It’s actually easier to do the right thing

March 26, 2012

The right thing is to plan, organize and execute with long-term results in mind.  But nearly every manager is so driven by short-term metrics that they fail to account for longer-term effects of their decisions and actions.  As a result, they accomplish less for themselves and for their organizations, making them less effective and less competitive.

Here are three ways to incorporate longer-term thinking:

1. People working for you know when they’re being put at a disadvantage due to short-term thinking.  For example, if you won’t spend the capital needed to buy the right tools, they’ll keep working, but they’ll resent both the inefficiency of the work and the lack of regard it shows for them as workers.

People will find ways to correct problems and to self-organize to be more efficient if you will only give the room to operate.  This includes trusting them to find the best way to organize and giving them enough budget to execute the plan.    Your main contribution after that is to give them enough of the bigger picture so they know how their work fits in with your objectives.

2. If you’re committed to personal growth, then you need to track your effectiveness over a longer term.  Your monthly or quarterly objectives are the table stakes in this game.  Cranking out regular results will guard your job, but it won’t make you ready for a larger role unless you include a vision of what’s possible in the longer term

If you want to be seen as an emerging leader, then you have to champion longer-term growth and improvement.  To do that, you’ll need to solicit feedback and actually listen to it.  And you’ll need ways to identify short-term objectives that are actually causing damage to longer-term results.

For example, a client company refused for years to convert to better programming language tools because changing tools would make the first project to use them take longer.  As a result, they went for years at a disadvantage compared to their competitors.   Eventually, they changed – when they merged with a competitor that was already using the tools.

3. In some areas, such as product development, experimentation is essential.  You may think that Engineering is a deductive, forward-only process; but in fact a lot of development involves eliminating the unworkable by trying it out.

Once you realize that experimentation is part of the process, you stop regarding abandoned directions as a waste of time and resources.  In fact, experiments lead to better decisions and stronger platforms on which good products are based. Since the result of having stronger platforms is not visible until the next product, you could harm your product line significantly by insisting on maximum-speed implementation.

The alternative to backtracking after an experiment is to fall off a cliff – with failure of the process.  It’s better to insist on high-quality, incremental progress.  And how do you know you are seeing incremental progress?  You have to have a longer-term vision and plan to measure it against.

Once you have the vision and the plan, it’s actually easier to do the right thing.

 

How are you keeping longer-term results in mind?  Post your comments below.

Filed Under: Agile Management, Painless IT Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Software, software everywhere

January 23, 2012

Software is different from other technical stuff.  It’s abstract, invisible, and runs at extremely high speed.  So the people who are good at working with software tend to be different from “ordinary” engineers.  They have to be good at visualizing the abstract processes and the mathematical algorithms that make up the procedures implemented in software.

Software people are different, so their managers need to be able to deal with the difference.  Effective software managers know what’s critical to a well-functioning software team and those managers get good at providing it, even in the face of obstacles.

Obstacles come from upper management that doesn’t understand how software, and software people, is unique.  As a result, they assume that a manager who has skills in Operations can just as well manage software.

I’ve seen IT shops where the best software people left the company quickly after being treated as if they were call-center operators.  For example, the management assumed that the software people could be located anywhere in the building, that they didn’t need any special whiteboards to keep track of their project information.

Why should you care? After all, can’t you just hire the brains you need for software?  Well, not so fast.  You’re competing with every company in the world for the same kind of brains. Unless you’re in an entrepreneurial, fast growing, innovative company, software people will not prefer working for you over going to work in a more exciting environment.

IT is undergoing rapid change, primarily driven by the availability of cloud services.  But the cloud just moves the data centers to somewhere else. If you look closely at internal IT activities, you will realize that IT is itself a software-intensive activity.

This sounds self-evident, but it’s not a joke.  It’s a reality that many financial and operations executives fail to understand.  Everyone, from the business analysts to the website deployment people are not just software users – they have to understand software principles to do their work.

Business competition will come from new players, and from old players who master software tools and the business possibilities opened up by software.

As software becomes an integral part of business, there is a subtle shift in what management has to do and to know.  You now need staff – or consultants – who are knowledgeable about software and its workings.  And from them you need to learn what software means for the future of your business.

Is there something you’ve learned recently about software?  I welcome your comments.

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Constant Reinvention = Survival

January 26, 2008
Nothing lasts forever. Even the best-conceived business strategies eventually become constraints on growth.

Consider Dell. “Dell succumbed to complacency in the belief that its business model would always keep it far ahead of the pack.” But the competitors got better while Dell failed “to invest in new business lines, talent, or innovation that could provide another competitive edge.” * [see Business Week citation below]

As a leader in technology or product development, you may think that your entire job is to execute well on the development plans laid out by Marketing or a strategic planning group. But you can do more. You can help the executive staff recognize that the business has other opportunities.

Consider what the Business Week authors went on to say: “Long-term success demands constant reinvention.” This means that while you’re turning out products that meet the current set of goals for functions, price and quality, the viability of the company may depend on your pointing out where innovative products or services could come from, using the brains you already have on your staff. Reinvention means re-thinking the orthodoxies everyone has accepted as the characteristics of the company. Do you have some independent thinkers on your staff who keep coming up with off-the-wall ideas? Maybe some of those ideas are actually your ticket to survival.

