The Path?

Those who know me know that I don't sit still. I am always thinking, watching and learning from others. I used to take a class here and there from the local community college. Then I took a bunch of technical classes from geek-tanks. Then I went through a great Leadership Development Program at my former agency. After that I went through what essentially amounted to a PMI program of 8 Project Management classes. I got my PMP last summer. I'm currently in a Master's program, finishing in August.

Thomas Jefferson believed that learning was a lifelong pursuit and that there are no terminal degrees. I happen to agree with that sentiment. The question that I have is, what should be next for me? I know that I will take some time to chill. As one of my friends has remarked, I have incurred an enormous debt. I'm not just talking about the cost of tuition to the school, I'm talking about the debt to my family in terms of time and attention. I will need some time to pay down that debt.

But at some point I will have it balanced or even have a surplus, and my question then is, what should be next? I've got a bunch of things that could make sense, but I need to weigh them and identify the best opportunity. This is no different from the regular project selection that is performed everyday. Given scarce resources which project or projects provide the best value?

Here's a sampling of what I'm looking at:

• Program Management Professional - The PgMP Certification could make sense. I could manage my time effectively and probably have a good work/school/life balance. But is there a real benefit to having this certification? I don't know anybody who has even tried. I don't know what it gets me that I don't already have with my PMP. It costs $1500 to take the exam.
  
• ComSci Fellowship - The Commerce, Science and Technology Fellowship is run out of the Department of Commerce. It is a 10-month policy seminar program in which I would attend a bunch of sessions in which we dive into an issue and consider the nuances and implications. They have a bunch of Ph.D.'s in their alumni, and it makes me nervous that the focus is much less on technology. However there always seems to be some people from NIST in each class and those types of contacts are valuable to me. The big problem is that it kicks off in September and I need to pay down some of my family debt, which is hard to do if I jump right in. The costs though would be born by my agency. This looks like a good option for a year from now.
  
• SES Candidate Development - The Senior Executive Service Candidate Development Program is one I would do regardless of time or place. But I have a couple problems. First it is offered on a very irregular schedule. This makes it very difficult to plan for. I can't even tell when the next one will be offered. The second issue I have is that it is sometimes open to grades 14 and 15, but sometimes only to 15's. I'm a 14 right now, so if I want to reduce the risk of being able to consider this as an option I need to get into a 15. In terms of value, I know that this one is high because I'm never going to leave federal service. This is the type of experience that will introduce me to a new set of peers, more relevant to where I am. Don't misunderstand, I am really enjoying my Master's program, but in a lot of ways my peers there are catagorically different from me because most of them work on contracts. It is hard to identify all of the things that are different, but suffice to say that someone explained it to me as: 'When I was a contractor I had my hands on the oar and I was rowing as hard as I could, but when I became a fed, I had to make sure that people were all rowing in the right direction and that we had paddles that were able to work well together and that the boat doesn't spring a leak.' As such I place a high value on my connections to these types of people, and there are only two others in my current class.
  
• The last thing I'm considering is something in Public Policy. I feel good about my level of competence with most IT related matters, however I also recognize that the thinner the air gets, the more I will be simply in a role of public policy.

I don't know what I'm going to do yet, but that's ok; I have time. But I know that I will do something just as soon as I start to get complacent with where I am and what I have, I will once again push to discover new things.

Rewards

The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Since I'm a government employee we often award a contract to a company to help us with the development of complicated systems and applications. I have been lucky to have worked with some very very good teams of contractors. While I like Ralph's quote, sometimes just doing something isn't enough of a reward. As such I'm going to take a little space here to share how I like to dole out rewards for very good work.

The first and biggest reward for a job well done is to get more work. This keeps the members of the contract team gainfully employeed and allows an opportunity for longer term planning. You have to be careful with this one because if you give it too early you might lose the leverage to get that same type of effort that made you want to give more work.

The second opportunity for rewards is to nominate a company or team for an award. I take every opportunity to nominate excellent performance for contracting awards. Even if the team you nominate doesn't win, it is always an honor to know that the client values your effort so much that he or she will take the time to complete the nomination form.

