Project X Discussions

Collaboration is More Than Just Talk

As most of you who follow our blog know, Project X's RapidBI Approach and Platform is linked and depends very much on Agile Development and Real Collaboration.

The challenge with the word collaboration is that often it is just talk.  I have had the opportunity to work with someone who knew how to collaborate.  He is also a Lean Six Sigma guy and that doesn't hurt either.  It was a real pleasure.  We had some bumps coming up with common frameworks, we are both type A personalities and that was often fun.

But after about 1 week I really felt he was a collaborative partner.  We got to a comfort level I felt that allowed for often open or frank discussion that hopefully he would agree that neither of us used to our advantage when things got tough.

Exit that phase in the project/program and we had new people come in.  Sadly we can not get past the 'Just Talk' phase of collaboration.  This is tell me what I need to do, I will do it and then throw whatever back at you.  Sadly not even jumping back onto our collaboration platform helped us break through.  I just did an audit of the collaboration environment and there is nothing there.

Funny how we are spinning.  Less talk, Way less oversight meetings and lets get together and do it.

CoffeeCAST - #53 - BI Governance

Michael and I sat down after a great morning of review on lessons learned and wanted to quickly chat about Business Intelligence Governance.

In today's CoffeeCAST we talk about the main four areas of focus without going too deep on any one.  They are:

1. BI Governance committee
2. BI Lifecycle / Process
3. End-User Support Structure
4. BI Program Review

53 CoffeeCAST #53 - BI Governance

This was a broad and interesting area.  I think next week I will sit down again and talk specifics on these areas as a single discussion.

This is just a starting point to the conversation, so feel free to join in and add your thoughts.

KPI - Key Performance Indicators

KPI's are very important components of our strategy to monitor and report our organizational effectiveness.  Wikepedia has a great definition that links to the similar ideas of BAM (Business Activity Monitoring) and Scorecards.

In context these often seem like very daunting tasks as often you are aligning to best practices to compare say utilization vs best in class, others are counting customers, churn and cycle time against targets. 

One of the interesting starting points when I look to understand a business is to read their annual report as well as their competitors.  Annual reports are a great starting point as public companies have often identified some early KPIs that they report to the street.  It's a great place to start, but certainly not even close to the finish.  This often allows a quick win for the Business Intelligence team to then leverage the time it takes to properly identify and align to others for the organization.

There are two dysfunctions I often see in these types of exercises:

1. The Measurement Sets the Behaviour - often what we measure will set the behaviour of our teams.  In Sales I have seen people move new business to January as one of their KPIs was Annual Booked Revenue (revenue realized in the year the business was signed).  This often moved business from Dec. to Jan.  Not what the organization wanted I would think.
2. Too Many KPIs - How can you have 500 KPIs?  Often every metric and fact are determined to be a KPI as opposed to just being metrics and facts.  Often aiming for less than 10 will give you less than 20 as the result.

Otherwise, you want to leverage the Rapid BI and iterative approach to developing these so that the organization can learn as you work and evolve these measures of success and improvement.  So guide the discovery and iterate from the learning.  This is one of the approaches we have found successful at Project X Ltd.

Communication and Collaboration

As part of Project X Ltd's RapidBI platform and approach, we heavily rely on repeatable processes and infrastructure.

In doing a post project review, one of the areas that I saw that is difficult to ensure through the collaboration model is understanding.  We use a variety of platforms for sharing, but none of these platforms ensure understanding.

This is where collocation and repetition are key.  During a big project, I had on my whiteboard by my office a picture of the end to end architecture of our solution so that people could come by and see it.  This certainly helped, but I was always surprised to see how little people often understood.

This is where we need to go back to the 101 of learning and remember that people have various ways that they learn.  This is also true on communication and collaboration.  We have so many tools and methods available to us, often we forget that not one size fits all.  Some people love MS Project, others excel and maybe even a napkin, but this is only one view and leads to paralysis on working the work breakdown structure versus doing the work.

I was reminded again of this when we called a stop the spinning meeting and our client asked if we could go back to a collaboration method that others understood, but not the new leaders of the initiative.  And boom, the team starting gelling again.

Project X Ltd. and MicroStrategy Partnership

Project X Ltd., a Toronto-based boutique advisory and systems integration firm is pleased to announce that they have established a Global Consulting Partnership with MicroStrategy, the industry’s best-in-class provider of Business Intelligence software. 

Project X Ltd. employs a unique approach to the delivery of Business Intelligence projects known as RapidBI™.  This methodology allows their customers to realize value quickly and in an iterative process.  Project X Ltd added to the RapidBI™ methodology with a best in class infrastructure that allows for their own research and development, but also rapid development for their clients.  MicroStrategy was chosen to be a part of this infrastructure as it aligns very well to their methodology and RapidBI™ platform. 

