Rough Edge or Competitive Edge, Insider or Outsider - How do you great a good CEO

Large organisations develop a path to the top spot that identifies junior or middle-ranking executives and then trains them in what is involved in taking more and more responsibility. The executive moves roles every two years. The roles will broaden his knowledge of finance, marketing, engineering and will involve an overseas position if it is a multi-national company. Before he gets to the final stage he will lead a division before competing with the other princes and princesses for the top role.

This process can identify great executives but its objective of taking raw material and processing to make a freshly minted CEO often has the wrong outcome. Businesses change so much that the existing CEO would no longer be a viable candidate because whatever industry it is will have changed so much. Financial Services, Energy, Construction, Pharmaceutical and Agriculture have regular upheavals in terms of structures, competitors and technology that the experience of the CEO has a limited shelf-life.

This grooming of the new CEO means that they understand the existing business but once they are crowned the challenge is that they are committed and invested in the existing structures. The Management version of Hogwarts that they have been through will mean that they understand all the spells and potions of modern Management but they will have lost the rough edges and the unpredictability that they possessed at the start of the polishing process. The CEOs will look the same (well groomed, good diet and exercise)  and they talk the same MBA language - synergy, deep dive, customer focus innovation and agile are a selection of the management karaoke that is played out.

There are many examples of CEOs who have been trained, groomed and failed. Even selection from a competitor does not guarantee success. The person usually selected is similar to the incumbent CEO but does not know of any pent up challenges that will affect his ability to make a success of the role. Poor David Moyes of Everton was given a hospital pass by Alex Ferguson with a decaying and ageing squad that needed renewal.

The challenge is how to progress the people you identify and let them keep their rough edge because these will be the competitive edge. Perhaps a part of their education is to take over a failing unit and turn it around or create a business unit from scratch and demonstrate success. Peer review will not be helpful, he should be reviewed by those above and below. Was he able to influence them, persuade them and motivate them?

The last thing that a large organisation will need is a 'safe pair of hands' as the CEO. That type of captaincy will not be able to see the choppy waters ahead and realise that the company needs refresh and change.

Old Thinking About User Design Wins Out

I think there that well-designed applications owe more to Art than Science. Remember how different Google and Facebook were to other applications that we around at the time and how the simplicity of their design stood out from some of the cluttered and confused applications that had evolved through the accretion of functionality.

I was reminded of this because of a recent experience when someone brought my attention to a piece of work where a well-known narrative was translated into emojis.

An emoji is a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion in electronic communication such as the smiley faces that you use in instant messaging.  Emojis are modern-day hieroglyphics, An enterprising individual, Joe Hale, has created special emojis and used them to make a four-foot-tall Wonderland emoji Poster that tells the story of ‘Alice in Wonderland’.

Here is an example of his translation of the ‘Alice’ text to a set of images. If we use ‘Do Cats Eat Bats?’ It appears as:

Another example: ‘And how do you know that you’re mad?’

There is a whole poster worth of this approach.

Joe believes the idea, ‘"Alice in Wonderland translated into emoji," is powerful enough to create images in the reader's mind's eye, and anybody curious enough can develop these images into their own personal Wonderland in their head and escape to that place.' He adds 'People should just use my poster as a visual aid to think about Wonderland, trip out and explore their imagination. Or: be inspired to read some Lewis Carroll!’

The entire 'Alice' story has been reimagined in this fashion. Alice in Wonderland is such a well-known story that there are sequels and reimaginings in film, animation and books but his idea that you could look at the story in its entirety as a poster was unexpected. After 150 years people are coming up with new ways of representing the story.

His approach is extremely user-centric for a younger generation who read from phones and tablets and take their information in different sized chunks than that of previous generations.  Presenting the information this way opens up new ways of reading the story.

150 years old (Alice in Wonderland)  in literature is about 10 in technology terms. The emoji 'Alice in Wonderland'  makes me curious why mainstream technology often uses the same mechanisms and narratives to present to and communicate with the users that it was using more than 20 years ago. The interactive design of applications has not progressed much from the original design book that Apple provided to explain how menus, icons, buttons should be laid out. Alan Cooper's book in 1995, 'About Face',  was a bible for application developers getting to grips with a new way of presenting applications that were no longer command line driven. Today, a lot of the applications that are heavily used by the public could have been written 20 years ago using old technology and old thinking. My online tax system does not remember preferences from year to year whereas most people's tax affairs are unchanged. Banking systems have all my data but provide no analysis of my spending habits (book, food, travel and entertainment) when I log on. It seems that much of current design is based around copying competitors or redesigning an identical product from scratch.

