Month: December 2011

Evaluating and Selecting Senior Talent – Perhaps the Google Way?

    Jim D

There was an interesting article earlier this week on the interview approach that Google has used as part of their talent selection in the Wall Street Journal by William Poundstone. My preceding post reviewed the Google approach and what best practices there are for more junior IT talent. In this post, I cover the best techniques for evaluating and selecting senior IT talent.

As mentioned, according the the WSJ article, currently Google gets over a million applications per year, and from this only about 1 in 130 applicants are hired. Yet getting this flood of applicants and having ratios of candidates to hires close to 1 to 100 is not unusual. At the last two large companies I have held senior positions in, we received hundreds of thousands of applications per year, and the end ratio to the hire was close to 1 to 100. And, as an IT leader making sure your HR department can handle these ever-growing volumes effectively is an important service you should provide, especially if you are a retail company. Remember every potential applicant who has a poor experience on your web job site and process is a potential customer who is now turned off on your company. Again, the preceding post covers how to filter and handle this flood today, we will cover the senior end of the spectrum.

For recruiting senior staff, I think it is important to understand two key facts:

  • They already know the buzzwords and techspeak and political positioning and that you are unlikely to catch them out in an interview with traditional questions (e.g., ‘What was your best project experience and why?’ or ‘When have you failed and what did you learn?’ or ‘What weaknesses do you have?’)
  • Fully one third of all senior hires through traditional methods are duds and only one third are outstanding hires or A players

So how do you effectively sort through a knowledgeable field of seemingly qualified applicants and make the right hire and avoid the duds?

The Google approach, and apparently a growing approach elsewhere is to include brain teasers in the interview process such as:

‘You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?’

Hopefully, these brain teasers will enlighten the interviewer about the intellect and creativity of the candidate, and also provide how they might respond in a tough situation. While I think this can be better than the stock interview questions that the candidates are already prepared to answer, I think there are a number of better techniques to sort out the best candidates from those who are just adequate or worse, the duds. And again, I think you must start much earlier in the process than the interview.

You should have a dedicated process just for senior candidates staffed with your best recruiters. And these recruiters are good at three things:

  • Being good at cold calling and getting hold of A players who are busy and not looking for a job (we’ll talk later about the source of the names, but this is the entry step)
  • Checking references – really finding out how well and in what manner this person has delivered
  • Recognizing critical cues about the candidate based on the candidates behavior throughout the selection process

In your selection process for senior talent, the first step is the candidate sourcing, or where you get the names of potential top talent that would fill one of your senior positions. This is actually probably the most important step of the process, because if done well, you will have a ready source of mostly ‘A’ caliber talent and you will avoid most of the duds ever getting into your recruiting process. For reliable sources of good talent I would rely on the following:

  • your own personal ‘virtual’ bench – you should cultivate and maintain a virtual bench throughout your career. Those outstanding performers who worked for you or with you and would come and work for you again.
  • thoughtful referrals from your current ‘A’ players – use their virtual bench and their knowledge of other strong performers to reach the A players that you might otherwise not find.
  • industry referenced talent based on either:
    • strong results at top firms or progression working under a well-known strong leader – that’s where quality results, leadership, and excellent approaches are forged.
    • strong recommendations from previous colleagues now working with the candidate – get a real-life view from a reliable perspective.
    • balanced recommendations coming from an established vendor – while taking care to understand their potential bias of course, could point out talents from someone who has a the perspective to measure and benchmark.
  • top recruiters or search firms known for their quality (this must be used in a cautious manner though) – also can have great perspective and if they know you well, and are focused on your needs can get you the right talent. Don’t forget often talent is off the table because of agreements with other clients.

Once you have the right list of candidates then you move into the evaluation and selection process. I have successfully implemented top-grading approaches to interviewing but I would suggest I am an 80% adherent of this method. The top-grading approach can be lengthy and exhaustive but I think you can trim it substantially and achieve the same effect (though I am sure Brad Smart would disagree). And you can improve it by adding and emphasizing behavioral and team interviews. Given that many senior hires do not work out due to culture misalignment, leadership style, or poor teamwork; a behavioral interview focused on these aspects will reveal potential issues. I recommend doing a team type interview where at least one, if not both of the interviewers are skilled in behavioral interviewing and non-verbal cues. Ensure you explore their flexibility and adaptability for   different environments and cultures. Someone who has been highly successful in one environment for 10 or 15 years may be a fish out of water in your firm.

As for those key questions to help sort a great fit from an okay fit, I recommend that you will get a clearer response if you ask a ‘reflective’ question versus a direct question. For example, if you want to understand their personal attributes, rather than ask them a question like “Do you work hard’ or ‘Do you consider yourself innovative’, etc, instead ask them to reflect their own image with questions such as ‘When you are building a team, on what attributes do you select the team members?’  They will not typically have a stock response for a reflective question, and they will be less guarded in their response because they would not perceive that they are talking about themselves, merely their approach. But their answers can be illuminating, it will show what they value. Someone who builds a team based on loyalty and experience attributes is very different than someone who builds a team based on initiative, intelligence, and ability to work through problems. Reflective questions can provide these insights.