“Project X Ltd. is a company that prides itself on doing things differently to bring real, tangible benefits to its clients,” says Stephen Hayward, President & CEO of Project X Ltd.  “Being able to solidify our relationship with a world-class partner like MicroStrategy really allows us to make our vision for unique and differentiated business intelligence initiatives a reality,” continues Hayward.  “The proof of this is in the success of our work with our clients in the past and in the future.”

Throughout 2010 Project X Ltd. will evolve a Centre of Excellence in business intelligence that revolves around their methodology, their partnership with MicroStrategy and their RapidBI™ Platform, which is a dedicated environment that allows customers to develop business intelligence proof-of-concept applications.  “The long term success of business intelligence initiatives is quickly iterating and learning from what you find through development,” say Michael Ianni-Palarchio, Vice President of Consulting.  “Our RapidBI Platform is a safe environment for clients to experiment and discover important aspects of their data and business processes through the development of prototype BI applications.”

Niche Consulting Firms

Project X Ltd has now been around for just under 5 years and have evolved into a Niche Advisory and Technology Services organization.  In discussions over the weekend, I had a great conversation with someone from industry about why we are choosing to stay niche and what value this brings to our clients.

So let's frame this a bit and provide a some context for this blog post.  eHealth Ontario has come under fire lately about their use of consultants and the associated costs that have produced no return for the taxpayers.  Sadly I do not know anything other than what is published in the papers or web, so I can't comment on this.  But it was a good starting point about how big does not necessarily mean good and the staffing model at the other extreme can also not be as manageable.

When Graham and I first described what we wanted to build we modeled our company off of Gellman Hayward and Partners Ltd who we both had been exposed to.  It was a great place with some great people doing great work.  Most importantly, it provided real, tangible value to its clients. 

We then looked at the gap that frequently exists between the business and technology and how finding a select area of expertise and a mind to this issue we could help facilitate the better utilization of IT by the business.  This lead us to Actionable Strategy and then eventually Rapid Results.

Why Rapid Results?

1. Mainly because this is what the business needs to be able to address the changing landscape of their business.
2. Our large competitors are not about that and need massive projects that last years.  We wanted results in 90 to 100 days.
3. Staffing resources though good, would not have the necessary glue and accountability to bring best practices to the client to help drive value.
4. We want to empower our clients to be able to utilize the same methods and breed change agents and most of our competition should be scared of this type of thinking.
5. Be fast, be nimble and most of all be focused on the results.  Use the process as a tool not the answer.

Whether we like the name of the approach of Rapid Results or the things it gives us the ability to do.  This is one of the underpinnings of us and how we operate as a niche firm and strive to drive value.  Our clients seem to like it and our competitors don't seem to want to do it.

Visualization instead of Dashboards and Reports

As a major part of what Project X Ltd does, we look at aligning business value as quickly as possible.  We term this loosely under the Rapid Results monicer.  I have had feedback from colleagues that using the term Rapid Results in IT scares the IT folks and often even the Business folks are skeptical.

Recently I have watched a transformation in how people are thinking about Business Intelligence in which it is now refered to as Visualization instead of Dashboards and Reports.  I think that though this might be viewed as changing the words, there is a powerfull double edged sword on meeting the needs of our stakeholders as we transform this view of BI.

For me the difference is about creating constructs that allow our stakeholders to create their own view of the information so that they can start to come up with their own objects that help them in their work.  Whether the construct/object ends up being a report, dashboard, alert, call to action or something else the double edged sword is that with freedom comes confusion.

In the case I watched, the users found it hard to live in a loose environment, though the data was governed and structured how they evolved their use of this information was a real challenge.

Simply, running a SQL query on a database is very different from working with a Microstrategy schema objects in a proper model.  This has caused confusion in results, approach and value.

For me the lesson is in training and change management are crucial when changing the viewpoint of a word.

The Cloud Theory of Strategic Planning

In setting strategy, we need to have an overall vision or overall goal.  The diagram is a way of thinking strategy and planning. My idea comes from the theory of Alfred Adler who talked about motivation and said the human organism is motivated to goal.  Without a goal, the organism will cease.  Therefore our psychology always keep the goal just out of reach.  Thus he said we keep our goal "dimly envisaged".  Thus that is my cloud.  It is a dimly envisaged goal. Having the cloud defined, we then need to set a strategy. The boundaries in the diagram represent the strategy which defines the direction we must go to get closer to our goal.  Then we decide on the next few steps to take us closer to the goal.  Then we embark of the first 100 day project.  At the end of that project we evaluate how we are doing towards the goal.   How does it feel and have we made improvement?  That gives us an opportunity to alter the next project slightly.  It is a strategic but incremental approach.  A simple example might help. As you think about your company, you have a image of what you would like it to become. Let's imagine you want your company to become a company that makes a difference for your customers and makes good living for all the employees. This image would be the cloud. To move toward the cloud, you need a strategy. You decide what kind of product or service you will offer the customer. This decision will help set the boundaries of your plan. You decide you will offer customers services in the use of computers for planning for example. Based on that decision, you now make an action plan to get business from customers. As the test your ideas, you find that customers really want something a little diferent and you adjust your action plan. You take an incremental approach to your action plan in the context of your overall strategy. For each strategy, you decide to take some action. For a partner, you decide to look for certain kinds of people. You try that for a while and discover you are not finding the right people. You then change you action and try a different approach. The key with testing if an action is moving you in the right direstion is how the results feel. This approach to implemting strategy is called incrementalism. The approach is quite different form creating the five year plan. The value of the cloud theory is that it gives you a visual model of strategy and the rapid results process.

