Quality importance in report

Eugenio — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 11:59:56 +0000

“The finest qualities of our nature, like the bloom on fruits, can be preserved only by the most delicate handling.”

I was quite amused by reading MBWA “management by wandering around” as well described in this post. At the first impact, it seems that “lazy chats” are situated at the opposite spectrum of a well prepared report.

Speaking for myself, I have to admit to using this technique with good results. However, it needs to be integrated with more “serious” work on the keyboard and meeting rooms’ chairs. The most difficult thing to do in this spectrum is to strike the balance between the time spent sitting in the “Ivory tower” trying to make sense of the figures and then matching them with people’s instances, and creating the right environment for letting the people to do their best. Thereof, the biggest challenge is still to understand it and frame their outputs in the project’s scope. Yes, details are essential in this trade.

Oceans are made of single drops. It does not make a lot of sense to analyze one by one, not if you are accountable for taking the ship in the safe harbor. Details are needed for focusing on the way these drops are drifting, catching to understand their movements in order to see the favorable stream. Then, do not forget the wind or the fuel reserves.

Scoping the report

Highlight (weekly) reports are used for transmitting the key values about the project’s trend. They can be considered the communication system that transmits information from the surrounding reality (e.g. production floor, customers, market) to the brain, which has the tools for making proper reactions. Each bit of information is made by packets. Namely, words, numbers and diagrams are set for creating the environment where containing actionable information are rapidly understandable.

Mining for the information, checking their validity and finding the best way to present them is a long and complex process that requires many skills. The first one is the ability to negotiate the most important topics with each recipient. In other words, most of the process of collecting and checking information should be re-usable for some different professional roles (e.g. Sponsor, CFO, and CIO).

People are still at the core of the system

I, professionally, grew up with a couple of myths:

Total Quality Management
The dashboard from where it were possible to mining all information about all processes in real-time.

To be honest, I am still fond of these concepts. The long array of successes and failures has convinced me of the paramount importance of the people in this search. Their abilities, capacities and attitudes are the most important values to be look at in the effort of building together the best place to produce.

Let me clarify, also to myself, what makes “comfortable” the workplace.

At the top of the requirements, there are the human relationships. Creating empathy is the most urgent and important task. However, it never comes alone. It is too easy, especially for a consultant, to quickly build personal links based on the office politics. They are worthless and become dangerous.

A workplace is an ideal fabric woven by rules. Some of them are clearly set (taking the form of documents – e.g. RACI) others are to be read in each person behavior. The latter are much more important. It is amazing how much information can be retrieved just asking for them with no other intention that understand the person’s situation. No betrayal is allowed; neither on spoofing for future speculations nor on making empty promises in a trade that will be easy nullified by reality.

Rules and apples

Eugenio — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 15:45:18 +0000

Firing people

Apples fell before Newton’s formulation of gravitation theory.
This affirmation could sound obvious. However, this wants to introduce a serious problem in quality of management. The case has been clearly described by Tom L. Barnett in “Second Chances” post.
Rules cannot change our surrounding reality. Laws can only help our communities (project’s team is just one of them) to establish some shared concepts about what (when, how etc.) has been allowed to do. The “why” is exclusive pertinence of leadership.
Due to their focus on dynamic activities and a specific requirement of flexibility in their daily application (leadership again), they are called “processes”.

Power and responsibility

Most of my career as manager has been spent as a consultant. This means that any time, there is a problem, the “blaming game” it is not easy to play, especially when people reporting to me have a permanent position in the company.
In the informal process of looking for the scapegoat, there is always a lot to learn about the poor quality of the process either in their (mis)conceptions or management.

Analyzing the case

Tom did very good work in describing the case. The oversight in a “simple” operation created a damage to the customer. As a result, one of the two commanding manager fired his two senior technicians, just to give the “right example” to the troop.

In the following table, there is the breakdown of the event in a way that can easily be copied into an Excel sheet for making your own calculations (i.e. times and hourly rate)

ID	Action	Effects
1	Hiring two senior technicians	HR + PM costs
2	Forming them into company’s and project’s rules	Some disruptions in the team due to the insertion of these persons
3	Acquisition followed by production of specific knowledge related to the project	If not properly distributed, this capital is lost
4	Personal relationships within the team	Values like trust or just a common lingo are assets[i]
5	Relationship with the customer’s final users	The company’s image has a specific commercial value
6	Analyzing the current situation for creating specific rules	The whole team spent some time for: collecting the existing “issues
7	Ruling the new processes	Communications to the team.[ii]
8	Implementing the new process	Team organization
9	Adjusting the existing plans to the new rules	Assuming that these modifications were absorbed within the existing working time
The incident
10	Amending customer’s relationship	Involving senior management, sale department, technical team and so on
11	Some “commercial” meeting within the company and with the customer	Managers involved in unpleasant explanations
12	Finding the culprits	Manager and technicians
13	Start again from point 1	To point 9

The manager’s role

In the reported case, there was a clear breach of the rules due to the pettiness of the task.

In my experience, this means that the team’s culture accepted that some corners (rules) can be cut without a specific and “written” order of the manager, who is responsible for each outcome of his/her team.
The manager’s authority is blatantly ignored. Moreover, he was not aware of the current trend.
It is not easy to explain the rationale behind the plans, when some of the required tasks (e.g. quality controls) were not properly done or just avoided.

Costs

Were the manager’s role limited to find a culprit and deliver a punishment, a lot of money and energy spent on educating them is just wasted.
It is not a plea for lazy or incompetent people whichever the role covered in the company. The fact that work is an economic activity means that errors shall be paid by the person who was responsible for avoiding them or reducing their frequencies and impacts.

The need for process

Usually the idea of a process is intertwined with templates (less frequently with delivery dates, seldom with proper analysis on quality).
Once the template (from complex Gantt to attendance timesheet) is delivered, the debt with the company is almost repaid.

Poor management creates a vacuum. This is stuffed by a myriad of personal relations at various levels. It could range from sales people offering an “interesting feature” (with no proper Change Management procedures) to producers working “directly” for the customer (final user).
In the meantime, the manager is busy with meetings organized for discussing the plans and procedures.
In this kind of scenario, controls are considered by anyone (excluded the legislator) a waste of time.

It is not a veiled critic to some of the Agile techniques. I am describing situations when the company wastes good money for buying plans and rules that are not properly used.

Conclusion

“You can do a lot of things with bayonets. However, it is not healthy use them as a throne” said Napoleon. He was not a person who refrained from the use of force.
“Treaties without the supporting force are just scrap paper” citing Bismarck (the Iron Chancellor)

Managers (officers in the army or navy concept) have to know how and when use force.

Whether the company has decided to accept the manager’s decision to fire who did not respect the procedures or to sack the manager for missing the following targets:

Hiring the right people
Setting the working procedures and needed controls
Carrying through the follows up (better if delegated to someone directly involved in the production)

The created mess requires a very hard work in theses areas:

Communication within each team about the manager’s role.
Synergies among the teams
Reviewing existing procedures
Increasing the awareness about the company’s existence and mission

[i] http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6278.html

[ii] http://comics.com/affiliate/washington_post/?ComicID=21

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