Project Management Approach to Nation Building

This week in Bangalore at the PMI National Conference 2011, I had the pleasure of hearing India's former President Dr APJ Abdul Kalam on the topic of Project Management Approach to Nation Building. A truly inspirational speech which exhorted the audience of mostly project managers to be leaders and create leaders in the task of nation building. Dr Kalam recounted his experiences in ISRO and DRDO around project management.

The question I had formulated to ask the eminent speaker and which was expressed in most of the questions from the rest of the audience was to solicit his views on tackling corruption - one of the big obstacles to nation building which has been brought under the spotlight  very harshly in recent times.
In his replies, Dr Kalam beseeched parents and teachers to instill in their children a value system which prevents the very thought of corruption as a normal way of life. This would lead to a revolution of truth with the youth brigade leading the charge and which questions their elders and seniors when and where they see a wrong practice - be it in their homes itself.

He also pointed to the initiatives in e-governance which he had started while he was President of India, and pointed out the transparency and accountability this inherently brings in public dealings.
Another very powerful concept that Dr Kalam elaborated was creating a Brand of Integrity around oneself which then permeates to the environment around one and starts increasing the Circle of Integrity. He explained how due to this brand of integrity which he himself followed and promoted, in his 40 years of experience in dealing with public funds as well as dealings with government officials and people's representatives, no one ever asked him to do anything wrong. That is the value which his Brand of Integrity confers on him and his work.

Dr Kalam asked us to take a pledge to work with integrity and suceed with integrity. He also pointed out the importance of managing failures better than managing success.

A few key take-aways from his speech on project management for nation building -
- What worked yesteday is not going to work in today's changing, tumultous and volatile times. The focus has indeed shifted from

• availability of resources to availability of knowledge,
• hierarchy to synergy,
• command to facilitation,
• order to empower and
• seniority or authority to creativity

My earlier blog postings on a similar topic is listed here for relevance. The redundancy of hierarchies

You Are The Traffic

There is a sign on a busy stretch of highway in Luton which says "You are not stuck in traffic. You are the traffic." Really makes one think. Many have been the times when we have been wistful about ideal scenarios and how we wish things were better around us. What we probably do not realise is how much we contribute to the problem itself.

If we are not engaged in working towards making things better, then definitely we are making things worse. If we do not provide the solution we are a part of the problem. My exhortation to you today is -

STOP WHINING! START WINNING!!

Look around you in your work environment and I am sure you will be able to make a list of 10 processes which hinder your work in some way or the other, making you inefficient or making you spend family time at work or making you put in heroic efforts. And as I have noted earlier in my trilogy on The Elusive Business Process, heroic efforts are a sure shot indication that things are being run in an ad hoc manner.

Here are a few tips on how to identify what is not working in your organisation -

1. Hours spent in escalation calls and on e-mail - If your employees are spending most of their time handling e-mail, it is a sure shot indication of processes which do not work. Any transaction which cannot be handled by the process, lands up in the inbox. The amount of time your team spends on e-mail will be directly proportional to the time you as a manager will spend on handling escalation calls and mails.

If you are encouraging completion of transactions on e-mail, you are contributing to the problem. A transaction handled on the e-mail, while resulting in temporary instant gratification, does not solve the problem permanently. Primarily the information and the solution remains confined to the few people involved in the mail. And reply-all does not solve the problem either.

2. Innovation in routine transactions - Innovation is good. But we do not want all our employees to start innovating in their daily routine chores. That is supposed to be run blind-folded and only taken up for process improvement or SLA impprovements. Routine can even be questioned as to whether it is indeed adding any value to the company. But once established as a required value-add task, it should not have to be perforce improvised upon to get anything done around here.

3. Personal interactions and rapport get things done - Another clear indication that process is not working. All good behaviours in themselves but as tools to get work done, it indicates your organisation will not survive the next round of exodus. This also leads to processes which get enforced for few people and get bypassed for few others who have a good rapport.

