Shipulski On Design

Posts Tagged ‘Lessons Learned’

There always far more tasks than there is time.  Same for vacations and laundry.  And that’s why it’s important to learn when-and how-to say no.  No isn’t a cop-out.  No is ownership of the reality we can’t do everything.  The opposite of no isn’t maybe; the opposite of no is yes while knowing full well it won’t get done.  Where the no-in-the-now is skillful, the slow no is unskillful.

When you know the work won’t get done and when you know the trip to the Grand Canyon won’t happen, say no.  Where yes is the instigator of dilution, no is the keystone of effectiveness.

And once it’s yes, Parkinson’s law kicks you in the shins.  It’s not Parkinson’s good idea or Parkinson’s conjecture – it’s Parkinson’s law.  And it’s a law is because the work does, in fact, always fill the time available for its completion.  If the work fills the time available, it makes sense to me to define the time you’ll spend on a task before starting the task.  More important tasks are allocated more time, less important tasks get less and the least important get a no-in-the-now.  To beat Parkinson at his own game, use a timer.

Decide how much time you want to spend on a task.  Then, to improve efficiency, divide by two.  Set a countdown timer (I like E.gg Timer) and display it in the upper right corner of your computer screen. (As I write this post, my timer has 1:29 remaining.) As the timer counts down you’ll converge on completeness.

80% right, 100% done is a good mantra.

I guess I’m done now.

Image credit — bruno kvot

Whether it’s strategic planning or personal planning, work always outstrips capacity.  And whether it’s corporate growth or personal improvement, there’s always a desire to do more.  But the more-with-less and it’s-never-good-enough paradigms have overfilled everyone’s plates, and there’s no room for more. There is no more time to double-book and there are no more resources to double-dip.  Though the growth-on-all-fronts will not stop, more is not the answer.

Growth objectives and BHAGs are everywhere and there are more than too many good ideas to try.  And with salary increases and incentive compensation tied to performance and the accountability movement liberally slathered over the organization, there’s immense pressure to do more. There’s so much pressure to do more and so little tolerance for a resource-constrained “No, we can’t do that.” the people that do the work no longer no longer respond truthfully to the growth edict.  They are tired of fighting for timelines driven by work content and project pipelines based on resources.  Instead, they say yes to more, knowing full well that no will come later in the form of slipped timelines, missed specifications and disgruntled teams.

Starting is easy, but starting requires resources.  And with all resources over-booked for the next three years, starting must start with stopping.  Here’s a rule for our environment of fixed resources: no new projects without stopping an existing one. Finishing is the best form of stopping, but mid-project cancellation is next best.  Stopping is much more difficult than starting because stopping breaks commitments, changes compensation and changes who has power and control.  But in the age of growth and accountability, stopping before starting is the only way.

Stopping doesn’t come easy, so it’s best to start small.  The best place to start stopping is your calendar.  Look out three weeks and add up the hours of your standing meetings.  Write that number down and divide by two.  That’s your stopping target.

For meetings you own, cancel all the status meetings.  Instead of the status meeting write short status updates.  For your non-status meetings, reduce their duration by half.  Write down the hours of meetings you stopped. For meetings you attend, stop attending all status meetings. (If there’s no decision to be made at the meeting, it’s a status meeting.)  Read the status updates sent out by the meeting owner.  Write down the hours of meetings you stopped attending and add it to the previous number.

If you run meetings 3 hours a week and attend others meetings 5 hours per week, that’s 8 hours of meetings, leaving 32 for work. If you hit your stopping target you free up 4 hours per week.  It doesn’t sound meaningful, but it is.  It’s actually a 12% increase in work time. [(4÷32) x 100% = 12.5%]

The next step is counter intuitive – for every hour you free up set up an hour of recurring meetings with yourself. (4 hours stopped, 4 hours started.)  And because these new meetings with yourself must be used for new work, 12% of your time must be spent doing new work

The stopping mindset doesn’t stop at meetings.  Allocate 30 minutes a week in one of your new meetings (you set the agenda for them) to figure how to stop more work.  Continue this process until you’ve freed up 20% of your time for new work.

More isn’t the answer.  Stopping is.

