Lukasz's Blog

Much ado about Peter

The Peter Principle states that “in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence”, meaning that employees tend to be promoted until they reach a position in which they cannot work competently. Whilst often considered to be tongue-in-cheek there is unfortunately a lot of evidence to suggest the Peter Principle is well and truly alive in today organisations.

A mismatch of skills and experience is an issue at all levels of the organisation but the higher up the organisation structure you go the more people - and results - are affected. I have worked both with, and in, teams who feel disempowered and disengaged as a result of having a manager who still behaves like an individual contributor.

In each case there are some common patterns behind the problem.

1. Weak or non-existent succession/progression planning - too many organisations see ‘becoming a manager’ as the only way in which individuals can take a more senior (and higher paid) role. Some people are just not cut out to be managers but excel at being individual contributors or subject matter experts - make sure development plans can accommodate this reality. I have previously created development programmes with a two stream structure - one for  Management and one for Specialists - each offering opportunities to grow and earn more.
2. Limited training and upskilling - many people find themselves in a people management role without any additional training or upskilling. Managing teams requires a different skill set (and mind set) than does working as part of one but many organisations just expect people to magically have these skills overnight without a clear training plan.
3. Only Child Syndrome - too many managers believe their role is to be able to answer all questions, and their team is simply there to make them look good. They disempower their team by harvesting information, picking the bits that suit their take on things and then deliver the result as their own. Taking on a management role needs to come with the acceptance of the fact that its no longer all about you - a large part of your job is to serve and support your team members in succeeding. Individuals who are uncomfortable with that should not be put on the Management development stream (see point 2).
4. Mismatched Performance Measures & incentives- managers need to be evaluated based on a careful balance between both individual and team key performance measures (KPI). I’m a firm believer that the balance should shift sharply in favour of the team KPIs as you move up the organisation structure. Too often that’s not the case. I’ve seen senior managers and executives been measured, and incentivised, based almost solely on individual KPIs. This often lead to the 'only child syndrome’ (see point 3) and skews team performance. More often than not you end up with generic KPIs that are useful for neither evaluating the individuals true performance nor incentivising them correctly (by that I mean beyond just salary) to grow and achieve improved performance.

Many books have been written about why organisations, and structures, become dysfunctional however I think too many of them over-complicate matters and try too hard to develop a 'one fits for all’ model which isn’t practical.

There are no shortcuts to doing things properly - organisations need to spend time and brain power on getting their structures, development plans and performance measurement working in their context. I’ve heard people talk about these things as the 'soft side’ of business but I would suggest to you that that is a very naive, short-sighted view. These are the things which significantly contribute to delivering sustainable, long-term results which will separate you from everyone else in the market.

Project Management Maturity Levels

The last decade has seen a huge growth in project management, to the point where some organisations I have worked with seem to be unable to do anything unless a project is kicked off. The demand for project management skills has also created a whole new ’snake oil’ marketplace filled with methodologies, practitioners and consultants.

To their credit the major project management bodies (OCG, PMI etc.) have done a good job of getting standards and certifications in place however there are still a LOT of rogue practitioners out there.

A lot of organisations I’ve worked with have also not done themselves too many favours by being very loose around their definition of project management and what purpose it actually serves - many figured they just needed project management because everyone around them was doing it. Many went in expecting to deliver projects sooner, with less risk and cheaper than before and are often left wanting when process went wild and few benefits were realised.

I’ve often used a maturity model (see graphic below) to position the project management function within the organisation based on what outcomes the business is after. For example, Maturity Level 1 focuses on managing cost and risk associated with bespoke projects whilst Level 3 concentrates on developing and delivering cross-functional portfolios of projects.

Many organisations experience a disconnect with what they want to achieve and how they position their project management capability. Many are after a portfolio approach to projects but position their project management capability at Level 1. Expecting enterprise-wide efficiencies & reporting when operating at Level 1 is another classic misalignment example. Heavily utilising contract resources in an environment where portfolio-wide continuity and alignment is a primary issue is the other issue I see all too often.

I think its quite timely for organisations to look at the project management investments and 1.) make sure they are positioned & aligned with the wider organisational objectives, 2.) have the right-sized process frameworks & tools in place and 3.) most importantly have the right people on board to help them realise the outcomes they are after.

I would also consider some of the more flexible approaches to solution development such as the Agile/Scrum methodologies as part of a balanced delivery platform.

Going mobile with new Web Technologies

Enabling the capturing and viewing of data whilst on the move is a bit of a ‘no-brainer’ given the spread out and mobile nature of our workforce. It improves efficiency, safety and overall responsiveness to our customers. On any given day we have hundreds of field staff working on our project and maintenance activities. Historically they have had some connectivity back to our systems using what would now be considered a reasonably legacy VPN (virtual private network) solution but its put a lot of people off because it’s been slow and very device dependent. Secure, device agnostic web-based delivery has long been held as the panacea in this area. The challenges has been getting browser-based apps to be a usable as their desktop cousins.

