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By Scott Berkun on January 21st, 2010
13 Comments »
Management

How to stop overcommunication

Spolsky’s latest piece is about Brook’s law, and how adding people to projects can make them worse.

For those unfamiliar, Brook’s law states that when you add a person, you geometricly increase the amount of communication people of the project have to do, suggesting it’s a bad idea.

While I agree with the law, there are important exceptions I’ve identified -� depending who the person in question is (elite or bozo), how good they are at jumping in tough territory (ninja or bozo),� and how much they already know about the project (familiar or bozo newbie).

Spolsky’s points are generally sound, but I believe there’s a deeper cause for overcommunication.

The reason committees suck is authority is distributed across a large number of people. This makes everyone feel like everyone needs to know about everything. And worse, people fight in the backroom to obtain control over the committee, so the visible authority and real authority can be far apart.

Overcommunication is a symptom of lack of clarity over power.� If you want better communication, clarify the following:

Who is the single person who has decision making authority for decision X
Who should have input into that decision
Who should be informed when the decision has been made

This sets everyone’s expectations for who needs to know what.� It reduces endless forwarding of fyi material on the hopes someone might need it.

The person with decision making authority should be collaborating with others, and can delegate their authority, but no one should ever be confused that they have the power to make the call.

45 people can not effectively make a decision together. But 44 people can council one wise, empowered person to make a more effective decision.

Like Spolsky, I agree things would be better if there were 5 people in the room, instead of 45, but the clear distribution of power is the problem I’d solve first.

By Scott Berkun on January 13th, 2010
9 Comments »
Management

How to create great work environments

(Note: In a series of posts, now called readers choice, I�ll write about whatever people submit and vote for.� If you dig this, let me know if the comments, and submit your ideas and votes).

The actual question submitted was:

How to create environments that encourage people to make mistakes and learn from them?

This is easy. It goes on every day in every decent classroom around the world.

What this question is really asking is how can the person in charge create an atmosphere where learning is rewarded.� Nearly every manager or leader talks about this, but rarely is it true.

There are four things people get wrong that makes this seem harder than it is.

The person in power defines the culture through their behavior. If the bossman fires people for making a small mistake, people will hide mistakes and obsess about avoiding them, making creativity and innovation unlikely. If the bossman instead sees failures as learning moments, and takes time to teach solutions, or asks the mistake maker what they learned and how it can be avoided next time, people will feel there is room for them to learn. Many people in power are not self-aware enough to see the gap between what they say, and what they do, despite the fact people respond only to the later. Most managers are more punitive and risk-averse than they think they are.
Everyone must understand the different kinds of mistakes.�� The word mistake is loaded. We’re taught to believe mistakes are bad, and people who make them are evil and horrible. But if you are asked to solve a challenging problem you won’t solve it on the first try. Or second. Or maybe even your 50th. Your first few attempts will naturally fail. This is a kind of mistake, or failure, but a necessary one, and one no customer will see. This is useful failure. It represents an opportunity to learn, or eliminate a reasonable possibility others would eventually try. The person in power has to communicate the difference between interesting or necessary mistakes, and useless ones, and their responses have to be appropriate.
The person in power has to care about employees long term.� If I expect to manage you for 30 years, I want you to learn. I want you to grow. I want you to be as potent as possible in the long run, and I’d be willing to make short term sacrifices to make that possible (Paying for training, for books, coaching you, pushing to get you interesting assignments with the VP, etc.) If I don’t expect you to work for me for long, or see zero potential for you, then I’d never be willing to make that sacrifice. I’d always think you were already at 100% of what you are capable of, and have ZERO new to learn. Part of what defines the culture around a leader is their answer to this question: how good do I think the people I manage can possibly be? And how much do I care about getting them there? If they behave with long term care, odds go up everyone will teach, and care for, each other as well.
Everyone has to properly set expectations.� An easy question I ask as a consultant, when people tell me of a problem they’ve having with someone at work, is this: Have you talked to them about it? 60-70% of the time they say no. If you feel your boss doesn’t let you learn from your mistakes, it’s up to you to ask for more space, making the argument you’ll be more productive/smarter/creative or whatever he wants from you if he treats you differently. And promise to prove it. Perhaps you can negotiate for only certain tasks to be freer than others. But if you never give the feedback, or never explicitly state what you want, odds are slim you’ll ever get it. If your manager is unwilling to ever give you what you want, then accept it or move on.