Image credit – Craig Sefton

As vacation approaches the work days drag. Sure you’re excited about the future, but when compared to the upcoming pleasantness, the daily grind feels more like a prison.  Anticipating a good time in the future rips you from the present moment and puts you in a place you’d rather be.  And when you don’t want to be where you are, wherever you are becomes your jail cell.

Mid-way through vacation, as the work days approach, you push yourself into the future and anticipate the stress and anxiety of the work day.  Though vacation should be fun, the stress around the workday and the impending loss of vacation prevent your full engagement in the perfect now.  I’m not sure why, but for some reason your brain doesn’t want to be on vacation with you.  It’s difficult to think of your perfect vacation as your jail cell, but while your brain is disembodied, I think it is.

And when vacation is over and you return to work, it’s pretty clear you’re back in jail.  You put yourself back in the past of your wonderful vacation; compare your cubicle your previous poshness; and make it clear to yourself that you’d rather be somewhere else. And the better your vacation, the longer your jail time.

But it’s easier to see how we use unpleasant situations to build our jail cells.  Our aversion to uncomfortable situations pushes us into the past to beat ourselves up over uncontrollable factors we think we should have recognized and controlled.  We turn a simple unpleasant situation into a jail cell of self-judging.  Or, we push ourselves into the future and generate anxiety around a sea of catastrophic consequences, none of which will happen.  Instead of building jails, it’s far more effective to let ourselves feel the unpleasantness for what it is (the result of thoughts of our own making) and let it dissipate on its own.

The best way to become a jail breaker is to start with awareness – awareness your mind has left the present moment.  When you’re on vacation, be on vacation.  And when you’re in the middle of an unpleasant situation, sit right there in the middle of the unpleasant situation.  (No one has ever died from an unpleasant situation.)  And, as a skillful jail breaker, when you realize your mind is in the past or future, don’t judge yourself, praise yourself for recognizing your mind’s unintended time travel and get back to your vacation.

But this is more than a recipe for better vacations. It’s a recipe for better relationships and better work.  You can be all-in with the people you care about and you can be singularly focused on the most challenging work.  When someone is standing in front of you and you give them 100% of your attention, your relationship with them improves.  And when you give a problem 100% of your attention, it gets solved.

Think about the triggers that pull and push you out of the present moment (the dings of texts, the beeps of emails, or the buzzes of push notifications) and get rid of them.  At least while you’re on vacation.

When doing something from the first time you’re going to get it wrong.  There’s no shame in that because that’s how it goes with new work. But more strongly, if you don’t get it wrong you’re not trying hard enough.  And more strongly, embrace the inherent wrongness as a guiding principle.

Take Small Bites. With new work, a small scope is better than a large one.  But it’s exciting to do new work and there’s a desire to deliver as much novel usefulness as possible.  And, without realizing it, the excitement can lead to a project bloated with novelty.  With the best intentions, the project team is underwater with too much work and too little time.  With new work, it’s better to take one bite and swallow than three and choke.

Ratchet Thinking. With new work comes passion and energy.  And though the twins can be helpful and fun to have around, they’re not always well-behaved.  Passion can push a project forward but can also push it off a cliff. Energy creates pace and can quickly accelerate a project though the milestones, but energy can be careless and can just as easily accelerate a project in the wrong direction.  And that’s where ratchet thinking can help.

As an approach, the objective of ratchet thinking is to create small movements in the right direction without the possibility of back-sliding.  Solve a problem and click forward one notch; solve a second problem and click forward another notch.  But, with ratchet thinking, if the third problem isn’t solved, the project holds its ground at the second notch.  It takes a bit more time to choose the right problem and to solve it in a way that cannot unwind progress, but ultimately it’s faster.  Ratchet thinking takes the right small bite, chews, swallows.

Zero Cost of Change. New work is all about adding new functions, enhancing features and fixing what’s broken.  In other words, new work is all about change. And the faster change can happen, the faster the product/service/business model is ready for sale.  But as the cost of change increases the rate of changes slows.  So why not design the project to eliminate the cost of change?

To do that, design the hardware with a bit more capability and headroom so there’s some wiggle room to handle the changes that will come.  Use a modular approach for the software to minimize the interactions of software changes and make sure the software can be updated remotely without customer involvement.  And put in place a good revision control (and tracking) mechanism.