4. Lack of workflows and automation - Lack of software or existence of software which does not have workflows is another factor leading to things that do not work. Basically this leads to a breakdown of information flow across functions that are supposed to deliver the goods or the as a whole to the customer. Either it does not work fast enough or it does not send the right information to the right functions at the right time. The key requirements to make the organisation work as one unit are integration, communication and empowerment.

5. Process for the sake of process - If anybody ever tells you that you need to do particular steps because a) managements says so b) SOX says so c) we have always done it this way, be assured that 9 times out of 10, you have come across a non-value add process. Question Why and question it five times before blindly following such processes.

Processes exist to enable business and not to hinder it.

World Telecommunications and Information Society Day 2011

We will be celebrating World Telecommunications and Information Society Day on 17th May 2011. At this point, let us look at the history of Telecommunications and look at some trends as to what the future portends.

That technology would tend towards obsolescence was pretty clear even in the 18th century. Soon after the semaphore towers went live, there emerged electrical telegraphy, which was over-shadowed by wireless telegraphy. All in a span of 40 years from 1792 onwards. Less than a century from this date, a wireless telephone call was demonstrated. Albeit, the scientific concept of this wireless call via modulated lightbeams was later used in fiber optic networks.

Thus the 19th century was a century of the telephone and telegraph. Of course there were doubting thomases and all these experiments were sometimes dismissed as new fangled thoughts and impractical inventions. There is an apocryphal story of President Rutherford praising the telephone as an amazing invention but doubting who would want to use one anyway!

Further work in the early part of the 20th century saw voices being transmitted from one corner of the globe to the other. There was also the curious matter of pictures being beamed into people's homes which saw the birth of the modern entertainment industry. The two wars in the first half of this century gave an impetus to communications research. Most of the technology we use today finds a seed of an idea in the military research done at this time.

From the 1940s onward we see the rise of computing power and the introduction of networking within twenty years. The latter part of the twentieth century upto the 80s sees a consolidation and growth in computing and networking. From this point on every decade has seen us taking several steps forward  in technological advancements.

The '80s belonged to the popularisation of computing power while the 90s saw widespread adoption of the the internet. While the technological heart skipped a beat at the turn of the century, fearing the apocalypse of Y2K, it quickly recovered to see the first decade of the 21st century lead to an almost endemic growth of mobile and social networking.

What next?
Now that we have moved eons beyond the initial incredulity of voices and pictures being transmitted from one place to another, and have succeeded in making the internet mobile, it does beg the question - what next?

Let us look at some of the trends we see taking hold in this second decade. The mobile workplace is definitely here to stay and e-mail has been pretty tough to dislodge so far despite the various waves of alternate communications. Digital means of doing business can still be said to be emerging and could be the next big thing. Cloud is definitely the toast of the town at the moment. History shows us that successful inventions need to catch the popular imagination to survive. History also tells us that new technology is more often than not built from innovations on top of previous technology. The Internet became widespread by using the old telephone and television networks.

Hence, I dare to predict that this decade will belong to networked business communication in pretty much the same way social networking took the first decade by storm. Organisations will become more and more virtual and we should soon see the establishment of an entire office infrastructure on the cloud. Especially as the digital generation starts entering the workforce, every bit of paper and physical transaction will be questioned for efficiency and productivity.

What would be interesting to watch is the socio-economic impact of these new developments. Would the big corporations be early movers and monopolize the virtual space or would this lead to the emergence of challenger organisations who would be much more nimble and open to such an idea? Would rural business take a lead over urban given that the economies of distance and opportunity would make it far more advantageous for them to be ravenous adapters to new technology?

The New Wave Business Process - Part III : The Elusive Business Process

Wiki defines the term 'business process' as a set of related, structured activities which lead to a service or a product being produced and delivered to customers. What this implies is that if you can define your business goals and list down the activities in various functions needed to achieve these goals, you should then be able to set a sequence to this list, which becomes your business process.