The users have evolved but the suppliers seem to be trapped into frameworks and models that do not permit change easily. Duplication of the look and is not standardisation or consistency when it repeats the flaws of the original. We may not end up with emoji driven applications but we should anticipate that the static, corporate, brochure look-and-feel of applications is under threat.

The poster is available online at http://joehale.bigcartel.com/product/wonderland-emoji-poster

Listening to Organisations - Large Organisations Like to Organise Their Own Funeral

I scoff when politicians do their tours to listen to the people. It suggests that the people have stopped talking. It really means that they are worried that they have got out of touch with what is going on. The same thing happens with organisations. As they grow older they get set in their ways; they develop a set of default behaviours and decide that it's not possible to do anything differently.

As a Project Manager, I treat the organisation as another individual. It is separate from the CEO and the board. It is not an accumulation of the thoughts and activities of the people who are on the front line. You can be a bank, a pharmaceutical company, a software company, s start-up or a public organisation. The same thing applies.

Currently, I'm doing so work for a massive public organisation (not the health Service, a completely different personality). It has been going for more than 100 years but will not see another 10 the way it is going on. It has to change because the competitors are gobbling up their market share but it cannot. It makes deals with the suppliers that are in nobody interests and to make a change to its core systems is almost impossible. Not completely impossible but you pay over the odds for any alteration. It is like paying £10,000 to have a light bulb changed where you know you could do the rewiring for that if you were prepared for some temporary disruption.

The incumbent management has been there for 15+ years and has cushy pensions so they want to continue that run until retirement. That means no big, bold decisions but a lot of noise about standards and compliance. The lower level personnel leave or are made redundant to save costs and their roles are given to consultancies or third parties (no it's not the BBC). Morale is weakening.

In order to get anything done and to motivate myself to play in the pantomime role assigned to me, I have to treat the company as a person on life support and the management as the relatives who have lost perspective at the imminent end of a close loved relative. It's a sad way to go and it is costing the taxpayer millions of pounds for the funeral.

Treating the organisation as a separate being also helps in that you can see if there are treatments or remedies that can change the context of their existence. For older organisations, it is often difficult for them to change their habits as these served them well in the past. They cannot see that these habits are now hastening their death and that action has to be taken to change the narrative.They try and apply a more disciplined version of the process that got them into such a sorry state. This is the first stage of the process and is called denial. I will have to skim read the Elisabeth Kubler-Ross book so I can plan for the next stages of the programme.

Healthcare: The Age of Control

I went to a great talk last night called 'The Age of the Cure: Healthcare in the 21st Century'. It was sponsored by 'The Specator' and Pfizer. A few themes came out of it.

• People living longer but for some there is a poor quality of life at the end of it
• NHS needs a redesign after 70 years
• There is a lot of nice shiny new technology that will help us manage our our health but it is our responsibility.
• There are low tech things we can do to improve our chances - less salt
• Technology will not replace face-to-face meetings with GPs
• People need some autonomy when it comes to choosing how to end their life. It is not a discussion that is encouraged and many people are not prepared for it and do not know what to do.
• The low hanging fruit of infections and diseases has been found. Improvements in treatment will be incremental.

I had a concern about the technology aspect as it seemed to be a new panacea for the population and illness challenges we face. The technology may be good but the IT firms rip the NHS off and have a terrible track record for delivery. I don't want millions or tens of millions to go to non-delivery of poor systems.

It was a good debate with food for thought. The weakest ideas came from the politician on the panel who used to be a Health Secretary. The GP was good and so was the DNA scientist. I was a bit concerned about the Medical Technology person as he is the type the large consultancies love to bamboozle while pretending to be his friend.

The Great British Server Build Factory

One project had a 'Build Factory' - the client would send the specification to our team and server after server would be built and installed for them. They wanted hundreds and hundreds of servers so the profit margin would be great. Except its not really a factory. People are not co-located and talking to each other. If there is a problem then the assembly line is not halted until the issue is fixed and they will carry on. There was no officious man with a clip board checking quality. Instead there was the ghoulish combination of offshore resources, onshore project managers, tracker spreadsheets and optimistic forecasts for the factory.

Several months later there is a new word that is used. 'Remediation'. Most of the servers have issues. Each server will have different issues so there are no systematic problems. A separate team has to work through all the servers and identify the defects and fix them.

In a discussion about the build factory one PM said 'we did get the defects down from 10-20 a server to 2 or 3 a server'. That's interesting. Is that what you want to tell the client. If you buy a car with 2 or 3 known defects when it is brand new is that acceptable or a piece of hospital equipment.?' The dream of the Build Factory had taken its toll on him.