Doing new work is full of contradictions: move quickly, but take the time to think things through; take on as much as you can, but no more; be wrong, but in the right way; and sometimes slower is faster.

But doing new work you must.

image credit – leasqueaky

When the work is new, it all comes down to learning.  And with learning it all comes down to three questions:

• What do you want to learn?
• What actions will take to learn what you want to learn?
• How will you decide if you learned what you wanted to learn?

There are many definitions of learning.  To me, when your beliefs change, that’s learning.  If your hunch moves to a validated idea, that’s learning.  If your understanding of a system moves from “I don’t know” to “I know a little bit.”, that’s learning.  If you believed your customers buy your product for Feature A and now you know they really buy it because of Feature B, that’s learning.

What do you want to learn? The best place to start is to clearly define what you want to learn.  Sounds easy, but it’s not. Some of the leading thinking recommends you define a formal hypothesis.  I don’t like that word.  It’s scary, intimidating and distracting.  It’s just not helpful.  Instead, I suggest you define a Learning Objective.  To do that, complete this sentence:

I want to learn if the customer ____________________.

It may take several iterations/meetings to agree on a Learning Objective, but that’s time well spent.  It’s faster to take the time to define what you want to learn than to quickly learn something that doesn’t matter.  And define the Learning Objective as narrowly as possible.  The tighter the Learning Objective, the faster you can learn it.

What actions will you take to learn what you want to learn? In other words, for every Learning Objective create a Learning Plan.  Use the Who, What, When format.  Define Who will do What and When they’ll be done.  To increase the learning rate, define the minimum work to fulfill the narrowly-defined Learning Objective.  Just as you defined the Learning Objective narrowly, define the Learning Plan narrowly.  And to further speed the learning, set constraints like – no one can travel to see customers; no more than five customers can be contacted; and the Learning Plan must be completed in two days.  You’re not looking for large sample sizes and statistical significance; you’re looking to use your best judgement supported by the minimum learning to create reasonable certainty.

How will you decide if you learned what you wanted to learn? Learning requires decisions, decisions require judgement and judgement requires supporting information.  As part of the Learning Plan, define the Learning Information you’ll collect/capture/record to support your decisions.  Audio recordings are good and video is better.  For fast learning, you can record a phone call with a customer or ask them to share their webcam (and record the feed) as you talk with them.  Or you can ask them to shoot some video with their smart phone to provide the information needed to achieve you Learning Objective.

To analyze the data, it’s best to review the audio/video as a group and talk about what you see.  You should watch for body language as well as listen to the words.  Don’t expect complete agreement among your team and expect to create follow-on Learning Objectives and Learning Plans to answer the open questions.  Repeat the process until there’s enough agreement to move forward, but don’t wait for 100% consensus.

When you present your learning to company leadership, show the raw video data that supports your learning.  Practically, you’ll connect company leaders to customers and let the customers dispel long-held biases and challenge old thinking.

There’s nothing more powerful than a customer telling your company leaders how things really are.

Image credit – Thomas Hawk

People ask why.

People buy products from people.

The right people turn activity into progress.

People want to make a difference, and they do.

People have biases which bring a richer understanding.

People use judgement – that’s why robots don’t run projects.

People recognize when the rules don’t apply and act accordingly.

Business models are an interconnected collection of people processes.

The simplest processes require judgement, that’s why they’re run by people.

People don’t like good service, they like effective interaction with other people.

People are the power behind the tools.  (I never met a hammer that swung itself.)

Progress is powered by people.

Image credit – las – intially

How a company allocates its resources defines its strategy.  But it’s tricky business to allocate resources in a way that makes the most of the existing products, services and business models yet accomplishes what’s needed to create the future.

To strike the right balance, and before any decisions on specific projects, allocate the desired spending into three buckets – short, medium and long.  Or, if you prefer, Horizon 1, 2 and 3.  Use the business objectives to set the weighting. Then, sit next to the CFO for a couple days and allocate last year’s actual spending to the three buckets and compare the actuals with how resources will be allocated going forward.  Define the number of people who will work on short, medium and long and how many will move from one bucket to another.

To get the balance right, short term projects are judged relative to short term projects, medium term projects are judged relative to medium term projects and the long term ones are judged against their long term peers.  Long term projects cannot be staffed at the expense of short term projects and medium term projects cannot take resources from long term projects.  To get the balance right, those are the rules.