Next, I give constant and lots of feedback. Most of it is good feedback, like this morning I told Michael that I was impressed with his understanding of a certain type of interaction and I thanked him for providing that type of analysis. These little things really add up. When someone does something well, tell him or her. The converse is also true. In order to be taken seriously when you give praise, you must be fair in telling people when they can do better. Let me make sure I keep that idea in context. Some people believe in the idea of calling someone out on the carpet. That is never a good situation. If you do that, either as a government person, or as a manager, stop it right now. People who do that are not leaders, they are managers. You have missed the opportunity to teach. Instead, take the opportunity to get with the person whose performance is less than what is expected, and get him or her alone. Use that time to figure out a way to make the situation work. But praise is in public, criticism is in private.

Little sidebar, I was in a situation in which I was told to call someone on the carpet. I did as I was told to do. It didn't go so well for me. It made a difficult situation worse and heaped a ton of added pressure on me. Add to that the fact I was not comfortable acting like that, it was an aweful situation for me. Don't misunderstand, I can lobby and argue on a position or a point, but those aren't directed at a person. Once focus is on a person, take it to the right place and time.

Another way I try to pass out rewards is by passing compliments onto the person's supervisor or boss. This is why I keep the boss's business card. When something really good happens I will take the 10 or 15 minutes to send a note to the boss. Perhaps it goes nowhere. But I know at least a couple of times those little notes turned into spot awards for the person I complimented.

Last way to make sure that great performance is recognized is to make sure it is documented in the contract closeout. You have seen me comment on PPIRS before. It is important that good performance is identified there so that other agencies can see what happened and use it to make better-informed decisions.

Number 1 Cheerleader

Part of being the Project Manager is being the #1 cheerleader of the result or product. As such, I'm currently in that "ra ra" mode right now. Most of what we do represents a change from the status quo. Most people get nervous around change. As PMs we have both an opportunity and a responsibility to make that process go well. It will be different every time. But this is now the second time that I am employing this strategy and it has been effective both times.

Grass roots. Most of my friends and colleagues are probably local to the Washington DC area. I will heretofor refer to that place as the Ivory Tower. We build systems and applications in the ivory tower and they get deployed and used everywhere but. This causes a sense of alienation for the people actually executing programs and using the systems and applications we develop. In order to overcome this alienation I make it my job to be the #1 cheerleader for the product. I have been visiting places, Minneapolis last week, Atlanta yesterday, Denver a few weeks from now, and my message is the same; 'Take a look at this new application.'

I had a great platform yesterday to go out and speak with the leadership in the field. I was allotted a half hour. I got to the end of my 30 minutes and thanked them for their time. And then they didn't go away. They kept asking questions and wanting to see different functions. Before I knew it another 30 minutes went by. They loved the application and are pushing hard to expand the scope to meet the divergent needs of a broader set of programs.

It doesn't hurt that I have an excellent team of contractors working to develop the functionality. Very hard working and very responsive to customer needs. But the thing that is really different here is that I get the feeling that people in IT don't take the initiative to go out into the field to do this kind of grass-roots marketing. There is something to be said about getting out there and sitting down with people and looking them in the eye. I could read body language from people and probe to get their questions out. I love Live Meeting, but I can never read that type of feedback through a Live Meeting.

Lesson learned is, Web Exs and Live Meetings are great tools, but don't overuse them. Sometimes you need to get out of the Ivory Tower and share the pain. Only then will people pay attention and only then will you be able to really connect with them.

Transparency

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.
- Serenity Prayer

I never thought that I could feel so strongly about transparency in an organization. This just doesn’t seem like one of those deal-breaker type issues. But it can be if the organization straddles the fence.

I am a very transparent decision-maker. People will often hear me say things like, “It costs us nothing to get their buy-in,” and “Isn’t it worth it to get their input.” As a Project Manager I actually don’t make very many decisions at all. Instead, what I do is create an environment in which decisions can be made. Think about it, Project Managers are generally very process-oriented. The fact that there is a process at all usually means that more than one person is making the decision.

Other people though, make decisions in a vacuum. They are intentionally not inclusive in the decision-making process and because of this I will argue that their decisions are flawed and risky. Let me take a moment to explain. Decisions made by just one person are difficult to counter because other people don’t know what evidence was used to make the decision. Additionally, given the evidence, we don’t know how that evidence was prioritized and ranked. This causes other people to clam up and not challenge the decision. I know that if you make a decision based on flawed data I can tell you that your data was flawed and that will lead to an opportunity to reconsider the decision. But if I don’t know your data then I cannot make that challenge.

