of the enterprise.
Fair enough
What if sustainment requires compromise of mission?
Now, we've got an issue. The legitimacy of the enterprise may hang in the balance.

Questions: Should the enterprise go out of business if it can't sustain the mission, or the other way around: change the mission to fit what's sustainable?

My experience is that in the private sector, it's the latter: change missions. That's ok; that's destructive innovation

In the public sector, perhaps it's not so simple: the mission may be everything. If this or that institution can't make a go of it, change the institution.

Now, the hard part is when authortitarian governance intersects with instutional sustainment. It may morph into sustaining the authority over both mission and institution. At the very least, the authoritarian will seek to sustain the structure that gives sustenance to power.

What's the remedy? Well, the Arab spring is one example. Upset elections are another. In the private sector, it's activist shareholders. In the project business, it's solidarity among team leaders.

Bottom line: it's good until it's bad. Then, it has to be resisted and fixed.

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How to fail at agile

Ever thoughtful and helpful, Mike Cohn, a leading thought leader on SCRUM, has assembled in one place his top 20 tips on how to fail at agile. You can get this useful article here.

Mike tells us:

Although there are many ways to sabotage your agile project, for convenience we have grouped them into four categories: management issues, team issues, product owner issues, and process issues. In each instance, we will cite an example of someone who successfully caused agile failure, list the general guidelines for failure that the example is meant to demonstrate, and then list alternative techniques you can try to help you replicate the process. We hope this approach will allow you to fail quickly and avoid potential success.

Wow! I wonder if it is as easy as Mike would have you believe? Failure may actually be easier than success with over 20 ways to do it. Such diversity!

 

Here's a few of the better ones:

• GUIDELINE 3: Equate self-managing with self-leading and provide no direction to the team whatsoever
• GUIDELINE 8: Do not create cross-functional teams. Put all the testers on one team, all the programmers on another, and so on
• GUIDELINE 9: Large projects need large teams. Ignore studies that show productivity decreases with large teams due to increased communication overhead. Since everyone needs to know everything, invite all fifty people to the daily standup.
• GUIDELINE 12: Replace a plan document with a plan “in your head” that only you know.
• GUIDELINE 16: Slavishly follow agile practices without understanding their underlying principles.
• GUIDELINE 20: Convince yourself that you’ll be able to do all requested work, so the order of your work doesn’t matter.

An alternative is given here:

 

 

 

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Risk exposure

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And then what?!

Robert Gates

US Defense Secretary

 

It has been reported that Robert Gates routinely asked that question when being briefed on a new opportunity. He likely understands that "risk is the price paid for opportunity". Gates may have been thinking about this:

Decisions in the face of uncertainty deal with these questions (the big Three)

• Are all the facts and estimates in the frame?
• Is the information understood for its function, features, and performance?
• Are the consequences known and understood?

Facts come from history; estimates are about the future (there are no facts about the future, after all)

Consequences is another word for exposure. Is the risk exposure understood? Perhaps it is if you internalize these ideas:

 

1. All risk events are not going to happen, or happen to the degree you estimate, so the total risk exposure on the risk register (sum of all costs,or schedule) is overstating the risk to the project

 

2. If you have benchmark data on the probability of occurrence, you can weight the event values by the benchmark data; however, if there is no benchmark data (what we call calibrated data), then there is no point guessing and then multiplying probability by likelihood.... that's just multiplying two guesses, and what's the point of that?.

 

3. Without benchmark data, you can label each risk qualitatively with a high, medium, low possibility of occurrence. While these are also a guess, the guess has a broader range and is more likely to cover the real possibilities. Thus, you can then look at the risk exposure in each broad category

 

4. Based on experience and intuition (learned responses) you can choose which events to keep an eye on, and which events may be mitigated by some strategy

 

5. You can plan buffers and reserves to absorb the unmanaged (low) risks

6. Risk attitudes--and thus risk estimates--are temporally biased: the future is more optimistic than the present for the same challenge.

Sponsors, with their longer business timeframe, are more optimistic than the project manager; thus, sponsors understate risk. But the corollary is that PMs tend to overstate the risk. Thus, there is a constant tension. Project managers are the ultimate manager of this tension!

