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CALL To Magic
To You
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FLASH INTERVIEW
Now you see me, now you don't
Flash Interview with Pedro Faria
CALL To Magic
—
Mar 2017
There is no such thing as magic (I can’t say this to my daughter, but I can say it here), so I don’t have any tricks. Sorry. But I can talk about some practices/tricks that you might as well not try, because they just don’t work.
First: adding people to the problem. I strongly recommend a book from 1975, called The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick Brooks. It’s about projects, teams and systems, using examples from IBM in the 60s. One of the book’s timeless messages is the principle that says adding manpower to a delayed project will delay it even more. It may seem like nonsense but it’s true. It’s an intentional generalization (as are all principles) but the important thing is to understand the circumstances in which such tool has any chance of being successful and not just simply assume that everything will be okay with more people. Adding more people also adds several overhead forms so it’s important to acknowledge if the balance between the overhead and new contributions are indeed positive. The nature of delayed work (can it be parallelized?) and the timing in which the project is reinforced (can this delay be solved no matter how many people are brought in to reinforce it?) are essential questions before using this approach so that “the cure is not worse than the disease”.
Second: hold hands, close your eyes and pray that the delivery date is met. Setting a date is not enough to make it realistic. Establishing a date is the result of a plan and not the opposite, namely when we want other variables (cost, scope and quality) to be adamant as well. In such context all that’s left is wishful thinking.
Third: saying that the project is Agile. For some people (namely clients), Agile is the synonym of a new unified theory of the origin of the universe and all visible and invisible things. The rationale seems to be: “If we call this Agile, it will be undoubtedly faster, cheaper and we can change our mind at any time. Oh! And we want the same delivery date, the scope and the cost to be fixed up front and can’t change because that’s your commitment with us.”
Suddenly, extra work no longer respects the laws of physics where more things take more time and space. If changing the law of time is the only way to solve the delay, I’m sorry but saying that we’ll be doing the rest in Agile will not be enough and won’t make it work.
Diplomacy is your main tool Accept some, guarantee that the client is fully aware of the “free favours” so that we can say no to others, without dramas. Saying no accompanied by an alternative way forward. The client is more likely to accept a no if he’s not feeling trapped!
The life of those that manage projects is a balance between clients’ satisfaction and the protection of the team for which you are accountable for. Sometimes I see unbalanced scales because of the constant “yes” at the expense of the team doing more of this and more of that. Without going into detail on what is a formally agreed scope, it’s really important that the person responsible does not see the team as a bottomless pit, but instead has the courage and the art to look at the team as a main stakeholder.
In one of our projects I saw one of the most dramatic transformations in loco, going from a doomed for failure status to an impressive recovery.
It had all the types of problems that we read about in books about projects and teams. There was little plan control, no focus on the delivery, too much energy was lost looking for nothing, we auto-generated scope creep, the teams lived entrenched and blamed “others” and some leaders had a negative effect in (un)motivating people. This cannot be solved with tricks.
Hard decisions were necessary, such as leadership replacement and restructuring the way the project was organized.
However, in my opinion, there was a specific change that had a major impact: adopting participatory and transparent project management methodologies.
That, which today is a common practice at Celfocus, the use of a management tool was incubated in the project. It made the plan, the status and the goal visible, transparent and available to all, anytime, anywhere. A trust formula was applied with which each individual was considered the best information source on the status of his own activities, including his daily revision of the estimation to complete them. That trust and the participating feeling allows people to feel the project, the goal and the plan as something of his own and, thus, accountability is something natural and not imposed. Little things make a difference when we talk about motivation. And motivation made an enormous difference.
It is true in the sense that an idea/product may be brilliant but if it is not communicated / sold in a certain way, it will hardly come alive. And having “magic tricks” may be the difference between winning or losing.
Sometimes it depends on the art of the artist in his relation with the decision makers, other times it depends on telling a story based on a happy path of dependencies that are rarely materialized. But if we don’t do it this way, someone else will and they’ll take the win.
But magic can’t be that strong to the point that one thinks that it makes reality disappear. For example, the existing tendency to “massage” the quotation or timelines only because we want it to hit the client’s target, very often leads to bad results. Our work can’t be to say what the client wants to hear. The echo in nature takes care of that. We take the client to the Grand Canyon, he screams very loud that he wants a CRM and an online store in 4 months and the echo gives him exactly what he wants to hear.