Business is definitely run 100% on process. What matters is what is the maturity level of the business process in your organization. After all even ad-hoc collaboration leads to following a process which delivers products and services. However, ad-hoc process will not be scalable or repeatable. If we want to deliver consistent reliable service to customers, then business process maturity has to be ensured.

In order to take steps forward in the right direction, we need to first realize where we are. In your organisation, if  you see great customer appreciation for individual efforts, personal interactions help save the day, and your team is motivated to ensure no problem is insurmountable in meeting deadlines, then you are in trouble as far as process maturity is concerned. These are all symptoms of an ad-hoc process organization.

What you need to do at this stage is take a hard look at the structures in your organization, study process documentation (in all likelihood - none), and embark on a study of process frameworks best suited to your business environment and industry sector. Such an entity is likely to go through organizational re-structuring, documentation of existing ad-hoc process, adoption of frameworks and trying to super-impose ad-hoc processes to standard frameworks.

In order to reach Managed processes, such an entity would be well advised to set up a central process analysis team comprising of a cross functional selection of senior managers. This forum should be empowered with top management sponsorship and review. Individual heroism should take a second seat to the goal of creating a managed process entity.

This forum should strive to build / modify the organization structure aligned to processes. This will lead to internal service units being created which so far as possible are the owners of specific deliverables within the entire process and which in turn defining TAT and SLA for each other. This would also result in providing role clarity to employees on what exactly they are supposed to deliver to the organization.

The hallmark of a managed process entity would be existence of disciplined organizational units which own and deliver specific tasks with desired quality and within specified timelines. At this stage the organization should see repeatable practices, customer appreciation for consistency and reliability of the organization as opposed to appreciation for individual heroism earlier.

By now the organization would be demonstrating process definition in every work unit. Each work unit is now stabilizing their process. It is possible to get data out of every process step to measure and improve on bottlenecks. The next step would be to standardize the processes across work units and ensure seamless interaction among various functions. Only at this stage would BPR or Six Sigma programs yield benefits for the organization. If such exercises are attempted on an immature organization, the programs will not be well appreciated and by the time we reach this stage a fatigue would have set in amongst the resoruces which will make it all the more difficult to progress beyond this stage.

Thus it is very important to calibrate the process maturity journey of the organization to avoid mis-steps and over-reaching one's goals. While we are moving processes to managed and stabilized stages, it is also important to realize the potential of automation in bringing about productivity gains. Automation will help little in ad-hoc processes and will in fact be counter productive as one goes on spending endlessly on automating new ad hoc processes continuously. Once work units agree upon standardized processes, automation can be brought in to define, perform, monitor, measure and report on processes which can be then taken up for further improvement based on observations.

These further improvements are most likely to come in the form of end to end integration projects being taken up within the organization. By this time, industry best practices would have been instituitionalized and functions will even start improvising on industry best practices. This should neither be surprising or disturbing. After all industry best practice is defined as those practices which work best for us.

Beyond this, each organization will need to find its own unique path to reach repeatable and innovating stages of process maturity. At repeatable stage the aim will be to reduce process output variances, empowered functions will take corrective action or improvement steps on their process area, since they know the larger model and are in sync with the larger picture of the organization. Organizational capability measures will be more in focus rather than function wise capabilities.

For an organization to be recognized as an innovative process organization, there should be demonstrated sponsorship of innovation projects, proactive improvement programs for achieving organizational goals. Often what is seen is that leadership teams attempt to execute projects at innovation maturity levels which may be in keeping with their thought process maturity, but fails to recognise the maturity levels of the organizations that they head. This is a major pitfall to be avoided. Leaders need to ensure that they nurture the maturity level of their organizations, rather than operate at innovating levels and assuming their organization will play catch up.

The New Wave Business Process - Part II : 'App'lied Business Theory

A conversation I was having with a senior strategist and a vendor conference which I attended this week triggered some further thought process on handling the new wave business processes. So I decided to elaborate on my initial concept in the previous blog - http://fjb-mgmt-class.blogspot.com/2011/03/new-wave-business-process.html - about network linked business capability and online collaboration leading to commercial transactions.