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Leonardo and DONE

I've been reading a really fascinating book about Leonardo da Vinci: "Da Vinci's Ghost: genius, obsession, and how Leonardo created the world in his own image"

In Chapter 4, we learn this:
"Leonardo had trouble with deadlines". Over a three year period from 1478 to 1481, while living in Milan as a painter-artist, he received several commissions for significant works.... and did not get to DONE on any of them!

It appears he kept the down payment, but failed to collect the check that goes with DONE.

In fact, when it came to selecting the 1481 team to decorate the (new) Sistine Chapel, he got left off, allegedly because of his reputation for not getting DONE...to his consternation.

So, why wasn't Leonardo disposed to good project management?  One of his supporters, who was also his critic, said this:

Alas! This man will do nothing at all, since he is thinking of the end before he has made a beginning. ... In his imagination, he frequently formed enterprises so difficult and so subtle that they could not be realized and worthily executed by human hands. His conceptions were varied to infinity

In other words, when came to the WBS, Da Vinci got trapped in the paralysis of analysis. He often began an engagement with a round of experimentation and investigation, sort of a 15th century version of Boehm's Spiral Method.

But we also see a measure of emergence and progressive elaboration in his inability to control scope or contain his imagination

In fact, containing (or constraining) imagination is the challenge in all "thought projects" (Thought projects: those which have intangible requirements, or requirements about intangibles) that have scope with no tangible boundaries and are simply what you can imagine.

I guess the good news is that Leonardo was able to get his game together and left the world with an incredible legacy. I think that's good news for all of us, even the agilists among us!

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Writing, and then re-writing

Dilbert: "Your second paragraph is pointless and confusing. Let's just delete it."
Writer: "I'm a highly trained technical writer. What makes you think you can do my job better?"
Dilbert: "That might be a trick question. But I'm pretty sure the answer is in paragraph two"

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Good writing is not written.... it's re-written. And it's likely rewritten again. Even when you start with an outline and a story board as I do.

I'm working on my fourth book (due to be published early next year) "Maximizing Project Value"; I'm supposed to know how to do this. But after almost a year, I'm still rewriting. Of course, I had a good beta reading team; they really gave me some good stuff.

(By the way, it's going to be a paper book. But if you've got an itch to self-publish an ebook, take a look at this blog on how to write an ebook)

Now comes the editing by a professional editor. And you get this stuff, among other good suggestions:

More about the lowly comma from Ben Yagoda who is a professor of English:

If I’ve seen it once, I’ve seen it a thousand times. I’m referring to a student’s writing a sentence like:
I went to see the movie, “Midnight in Paris” with my friend, Jessie.

Comma after “movie,” comma after “friend” and, sometimes, comma after “Paris” as well. None are correct — unless “Midnight in Paris” is the only movie in the world and Jessie is the writer’s only friend. Otherwise, the punctuation should be:

I went to see the movie “Midnight in Paris” with my friend Jessie.
If that seems wrong or weird or anything short of clearly right, bear with me a minute and take a look at another correct sentence:
I went to see Woody Allen’s latest movie, “Midnight in Paris,” with my oldest friend, Jessie.

You need a comma after “movie” because this and only this is Mr. Allen’s newest movie in theaters, and before “Jessie” because she and only she is the writer’s oldest friend.

The syntactical situation I’m talking about is identifier-name. The basic idea is that if the name (in the above example, “Jessie”) is the only thing in the world described by the identifier (“my oldest friend”), use a comma before the name (and after it as well, unless you’ve come to the end of the sentence). If not, don’t use any commas.

OMG, enough about the comma!

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Space X

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When it's really important to do, the odds are not important

Elon Musk

Founder, Space X



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The new Three R's

Are these the new three R's: Responsibility, restraint, respect? (You probably remember the orginial three: reading, 'righting, and 'rithmetic)

We could do a lot worse, and perhaps not better than to adopt the "new three".

• Reponsibility: accept commitment, be committed, accept if you are wrong, and celebrate if you are right.
• Restraint: If you're working with Other People's Money (and when aren't you?) limit yourself to the risks you would take if it were your money; and if your benefactor is more risk seeking, then draw restraint from him/her
• Respect: Sometimes it's hard to respect the village idiot, especially when the idiot is in your chain of command. Nonetheless, if you can't really respect, then at least be civil. No need to be nasty; just get the job done and press on.

If you value relationships (and not everyone does), then perhaps the new three R's are principles you can live by, not only to live with.

(Music fades in here, as I depart)

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