All Posts by Bob Lewis

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

If you’ve been paying attention the past couple of weeks you know I’ve been on vacation. If you’re hoping I’ll get back to posting profound ideas about leadership, management, organizational dynamics and such …

Well, first, thanks for thinking past posts have included profound ideas. I much appreciate the compliment.

But second, no, I’m not. In fact, as I type this sentence I have no idea what the sentences that follow will talk about. Let’s find out together, shall we?

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Seems to me there are two types of travel. There’s travel that takes you to places that pamper you – places you can just lean back, breathe deeply, and pretend all the aggravations of the world, be they petty inconveniences or important but nothing you can do anything about at the moment, are Someone Else’s Problem, at least until you’re back at home.

In this kind of travel, going to experience stuff is something you do in between mojitos.

The other type of travel is more adventurous; the experience is the point of it. It immerses us. It isn’t just the same as our response to the pages of travel magazines only more so, no matter how talented their photographers might be.

This vacation has mostly been the former, not to say we engaged in no sightseeing. There was, for example, our excursion to see the Pulpi geode – the world’s largest. It was spectacular in a way no photograph can possibly convey. A marvel.

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If this post had a plot, the Pulpi geode reference would have been its plot spoiler. Not a plot but a tout: We’ve been vacationing in Spain, near Mojacar, at Cortijo Del Sarmiento, a lovely bed and breakfast whose proprietors, our new friends Yvonne and Carsten, are taking care of us in fine style. If you like what you’re reading about this week, I’m sure they’d be delighted to talk with you.

I hope you’ll forgive the plug. Even more, no matter what business you’re in, please don’t ask me to give yours a plug too. This is a one-time thing.

Speaking of asking for forgiveness, while there’s been no quid pro quo, for those who enjoy calamari there was a squid pro quo.

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I had an eye-opening conversation with Yvonne (eye-opening for me, at least) regarding their marketing efforts. Without going into a great deal of depth … and gimme a break! I’m on vacation, so I wasn’t taking notes! … to run a business like this in the 2020’s it isn’t enough to run the business. Yvonne is quite sophisticated in social media marketing, posting content about Cortijo Del Sarmiento and nearby points of interest at least as often as I post content here on KJR, on their own website as well as on a variety of social media platforms; and beyond this investing time to encourage other local businesses to create a unified presence – a regional brand – everyone can use to attract visitors.

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Mojacar is located in Spain’s less-touristy southeast corner. If you’re looking for a more French Riveria-ish sort of Mediterranean experience, that’s what Spain’s Costa Del Sol is for.

But call it tourism or whatever else you like, it’s in this region that you’ll find Alhambra, which was, in its heyday, one of Islam’s most important religious / political centers on the Iberian peninsula.

Speaking of experiences even the best photos can’t convey, what I found most remarkable about Alhambra was how little damage the Catholic hierarchy did to the glorious Moorish artwork and architecture they took possession of in 1492.

Religious intolerance did, thankfully take a back seat to the desire to preserve something spectacular and utterly irreplaceable.

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Flamenco.

Most Americans, when we hear the word, probably think it’s little more than folky tap dancing. Having attended a couple of flamenco performances on this trip, permit me to suggest you pay attention to the guitar playing that accompanies the dancing. Flamenco guitar entails a speed and precision of play that puts Mark Knopfler – my personal guitar hero – to shame.

Stunning.

Bob’s last word: It’s hard to explain in concrete terms what we get out of the sort of travel we’re engaged in right now. All I can say is that there’s something about being Someplace Different that’s apart from the specific experience of being someplace that isn’t the same as the place we left and will soon go home to.

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|In: Project Management|Last Updated:

I’m still on vacation (and will be for another week). I won’t be in a position to post a re-run tomorrow, so I’m sending this one out early. I don’t think anything in it has become at all stale, so give it a read even though you might remember it from 10 years ago. – Bob

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Remember the rule from the KJR Manifesto, that there’s no such thing as an IT project — they’re all business change projects that make use of information technology?

It’s just as true for the projects that result in so-called “shadow IT” — the information technology that happens without IT’s direct involvement. And because it’s shadow IT, the folks who ask for it know this. They’re looking for business improvement — that’s where their thought process starts. The linkage is automatic.

Last week’s column explained why IT should start supporting shadow IT. But that isn’t enough. We need to support shadow projects as well … the too-small-to-notice-but-too-important-to-let-fail projects business managers charter to make their shadow IT happen, and also to make all kinds of other stuff happen too.

Let’s imagine, for the sake of argument, that your company has established a PMO or EPMO ([enterprise] program management office). If it’s like most PMOs, the company’s project managers all report there, and one of the rules is that all company projects must be managed by its trained project managers. That way, the company doesn’t risk investing in projects that are managed poorly.

Sounds a lot like the arguments against shadow IT, doesn’t it? Like those arguments, the driving force is risk reduction, but the actual impact is mostly opportunity avoidance.

Limiting the number of projects a business can take on to the number of available project managers artificially limits the company’s capacity for change. And when it comes to change, any bottleneck other than the company’s ability to absorb it is inappropriately limiting — a decision to adapt and improve more slowly than necessary.

Which is why, in so many companies that have established an official PMO or EMPO, business managers charter lots of under-the-radar projects.

The shadow project situation sounds more and more like shadow IT, doesn’t it?

On the whole, shadow projects have less risk and yield higher returns than most of the official projects in the company’s portfolio, a natural consequence of their being small, short, tightly focused, and properly sponsored.

Yes, properly sponsored, something that’s more-often true of shadow projects than official ones, because shadow projects are started by business managers who personally want them to succeed. This makes them sponsors … real sponsors, by definition … and the importance of sponsorship in effective project management is well known.

Just in case: Real sponsors want their projects to succeed enough to stick their necks out and take risks when necessary to support their project-manager partners. That’s in contrast to assigned sponsors, who are thrown in front of official projects, just because the methodology says every project has to have one. Assigned sponsors don’t really care, because why would they?

So shadow projects have less risk than their formally chartered brethren. Except for one thing: They’re mostly led by employees who, while promising, have no project management training or previous experience. Their managers/sponsors, themselves usually unaware of what project management actually takes, tell them, “This will be a terrific development opportunity for you,” ManagementSpeak for “There’s a bus approaching at high speed!” followed by a shove.

The result is that right now, many shadow projects aren’t managed as projects at all, because the employees who are put in charge of them have never managed a project and have no idea where to start.

They need help.

So here’s a thought: Instead of trying to stamp out these shadow projects the way IT used to try to stamp out shadow IT, why not provide some support?

Like, for example, giving about-to-be-run-over-by-a-bus neophyte project managers some tools and training, instead of treating them like orphan stepchildren. The secret, and the challenge: Those best equipped to provide the tools and training know too much about the subject. They know, that is, the techniques needed to implement SAP, erect a skyscraper, or build a nuclear submarine.

What many of them don’t know is which of those techniques can be safely jettisoned when the task at hand is managing a team of three people for a few months — at a rough guess, 90% of their expertise. As is so often but so strangely the case, scaling something down can be harder than scaling it up.

Still, it can be done, and doing it is important. In the aggregate, shadow projects add up, even if no one of them is a big hairy deal.

If the PMO/EPMO reports inside IT, the CIO can make shadow project support part of its charter. If not, there’s no reason IT can’t provide it on its own.

Which is a nice irony: Where IT used to do its best to stamp out shadow activities, it has just become an active conspirator in them.

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