Another reflective approach is to simulate leadership approaches and decisions with broad scenarios. Suggest they have inherited a poor performing team. Ask them what they would do. Again, you will get very different answers — some might delegate the problem to a trusted expert, others will apply an improvement approach that has worked for them previously, or they may form a committee to investigate. These are all illuminating. You can also try ‘off-guard’ questions to test their resilience or knowledge. You can even be slightly confrontational to see how they react to such situations. Do they constructively defend their positions or do they just fold and seek full consensus.  I recommend building a developing your own scripts that enable further insights into your senior candidates.

As you narrow down the choices, ensure you check the reference before you have made up your mind. I have seen many poor senior hires where one or two well-placed phone calls would have steered the company clear of the choice. And, if you do make the wrong hire, don’t wait to fix it. The single biggest regret that most senior managers have is not moving fast enough to replace a poor performer. If they are not doing well in the honeymoon period, they will not get going when things get tough. Spare them and you and make a quick and respectful break. Plus, you will likely still have the #2 or #3 candidate available.

The last recommendation I have for senior hires is: don’t forget about the ones on your current team with potential. For senior roles, I think large organizations often ‘pigeon-hole’ current talent and never see the potential they truly have. Someone who is successful in their current role, is smart, capable, coachable, works hard, and gets outstanding results is someone who likely can step up to the next level with assistance. Don’t overlook them.

If you deploy these techniques with senior hires, you should be able to reduce the ‘duds’ rate to 10% and increase the ‘A’ player rate to 60 or 70%. This is a huge improvement that will make a major difference in your organization. So, what techniques or ‘key questions’ have you used to make the right senior hires? Let me know, I am very interested in your approach as this is a tough area to be consistently successful in.

And if you were wondering about the brainteasers, WSJ and Mr. Poundstone also provided the answers to those Google interview questions. I did not provide the ‘right’ answers to the ‘reflective’ questions though.

Best, Jim

Evaluating and Selecting Talent – perhaps the Google Way?

    Jim D

There was an interesting article today on the interview approach that Google has used as part of their talent selection in the Wall Street Journal by William Poundstone. According the the WSJ article, currently Google gets over a million applications per year, and from this only about 1 in 130 applicants are hired. Getting a flood of applicants and having ratios of candidates to hires close to 1 to 100 is not unusual. At the last two large companies I have held senior positions in, we received hundreds of thousands of applications per year, and the end ratio to the hire was close to 1 to 100. Since the advent of the internet job boards and social networking, most large companies are now dealing with a flood of applicants. In fact, enabling your HR department to handle effectively these ever-growing volumes is an important service you should provide, especially if you are a retail company. In other words, every potential applicant who has a poor experience on your web job site and process is a potential customer who is now turned off on your company.

So how do you effectively sort through the flood of applicants effectively, select only the best and leave the rest with a positive experience?

The Google approach, and apparently a growing approach elsewhere is to include brain teasers in the interview process such as:

‘You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and thrown into a blender. Your mass is reduced so that your density is the same as usual. The blades start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?’

Hopefully, these brain teasers will enlighten the interviewer about the intellect and creativity of the candidate, and also provide how they might respond in a tough situation. While I think just about any off-the-wall puzzle question could do that, I think there are a number of better techniques to sort out the best candidates from those who are just adequate. And I think you must start much earlier in the process than the interview.

First, you should have two processes: one for senior candidates and one for everyone else (entry, junior, and mid-level). Let’s take the more junior roles first in today’s post. You should note that the source of the candidate has very different yields in terms of strong hires. Thus, you should treat candidates differently based on the recruiting method. And you should greatly prime those recruiting methods that are proven. For the more junior roles, your best sources for ‘A’ caliber staff are graduate and intern programs and referrals from current ‘A’ staff. In fact, I would venture these are 2 to 3 times more effective at getting top staff than all your other methods. So, assuming you have invested as much as possible in these two methods (you have referral awards in place, you have an extensive and well-supported intern and graduate program with appropriate universities), how best to handle and sort the flood of applicants from your other sources and fill the remaining shortfalls?

Consider the process from applicant to new hire as a giant funnel. And one where your internet interface must be top-notch to be appealing to your top candidates and thoughtful yet efficient at filtering and still providing a considerate experience for those you will not hire but could be your customers. To ensure you are getting the right candidates at the end of the process, and yet prevent your costs from soaring given the number of applicants, you must have efficient and effective early steps in the selection process. I recommend having a subject area test that an applicant takes via the internet for the vast majority of the junior positions. Your technical team can compile the test (say 200  questions) for the HR recruiting team and keep it up to date. Rotate a different 40 or 50 questions to each applicant that they can take the test over the internet in a set period of time. This will then filter out 80% of the applicants that are often not qualified and just applying. Your company can then send a thoughtful letter explaining they did not score high enough to be considered further but you appreciate that they applied.

Next, make it very clear throughout the process, that you will check references. This will cause the poor performers to think twice about applying to your company. As you move to the next step of identifying the candidates to interview from those who passed the test, I recommend setting a high bar where the candidates must be qualified but then have one additional outstanding experience or quality (e.g., won an award at their previous company or school, showed initiative in gaining additional certifications or knowledge of your company, etc). Now you have optimized the pool that you will interview — not too big to make it too time-consuming and expensive, and not too small to gain diversity and ensure you don’t miss great candidates. Again, I recommend two additional methods for the junior candidate process to achieve a better screen: a problem or work simulation; and a team interview.