Let us look at some of the changes we are seeing around us -
- Proliferation of apps
- Requirement of information
- Need to collaborate and communicate
- Remote and mobile access to apps and information for collaboration and communication

All of this points to a scenario where business operates more and more in a distributed manner and not from central locations. This also breaks down the traditional central chain of command and leads to empowerment at local levels for taking decisions and executing transactions. The challenge for leadership will be - how to ensure order in this chaos and channelize synergies across these disparate events which make for completion of a business transaction.

Working remotely is indeed supported by the emergence of technologies which support distributed collaboration. Concepts like cloud computing have matured to a level where they have business acceptance leading towards a critical mass needed to support the next stage of growth. The adoption of cloud computing opens up the business to tackle the challenges and opportunities of the future.

Now let us examine how these changes will affect the way people work. First the definition of work will undergo a change. Neither organisations will be willing to commit to fixed number of resources which is akin to sunk cost on a recurring basis, nor will resources be content to dedicate their efforts to one organisation. With that goes the concept of working hours (does it exist nowadays anyway?) as resources are supposed to perform tasks on demand. Whoever has the right skills at the time when the demand for a task to be performed comes up, gets to do the work.

What this means is that people, process and technology gets replaced with skills, capability, connectivity. Strong processes and technology support would simply be the hygiene factors which will enable this new way of working. We are getting comfortable with apps for our social requirements. Wouldn't it be great to have an app to submit your expenses? While you are on your business trip, you make your expenses through your mobile pay app and get a choice to charge it to your expenses which hits your organisations accounts payable.

Now taking this thought process to the next level - how about doing your entire business online? You no longer need concrete buildings full of people to do business. What this needs is an online infrastructure which replicates your steel and concrete structure and allows collaboration amongst your resources, partners, stakeholders, customers instantaneously. With this level of automation being built on the cloud, the organisation can hire resources online, allocate work as per skills and monitor work reports online. This concept can already be seen at work in the freelance community. If we put this in a online structure it results in a virtual organisation being created. Organisations would have administrators of such virtual departments playing the role of HODs.

When you have multiple such organisations created online and communicating with each other, you have online collaborating leading to commercial transactions. Procurement in Org A could then collaborate with Sales in Org B using an app similar to maybe Google Wave. Negotiations are conducted and recorded online resulting in issuance of a PO. This gets sent to resources in the sellers delivery organisation and the resources with the right skills and closest to the buyer get to deliver the products or services so procured.

If this concept is detailed out, it leads to huge benefits in productivity and costs. The ease of doing business also results in higher growth. Resources get benefited by getting the best value out of utilising their skills, doing what they do best.

The New Wave Business Process

Though this post focuses on a particular industry event, I am sure the process concerns raised here resonate across other sectors as well and are just as relevant.

I was at the TM Forum (TM Forum is the world’s leading industry consortium focused on improving business effectiveness for communications Service Providers.) Regional Spotlight in Delhi the previous week. One of the participants brought up the top three priorities for business as -
- New products
- Growth
- Improving Processes

This means post-recession communications service providers are clearly expecting and looking to ride the new wave of growth. At the same time there is a cautious approach to handling this growth by re-using existing infrastructure and improving current processes.
However, this was a CIO view and I would have liked to see more business process owners from operators at this forum participating and gearing up for the changes and improvements required to handle the next wave. (TM Forum's eTOM is the common business process architecture adopted by telecom operators globally.)

Now for improving the business processes, there will be dependence on IT to deliver automation projects that support the process changes or help make existing processes more efficient. No doubt IT will play an important role in process efficiency, but can only act as a catalyst. The initiator of this exercise has to be the process owner who has to have complete clarity on the future roadmap of the organization, the challenges current practices are likely to face in the future and the changes which are required to be brought about to stay current and releavant.