To choose the best projects within each bucket, clarity and constraints are more important than ROI.   Here are some questions to improve clarity and define the constraints.

How will the customer benefit? It’s best to show the customer using the product or service or experiencing the new business model.  Use a hand sketch and few, if any, words.  Use one page.

How is it different?  In the hand sketch above, draw the novel (different) elements in red.

Who is the new customer? Define where they live, the language they speak and how they get the job done today.

Are there regional constraints?  Infrastructure gaps, such as electricity, water, transportation are deal breakers.  Language gaps can be big problems, so can regulatory, legal and cultural constraints. If a regional constraint cannot be overcome, do something else.

How will your company make money?  Use this formula: (price – cost) x volume.  But, be clear about the size of the market today and the size it could be in five years.

How will you make, sell and service it?  Include in the cost of the project the cost to overcome organizational capacity/capability constraints.  If cost (or time) to close the gaps is prohibitive, do something else.

How will the business model change?  If it won’t, strongly consider a different project.

If the investigations show the project is worthwhile, how would you staff the project and when?  This is an important one.  If the project would be a winner, but there is no one to work on it, do something else.  Or, consider stopping a bad project to start the good one.

There’s usually a general tendency to move medium term resources to short term projects and skimp on long term projects.  Be respectful of the newly-minted resource balance defined at the start and don’t choose a project from one bucket over a project from another.  And don’t get carried away with ROI measured to three significant figures, rather, hold onto the fact that an insurmountable constraint reduces ROI to zero.

And staff projects fully.  Partially-staffed projects set expectations that good things are happening, but they never come to be.

Image credit – john curley

When it’s time for new work, the best and smartest get in a small room to figure out what to do.  The process is pretty simple: define a new destination, and, to know when they journey is over, define what it looks like to live there.  Define the idealized future state and define the work to get there.  Turn on the GPS, enter the destination and follow the instructions of the computerized voice.

But with new work, the GPS analogy is less than helpful.  Because the work is new, there’s no telling exactly where the destination is, or whether it exists at all.  No one has sold a product like the one described in the idealized future state.  At this stage, the product definition is wrong.  So, set your course heading for South America though the destination may turn out to be Europe.  No matter, it’s time to make progress, so get in the car and stomp the accelerator.

But with new work there is no map.  It’s never been done before.  Though unskillful, the first approach is to use the old map for the new territory.  That’s like using map data from 1928 in your GPS.  The computer voice will tell you to take a right, but that cart path no longer exists.  The GPS calls out instructions that don’t match the street signs and highway numbers you see through the windshield.  When the GPS disagrees with what you see with your eyeballs, the map is wrong.  It’s time to toss the GPS and believe the territory.

With new work, it’s not the destination that’s important, the current location is most important.  The old sea captains knew this.  Site the stars, mark the time, and set a course heading.  Sail for all your worth until the starts return and as soon as possible re-locate the ship, set a new heading and repeat.  The course heading depends more on location than destination.  If the ship is east of the West Indies, it’s best to sail west, and if the ship is to the north, it’s best to sail south.  Same destination, different course heading.

When the work is new, through away the old maps and the GPS and channel your inner sea caption. Position yourself with the stars, site the landmarks with your telescope, feel the wind in your face and use your best judgement to set the course heading.  And as soon as you can, repeat.

Image credit – Timo Gufler.

At the most basic level, business is about allocating resources to the best projects and executing those projects well.  Said another way, business is about deciding what to work on and then working effectively.  But how to go about deciding what to work on?  Here is a cascade of questions to start you on your journey.

What are your company’s guiding principles?  Why does it exist? How does it want to go about its life?   These questions create context from which to answer the questions that follow.  Once defined, all your actions should align with your context.

How has the business environment changed? This is a big one.  Everything is impermanent.  Change is the status quo.  What worked last time won’t work this time.  Your success is your enemy because it stunts intentions to work on new things.  Define new lines of customer goodness your competitors have developed; define how their technologies have increased performance; search YouTube to see the nascent technologies that will displace you; put yourself two years in the future where your customers will pay half what they pay today.  These answers, too, define the context for the questions that follow.

