Hands on or hands off what suits it business heads better
ACE Blog Article Home Hands-on or hands-off – What suits IT business heads better? Posts categories For L & D Heads For Business heads For PMs Delivery Excellence Agile methods Complex project management Skills and competencies Assessment Outsourcing Certifications and Career Recent posts IT trends: Will the Indian IT industry survive through the smart app explosion? Comparing strategic and tactical outsourcing Requirement change management by leveraging project constraints Is the schedule driving the project or vice versa What the CMMi and PMBoK don't tell you How can we help you? Send Hands-on or hands-off – What suits IT business heads better? September 7th, 2015 Posted by: admin Leadership approach for IT business heads – hands off or hands on? Have you come across situations where business heads in software organizations – Are uncomfortable in facing the development team. As a result, they don’t mingle with the teams easily and use authority of their position to demand results? Are uncomfortable talking to customers about any technicalities of the project and restrict themselves to discussing commercials? Are found inadequate to take proactive measures when software delivery results are not up to the expectations? Well, the above scenario is not too uncommon and there are many reasons for it. A business head in an IT organization can get into that position from a variety of career paths such as finance, HR and sales. Not all of them would have passed through the mill of end-to-end project delivery to understand the nitty-gritties of software delivery. And apparently many of them don’t need this understanding for their day-to-day functioning as their typical job involves meeting customers, building relationships, discussing commercials and closing the deals while delivery is taken care of by project managers. In summary, many business heads who get into that position laterally don’t have background in software delivery and don’t need it either for their day-to-day functioning in business matters but face certain limitations while dealing with delivery. Therefore, the question that arises is whether this hands-off approach is just fine or the business heads have to do something to become hands-on? In other words, do business heads need a certain level of awareness about software project management? What do they lose if they don’t have that awareness and what do they gain if they develop that awareness? As we will examine in this article, business heads stand to gain tremendously if they develop a basic level of skills in project management and there are 3 main reasons for doing so. In order to understand the 3 reasons, we have to first make clear the interrelation between software delivery results and business results at a parametric level. Impact of software delivery on IT business results While it is common knowledge that a high quality software delivery can lead to better business results, what is not evident is how it happens. Skill set of project managers and processes are two key areas of delivery excellence. Process and its skillful application result in improved delivery metrics. And some of these metrics directly translate into business results including topline and bottom line growth as shown in the diagram. business-results-of-project-management-skills Project management skills to business results road map The range of skills and process areas in software delivery is quite vast and trying to improve everything would not only be a poor choice from an ROI perspective, but would be ineffective as well. Apart from the 23 process areas that CMMi lists, there are other areas that CMMi doesn’t touch. Refer ” ” for more details. There are skills such as estimation, requirement elicitation, requirement management, planning and tracking, risk management, test management, quality management, team leadership, communication to name a few. Training future project managers on all the skills relevant to project management would be as much of a syllabus as that of a master’s degree in project management which organizations can ill afford if all of their staff have to go through it. Therefore, choosing the right subset of skills to train future project managers, choosing the right process areas for rigorous implementation are key to success and this is where the business leader has to play a key role. The business leader has to provide direction in ensuring that the right skill sets and process areas that suit their business context are chosen. And driving delivery excellence in such a way that improvement in delivery is tracked all the way up to business results is also a responsibility of the business leadership. Hence, a business leader needs some high-level knowledge of software project management to be able to make the right choices, drive delivery excellence and ensure that delivery excellence translates into business benefits. Relating delivery excellence to business results Going into further details, the choice of process areas and skill sets has to be based on the delivery parameters or metrics targeted. Carving out a road map for delivery excellence has a method to it; the business head has to first choose the delivery metrics that have maximum impact on business results in their context and then choose the processes and skill sets that can specifically improve these metrics. There is a wide variety of metrics available in the software industry and a business leadership has to choose those metrics that make sense in their business context. This is a key area where thought leadership of the business head plays a crucial role. There are a variety of delivery parameters or metrics at various levels of the organization and each has an impact on different business parameter as illustrated in the diagram. The business leadership should have an understanding of this relationship. IT-business-metrics Comparison of IT business parameters In summary, choosing the right delivery metrics to target, choosing the right set of skills and processes to improve the targeted metrics is a responsibility of business leadership. Even if this is done by delivery teams or a hands-on delivery, head, it is the responsibility of business leadership to get it done. The 3
Do you convey WIIFM while assigning roles to team members?
