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Fortune Cookie Wisdom
Take the time to explore, to test your work, to learn and iterate, then test again. Take the time to learn more about who will use the product of your work, about their goals, desires, frustrations and obstacles. It takes time to learn how to do this well, to execute the work and incorporate it into the rhythm and governance of the project...
Collaboration is inconvenient. It takes time to share ideas, then more time to listen to ideas that other people have, and even more time to try and figure out which idea is best. It’s even harder when we have a big personal investment in our idea, or the other ideas might cause trouble for us.
Early in his career, Roger Martin, former Dean of the Rotman School of Management, was helping to facilitate tense negotiations between mine owners and local unions on whether to close a historic copper mine in upper Michigan...
Let’s say you are a manager. One of your many tasks is to decide how best to spend a million dollars. Maybe a morale event to Hawaii for your team? That would be fun. Or maybe approve that operations project to streamline your company’s billing process. That sounds like it should result in a better return than the Hawaii thing. But how will you know? How can you be certain that project delivers the promised benefits?
One option is to...
For most people, ambiguity leads to anxiety. Questions about whether a project stakeholder will be satisfied, whether the work can be completed within the expected time, or about whether an idea is technically feasible – all lead to fearful behavior on a project, both from managers as well as individual contributors. The usual response to this anxiety is to work as hard as possible to reduce the ambiguity of a project as quickly as possible. That means establishing detailed plans, specifications, requirements – anything to eliminate ambiguity.
Knowing exactly what work needs to be done by when feels reassuring. It makes it easier to manage expectations and spot problems based on deviations from the plan. But the benefits of certainty come with some costly tradeoffs...
9 people in a conference room, reviewing requirements. There’s debate, points made, counterpoints made. Slowly, with great effort, ideas develop and flit around each other, desperately seeking to converge. Homer is trying to track, trying to keep up. Marge is selling hard, sharing the urgency of her vision. Bart is doing his best to update the document to reflect what clarity he can glean from the discussion. Others disengage, waiting for a topic that concerns them more directly. Reading the document a few days later, none of it makes sense. Sound familiar?
We’ve seen teams make some odd decisions over the years, and the thing that we always end up puzzling over is, why? How come they made that decision?
Sometimes it seems like it’s just what they can agree on, even if no one’s happy. Underneath the surface, we observe, everyone seems to be striving for different objectives. Rallying around business value, the reason for the work in the first place, is one obvious way to bring diverse teams together...
This little phrase has been popping up all over lately, attributed to multiple sources. Here’s why it has such a powerful effect on how we approach IT work.
The most intuitive way to avoid mistakes is to plan carefully. Thinking about the big picture, ideally, means that every step you take moves you one step closer to the goal. And having a shared, common vision means that everyone can work independently and produce results that move the team forward. Result: less rework and less communication overhead. If complete, accurate, detailed plans don’t get you where you want to go, then, presumably, they aren’t complete, accurate or detailed enough.
Thinking about the big picture is pretty important, as far as it goes. The problem is that...
Okay, buckle your seatbelt for this one. It’s a simple idea that is essential for healthy design, innovation and producing high quality work, but it’s pretty counter-intuitive for most IT pros. Let’s start with the first part: “Start work as soon as possible,” or
How often have you heard, or maybe asked, this question, “When will the requirements be done and locked?” Or, “When will the research be finished?” Or, “When will spec be signed off?”
Most people like to ask these “When will the work be done” questions because we feel like the answer gives us a measure of progress. We know that when a certain category of work is complete, it adds to the road in our rear view mirror and less road remains ahead.
Too often, however, we find...