What are you working on? Define your fully-staffed projects. Distill each to a single page. Do they provide new customer value?  Are the projects aligned with your company’s guiding principles? For those that don’t, stop them.  How do your fully-staffed projects compare to the trajectory of your competitors’ offerings?  For those that compare poorly, stop them.

For projects that remain, do they meet your business objectives?  If yes, put your head down and execute.  If no, do you have better projects?  If yes, move the freed up resources (from the stopped projects) onto the new projects.  Do it now.  If you don’t have better projects, find some.  Use lines of evolution for technological systems to figure out what’s next, define new projects and move the resources.  Do it now.

The best leading indicator of innovation is your portfolio of fully-staffed projects.  Where other companies argue and complain about organizational structure, move your best resources to your best projects and execute.  Where other companies use politics to trump logic, move your best resources to your best projects and execute.  Where other successful companies hold on to tired business models and do-what-we-did-last-time projects, move your best resources to your best projects and execute.

Be ruthless with your projects.  Stop the bad ones and start some good ones. Be clear about what your projects will deliver – define the novel customer value and the technical work to get there.  Use one page for each.  If you can’t define the novel customer value with a simple cartoon, it’s because there is none.  And if you can’t define how you’ll get there with a hand sketch, it’s because you don’t know how.

Define your company’s purpose and use that to decide what to work on.  If a project is misaligned, kill it. If a project is boring, don’t bother.  If it’s been done before, don’t do it.  And if you know how it will go, do something else.

If you’re not changing, you’re dying.

Image credit – David Flam

I don’t believe the role of Chief Innovation Officer has a place in today’s organizations.  Today, it should be about doing the right new work to create value.  That work, I believe, should be done within the organization as a whole or within dedicated teams within the organization. That work, I believe, cannot be done by the Chief Innovation Officer because the organizational capability and capacity under their direct control is hollow.

Chief Innovation Officers don’t have the resources under their control to do innovation work.  That’s the fundamental problem.  Without the resources to invent, validate and commercialize, the Chief Innovation Officer is really the Chief Innovation Mascot- an advocate for the cause who wears the costume but doesn’t have direct control over the work.

Companies need to stop talking about innovation as a word and start doing the work that creates new products and services for new customers in markets.  It all starts with the company’s business objectives (profitability goals) and an evaluation of existing projects to see if they’ll meet those objectives.  If they will, then it’s about executing those projects. (The Chief Innovation Officer can’t help here because that requires operational resources.)  If they won’t, it’s about defining and executing new projects that deliver new value to new customers. (Again, this is work for deep subject matter experts across multiple organizations, none of which work for the Chief Innovation Officer.)

To create a non-biased view of the projects,  identify lines of customer goodness, measure the rate of change of that goodness, assess the underpinning technologies (momentum, trajectory, maturity and completeness) and define the trajectory of the commercial space. This requires significant resource commitments from marketing, engineering and sales, resource commitments The Chief Innovation Officer can’t commit.  Cajole and prod for resources, yes.  Allocate them, no.

With a clear-eyed view of their projects and the new-found realization that their projects won’t cut it, companies can strengthen their resolve to do new work in new ways.  The realization of an immanent shortfall in profits is the only think powerful enough to cause the company to change course.  The company then spends the time to create new projects and (here’s the kicker) moves resources to the new projects.  The most articulate and persuasive Chief Innovation Officer can’t change an organization’s direction like that, nor can they move the resources.

To me it’s not about the Chief Innovation Officer.  To me it’s about creating the causes and conditions for novel work; creating organizational capability and capacity to do the novel work; and applying resources to the novel work so it’s done effectively.  And, yes, there are tools and methods to do that work well, but all that is secondary to allocating organizational capacity to do new work in new ways.

When Chief Innovation Officer are held accountable for “innovation objectives,” they fail because they’re beholden to the leaders who control the resources. (That’s why their tenures are short.)  And even if they did meet the innovation objectives, the company would not increase it’s profits because innovation objectives don’t pay the bills.    The leaders that control the resources must be held accountable for profitability objectives and they must be supported along the way by people that know how to do new work in new ways.

Let’s stop talking about innovation and the officers that are supposed to do it, and let’s start talking about new products and new services that deliver new value to new customers in new markets.