The problem or work simulation (not a brain teaser), would be a 1 or 2 hour session where you give the candidate an exercise similar to the work that they will be doing. If a Unix administrator, give them Unix scripts to write. If a developer, ask them to design or or outline how they code an interface, etc.  This will give you real insight into their capabilities.

The team interview is critical. Often, organizations make the mistake of having only management interview a candidate when in reality, those who are more familiar with the work, and who often will hold a higher bar on the selection, are the teammates and peer staff that this person would work with. In fact, they don’t want someone who is incompetent or would be a poor fit because then they have to carry the load. So include in them in the process. Have one of the more outgoing and senior individuals lead the interview with one or two others participating. And ask the HR person or someone skilled at nonverbal communication to join. Then, when the lead person is asking the questions, the others can observe the body language and other signals that this candidate is giving off that most interviewers miss because they are so focused on the next question. They can ask questions as well of course but should focus on what is not said. Given the importance of team in IT, this is a critical filter to ensure you get people who not only know what must be done, but can do it in the team and culture setting that you have at your company. I have employed the team interview process to ensure you set a consistently high bar, eliminate those who would be detrimental to the team, and importantly, avoid the manager picking only their favorites. And don’t neglect checking the references. And the more senior a person is, the more important it is for you to check the references.

Have established the key selection steps above, the tougher part can be getting the candidates in the first place. Often, the best candidates, the ‘A’ players are not in the applicant pool but are busy working somewhere else. This is where your referrals from your ‘A’ players come in. Your top engineers often know the other good engineers at other companies or elsewhere in the industry. Ensure you have recruiters willing to follow up on the referrals and if necessary, cold call. And make sure, once the candidate is past the initial filters, you move them quickly through the process — otherwise you will lose out on the best candidates to other companies who moved quicker.

Every now and then you will come across other approaches that allow you to identify the top performers. I recall when working for a company in the Midwest that we had a critical need for MUMPS (or Cache) developers (we had a major financial services legacy system developed on a tool primarily used in hospital applications).  We had enormous difficulty finding anyone who had the experience much less developers who were top-notch until, in talking to one of the senior engineers, I found out he had just received a certification and he had not scored as as high as some others nationally. When he showed me the website with the scores listed of those who had taken the test nationally, there was the gold mine of all the top developers in that field. By the next day, we had our best recruiters calling those developers to see if they were interested in a new job at a new company. In fact, I think we ended up hiring 7 of engineers who scored in the top ten on that list.

So you may not have a list of the best fall into your lap like I did at that time, but you can get the best by always having your door open. In other words, for most shops of any size, you will always need project managers, network engineers, server engineers and developers and designers. By taking a ‘pipeline’ approach, where you always have a ‘proxy’ opening for these positions, you can be choosier (you are not under a deadline to fill a position) and when the ‘A’ player who is working at another company gets frustrated one day and decides to post his resume or look, you will come in contact. And with a tuned process using the steps above, you will likely land the best candidates.

Doing a robust intern and graduate program is another form of a pipeline. If you do not have these in place, establish strong intern and graduate programs with the universities near your key sites. It will be a good source for as much as 20% of the new and replacement staff you need. View the intern assignment as one long interview and be sure to have a job placement offer ready at the end of the internship to assure the best interns of a place at your shop when they graduate the following year.

If you deploy these techniques, and ensure your managers place recruiting tasks as important and urgent, and review regularly the operational metrics around recruiting (not just time to hire but more importantly quality of hire by vintage and by source) you will build a strong pipeline of talent that enables you to build sustainably a high performing team. In my next post, I will talk about the different approaches to use for more senior positions as well as top-grading, a very good technique to filter at senior levels.

And by the way, WSJ and Mr. Poundstone also provided the answers to those Google interview questions. Enjoy!

What techniques or best practices have you used to recruit? Any particular pitfalls or issues to avoid? What companies do you admire for their recruiting processes?

Best, Jim

 

 

 

 

Ensuring Project Success: Best practices in Project Delivery

    Jim D

Project delivery is one of the critical services that IT provides. Unfortunately, in the industry, the track record of project delivery for IT is at best a mixed bag. A number of different studies over the past five years put the industry success rate below 50%. A good reference in fact is the Dr. Dobbs site where a 2010 survey found project success rates to be:

  • Ad-hoc projects: 49% are successful, 37% are challenged, and 14% are failures.
  • Iterative projects: 61% are successful, 28% are challenged, and 11% are failures.
  • Agile projects: 60% are successful, 28% are challenged, and 12% are failures.
  • Traditional projects: 47% are successful, 36% are challenged, and 17% are failures.

So, obviously not a stellar track record in the industry. And while you may feel that you a doing a good job of project delivery, typically this means the most visible projects are doing okay or even good, but there are issues elsewhere. In this post and in the next few I will provide a quick primer to check and ensure you are leveraging the key project delivery best practices that enable more successful track record.

Key project delivery practice areas: These areas are project initiation, project communications and reporting, project management, release management, and program management. There are also a few critical techniques to overcome obstacles including how to get the right resource mix, doing the tough stuff first, and when to use a waterfall approach versus incremental or agile. I will cover the first two areas today and the rest over the few weeks.

