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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

With 30,000 species of fish identified and catalogued, you’d think some of the more exotic might belong in our growing business bestiary. You’d be right. For example:

Remoras

Remoras have a suction cup on top of their heads. But they aren’t parasites. Just freeloaders. With the suction cup they attach themselves to a convenient predator — sharks are the best-known, but hardly the only ones.

Remora

Photo by Klaus Stiefel – all rights reserved

Remoras benefit twice from this arrangement: They get a free ride, and the free ride reliably takes them to a source of food: When sharks kill prey they aren’t tidy. They leave little bits of meat floating around, which the Remora is happy to snag.

The Remoras you have to deal with are like this. Neither energetic nor particularly competent, they ride along on team activities. They don’t produce much, but they don’t get in the way, either. Their specialty is being harmless. In return they get a share of credit for their team’s success.

The problem is that their teammates have to pick up the slack. If you’re part of a seven-person team with one Remora, the rest of you either have to work 15% harder, or you have to accept that your team will be about that much less productive than any non-Remora-afflicted teams you’re compared to.

What to do when a Remora suctions onto you?

What managers can (and can’t) do

Managers can do their best, assigning tasks, making sure “completion” has a tangible definition, and reviewing at least a sample of task results to make sure everyone is at least getting something identifiable done.

But this won’t tell you whether one is a Remora who relies too much on help from teammates, especially because you want to encourage team members to ask each other for help when they’re stuck. Beyond this you also want to assign some tasks as collaborations.

Also, leaders are responsible for team dynamics, and you don’t want a team where ratting each other out to the manager is a common solution, nor do you want to fall into the trap of adjudicating these disputes.

So in the end, Remoras are a team problem. As a team member, what can you do? You can:

  • Complain to your manager, who is, after all, supposed to make sure all members of the workforce are productive.

But in addition to the ratting-out issue, there’s a good chance your manager already knows about the Remora, but isn’t willing to deal with the problem because (1) documenting the Remora’s poor performance in ways HR will accept isn’t always as easy as it sounds; and (2) the Remora is an inoffensive soul and the manager doesn’t want the guilt associated with terminating someone who isn’t, in the end, a bad human being.

  • Accept some of the extra workload, leaving the rest to marginally poorer team performance, and don’t worry about it.

There’s a lot to be said for doing nothing. It’s a stress-free alternative. Here’s how to decide whether it’s the right choice: Make a list of the five biggest problems you face every day in doing your job. If the Remora doesn’t make the list, it’s time to shrug your shoulders and get on with it.

  • Help the Remora find something productive to do. Many Remoras aren’t what they are by choice. They just aren’t very good at what they’re supposed to do and don’t have much opportunity to do what they are at least semi-competent to take on.

Figure out some tasks they can do that would help out the team, and enlist friends on your team to figure out some more. There’s almost always something, even if it’s just taking and publishing all meeting notes, manually unit-testing user-interface code other team members produce, or taking care of bits and pieces of paperwork that’s even more annoying than having a Remora on the team.

  • Ignore. Just because someone asks you for help, that doesn’t mean you have to provide it. As the old saying goes, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me thirty-seven times, shame on me.

Something to keep in mind as you decide what to do about your workplace Remoras:

Sharks ignore them.

* * *

Thanks to Ed Paquette, Paul Schaefer, and Myron Ware for suggesting and offering their descriptions of this gilly critter.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

Somewhere in the business you support is a manager who needs to do things more effectively. The alternatives:

  • Shovel a request into the IT request queue.
  • Ask Clyde, who’s “good with PCs” to do something magical with Excel.
  • Bring in a local IT services company to build a system that helps do things more effectively.
  • Find some inexpensive off-the-shelf software that will help do things more effectively, then badger IT into allowing its installation.
  • Contract with a SaaS vendor whose software will help do things more effectively and don’t tell IT anything about it.
  • Sigh a great sigh and give up on making things happen more effectively.

The first bullet is The Right Way To Do Things.

The remaining bullets are all some form of end-user computing (EUC) or the dreaded shadow IT.

Except for the last bullet, that is. The Great Sigh is a key reason entrepreneurships are able to beat, or at least hold their own against their giant competitors.

Let’s add a dimension to this mess exciting array of alternatives: The backbone and hub of your enterprise technical architecture is one of the major commercial ERP suites. What the manager needs would, most logically, be implemented as a customization to one of the ERP suite’s modules.

Nope. Can’t have that. So option #1 — the right way to do things — is off the table, leaving only end-user computing (EUC), Shadow IT, or sighing deep sighs on the table for our sadly un-mythical manager to choose from.

Compared to the rest of the population, KJR’s readers are, disproportionately, metrics nerds, so let’s add a nerdy metrical dimension as well.

The metrics your average business manager cares about in this situation are, in descending order of importance:
1. Cycle time: Start the stopwatch the moment the manager first develops a reasonably clear idea of what’s needed. Stop it when the software is in production and the manager’s employees are doing things the new way. More than anything else, managers want this cycle time to be short.
2. Quality: No, not being bug free, although that’s nice too. Quality isn’t just the absence of defects. It’s also adherence to specifications – whether the software does what the manager needs it to do. By this definition, the plain-vanilla version of the ERP suite’s module is a low-quality solution. It doesn’t do what the manager needs it to do, because if it did, the manager wouldn’t be submitting the request. Q.E.D.
3. Fixed cost: This is the initial spend – how much the manager will have to pay for the solution. This matters because above a certain amount the software becomes a capital acquisition, which means the manager would have to go through the company’s CapEx approval process … a governance process that makes the IT request queue seem downright friendly and inviting in comparison.
IT’s priorities, presumably reflected in your company’s IT request governance, are quite different, usually along the lines of:

1. Financial Value: Amortize the fixed project costs over some reasonable number of useful years of software service. Add the expected cost of ongoing maintenance. Subtract from the business benefits that will come from doing things the new way. Divide by total cost to turn the result into a percentage. (Yes, yes, multiply by 100. Don’t be pedantic. Oh, I forgot — you’re a metrics nerd too. Okay.)

If the result is a positive number, rank it against all the other requests that have to compete for IT’s time and attention.

2. Political Value: Don’t be shocked. Also, don’t be outraged. The Financial Value undervalues a lot of what are, in polite company, called “intangible benefits.” (In less polite company they’re called “warm fuzzies”; also, “Don’t be ridiculous!”)

As minor matters like customer satisfaction usually fall into the intangibles bucket, there’s often value in political value — for someone standing up for what matters most, even if it’s hard to put a number to it.

3. Strategic Value: Some projects are part of the strategic plan — they advance the strategy. Others aren’t part of the plan but they are consistent with strategic intent. There are no others — any manager worth his or her salt knows how to write the obligatory two-paragraph account of how their pet project fits into the company strategy.

Compare the two sets of priorities and it should be clear why, for most managers, and especially for smaller efforts, EUC and shadow IT are the preferred ways to go.

Doing things the so-called right way might make a manager a good corporate citizen.

But EUC and shadow IT are what get the annual bonus.

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