All Posts in Strategy and Tactics

|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

The word is schwerpunkt (and a round of applause to regular correspondent Sean Murphy for telling us about it). Add it to your vocabulary and impress your friends. It encapsulates the concept discussed in last week’s column — that the difference between a dent and a hole is focus.

This week’s work is schmear. It’s what cream cheese is on a bagel — spread out. Some things are better spread out. Schwerpunkt cream cheese would be hard to swallow.

If the schwerpunkt of last week’s column wasn’t clear, let me make it so now: It isn’t that you should concentrate all of your efforts on just a few high-profile initiatives. Far from it. Doing that will cause you to miss a whole lot of low-risk, high-benefit investments in business improvement.

Unless your company is so badly run that it has choked the creative thinking out of everyone, you have pent-up demand — ideas generated in workgroup after workgroup on how to run things better. Want to find them? Scan your network shares for Excel spreadsheets.

(Sidebar gripe #1: Over and over, I hear IT professionals complain about people in the business using Excel as a database. And, over and over again I also hear IT professionals explain how dangerous it is to deploy Microsoft Access to people in the business. Please, folks — one or the other, but not both.)

Excel is the general-purpose tool business users and managers use to keep track of task assignments, figure profitability, keep track of assets, forecast spending, keep track of work in progress, and otherwise automate — clumsily, perhaps, but still automate — a thousand bits and pieces of what they do.

(Sidebar gripe #2: Isn’t it pretty obvious by now that the world needs a good, general purpose, configurable tracking system development platform? I’m not talking about full-blown business process management (BPM) software. I’m talking about something inexpensive that lets a business manager lay out a series of steps, define what triggers the transition from one step to the next, track status within each step, and automatically maintain a history of each job that progresses through the steps.)

As I was saying, many of these bits and pieces are supposed to be temporary solutions, which persist until IT gets around to doing them the right way. At a rough guess, I’d estimate that something like 18,542,147 business managers have, by now, created 96,834,549 tracking systems in Excel, and every one has wished they had something better. And no, Bugzilla doesn’t really do the job either, although using it for this purpose is probably something less of a kludge than using Excel.

Which brings us to the IT schmear. That’s what you need to help people in the business. You need to reserve a certain amount of your total discretionary labor budget to help lots of people with their small needs.

And don’t try to get fancy with governance. Fancy governance is for big, risky requests. Too many companies try to force their one and two-week “project” requests through the same governance process they use when deciding whether to replace their legacy environment with SAP. All that does is bog things down: Investing 60 hours to decide whether to approve a 30-hour request is a great way to make sure nobody submits a 30-hour request.

(Sidebar gripe #3: I like agile methodologies. They have a lot going for them. But why haven’t any of their proponents explained what’s best about them — that they turn big projects into the equivalent of a big pile of 30-hour requests, virtually guaranteeing completion and at least semi-useful results.)

Where was I? Oh, yes, you want lots of people to submit 30-hour requests, because unlike big IT projects, the completion rate for 30-hour requests is something approximating all of them. Screen out the obvious duds, but don’t spend much time or effort on it. Enough will be good ideas that in the aggregate they’ll pay for themselves without much trouble.

Don’t try to measure the value either. It’s like trying to measure the value of changing the oil in your car — the value is there, but try proving it using modern accounting methods. Heck, try applying the typical, ROI-driven “best practices” IT governance to oil changes and see how far you get.

It’s about balance. When it comes to achieving large-scale, risky change, concentrate your forces. But when it comes to surviving until the future gets here, you need a different set of tactics.

Place your schwerpunkt on schmearing.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

It’s summer — the season when sunlight falling across a sandy beach will warm you through and through, driving the last vestiges of winter’s cold from your chilled and battered muscles. Ahhhh.

Put a convex lens between you and the sun, though, and OUCH!

The difference between diffused warmth and ignition is focus.

Swing a hammer at a piece of wood and you’ll get a dent in the wood. Swing the same hammer at a nail positioned over the wood and you’ll get a hole in the wood, filled with a nail. The difference between a dent and penetration is focus, too — the nail focuses the hammer’s energy onto a much smaller area.

Want your IT organization to have more impact? The secret is no secret — it’s the ability to focus your organization’s energies.

The only problem is, the entire company’s political ecology operates to blur your focus.

It happens like this: A dozen or so different executives and managers submit project requests … important requests … for IT. IT has enough staff to support only three of them at any one time. That, however, would result in winners and losers, so you reach a compromise with the executive committee. Instead of choosing three projects to work on, staffing them fully, and getting each done in the six months a fully staffed project would take, you instead launch all twelve. With twelve projects in play you assign your staff among them so that everyone works on four projects at once.

Being reasonable, you recognize that each project will take four times as long as it would with dedicated teams working on them. But that’s okay, because while nobody is getting exactly what they want, everyone is getting enough.

Except that it isn’t okay. It’s a disaster. First of all, no project should ever have a timeline longer than six months. Beyond that there’s no sense of urgency — two years and forever are mathematically equal, according to the calculus of project management.

Second of all, it isn’t the case that a developer, divided among four projects, will get the same amount of total work done as one who is dedicated to a single project. It takes time for people to switch their attention from one to another — real, significant time, which translates to perhaps 10% or more additional overhead.

And finally, even if neither of these effects were true, it’s still bad business. Compare the business benefit to be had in the two cases. With dedicated project teams, every six months another three projects would finish, delivering their business benefit. One fourth of the total benefit would arrive after six months, another fourth after a year, and so on. With divided effort, the company experiences no benefit at all until two full years has elapsed. If all projects deliver the same annual benefit … call it a Benefit Unit (BU) … then after two years the company with dedicated project teams will receive nine BUs. The one with divided effort will receive none.

Nine to nothing — that’s a winning score. The mathematics behind it isn’t even complicated. In most companies it’s also unachievable, due to a recently-discovered psychological effect known as “envy.”

Okay, I lied about it being recently discovered.

Envy works like this: Imagine I offered you five thousand dollars, just for reading Keep the Joint Running every week. I imagine you’d be happy to have it.

Now imagine that after a few months you found out that I’m giving your colleague in the next cubicle ten thousand dollars for reading it. Would you still be happy about the five grand you’re getting? If so, you’d be unusual. Most people would be unhappy at the unfairness of it instead. They’d be envious.

So it is with IT governance. Give the members of the executive committee a similar choice — everyone gets the same small benefit, or everyone gets more benefit, but it’s distributed unequally — and most will prefer the former.

Most CIOs think of IT governance as a process — an organized series of steps, that operates on evidence and logic in an almost algorithmic fashion to establish IT’s priorities.

It sure would be nice if that was the case. It can be the case. But only if, as a prerequisite, the executive “team” is really a team — aligned to a common purpose instead of each one focusing on personal perquisites.

It does happen. It just doesn’t happen very often.

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