Project Initiation – I have rarely, and I suspect similarly for you, been part of an organization where the demand for IT to deliver projects is less than the supply of IT resources to execute those projects. In fact, this over-demand is often chronic and our IT response sometimes exacerbates the situation. Because of our desire to meet the business’s wishes, and to show progress, we make the mistake of initiating projects before they or our teams are ready to start. It is critical to ensure that you have effective sponsorship, a good bead on requirements and adequate resources before you initiate the project. There is no issue with doing concept or project exploration, initial requirements and designs, high level planning or estimation, but these must all be divided from the formal project effort with a strong entry gate that ensures you have the sponsorship, understanding of the deliverable, and adequate resources. Most projects that fail (and remember, this is probably half of the projects you do), started to fail at the beginning. They were started without clear business ownership or decision-makers, or with a very broad or ambiguous description of delivery. or they were started when you were already over-committed, without senior business analysts or technology designers.  This is just a waste of money, resource time, and business opportunity.

Address this by setting a robust entry gate and be disciplined about when to start a project. If the business sponsors aren’t there, this is a discussion for you to have with that business leader. If the project is defined as overly broad or is ambiguous, don’t fall into that trap. Take the two or three most well-defined needs and split off or chunk the project into starting with just that piece. The rest will fall into place as the work is done and everyone understands better the situation. You and the business may decide not to progress further, If you decide to proceed then start up the next chunk as a separate project. And, as much as you want to get more done, don’t start the project before you have resources. As you operate your project ‘factory’ at extremely high utilization levels, each additional piece of work you add makes you less efficient and more costly. You must use higher priced contractors rather than internal resources. And your key experts that must do the work, now have to juggle one more thing and will be less effective. It would be far better for your 500 resource team to do say, 80 projects effectively, rather than 110 projects ineffectively. It is like a server that has not enough memory for the applications active on the system. More and more time is spent on overhead, paging things in and out rather than on real work. The end result is less work done in total even though more projects are active. This is a common trap that is overcome by knowing you effectiveness range and then simply prioritizing with the business. If something critical has come up then for it to be started you must ice and take off the table other projects. Make these choices with your business partners. If you maintain this balance, then you will get more projects done in the year — and that should be the true measure of delivery (not how man projects you started).

Project reporting and communication – Doing a project is a team effort. You have many staff with different backgrounds and skills from different organizations that must come together to deliver on a single blueprint to a common goal. With such a diverse team, effective communications are paramount. And yet, often, the only formal communications are those that a directed towards senior management. There are three primary audiences that a project manager should communicate formally: senior management, the business customer, and the project team. Further, the project manager should leverage the same detailed reporting and advanced analysis that they are doing to manage the project to quickly reformat into a digestible report for their audience.

Oftentimes, you find the project managers are burdened by multiple reporting systems where they are manually entering the same information two or three times. And then middle management for both IT and the business demand additional reports on metrics that are not useful and forms for approval that are bureaucratic and repetitive. Meanwhile, the critical data (e.g. risk items, resource utilization, critical path delays) are not reported broadly if at all. And the project manager is overwhelmed with the busy work versus the real task at hand.

So streamline the reporting process. Ensure your team a single, effective project reporting tool and invest in one if not. I recommend that all the but the smallest projects produce a weekly ‘4-Box’ report. This one pager can be used for all three primary audiences and ensures the project manager, the sponsor and the key stakeholders are paying attention to the important aspects of the project.

I will be placing a 4-Box sample on the reference page for your use later this month. But they key components are simple:

  • a landscape page with 4 quadrants, a left margin column and a header section
  • the header consists of the Project Title centered and Project Status in color boxes on the far right upper corner, and the project mission in small font (it always amazing how many people work on a project and do not know what it is intended to do — thus the mission on every communication)
  • the left margin contains the names and phone numbers of the project manager, sponsor, and all key participants and stakeholders. Thus everyone knows who to call if there is an issue or question
  • The upper left quadrant contains a brief description and the key milestones for the project with dates and a status indicator (e.g. completed, underway, etc)
  • The lower left quadrant box contains accomplishments and progress for the past week (or time period). There should be a brief description of progress and a listing of the key milestones or tasks completed.
  • The upper right quadrant is a listing of the key risks and issues the project faces. They should be catalogued and a status indicated (e.g. Mitigated, Underway, Open) with a color status as well.
  • The bottom right quadrant should provide what will will get done this next week or time period by milestone or significant task with dates and with owners.

Additional information can be used to augment the report, but they key is now you can use the same one page to communicate effectively with all your audiences. This ensures everyone is one the same page (literally) at a minimum of effort. Note also that we avoid the ‘ creative writing’ of project status reports that some many organizations waste time and use to put an optimistic spin on the project progress. Instead, just the facts.

By aligning your project process and teams to these two best practice approaches, you will find:

  • you are not starting projects before they are ready to be started
  • you will run your project factory at optimal output and effectiveness
  • you will lighten the overhead load on your project managers, so they can do more real work
  • your project teams will be on the same page (and thus more effective)
  • you and your businesses will know what is going on and can identify issues much earlier and solve them more quickly

In essence, you will deliver projects more successfully.

What are the variations on these approaches that you have used with success? What would you do differently? What other areas of project delivery are problematic that you have solutions for? Have a wonderful holiday and I look forward to your perspectives.