Our work implies saying things as they are, balancing the (hard) equation of helping the client to achieve his goals without making promises founded on unsolid baselines, which inevitably will come back to bite us! The solution for the equation is often to understand the client’s real objectives, which usually aren’t exactly what he’s saying.
Recently, one of our clients’ CIO said “Don’t go local”. I found this expression very interesting. It was his way of telling us that he expects us not to embark in what his people want/say when we know that what they are asking is impossible.
Growing pains. Celfocus made a remarkable growth (in headcount, revenues, etc.), which in itself led to several challenges that need to be tackled. As we became bigger and more relevant, we also have projects and clients that can only be achieved with a management approach, methodologies, marketing, sales, etc. with that very same greatness and sophistication. We are even on the path to leave our 100% service DNA and become a company that also has products. All this sets daily challenges that sometimes are very hard to solve. But if it were an easy task, someone else would be here to do it!
Before the third, comes the first and the second.
First, to see my football club become champion four-years in a row ( because it’s something I can’t control, maybe we’ll manage to get it with wishes). The second is to see the construction of my house finished (and, within the budget and deadline). Software projects compared to the worries of getting a house built is nothing!
And third, to see CELFOCUS Omnichannel rule the world.
There is no such thing as magic (I can’t say this to my daughter, but I can say it here), so I don’t have any tricks. Sorry. But I can talk about some practices/tricks that you might as well not try, because they just don’t work.
First: adding people to the problem. I strongly recommend a book from 1975, called The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick Brooks. It’s about projects, teams and systems, using examples from IBM in the 60s. One of the book’s timeless messages is the principle that says adding manpower to a delayed project will delay it even more. It may seem like nonsense but it’s true. It’s an intentional generalization (as are all principles) but the important thing is to understand the circumstances in which such tool has any chance of being successful and not just simply assume that everything will be okay with more people. Adding more people also adds several overhead forms so it’s important to acknowledge if the balance between the overhead and new contributions are indeed positive. The nature of delayed work (can it be parallelized?) and the timing in which the project is reinforced (can this delay be solved no matter how many people are brought in to reinforce it?) are essential questions before using this approach so that “the cure is not worse than the disease”.
Second: hold hands, close your eyes and pray that the delivery date is met. Setting a date is not enough to make it realistic. Establishing a date is the result of a plan and not the opposite, namely when we want other variables (cost, scope and quality) to be adamant as well. In such context all that’s left is wishful thinking.
Third: saying that the project is Agile. For some people (namely clients), Agile is the synonym of a new unified theory of the origin of the universe and all visible and invisible things. The rationale seems to be: “If we call this Agile, it will be undoubtedly faster, cheaper and we can change our mind at any time. Oh! And we want the same delivery date, the scope and the cost to be fixed up front and can’t change because that’s your commitment with us.”
Suddenly, extra work no longer respects the laws of physics where more things take more time and space. If changing the law of time is the only way to solve the delay, I’m sorry but saying that we’ll be doing the rest in Agile will not be enough and won’t make it work.
Growing pains. Celfocus made a remarkable growth (in headcount, revenues, etc.), which in itself led to several challenges that need to be tackled. As we became bigger and more relevant, we also have projects and clients that can only be achieved with a management approach, methodologies, marketing, sales, etc. with that very same greatness and sophistication. We are even on the path to leave our 100% service DNA and become a company that also has products. All this sets daily challenges that sometimes are very hard to solve. But if it were an easy task, someone else would be here to do it!
There is no such thing as magic (I can’t say this to my daughter, but I can say it here), so I don’t have any tricks. Sorry. But I can talk about some practices/tricks that you might as well not try, because they just don’t work.
First: adding people to the problem. I strongly recommend a book from 1975, called The Mythical Man-Month by Frederick Brooks. It’s about projects, teams and systems, using examples from IBM in the 60s. One of the book’s timeless messages is the principle that says adding manpower to a delayed project will delay it even more. It may seem like nonsense but it’s true. It’s an intentional generalization (as are all principles) but the important thing is to understand the circumstances in which such tool has any chance of being successful and not just simply assume that everything will be okay with more people. Adding more people also adds several overhead forms so it’s important to acknowledge if the balance between the overhead and new contributions are indeed positive. The nature of delayed work (can it be parallelized?) and the timing in which the project is reinforced (can this delay be solved no matter how many people are brought in to reinforce it?) are essential questions before using this approach so that “the cure is not worse than the disease”.