Richer web technologies such as Adobe Flash, and more recently Microsoft Silverlight, have gone some way to bridge the gap between 'rich’ desktop applications and traditionally 'lite’ browser-based ones. The main challenge with these technologies has been that they were reliant on browser plugins & played well in some instances and poorly in others.

For example, we use a GIS (geographic information system) platform that relies on Adobe Flex which makes it difficult to deliver it to our ever increasing number of iPad users.

With a resurgence in the drive for mobility we have recently started looking at what technologies are out there which would help us best meet our objective of secure, anywhere and to any device. We quickly shifted our focus to HTML5 which seemed to tick more boxes than any of the other offerings we considered.

Working with a couple of partners, we started building field data collection applications for deployment on Apple, Android, Windows Mobile and Blackberry devices. We have invested in a framework which allowed us to deliver cross-platform functionality with 'near native’ integration (for example, data and time selectors on iPads) without having to recode for specific devices or form factors. In essence we have built a solution which allows us to convert our paper-based forms into electronic versions and have the data submitted from those forms in real-time back to a series of data stores. We are also able to use some of the advanced capabilities of the devices including capturing information using the camera and GPS functions.

We have also coupled this solution with one based on Adobe’s PDF forms technology to offer us a rapid development & deployment option. We utilise PDF forms to capture data and post it - via the web - to our databases or email it through to the right people. This makes it easy to seamlessly distribute information amongst both internal staff and external parties & stakeholders.

We have tried several user scenarios & pilot field deployments and have had excellent user participation and uptake. In the new year we will be looking to mobile enable more and more of our condition assessment maintenance activities.

Effective Governance - Funding Structures

Many organisations utilise budget ownership as a governance tool. Whilst fundamentally there is nothing wrong with that, the devil is in the detail of how they go about doing this. The division of labour approach - first devised during the industrial revolution - doesn’t actually work particularly well in modern, integrated organisations.

Budget ownership tends to be allocated based on systems and applications rather than business services and/or processes. For example, Jane may be the owner of application XYZ and Joe may be the owner of application ABC. The rub comes in when processes are delivered across a mix of ABC and XYZ. Nine out of ten times the investment plan plans for XYZ and ABC are developed independently - unless Joe and Jane are the exception to the norm and employ some excellent ‘systems thinking’. Good on Joe and Jane if they do, I’d hire them any day.

The more I look at the issue the more I think the concept of process ownership has been overlooked too quickly by most organisations. N.B. Let me be clear here; by process I don’t mean some abstract flow charts on huge sheets of paper but rather the actual, practical workings of an organisation.

Identifying and understanding the processes of the organisation has many benefits including the ability to identify & eliminate duplicate effort, reduce any activities which don’t add customer value and reduce the number of information sources within an organisation.

Each process - or process set (see service) - should have a clear, cross-functional owner who is responsible for the day-to-day management and development of the respective process(es). All too often I see notional ownership which serves more as a compliance exercise (we have owners) than a organisational performance improvement tool. I think organisations are missing a fantastic opportunity in that respect. Ownership isn’t just a budgetary control thing - owners need to actively engage with the users of their processes to refine and improve them.This of course comes down to your people - picking the right ones to be process owners.

I would suggest that allocating control of the IT budget to process owners is a good way to reduce diversity and cost by allowing all changes to be vetted by the process owner - in consultation with the users - before being implemented.

Shared infrastructure should be funded from a common pool (often overseen by a capital committee) and the processes that run on top of this infrastructure are governed by process owners who represent the interests of the end-to-end business users.This more naturally loans itself to managing programmes of work and portfolio of investments in a more integrated manner.

I think this is a goldmine of efficiency & effectiveness which most business have not explored and which is definitely enabled by IT.

Built to Last?

The handover from project to operations has always been a challenge (see ‘throw over the fence’) but it seems that in recent times it’s hitting new peaks. Most people I have talked to have recently experienced, or are experiencing, the challenges associated with keeping a service running optimally once its been handed over into operations. 

I think a bunch of the issues stem from not properly involving the operational team members in the project from the outset. Providing handover documentation is certainly necessary but far from sufficient.  For example, I’ve seen a plenty of instances – usually in an outsource environments – where new technologies are introduced but little or no training on them is provided to operational staff who are expected to support and maintain them.

Operational teams members, who will be responsible for the ongoing delivery of a service, are critical stakeholders in project initiatives but are seldom thought of as such – the focus tends to be on ‘the business’. I’d suggest that this is shortsighted.

The challenge is that operational teams are usually very busy and cannot afford to spend too much time working in the projects space but not spending time with projects usually only adds to their workload. The key is to involve them at the right ‘gates’ to ensure they understand the business context, the solution & how it will be used and the functional & non-functional service requirements that will ultimately turn into Service Level Agreements (SLAs).  They should also look at what new technologies & capabilities will be introduced to ensure they have the right mix of staff and skills to support the solution.

Some well-planned involvement up front not only reduces the potential for operational risks & impacts but also breaks down the silos that often exist between project and operational teams.