Best, Jim

 

Your Year End IT Leadership Checklist

    Jim D

I think we can all feel the holiday and yearend swooping in and things winding down where we work. The Christmas parties are in full swing and everyone is focused on making sure they get everything on their Christmas gift list. Next week is certain to be quiet in the office. For senior IT managers, here is a quick list of things to do as the year-end approaches:

1. Vacation overlaps: Re-check that you and your senior team are not all out on vacation and no one is left to mind the shop. If there’s a gap, given the timing, you need to be the one to fill it (besides, this way you’ll have an excuse when your spouse asks you to go to the store with return items).

2. Batch Cycles: With the upsurge in retail sales and other peaks this time of year, ask the production batch team to re-calibrate the peak processing time for batch runs in December, month-end and year end. It’s better to find out now you need to address capacity than at 3 am Sunday morning in the New Year and your company can’t close the books on time.

3. Feedback for your team: Spend some of your vacation time writing thoughtful performance reviews for your team. Start with your best and worst performers, they will get the biggest positive impact from a better writeup this year. For outstanding insight on competencies and how to coach, check out FYI: For Your Improvement by Lombardo and Eichinger.

4. Gain new insights: Spend another part of your vacation time reading a good management or IT book. The new perspectives experienced will help your fresh thinking in the new year. If you are looking for ideas then perhaps Magical Mathematics or The Rare Find or perhaps Great by Choice.

5. Start out proactively: Book time in January with your planning team to ensure you have the IT goals for 2012 clearly defined and map out the steps you will be taking to communicate it broadly. Otherwise you can get caught up on the first assignments that come in the door in 2012 and remain reactive the entire year.

6. Allocate the time for your customers: Ask your admin to ensure you have regular meetings scheduled every month with all of your business partners. You may already be doing this, but regular sessions are key to keeping in touch and providing great service.

7. Thank the team: Take your team out for a drink and thank them for the accomplishments for the year. Keep the evening clear of any assignments or negatives on missed deliveries. Everyone needs to be thanked and appreciated, and you’re likely to do enough ‘coaching’ of them the rest of the time.

8. Thank your admin: Your admin is the primary interface by which most people interact with you. If she or he has done well, make sure you thank them. And a nice gift is very reasonable — and ensure they do not get you one either. This would be on top of any formal bonus.

9. Thank your sponsors: Spend some quality time with your boss and whatever the challenges for the year have been, thank them for their support and the opportunities they have given you. Let them know you will be refreshed and ready to go for the new year.

10. Take time for yourself and your family: Make sure you take the time to decompress and reflect. Do whatever you need to do to relax and recharge. Focus on your family. Think about what went well and not so well. Identify the key things about you that you want to change in the new year. Save the how for another reflecting session. Make sure you walk into January with renewed strength and vigor and a focus and game plan on the new you.

For some of you, you have already either completed or will knock off all 10 items. For others, perhaps you have nearly all of them, but there is one or two items you can add to your list. If you are doing less than 5 of them, you need to make sure you do #10 so that you personally are ready for next year.

I hope your year has been successful and rewarding. And I trust that this blog has provided some insight for the last part of the year. Next year, I plan to make to continue to provide the regular posts and insights but have the best practices sections well-developed to enable a quick reference guide for IT management for you and your team.

All the best, and have a great holiday, Jim

 

IT Transparency: A key approach to delivering value and ensuring focus

    Jim D

Frequently, IT shops have a difficult time convincing their business users of the value of IT. It is straightforward for a businessperson to look at the cost of IT, which is readily available but not have a good reference for the benefits and the overall value of IT. This lack of a good reference then leads to further concerns on IT budgets and investment. As CIO, it is imperative that you provide transparency on the benefits and impacts of IT so your customer and the business team can understand the value of IT and properly allocate budget and investment to make the business more successful. Yet frequently, IT does a very poor job of measuring IT impact and benefits, and when it is measured it is often done only in technical metrics which are not easily translated into understandable business metrics.

A good area to start to provide transparency to your business partners is with your production services. Typical IT metrics here are done only in technical terms not in business terms. For example, you often find availability measured in outage time or percentage or as the number of incidents per month. And while these are useful metrics to do some technical analysis, they are poor metrics to communicate business impact. Instead you should be providing your production metrics to your customer in business form. For example, you should report on the key service channels that are delivered to the end customer (e.g., ATMs, retail points of sale, call centers, etc) and the underlying metric should be customer impact availability. You derive this metric by counting the number of customer interaction or transactions that were successful divided by the total number of possible customer interactions or transactions for that time period.

Specifically, take an ATM channel as the example. Let’s assume there are normally 100,000 customer transactions in that month. If the ATMs were down for 1 hour that month and there would have been 1000 customer transactions that normally would have been completed in that hour then the customer impact availability was 99% (= (100,000 -1,000)/100,000). Just as importantly, your business also knows 1,000 customers were impacted by the systems issue. And if the outage occurred at peak usage — say 1 hour on a Friday evening rather than 3 AM on a Sunday, you may have 2,000 customers impacted versus 100. And your business-oriented metric, customer impact availability, would show this rather than the constant view that a system time availability metric would show. But this is critical knowledge, for you and for your business partners. You will have to collect information on how your customers use your service channels and understand daily, weekly, and seasonal variations, but you should know this anyway so you can better plan capacity upgrades and implement changes and releases.