Image credit – Neon Tommy

Once you have a project to work on, it’s always a challenge to choose the first task.  And once finished with the first task, the next hardest thing is to figure out the next next task.

Two words to live by: Critical Path.

By definition, the next task to work on is the next task on the critical path.  How do you tell if the task is on the critical path?  When you are late by one day on a critical path task, the project, as a whole, will finish a day late.  If you are late by one day and the project won’t be delayed, the task is not on the critical path and you shouldn’t work on it.

Rule 1: If you can’t work the critical path, don’t work on anything.

Working on a non-critical path task is worse than working on nothing.  Working on a non-critical path task is like waiting with perspiration.  It’s worse than activity without progress.  Resources are consumed on unnecessary tasks and the resulting work creates extra constraints on future work, all in the name of leveraging the work you shouldn’t have done in the first place.

How to spot the critical path? If a similar project has been done before, ask the project manager what the critical path was for that project.  Then listen, because that’s the critical path.  If your project is similar to a previous project except with some incremental newness, the newness is on the critical path.

Rule 2: Newness, by definition, is on the critical path.

But as the level of newness increases, it’s more difficult for project managers to tell the critical path from work that should wait.  If you’re the right project manager, even for projects with significant newness, you are able to feel the critical path in your chest.  When you’re the right project manager, you can walk through the cubicles and your body is drawn to the critical path like a divining rod.   When you’re the right project manager and someone in another building is late on their critical path task, you somehow unknowingly end up getting a haircut at the same time and offering them the resources they need to get back on track.  When you’re the right project manager, the universe notifies you when the critical path has gone critical.

Rule 3: The only way to be the right project manager is to run a lot of projects and read a lot.  (I prefer historical fiction and biographies.)

Not all newness is created equal.  If the project won’t launch unless the newness is wrestled to the ground, that’s level 5 newness. Stop everything, clear the decks, and get after it until it succumbs to your diligence.  If the product won’t sell without the newness, that’s level 5 and you should behave accordingly.  If the newness causes the product to cost a bit more than expected, but the project will still sell like nobody’s business, that’s level 2.  Launch it and cost reduce it later.  If no one will notice if the newness doesn’t make it into the product, that’s level 0 newness. (Actually, it’s not newness at all, it’s unneeded complexity.)  Don’t put in the product and don’t bother telling anyone.

Rule 4: The newness you’re afraid of isn’t the newness you should be afraid of.

A good project plan starts with a good understanding of the newness.  Then, the right project work is defined to make sure the newness gets the attention it deserves.  The problem isn’t the newness you know, the problem is the unknown consequence of newness as it ripples through the commercialization engine. New product functionality gets engineering attention until it’s run to ground.  But what if the newness ripples into new materials that can’t be made or new assembly methods that don’t exist?  What if the new materials are banned substances?  What if your multi-million dollar test stations don’t have the capability to accommodate the new functionality?  What if the value proposition is new and your sales team doesn’t know how to sell it?  What if the newness requires a new distribution channel you don’t have? What if your service organization doesn’t have the ability to diagnose a failure of the new newness?

Rule 5: The only way to develop the capability to handle newness is to pair a soon-to-be great project manager with an already great project manager. 

It may sound like an inefficient way to solve the problem, but pairing the two project managers is a lot more efficient than letting a soon-to-be great project manager crash and burn.  After an inexperienced project manager runs a project into the ground, what’s the first thing you do?  You bring in a great project manager to get the project back on track and keep them in the saddle until the product launches.  Why not assume the wheels will fall off unless you put a pro alongside the high potential talent?

Rule 6: When your best project managers tell you they need resources, give them what they ask for.

If you want to deliver new value to new customs there’s no better way than to develop good project managers.  A good project manager instinctively knows the critical path; they know how the work is done; they know to unwind situations that needs to be unwound; they have the personal relationships to get things done when no one else can; because they are trusted, they can get people to bend (and sometimes break) the rules and feel good doing it; and they know what they need to successfully launch the product.

If you don’t know your critical path, you don’t know very much.  And if your project managers don’t know the critical path, you should stop what you’re doing, pull hard on the emergency break with both hands and don’t release it until you know they know.

Image credit – Patrick Emerson