All Posts in Leadership

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

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.

Comments

|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

Neil Armstrong passed away last week.

Those of us who, in spite of having come of age in the ’60s can remember some of it remember that once, we traveled between worlds and thought the investment worthwhile. When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon’s surface, all of us stepped there … “One giant leap for mankind,” as he put it, at a time when “mankind” was understood to include both men and women.

Sure, there was carping about spending on space travel when there were problems to solve here on earth. It was based on a misunderstanding, though: As Isaac Asimov pointed out, we didn’t take billions of dollars’ worth of gold to the moon and bury it there. We spent it all right here on earth, employing scientists, engineers, mechanics, construction workers.

And astronauts.

If the only benefit we cared about was economic impact, the innovations funded by the space program made it one of the four best investments we ever made as a society (and by “as a society” I mean made through our collective will, exercised through our government), along with the transcontinental railroad, interstate highway system, and Internet.

Financial benefit isn’t the only kind of benefit worth tallying, though. At a time when U.S. society was shattering into pieces, visiting the moon was something astonishing the United States accomplished that no other country on earth could do. And yes, U.S. society was that bad. Those who describe our current political dialog as the worst they’ve ever seen don’t remember the Democratic Convention of 1968, when Chicago’s mayor screamed the k-word at Abraham Ribicoff while his police ran riot over the hippies occupying Grant Park.

It was that bad. Being “part of the system” was enough to brand a person as beyond the pale among a significant segment of the population, and they weren’t entirely wrong: The “system” was, at the time, corrupt, racist, sexist, and, for many, desperate to an extent far beyond the worst of 2012.

Our predecessors in the field of IT (it was called “data processing” back then) were, by the way, despised by most Americans, who weren’t entirely wrong in feeling that way, as computer errors led to ordinary citizens receiving enormous and incorrect bills for which collection agencies dunned them (and also, on more than one occasion, their receiving entirely accurate bills for $0 past due — pay immediately or we’ll turn you over to a collection agency).

Back then, a popular act of protest against “the system” was to bend, fold, spindle and mutilate the punch card enclosed with the bill, disobeying the vendor’s admonition to the contrary.

And yet, the ’60s were also a time when America’s best minds became scientists and engineers so they could work at NASA to invent something that could help us get to the moon. Now, those with equivalent talent become “quants” who work on Wall Street to invent financial derivatives so as to make themselves wealthy enough to buy the moon.

And it was a time when a favorite expression among those in the counterculture was, “If you aren’t part of the solution, you’re part of the problem,” a sentiment I haven’t heard expressed in any form in the decades that followed, and sorely miss.

Also in the ’60s favor: Disco hadn’t been invented yet.

In 1969 we could go to the moon. In 2012, not only can’t we, we seem to have lost our appetite for it … for exploration for its own sake, for investing in knowledge gained for its own sake, and for investing when the returns are something our descendants will see, not ourselves.

Here’s how bad it is: Curiosity (the Mars rover, not the character trait) cost each and every American less than ten bucks, and yet I know people who complain about the expense.

Neil Armstrong was a proxy for all of us, for what we as Americans, and as human beings, could be, in the middle of a war in Vietnam that showed our ability to be the exact opposite.

On his death, his family released a statement that reads in part: “For those who may ask what they can do to honor Neil, we have a simple request. Honor his example of service, accomplishment and modesty, and the next time you walk outside on a clear night and see the moon smiling down at you, think of Neil Armstrong and give him a wink.”

Do more. Give him a nod as well. Ask yourself whether, given a choice, you’d rather be remembered for the wealth you accumulated, or for being the first person to walk on the moon.

Plan accordingly.

Comments