Second: hold hands, close your eyes and pray that the delivery date is met. Setting a date is not enough to make it realistic. Establishing a date is the result of a plan and not the opposite, namely when we want other variables (cost, scope and quality) to be adamant as well. In such context all that’s left is wishful thinking.
Third: saying that the project is Agile. For some people (namely clients), Agile is the synonym of a new unified theory of the origin of the universe and all visible and invisible things. The rationale seems to be: “If we call this Agile, it will be undoubtedly faster, cheaper and we can change our mind at any time. Oh! And we want the same delivery date, the scope and the cost to be fixed up front and can’t change because that’s your commitment with us.”
Suddenly, extra work no longer respects the laws of physics where more things take more time and space. If changing the law of time is the only way to solve the delay, I’m sorry but saying that we’ll be doing the rest in Agile will not be enough and won’t make it work.
Diplomacy is your main tool Accept some, guarantee that the client is fully aware of the “free favours” so that we can say no to others, without dramas. Saying no accompanied by an alternative way forward. The client is more likely to accept a no if he’s not feeling trapped!
The life of those that manage projects is a balance between clients’ satisfaction and the protection of the team for which you are accountable for. Sometimes I see unbalanced scales because of the constant “yes” at the expense of the team doing more of this and more of that. Without going into detail on what is a formally agreed scope, it’s really important that the person responsible does not see the team as a bottomless pit, but instead has the courage and the art to look at the team as a main stakeholder.
In one of our projects I saw one of the most dramatic transformations in loco, going from a doomed for failure status to an impressive recovery.
It had all the types of problems that we read about in books about projects and teams. There was little plan control, no focus on the delivery, too much energy was lost looking for nothing, we auto-generated scope creep, the teams lived entrenched and blamed “others” and some leaders had a negative effect in (un)motivating people. This cannot be solved with tricks.
Hard decisions were necessary, such as leadership replacement and restructuring the way the project was organized.
However, in my opinion, there was a specific change that had a major impact: adopting participatory and transparent project management methodologies.
That, which today is a common practice at Celfocus, the use of a management tool was incubated in the project. It made the plan, the status and the goal visible, transparent and available to all, anytime, anywhere. A trust formula was applied with which each individual was considered the best information source on the status of his own activities, including his daily revision of the estimation to complete them. That trust and the participating feeling allows people to feel the project, the goal and the plan as something of his own and, thus, accountability is something natural and not imposed. Little things make a difference when we talk about motivation. And motivation made an enormous difference.
It is true in the sense that an idea/product may be brilliant but if it is not communicated / sold in a certain way, it will hardly come alive. And having “magic tricks” may be the difference between winning or losing.
Sometimes it depends on the art of the artist in his relation with the decision makers, other times it depends on telling a story based on a happy path of dependencies that are rarely materialized. But if we don’t do it this way, someone else will and they’ll take the win.
But magic can’t be that strong to the point that one thinks that it makes reality disappear. For example, the existing tendency to “massage” the quotation or timelines only because we want it to hit the client’s target, very often leads to bad results. Our work can’t be to say what the client wants to hear. The echo in nature takes care of that. We take the client to the Grand Canyon, he screams very loud that he wants a CRM and an online store in 4 months and the echo gives him exactly what he wants to hear.
Our work implies saying things as they are, balancing the (hard) equation of helping the client to achieve his goals without making promises founded on unsolid baselines, which inevitably will come back to bite us! The solution for the equation is often to understand the client’s real objectives, which usually aren’t exactly what he’s saying.
Recently, one of our clients’ CIO said “Don’t go local”. I found this expression very interesting. It was his way of telling us that he expects us not to embark in what his people want/say when we know that what they are asking is impossible.
Growing pains. Celfocus made a remarkable growth (in headcount, revenues, etc.), which in itself led to several challenges that need to be tackled. As we became bigger and more relevant, we also have projects and clients that can only be achieved with a management approach, methodologies, marketing, sales, etc. with that very same greatness and sophistication. We are even on the path to leave our 100% service DNA and become a company that also has products. All this sets daily challenges that sometimes are very hard to solve. But if it were an easy task, someone else would be here to do it!
Before the third, comes the first and the second.
First, to see my football club become champion four-years in a row ( because it’s something I can’t control, maybe we’ll manage to get it with wishes). The second is to see the construction of my house finished (and, within the budget and deadline). Software projects compared to the worries of getting a house built is nothing!
And third, to see CELFOCUS Omnichannel rule the world.
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