Rapid Results and the Big Systems Project

One of the challenges we face in the systems business is the production of rapid results or early wins in the context of the large systems projects.  One of the important principles of change management is to create momentum and early bottom-line results.  I think we all are familiar with the challenge but let me describe it from my point of view. 

The business wants to improve a particular process in their organization and looks to the systems group for help because they know it will involve new systems.  Another way it may arise is the systems group develops a strategic systems plan and identifies a particular area where high return on investment is possible.  As a concrete example, let us take an inventory system for a large integrated mining company.  The current system consists of a distributed set of warehouses of parts through out the organization without any central information as to where things are.  In this organization, some of these parts are worth thousands of dollars and their availability is a large determining factor in the productivity of the company.  The company strategy has been the relentless pursuit of productivity and they have made big gains in the past.  One simple change was to make the driver of a underground scoop tram responsible for changing the tires on his vehicle.  These tires cost $20,000 each.  This change reduced dramatically the number of tire failures because the driver became more careful. 

The organization decided they needed a centralized information as to where all the parts are in this very decentralized organization where productivity is the responsibility of each group.  The multi-year project was undertaken to define requirements, select a system and implement it.  Because management was waiting for the new system before implementing changes, the old systems continued.  In the end, the system was implemented but none of the expected gains were achieved.  I expect the old inventory system remained.

Why did this organization which had been so successful in raising productivity in many areas fail on this project?   I honestly do not know for sure but I have some ideas.

I think the first cause was that the project was a systems project as opposed to a project initiated by the business with help for the systems people.  I suspect the system would likely worked just fine if it were part of a change effort by the business.  Centralized information on where parts are being held could have been implemented in many simple ways using their existing systems.  I expect each part of the organization was jealously guarding their spares to maintain their productivity.  Tackling that deeply entrenched behavior was a business problem, not a system issue.

During time the system was being developed, the business continued with old processes because they decided why change to something that will be replaced shortly anyway.  Because change is difficult anyway, they decided wait for the new system to drive the change.  My opinion is that attitude is a recipe for failure.

So what is a solution for these big systems projects because they absolutely necessary for most organization to modernize their processes and get productivity gains.  I do not think there is a simple answer and every project must be looked at carefully.  Each has unique characteristics but here are some important things to think about.

• Is the business driving the project and wanting the changes?
• Is the business eager to implement changes before the system is ready?
• Can the project introduce early changes to the processes to get productivity gains?
• Are there ways of introducing parts of the project quickly to effect improvements quickly?
• Are there ways to maintain the change momentum throughout the project?
• Will the big change give the organization indigestion?
• Are there more creative ways to introduce the changes to achieve rapid results?
• Is the organization capable of making the changes required? 
• Who are the most effective change leaders?

I have a great deal of sympathy for the systems people who are trying to help their organization make productivity gains.  I think senior management really needs look at the business organization and business leaders to take more leadership in making changes.  If you do not have a strong change coalition in the business that are will lead the change and produce rapid results, be careful and think twice about the big system project being the silver bullet that will save your organization.

I welcome comments and other ideas people have about big systems projects,

The Mushroom Farm

A friend of mine was describing the experience of her son who was an intern to one of the senior people in government.  It was a great experience for the person and he was included in many meetings and activities that regular employees would never get a chance to experience.  In addition he sat at his desk working while listening to music on his earphones to cover all the distraction around him.  Apparently this was tolerated for him but would not have been tolerated by other employees.

I have been mulling this over and looking for the lesson.  The expression that comes to mind is that many people feel they live on a mushroom farm.  "They keep us in the dark and feed us s*#t."  I have always wondered if that is really one of those cultural things.  Maybe somebody tried get off the farm and was giving a whack like the whack a mole game.

Another counter example was a friend of mine who was an executive director of a social service agency who said he always encouraged people who asked the difficult questions as opposed to shutting them down.  In many organizations many of the sacred cows discourage innovative thinking.

Another important idea is for the organizational leadership should encourage open communication up and down the organization.  Leadership by example really can overcome many cultural taboos.  If we all in the organization working towards the same goal, more communication can only help not hinder. 

Innovative ideas can really create rapid results and can come from anywhere in the organization.