His boss was more concerned that the factory was not productive enough. 'They promised me 20 a day but they manage only 20 a week', he complained. 'But if we are producing shoddy goods do we really want to produce it twice as quick or should we try and find out what our quality problems are so we don't need to recruit a team to fix problems. With better quality these additional people could be building even more servers'

A lot of the conversation was how ideas such as SIAM had institutionalised silos in the organisation whereas you would have people with cross-over skills and you would encourage the Unix person to know a bit about Windows and the Windows guy to know about SQL. Even the contractors we were pulling in were not able to hit the ground running.

As a joke I proosed we rebranded the 'Build Factory' as 'The Great British Server Build' and set up a marquee in the car park and have the teams create a new server each day - a SQL server, an Oracle Server, a Cluster and they could be judged by the client and the PM on how well they met the specification.

It would have been cheaper, cleaner and quicker to do it that way. Perhaps the team would have developed some ownership of their work and learned to work as a team. Instead they are dragging themselves across a set of hardware that they keep thinking they have got rid of and have to update the software as it has taken more than 6 months before they were originally created.

Implementation Weekends - Fortune Favours the Prepared PM

For a less experience PM the implementation weekends are a trial of fire. If it works then great you will be the project hero. If it does not go live then you are a dud. In previous times in order to 'unblock' projects I have had a go at installing Windows Server using the manual (how hard can it be - impossible) and after many unsuccessful attempts went down to the pub and had lunch and had to wait three days for a Wintel person to do it properly. I was assisted in my kamikaze attempt by a Unix developer as I regard one operating system much the same as another. He thought it was a humorous approach but as he had seen me do weirder things and take bigger risks and see them work he just went along to pick up another anecdote to tell him Unix chums.

As a senior PM most of the projects I get will be remediation ones where the client and the supplier started to do it in a way that was either cheap (its straight out of the box, their bread and butter work) or expensive in the wrong way (the complicated but plausible method) and they have come unstuck. When they come unstuck they usually double down and call that re-planning. Then, when all motivation, budget and any chance of it being regarded as a success they will bring in a simplifier rather than a complicator, which what I think I am.

Even with experienced Wintel resource the first project was still causing problems. So I went to the local church in the centre of London and prayed to God and then the implementation worked. Do I think there is a link between the two? Of course I do. On a metaphysical level I escalated the issue to the celestial PM and his only response was that I should have come to him first rather than waste time with Wintel contractors. As the ultimate escalation point he is busy and he appreciated trying to sort my own problems first before sharing mine with him. As he said to me 'I can't be everywhere at once' - so much for omnipresence.

There is a lot planning, reviewing and rehearsing in these weekends. There is no shortcut around it - plan, review and rehearse. Then you need good people who turn up. It sounds simple but when an implementation weekend is months late and has been rescheduled three of four times it's hard to get people's attention and keep them fresh. Sometimes the team can be a completely different one from the ones who developed the original plan. That's why reviews and  a walk-through are useful. Even then you might get people who don't turn up because their contract is not going to be reviewed or their is a management issue where they want to stick two fingers up to the company. You will never know until the implementation day itself. Advice: Cross-train people and get them to work in twos. It allows you to distribute the work more evenly and means yo have a broader set of questions.

The expensive and slow race to the starting line

The image below is the typical gestation of a project. The RFP can take weeks or months and the client already has a start date and an end date in mind even before they completed the RFP. The modern approach to just-in-time working means that there is a scramble on both sides to get the project in place before deadlines start. Bonuses, promotions and sales targets are all in play which is why we see so many projects announced in December so that they can be included in bonus calculations.

It would hard to design a more wasteful process as many suppliers are competing for the same work and they will not be paid for the work in responding to the RFP. It is regarded as the cost of doing business and there are some companies who simply do not respond to RFPs. These are usually the better companies who already have a full pipeline due to the quality of their work and satisfied customers.

The number of suppliers will be reduced to a shortlist but this will be very near the end of the process which means that many will have worked for nothing. Even the ones who have not succeeded will have improved the final answer as their clarifications will identify weaknesses in the client's project proposal or opportunities they had not identified.

At the end of the process at lot of time has been used up. At least 3 months and it can be more than a year even for a medium size project. By the time the project starts the personnel who have worked on the response will have moved to paid work and may not be available at the start. Sometimes it takes so long that the people are no longer employed by the supplier which is embarrassing on both sides.

Mobilisation is under pressure and the project is put under pressure to make up time that is perceived as lost. Sometimes the project has not achieved a great deal of clarity as the whole process is competitive between the suppliers and even with the client. The client may have contractors and personnel who believe that the project should be done 'in-house' and have a vested interest in making all the suppliers look bad.

There has to a fairer, quicker way of doing this to get a better outcome and reduce wasted effort.