You should apply the same criteria to your project delivery. Typically, IT shops only provide on-time and on-budget metrics. And these are often flawed because they either accept major changes through the project lifecycle (what I call ‘drawing the bullseye after the arrow is shot’) and they take no account of whether the project is ‘on-function’ or on-quality. Even worse, few shops track if the promised benefits were delivered or the expected revenue materialized. Thus making it very hard to assess if you are getting the expected return on investment. To remedy this, partner with the CFO office and tackle the large projects and big investments first. Insist on tracking with the CFO’s office the original cost, timeframe, benefits and and function and quality targets for this subset of the projects. If there is a major change to scope or requirements, note the change and track the additional revised cost, time, quality, etc. Then at project closeout, the project is not completed without a full assessment on how well you met the original estimates and any lessons learned on why not. It may also require a revisit of the benefits and revenues 6 months down the road to properly assess them. This information is extremely valuable to then have for assessing future investments. Is the business consistently over-estimating the revenue that will result? Is your team often underestimating the time to get projects completed? At the end of the year, you will be able to communicate not just these trends back to business but also you can outline that for X spend on large projects you delivered Y in benefits (with Finance’s backing). That should provide a compelling value statement if the projects were well-chosen. And if not, you now have the rationale to adjust the company’s investment process.

Similarly, for the ‘routine services’ of IT (delivering small systems, help desk services, desktop support, etc) you should provide metrics that are business relevant.  Provide the cost of the routine services as a cost per user (e.g. cost for desktop service per user per year) or cost per service (cost of a help desk call).  Go further and enable the business team to understand the impact of investment in the services by defining the number of staff hours of work saved. If you are implementing self service (e.g. password resets as an example) you may have a cost save (reduced help desk calls and thus fewer help desk staff, but you should really have reduced staff time to reset and less staff downtime as a result (improving staff productivity and engagement). Similarly, a new departmental workflow system should reduce both staff hours to process say an HR transaction but also substantially reduce the wall time of that transaction (again driving improved productivity and engagement). These are often neglected areas within a corporation that by translating into business metrics (staff hours saved, wall time reductions) will make visible the business benefits.

By routinely expressing what IT does in terms of business metrics, you will enable you business partners to understand the impact and value of IT on their customers and services. It will drive better decisions on how much and where to invest in technology. And it will also raise the level of business awareness of your team. When they know an outage impacted 32,000 customers, that comes across as much more material and important than a 40 minute router outage. You can adjust or denote the metrics as appropriate for your business. For example, if you are handling large financial sums then system outages may be expressed in terms of the sum of the financial amounts delayed or not processed. Further, several large Financial Services firms with robust shops report not just the customer impacts but also correlate if there was an industry cause and impact as well as if a portion of the functionality was available (e.g. you could access the ATM and withdraw cash but not see your balance).  The key is to put your primary measure in business relevant metrics.

What business relevant metrics have you used with success? What hurdles have you encountered?

I look forward to your thoughts and success with more transparent metrics.

Best, Jim

 

Too busy to be productive? Traps of our modern world

    Jim D

There was a very good article in the Wall Street Journal yesterday on ‘How to Save an Unproductive Day in 25 Minutes’.  I found it useful that the article points out a few techniques to keep that day from being a complete loss. But while the authors pointed out a portion of the cause of unproductivity (fragmentation and interruption), they failed to really pin down why so many of us struggle to be productive at work. Or perhaps to put it another way, why so many of us spend nearly all of our time killing alligators and spend so little time draining the swamp. This tendency of being ‘too busy to be productive’ finds particularly fertile ground in IT organizations.

The reason this is more prevalent in IT teams is because in IT there are are the usual ‘urgent’ distractions of email and phone calls and business meetings AND there are additional and very real urgent distractions of production issues and high priority projects that are running late but must be completed on a specific date. Thus, the opportunity and time to do important foundational tasks is even smaller. As a result, I come across many IT teams that are running at 100 miles an hour, not doing a good job of delivery of production or projects and their teams are at or close to burnout. And yet the solution to this very real and overwhelming issue is close at hand for IT leadership to leverage.

To solve this ‘too busy to be productive’ issue, you must address it on two levels: for your self and for your team. If you are running around with your hair on fire, then no amount of coaching by you will change how your team approaches their work. Let’s start with the knowledge that we will be able to change both your productivity and your team’s dramatically in two to three months. Understand that going forward, things that are important (and may or may not have a critical time deadline) will take precedence over everything that tends to interrupt but is not important. And you must demonstrate this improved choice everyday for the next 3 months. Here are the steps to get you and your team out of burnout and delivering with much greater quality and capability:

