Add story about Tom Demarco's story in the Deadline about the evil minister Belok and the power of the "and" from my SI-627 lecture 7 and NetHope Leadership Seminar presentations:
The Power of the “And” (cont.)
From Tompkin's Journal
Pathological Politics (PP)
The defining characteristic of PP is that goals of personal power and influence come to override natural goals of an organization
"We've been looking at it as a false dichotomy," the ex-General told them. "We've been thinking all day that either we do the projects the way we always planned to do them and preserve our Project Management Laboratory, or we give in to the greaseball [Belok]. That has been our error. It doesn't have to be a matter of OR. It could also be a matter of AND.“ p. 129
The power of the AND is greater than the power of the OR
NetHope CIO Challenge – Overcoming Obstacles
22 October 2015
Edward Happ
Global CIO, IFRC
A Project Management Novel?
Tom DeMarco, "The Deadline"
The case of the sinister Minister Belok…
Story Recap
- Thompson in charge of six large projects in Morovia
- Ultimate senior management supporter, Nation’s Noble Leader (NNL)
- Dream team: Belinda, Gabriel
- “…first time in his professional life that he had been turned loose to do the best work he could…”
- Then NNL leaves, the tyrant Belok left in charge
- He takes 186 days out of the schedule and combines teams because “lateness costs money”, qtr of million per day in profit
What did you learn from this story?
- What would you do?
- What “pathological political” situations have you seen in your work?
- How did the team solve the problem?
- What was Thompson’s leadership style?
My Take-aways
- #1: the power of the AND is greater than the power of the OR
- Remember: We are here “to do good work and to learn”
- A key indicator of power politics is the refusal to listen…”I will not hear talk of delivering any later than that”…”Do as you're told”
- “There is no such thing as a job with no politics”
- The answer came from the team not the leader
- A gelled team is your most valuable project asset
- Breaking the iron triangle of projects: senior management can control only 2 but must give the 3rd to the project team
The Iron Triangle – Seek to Optimize Three Factors
The client can only demand two
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_management_triangle
Thompson's Journal
Pathological Politics
- You have to be willing to put your job on the line any day…
- …but that doesn’t guarantee that pathological politics won’t affect you
- PP can crop up anywhere, even in the healthiest organization
- The defining characteristic of PP is that goals of personal power and influence come to override natural goals of an organization
- This can happen even when the pathological goal is directly opposed to the organizational goal
- Among the bad side effects of pathology: it becomes unsafe to have a leanly staffed project
Appendix
A PM Decision Framework
Project Management Methodologies
Ryan Nelson Paper
IT Project Management: Infamous Failures, Classic Mistakes, and Best Practices”, MIS Quarterly Executive, June 2007
- 10 Infamous project failures
- 4 recurrent mistakes:
- Faced with a project that is behind schedule? Add more people!
- Want to speed up development? Cut testing!
- A new version of the operating system becomes available during the project? Time for an upgrade!
- Is one of your key contributors aggravating the rest of the team? Wait until the end of the project to fire him!
Nonprofit IT Departments Can’t Play the Odds
IF
- 57% of ERP projects don't realize their ROI (Nucleus Research)
- 66% IT projects fail (Standish Chaos DB)
- NGOs spend a 18th what corporations do (Tuck survey)
- And we are spending donors’ dollars
THEN
- We must find a better way...
We Don’t Do Large Well
“… a staggering 31.1% of [IT] projects will be cancelled before they ever get completed.
Further results indicate 52.7% of projects will cost 189% of their original estimates.”
--Standish Chaos Report, 2014.
And this has not improved in the 30+ years of their tracking software projects
IT Strategic Direction is for Smaller, Best-of-Breed Applications
Why not ERP?
- Too expensive. UNICEF case of more than $20M
- Takes too long (esp. to impact 5-year strategies). 3-year+ STC case of BBEC
- Failure rate is too high. Standish database: 66% large IT projects
- Don't meet financial objectives. Nucleus ROI study: 55% < ROI
- Too hard to change. Become new legacy systems.
- Not optimized for the web. Case of SAP
- Almost impossible to please all dept's
- Tendency to lower common denominator of need.
- Expensive to customize. (short and long-term)
- User satisfaction is lower than for SaaS app’s
- We have a poor record of implementing large systems (SAP, HLS, Web Reconfig.)
- Not share-able with NSs. No multi-tenant model
- Total cost of ownership (TCO) of ERP’s is affordable by organizations that typically have 5 times more IT spending power per employee than large nonprofits
- The data integration model of ERPs is overrated (real-time integration needs are rare)
Pros/Cons of an Integrated Solution
= Cons/Pro of “Best-of-breed”
Pros
- + One user interface/experience
- + Common database
- + Integration between modules is included (though still require integration to other systems – Finance, HR, reporting, …)
Cons
- - bigger scope project has bigger complexities, issues/risks
- - statistically have more chances of failure
- - not “agile” with changing requirements due to inter-dependencies
- - organization gets locked into this solution
Project Chunking
Benefits of chunking down (CIO Magazine, Apr-03)
Less risk:
- Smaller and less complex
- Shorter timeframes
- Learning from preceding phases,
- Adjust to changing environment
Benefits realized sooner: putting value in users hands earlier
More frequent decision points: can change project’s course, leverage learning
see Work\NetHope\Leadership Training\
NetHope CIO Workshop - Obstacles v3.pptx |