ACE Blog Article Home Do you convey WIIFM while assigning roles to team members? Posts categories For L & D Heads For Business heads For PMs Delivery Excellence Agile methods Complex project management Skills and competencies Assessment Outsourcing Certifications and Career Recent posts How can we help you? Do you convey WIIFM while assigning roles to team members? September 7th, 2015 Posted by: admin Do you convey WIIFM for motivating team? Why WIIFM? Have you come across situations where the team members lack ownership of tasks assigned to them? And because of lack of ownership, does the project manager have to Follow-up frequently? Provide instructions and guidelines on issues that team members are expected to understand and execute by themselves? Motivate them frequently? Well, if this is the case, there is a good chance that the WIIFM for the team members is being ignored while assigning their roles and responsibilities. WIIFM stands for What’s In It For Me and answering WIIFM is a wide practice in mature organizations to ensure that employees own the responsibilities that they take up. What is WIIFM? Professionals work for many motives – money, designation (reputation), job satisfaction, a penchant for delivering results, networking, diving deep into technology, developing knowledge such as process knowledge & domain knowledge, growth in chosen career path etc. While an average expected salary level is common for everybody, additional incentives can be quite motivating for some but not for all. This additional incentive is what we mean by money as a factor of motivation. Other motivational factors are self-explanatory. While allocating roles and responsibilities, it helps if the project manager relates the role and responsibility to the career aspiration of the team member. That is, the question – ‘What’s In It For Me if I take up this role?’ has to be answered for the team member. If this is done, the team member is most likely to develop ownership of his role and is more likely to be happy to go the extra mile to deliver results. This insight may appear to be common sense; however, practicing it is quite tricky as it can backfire if not implemented cautiously. Therefore, analysing the tricky nature of WIIFM and illustrating simple ways of practicing it with real life examples is the purpose of this article. Digging deeper into WIIFM If there is ownership, the team members would not wait for instructions and would travel the extra mile to deliver the results. On the contrary if the team member lacks ownership, s/he would develop a distance with his/her work and this would not only result in reduced productivity, but also in other consequences such as not being self-driven, not figuring out certain details by themselves etc. Therefore, it is important to ensure that team members own their work and not develop a distance with it. This is better illustrated with an experiment. An interesting experiment that I have come across in team building exercises is as follows: A weighty object, typically a big stone is kept and a boundary strip is marked next to the stone. Workshop participants have to stand outside the boundary strip, lift the stone and hold it in air as long as they can. Depending on the weight of the stone, either many participants fail to lift the stone or even if they lift, they won’t be able to hold it for long. This happens because they are lifting the stone from a distance due to the boundary strip and it requires more energy to lift the stone from a distance. In the next step, the boundary strip is removed and participants are allowed to stand close to the stone and lift it. In this attempt, most will be able to lift the stone and hold it much longer than they could, during the first attempt. Moral of the experiment is that when there is a distance between the task and the performer, execution of the task becomes more tedious. This physical illustration holds true in the emotional sphere also. If an employee doesn’t feel that the work that he is carrying out belongs to him, then he would find it tedious. It is because of this tediousness that quality suffers and it takes more time to deliver. WIIFM would come to the rescue here. Using WIIFM for motivating team in simple ways Dealing with WIIFM can be quite tricky as it can be counter-productive at times. When the team members’ aspirations are captured, it raises their expectation bar and if there is no attempt to fulfil the aspirations, it can lead to disheartenment and further lack of ownership. On the other hand meeting the aspirations as-is can also be quite challenging as it may infeasible, or unjustified or may be against company policy. Some may be expecting a fast promotion and may not yet deserve; giving them promotion raises the expectation bar of others and can be counter-productive on the others. Some may be expecting a salary increment that may be disproportionate to what they deserve and it may be over and above the company policies. So, meeting the aspirations as-is could also troublesome. Therefore, the best way out is to meet the aspirations in a judicious and balanced way. After capturing the aspirations of the team member, the project manager has to think about them honestly and try to meet the aspirations to the extent possible within the project context. Two anecdotes below illustrate simple and pragmatic ways in which WIIFM of team members have been fulfilled – The project involved a legacy application based on IBM AS 400 and the project manager did carry out simple one-on-one meetings with the team members during the project initiation. One of the star performers of the project expressed that he is interested in Java and not in AS 400 technology. When asked by the project manager as to why he is specific about Java, the team member answered that Java projects are technologically more challenging and handling more challenging