For you:

a) First, get your calendar balanced. Take your calendar for the next two months and let’s implement some radical changes. First go through your calendar and categorize your activities as either important or not important, reactive (dealing with a crisis demand or the fallout of an issue) or proactive (e.g. planning or addressing root causes). After categorizing, it would be interesting to see how much time you are spending on important and proactive work. My bet is it is less than 25%. And it is even less than that because the first part of the meeting focuses on today’s production failure rather than the planning work you were going to do. Next, either delegate or eliminate all the not important meetings from your calendar. Then, at least 3 times a week allocate 2 hours for important proactive work. Ensure you cover the areas you know need the most attention. If production is a problem, then spend two hours on root cause and how to improve change quality. If project delivery is a problem, spend an hour with your key team reviewing your project metrics and constraints affecting delivery and how to solve them. Spend at least 1 hour per week ensuring your key goals for the next 3 months and the next year are clear, and craft the messages to ensure they are well-communicated. Spend another hour figuring out how you can improve or coach your team to better performance. And stop doing every email and phone call that comes in. You do not need to meet with vendors for new products and solutions when you are having issues with your current delivery. At least half of your emails never need to be read or responded to – ignore them. Stop interrupting your meetings due to phone calls unless it is your boss or a very important customer.   Throughout your day, continually evaluate if you are spending good, solid time on important proactive work.

b) Make clear decisions and ensure you empower the team to execute with quality. Sometimes the cause of the productivity issue is a team caught up in over-analysis. If you are not making clear decisions or if you are making micro-decisions then you can cause your team to do 200% of the work necessary as they try to buttress their recommendation and collect every data point possible. Or the team may abdicate doing work they should do because in the end, they know that you will overrule them and make a micro-decision. Be self aware enough that you are causing these effects. If, in the past three months you have either recalled previous decisions more than once or sent multiple decisions back for more research than either the team is inadequate or you are not decisioning effectively. Sound out with a trusted colleague or coach if you need to improve your decisioning process. The bottom line is that you must stop requiring or doing unimportant analysis work or decision work. Let your team make the decisions for the areas they are accountable for and stop requiring perfect facts to make a decision in this imperfect world.

For your team:

a) First, set goals and expectations that i) you want them to deliver with quality and ii) you will support them to fix things so their work can be done in an improved manner. You must let them know that not only is it ‘safe’ to do things with quality, it is expected. Your team and organization may have fallen into the trap of thinking the only thing that is important is that work must get done based on the timeline, even if it means slamming something in that is riddled with defects. By insisting on quality first, you put your team on notice that this is foundational. Now, it should also be noted that this is not a pass to then have endless delays and no accountability to deliver. Instead, you must work hard to deliver in as timely a manner possible, but with the quality.

b) Use the proactive important time or your calendar to work with your team on the things that will improve how the work is getting done. Are your processes convoluted and time-consuming? Then spend time with the team to straighten them out and lighten the load. Are the tools inadequate? Then figure out what is best practice and pilot an improved set. Are things going in with lousy quality and causing production issues and lots of rework? Then stop letting poor quality change in and fix it before production. Do this even if it means a train wreck on a promised implementation date with the customer. Go and personally talk to the customer that quality is too important to you and to him or her. (I have never met a customer who remembered they insisted something go into production when it was known poor quality and instead blamed IT. Conversely, if you delayed something by a few weeks or even months yet it went in with quality, 6 months later, they invariably remember the successful launch versus the delay.) Spend your time with your team draining the swamp.

c) Set their goals and their schedule leveraging the fact the people do urgent things first. In other words, it is a natural tendency to focus on the urgent things like email instead of getting a backout plan done for a change or mapping out how we improve our development process. So, as the leader, set clear deliverables and clear dates and accountability for the important things (thus making the important and proactive work important AND urgent) for your team. It is a very effective management technique. Then, you will find that much more of the proactive work will get done.

Watch what happens then as a virtuous cycle takes hold. Because implementations start to get done with more quality, there is less fallout and production incidents. With reduced demand to work production issues, your team should have more time and focus on doing more proactive work (you must do (c) above to get this effect, otherwise they will just do more email or other urgent and unimportant work). And as they do more proactive work, they eliminate bottlenecks and rework and become even more productive. This cycle will take a few months to gain traction. And if your organization is really in a rut it may take as long as 6 months to show measurable difference. But usually, the effect is much quicker, and the first lift can be outpaced by the second and third and subsequent lifts as the cycle repeats. I recall one infrastructure component team that had a terrible production track record, the rest of IT viewed them as a bottleneck in the project process and the team, being close to burnout, saw no solution except to double or triple the number of staff. By implementing this approach, within a few months their change success rate went from the mid eighties to better then 99% and they trimmed their implementation processes significantly in terms of effort to deliver a unit of work. Everyone understood what their goals were and what was important to get done to be successful. And when I asked one of the managers to compare his team’s work to the state three months prior, he said ‘It is night and day. I can get all the important work done and our implementations go smoothly. I no longer spend every evening on a bridge call trying to figure out why something is not working. And I come in the next morning refreshed and productive. My week is in a box.’ This was the result in just a few months.

It can be tough in IT with the press of production incidents and the pressure of critical project deadlines. Add to that our everyday distractions of email and mobile devices and trying to keep up with the pace of technology and we soon lose the forest for the trees. Perhaps the best treatise on this effect is in ‘The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People’ by Stephen R. Covey and his time management matrix.  By leveraging this knowledge of techniques to ensure we work on the important things versus the unimportant but urgent, you can be a better manager and your teams can be more successful and have their week in a box. You might even buy copies of this book for your managers so they understand what is happening themselves and learn personal techniques to address it.