Additionally, newer technologies will change the way we do business. We already have seen the changes in the way we interact with each other in the last five years. These changes have already started seeping into formal interactions and business communication. These changes will further percolate into the business transactions themselves as we see businesses recognize and adopt the power of cloud computing. I am currently conceptualizing a network linked business capability which enables businesses to collaborate online and possibly enter into binding transactions online. You could essentially run your entire business on the cloud. Just imagine the power unleashed by this concept of anytime, anywhere enabling business capability.

The kind of capabilities I am envisaging here changes the way we set up organizational structures, the way we hire and maintain our workforce, the way we interact within the organization, the way we define the tasks essential to carry on business, the way we engage with external stakeholders, in essense everything we call as 'doing business'. Businesses will have to go for a deep introspection and respect none of the currently established practices as valid in the future.

This essentially means the current ways of doing business will just not be good enough to tackle the new wave of growth which will have its own demands of quicker than before delivery, better than ever products and lower than ever costs. In essence this calls for not only looking afresh at business process re-engineering, but also changes the way we look at and perform BPR itself.

Attitude matters

There was an old ad which used to go "It's not size that matters. It's the attitude." It is as much true for organizations as it is for individuals.

This is one factor which allows you to rise above circumstances, background, hierarchies and make a mark for yourself. It has both positive and negative connotations. Keeping with the spirit of this blog we focus on the positives.

Having a positive attitude and approach means half the job is already tackled. When somebody tells you something cannot be done, just delve into the issue and bring out the real motivations for the behavior. You can easily categorise such a negative response into the following reasons -
Skill set issue - The person does not know how to approach the task and get it done. Can we provide a training or a SOP which will mitigate the negative and turn it into a 'can do' situation?
Intention - This is where attitude steps in. It can be a case of 'I do not want to do this' due to a variety of reasons. I am too senior, too junior, not the right person, why can't someone else do this. All of these can be attributed to an intention of not doing the task. You can easily identify this person does not want to give his 100% to the job.
Values and Ethics - A positive spin to the Intention aspect will be if the task being asked of you goes against the grain of your values. Again a strong attitude is required to put your foot down and point out the wrongs of doing such a task. Today in most organisations there are governance bodies which can be approached in such conflict situations.

In evaluating the above points, we touched upon a couple of important aspects. The desire or intention to serve the organisation's goals and a can do attitude which allows us to give our 100% to the job.

In whatever we do in our personal or professional lives, I have seen those people succeed who have a desire to serve the larger interests. Such people bring with themselves a sincerity of purpose and are able to percolate their values into the environment. Thing start to fall into place with such people around. With such an attitude, you win the respect, appreciation and affection of all you touch.
These people do not come to their jobs just to make a living, they are there with a vision, a purpose, a desire to achieve and leave the place in a better shape than they found it.

Here's a quote to describe the motivation behind such an attitude - " I don't know if I will succeed in this, but I know for sure I would have failed if I had not attempted it."

Another question to ask oneself is - do I give my 100% to what I set out to do? I tried my best is not good enough. If the result is not as per expectations, then somewhere that 100% was definitely missing. Another try, another approach is definitely called for. You cannot quit after having 'tried your best'. You have to keep at it, not till your boss is satisfied with the output, not till your customer is satisfied with the output, but till your inner self is satisfied with the output and you are convinced you could not have delivered better. That is called giving your 100%.

Keep in check the trait of taking each day and just getting done with it to wriggle out at the end having put in less than what satisfies you. Success is not a stroke of luck or a bolt from the blue. It is a choice which is in our hands and is carved out of the so many mundane tasks that define our character and approach and attitude. We have this choice and we exercise this choice every day for every task that we encounter. The number of right choices we make defines our attitude for success.

Another thought here is that the only attitude we can control and change is our own. We cannot lay down how people will behave or how the wind will blow. All we can decide is how we will take it and make the best out of it.

I will end this article with an oft-repeated story of three people cutting stones and on being asked as to what they were doing, one replies "I am cutting stones", the other replies "I am earning my wages" while the last one replies "I am building a temple where people will find succour". Attitude Matters.