Further, people who make decisions in this manner, unless they are really really informed, never even get access to the complete data. It is virtually impossible to see all of the sides of an important decision. Different people have different responsibilities and also different frames of reference. A solitary decision-maker loses the opportunity to collect this information. He or she will make a decision based on the available information, and I will grant that he or she will make the best decision possible. But with the lack of data making a good decision is more dependent on luck.

Lastly, when I make a decision in my inclusive manner I get to share responsibility with everyone else who participated in the process. That decision is partly mine, but also partly owned by everyone else. If it turns out to be a good decision then we all get to share in the rewards of making a good decision. If it turns out to be a bad decision then we all own a part of that bad decision. I try to include people who are affected or impacted by a particular decision. They are my stakeholders. As such when the decision turns out to have been a bad one, I have found that they don’t complain, even people who were on the other side. However when a sole decision-maker makes a bad decision, I am one of the mob ready to criticize. This is because in the latter case, solitary decision-makers accept complete responsibility for their decisions. When they are right they win big and when they are wrong they lose big.

I never really paid much credence to the Theory X and Theory Y stuff from McGregor. I know it is in the PMBOK and I really thought it was there to establish a more academic foundation for the book. Let’s face it, most of the book is experiential, you have to practice it. But some things are academic and Theory X and Y is one of them. Theory X basically states that employees are lazy robots who only follow explicit instructions. As such managers have to be very strict and authoritarian with the employees. Theory Y is the opposite. It states that employees generally want to work hard and better themselves. As such, Theory Y managers should nurture employees and help to develop them. The interesting connection for me is that I think Theory X people are more likely to be solitary decision-makers and Theory Y are likely to be more transparent decision-makers.

If these types of (closed) decisions are made frequently enough for a wide enough segment of the office they will change the culture. It is very disappointing when the actions of one or two people can change the culture of an organization. But that is what will happen if, as an organization, you don't collectively work at being transparent in how decisions are made.

A Time for Change...

Nothing endures but change.
- Heraclitus

The ink wasn’t even dry on the Constitution when the first 10 amendments, the Bill Of Rights, were approved in 1791. Everything must adapt to the world as it changes, and in the information age, the pace of change has increased. The systems and applications we develop for my agency are not immune to these phenomena. Regulations are crafted from statutes and policies from regulation and any or all of these are shaped and molded with the intent of helping people. Since the system or application is the personification of these policies, regulations and statutes, the system or application must adapt to these changes as well. That is why the ‘Set it and forget’ approach can never be applied to information systems at any agency.

Recognizing this fact is the first step to beating it. Too frequently people think that they can avoid change or wait-out the change. Those are the people who are put into a difficult situation and are forced to react rather than proactively manage change. Change will be required, but we can take steps to plan for and implement change over time. The first thing to do is to charter a Change Control Board. This is a vital component to managing change because we often want a lot of change, but have limited resources. Thus it is the job of the Change Control Board (CCB) to review and prioritize and approve changes for the system or application.

The next important component is to have a Requirements Baseline. A lot of projects fall down in this area. They want to measure and manage change, but without a requirements baseline, from what are you measuring? The Requirements Baseline includes project objectives, the project charter, the requirements specification, and the design specification. These artifacts describe the system with increasing levels of detail. The important thing to know is that the Requirements Baseline must be written down and approved in a document. A Prototype or Proof of Concept is not a Requirements Baseline. If you have a system or application, do you already have these artifacts? If not, I would recommend a change for your CCB to consider, “Develop the Requirements Baseline.”

The tool used to record the prioritized changes to a system or application is a Change Control Register (CCR). It does not, and should not be complicated. Each change must have a unique number for tracking, a description of the change, a status (new, completed, under development, rejected), priority, and history of actions. Excel is a great tool for developing a CCR. I like to have all my active changes on one worksheet, all my completed changes on another and my rejected changes on a third. This helps the CCB to focus on the changes that are important today and not on the changes that have already been addressed. It is important though that you not lose track of either the completed or rejected changes. I find myself referring back to them frequently.

Finally, the CCB must meet on a regular basis to solicit and consider changes and changes that may have been furloughed due to lack of funds.