All of us undoubtably, have had some experience where we felt trapped in an overwhelming level of work and no real way out. How did you solve this? Do these approaches resonate with you? Have you employed them to change your team in a sustaining way? I look forward to hearing from you.

Best, Jim

Two Months In

    Jim D

Given that it has been about two months since I started this blog, I thought it would be worthwhile to take a quick check of how’s it gone and map out things I hope to accomplish in the upcoming few months. First, I am surprised and pleased at how comfortable and accessible the IT management content is in this format. And, so that you can ensure I stay on pace, I should be able to produce 1 to 3 good, solid posts every week touching on a key facet of IT management. Even better, I have several collaboration efforts just underway and I am excited that we will be able to get this additional authorship and content posted over the next two to three months.

My other mid-term goal (four to six months) is to fill out the dedicated pages on key areas (like high performance teams). I hope to offer greater structure, techniques and templates on these pages that you can then reference and apply. So look for the first of these in the January timeframe. And if you have any suggestions or would like to assist, send me a comment, I would welcome your involvement.

Enjoy the upcoming holidays and know that you will see plenty more here on Recipes for IT.

Best, Jim

Getting Ready for 2012: A few things to add to your technology plans

    Jim D

By now, you have submitted your budget for 2012 and hopefully have an updated set of business and IT goals. And even if it is not final, you have a solid draft and good understanding of what you must get done in 2012 to be successful. So, here are several things to add to your technology plans if you are not already doing them:

Give them BYOD: If you have not enabled your company’s staff to do their work on their own mobile device yet, put it in your 2012 first quarter plan to pilot it and then to roll out in 2012. This is an easy win — it saves your company money and it enables your users to use the device they want to use and be more productive. Not sure how to begin? Here is one reference on how and another on the trends. And check out the prevalent toolset being used at Good Technologies.

Implement more self-service: An oft-neglected area is the improvement of your support functions and their productivity and service. In a typical corporation almost every employee is touched by the HR and Fiance processes, which can be heavily manual and archaic. By working with your Finance and HR functions you can reduce their costs and improve their delivery to their users through implementation of automation and self-service. Continued improvement in workflow toolsets from Sharepoint to Lombardi mean you can automate and put on your intranet more and more minor business processes than ever before at far less cost and effort. The end result is lower operations costs in HR and Finance, a more satisfied user base, and a better perception of IT.

Topgrade your team: With the weak economy of the past several years, and your budget being under pressure, there is significantly less turnover of personnel, even in IT. Don’t wait for the upturn to improve your team. Ensure you have rigorous improvement plans for the mediocre performers on your team. And if there is no material improvement, look to topgrade. Now is the time to replace poor performers with strong new talent. Don’t wait for the economy to fully turn around and growth to be required, everyone will be looking then, and it will be much harder to get the best talent.

Virtualize everything new: Perhaps you have made good progress on virtualization and are now above 40 or even 50% of your servers being virtualized. You should be able to get this to 80 or even 90%. How? Presumably you have projects in your 2012 budget to tackle some of the remaining significant pools of legacy servers. That’s great. But make sure you close the barn door. Insist that every new project must use virtualized servers and storage. And any exceptions require CIO approval with strong business case rationale. You want to use fiats sparingly, but this is one case where the change in behavior from every project thinking they must have dedicated infrastructure yields outstanding benefits across the board.

Start an intern or graduate program: Often, intern or graduate programs are the first areas to be cut when times get tough. Yet these programs enable you to bring on skilled resources at very low cost to assist your team. And you should really view them as extended interview sessions where you have productive work being done during the interview. As you should be keenly aware, the IT unemployment rate is quite low, this summer it was 3.8%, which is basically close to full employment. So, in order to get a jump on the best grads this year, start or expand your intern and graduate program. By bringing new talent in the door, you will reduce your overall, average IT staff cost, bring in new ideas and fresh energy,  and contribute to your community and local education institutions. A win-win-win all around.

Do some fun awards and incentives: Let’s face it, things are tough and have been for several years. The economy, the global situation (e.g., Euro), and the housing crisis contribute to a dour mood. And the upcoming yearlong political campaign in the US will only further heighten the general negativity. Your workforce though will not be as productive in this downtrodden mental state. So make a difference in 2012. Have some fun and celebrate successes, even smaller ones. Provide some fun and low cost rewards for your teams that meet your goals and values. And providing some fun recognition is a key retention factor for your best staff. Don’t make the mistake of rewarding the arsonist for putting out the fire he set, so ensure that you consider the means as well as the ends on any effort. But have some fun, make it unique, and reward the team!

Business intelligence: One last item to check to make sure you have it in your 2012 plan is leveraging the data you already have to know your customer better, improve your products or services, and reduce your costs. Why have advertising for customers who never click through or buy? Why do customers call your call center when they should be able to do it easier online? Knowing your customers and knowing your products and services requires IT to partner with the business to leverage the data you have to obtain intelligence. Investing in this area should be a key goal for 2012. If you are not doing much here, then I recommend finding out what your competitors are doing and sitting down with your business partners to sort through what you must do. Add it to your list.

What would you add to the 2012 plan? What are your highest priority areas for 2012? Risk and Regulatory? Growth and new product? Or Cost and Efficiency?

Share your thoughts, I look forward to hearing from you.

Best, Jim