“Nurture the next growth platform long before it’s needed.” This means you have to carve out the budget to support the radical ideas from the operating budget you’re supposed to use for mainstream development. If you can’t convince your executive staff to fund a skunkworks operation, then you should look at having some of your key contributors doing some off-the-record investigations. Is this risky in your company? Then maybe the company needs some shaking up.

“Most [companies] don’t [nurture the next ideas]. Distracted by the demands of their current success, they re lulled into a false sense of security.” It’s easy to focus only on the tasks that will satisfy the demands of current customers and current ways of doing business. And while it’s not easy to perform on those tasks at extraordinary levels, you can get lost in gunning for the immediate satisfactions of meeting this quarter’s goals. Can you be a VP or Director of Engineering and still make time for thinking about next year’s products and the businesses that you haven’t entered yet? Consider this: who else is better positioned to view what’s possible, who is out there needing better functions or services, and what can be combined to make a new business?

I suggest taking an advocate’s role as part of your commitment to the long term success of your company. You don’t have to be a marketer or business analyst to know what’s exciting and feasible in the next generation of products and services. Carve out a niche as a visionary and a keeper of the wild ideas that can open up new busineses for your company. Do it regularly, and you’ll be twice as valuable as the person who only meets the usual goals of Development. Besides, it may help your company survive.

———-
* “Where Dell Went Wrong” by Nanette Byrnes and Peter Burrows in Business Week, February 19, 2007, pages 62-63.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/07_08/b4022074.htm?chan=search

Filed Under: Painless IT Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Loss Leader

January 26, 2008

My colleague Joel Harrison is good at encapsulating learnings from his experience. In 2006, while I was visiting him at his startup company, Abrevity, he said, “You can’t justify a new product based on a cost analysis of the first-generation product. You have to have a vision.”

Joel and I had experienced the frustration of trying to create new products at a company that was in a high-volume, low-margin business — hard disk drives. On the one hand, Joel had prototyped a product that could have been the first available Ethernet-interfaced free-standing disk storage unit. I had been involved with defining a disk drive that stores and plays back video streams without a computer attached. While our company had funded the early prototyping of these products, it did not make the investment needed to launch them as consumer or end-user products.

Joel’s explanation, as I understand it, is that the company did an analysis of the cost of the first products in each case and concluded that the product cost too much to be priced reasonably in the marketplace. Now here’s where “vision” comes in. When you’re introducing a radical new product, you have to price it not based on the initial product’s cost, but based on a combination of the needs of the market and the expected cost curve as volume increases.

Companies selling services, such as cell phone service, do this all the time. To make the service workable, they have to invest a large amount of capital in infrastructure, such as cell phone towers, switching equipment, and so on. But pricing of the phone service must chosen both to make it attractive to the consumer and, when the number of subscribers reaches a reasonable target, to make a reasonable return on the investment.

The same thing is true with new products. The barrier to radical innovation and new product introduction in companies that have been operating in a low-margin high-volume environment for years is primarily a failure of imagination. They need the vision to see that (a) there is a market to be created or captured, (b) the product they have conceived is viable, and (c) initial pricing will lead to losses during the early stages of market development. Venture capital is based on selecting and funding this sort of innovation. But old companies have trouble thinking outside the low-margin, pay-for-itself-or-die product box.

That’s what Joel was telling me. If we could have planned the new businesses beyond the first product, and had got a commitment to fund the initial losses, we could have made history in disk drive marketing.

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Is your software on fire?

January 26, 2008

The spectacle of Dell laptops on fire in the summer of 2006 due to Sony battery problems has prodded me to think about product failures. There is nothing so attention-getting as a fire in a conference room. Few people who see this sort of failure will forget what they have seen.

Software failures may not be so spectacular, but they can be just as memorable to the people who witness them.

Examples from large-scale software systems: if you were waiting for your baggage in the new Denver airport a few years ago, you may have waited until human intervention delivered your bags, because the bag sorting system failed. And what if you dialed 911 and the call did not go through?

Examples from embedded systems: your cell phone drops a call due to a software glitch in the phone; your hard disk loses track of its position and takes an extra several seconds to recover.

Examples from everyday use of an operating system: Windows gets confused while processing interrupts from the web browser, and the browser hangs until you reboot; Outlook misses a beat and an email doesn’t appear on the screen when you expect it to.

If the computer or phone were to catch fire when any one of these failures occurs, you can bet that the manufacturer would do a massive recall the way Dell has done. But they didn’t. Instead, they let the users keep on running with a piece of software that “catches fire” regularly. If you’re like most users, you have become accustomed to seeing these fires and dealing with them. But do you like them? Of course not.

What are the consequences? Word of mouth travels quickly, and these failures have created a large population of users who resent having to use devices and software that fail. Resentment leads users to search for a better alternative. This is good for competitors who offer a better, unfailing solution.

But the whole world of software (and digital devices that depend on software) suffers from a bad image because of these failures. From consumer devices to mission-critical industrial control systems, everyone who has to deal with modern digital devices is gun-shy about failures. And rightfully so.

Is your software on fire?

There are known methods to assure that the software-dependent devices you make will not catch fire. If you’re not certain what these methods are, or who can implement them for you, you need to find someone who can help. But before you call in a consultant, be sure that you’re willing to pay the price: It takes time and money to make software reliable, just as it does in batteries and laptops. Are you ready to buy in?

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