If nothing else, remember back to the best learning experiences you had, in school or in work. What were those environments like, and what did the teachers or bosses do that others didn’t?� Leave it the comments� – I’d like to learn about them :)

Also see:

How to learn from your mistakes (which classifies different kinds in humorous detail)
How to survive a bad manager
Chapter 7 of the Myths of Innovation is focused on culture and how great creative leaders create great cultures.

By Scott Berkun on January 6th, 2010
58 Comments »
Management

Why do big companies suck?

(Note: In a new series of posts, now called reader’s choice, I’ll write about whatever people submit and vote for.� If you dig this, let me know if the comments, and submit your ideas and votes).

Before thinking about companies, it’s worth noticing that many things suck. For movies, books, websites, the bar is pretty damn low. Suckage is everywhere. And this is true regardless of size – many small companies suck and medium ones too.� The real question then is why, if at all, do big companies suck more than smaller ones?

I have to say, I’m not sure that they do, certainly not when I put my selfish consumer hat on. I own a Honda Civic, an Apple I-Pod and a Black & Decker cordless drill, three good products made by three very large corporations. These products are relatively cheap, very well made, and part of what I’m buying is faith the company will be around in five years if I need repairs or other support for these things.� A smaller company probably couldn’t provide low cost, high quality, products and promise they’d be around in the future.� When I fly I’m glad my airplane is made by Boeing or Airbus, and not some local startup company run by people working from their garage.

I’m not a fan of big in general, but there’s a case to be made that many excellent products come from big companies, some of which could never be made by smaller ones.

But there are some things that tend to happen when companies get big that are bad – and that’s what I’ll explore in the list below.

Why big companies suck:

The soul has left the building – All big companies start as small companies. But by the time a company hits the 500, 1000 or 50000 person mark, many of the people who made the small company successful have left, and their spirit left with them. You can have a financially successful company that is mostly banking on the ideas and successes of people who left years ago, but whose middle-managers take credit for what was mostly inherited the day they were hired. When things go bad, none of the ‘leadership’ has any of the tools required to fix, rebuild, or recreate the pattern of success that started it all.
Obsessive Optimization – When you have 5000 employees, or $500 million in revenue, fractions become significant. A .5%� increase in revenue is not a small thing, it’s a big thing. It can be bigger than many companies’ entire revenue. And as companies age the culture looks to optimize and refine, eventually to a point where the good things that led to all the success have been whittled away. Managers at big companies often have more incentives to minimize costs, than to find new business or develop new ideas since minimize costs or optimizing an existing process are cheaper wins that show results in the short term. In an optimization centric culture, the myopic love of short term wins can makes long term improvements, which often require short term sacrifices, hard to pull off.
Addicted to bureaucracy -� I travel a great deal and visit with companies of all sizes. It’s fascinating to visit places where there are 20 people doing work I know is done by 3 or 4 at one of their competitors, often with better results. It’s bizarre to see smart, senior people who have forgotten it’s possible in this universe to make things happen without talking to a committee, filling out forms, or doing extensive market research. The bigger a company gets the more dependencies there are between decisions, which makes it natural for committees and approvals to grow in number.� I get that. But it’s typically easier to add processes than it is to remove them. Over time bigger companies accumulate process, it gets inherited, and no one can even imagine a world that’s lean or efficient. Big companies should have dedicated process simplifers, senior people who just run around, point our areas that can be leaner or simpler, or where line level employees should be more autonomous, to keep this tendency in check. Or once a year every manager should be forced to
They believe their own bullshit - Any large group of people functions because of shared beliefs, but ther are both positive and negative kinds of belief. The negative kinds are the ones that involve lies, distortions of truth, and a lack of perspective.� Company all-hands meetings can feel like politica rallies, where� a reality distortion field prevents any valid questions of the company from being mentioned, and all bad news or mistakes are whitewashed away. When you’re banned from using competitors products, even when they’re better, or not allowed to critique and criticize decisions even when they’re dumb and bad, it gets harder and harder for good ideas to rise because real thinking is prevented. When the party line is BS, the wise start to keep their mouth shut, and look for other jobs.
The Peter Principle – When you have several layers of management it’s entirely possible the manager isn’t contributing much, and the line level employees are mostly self-sustaining. If a manager inherits a successful team, a team self motivated to improve, and it does under his management, he may very well be promoted for simply being around at the right time.� There are many bad reasons people get promoted, and it’s more likely to happen in bigger companies, where there is more ambiguity about who is contributing what.
It’s hard to fire people - Big companies get sued more often because they have more money. And on the day a small company gets it’s first law suit for wrongful termination, or discrimination, everyone runs the numbers and concludes it’s cheaper, on paper, to prolong the process for firing people and increase the amount of paperwork about employees managers must create, than it is to lose lawsuits.� Performance evaluations, mid-year reviews, and all of that are heavily (but of course not entirely) motivated by lawsuit prevention and defense.
Corporations can be psychopaths - In 1886 the U.S. Surpreme court ruled that corporations were entitled to the same protections as people. This was a big deal. It made it possible for executives to make decisions on behalf of a corporation that were illegal, or ethically questionable, without being directly liable for them, and gave constitutional rights to entities that were not people.� Combined with the motive for profit, there are lines big corporations are lead to cross that no indivudal ever would, since the entity of the corporation is held responsible, and not necessarily the individual leaders.
Status quo / Follower mentality – The bigger a company gets, the more it’s main attractive power for new employees is job security, rather than opportunity to grow, learn or take risks. The Innovator’s dilemma is real, and leaders who have big sucess are often the last to recognize when it’s time to move on. For anyone interested in progress, risk taking, change or growth potential, a large company is incredibly frustrating, as the dominant psychology is one of play it safe and political correctness. A running joke at Microsoft used to be that the best way to get a product idea to ship at Microsoft was to have a competitor do it first.

The list can go on I’m sure – what did I miss?

By Scott Berkun on December 23rd, 2009
24 Comments »
Making things happen

Everything is a project, even this

As often happens in life, when I meet people at a party or some work thing and they ask what I do, I tell them I write books. They ask what kind of books, and when I mention I wrote a book about project management they get all condescending. Why would you write a book about something as boring as project management? They ask.

To which, I often say.� Everything is a project.

And they say, what?

And I say, again, Everything is a project.

How did you get to this party? I ask. Well, that’s a project. How did you plan and deliver the last party you threw for others? That was a project too. The making of your home, the delivery of electricity and water to it, and the earning of wages to pay for all these things are all various forms of projects, or consist of activities roughly comparable to any definition of a project.

Then I say the kicker, project management is only as boring as the thing being managed.

On a good day, they they look at me for a long moment, frozen in that curiously goofy look of actually thinking that all of us make now and then, and then they say “Huh”. And then I ask them what they do, successfully completing the project of changing the conversation with a stranger at a party.

On a bad day, they conclude I am even more boring than they thought, and despite their full Martini in hand, excuse themselves to the bar to get a drink.

I wrote awhile ago about why project managers get no respect, and that’s because people who make a big deal out of the project-manageryness of their work, as opposed to the domain of the things they make (homes, software, films, cookies) come off as a kind of weenie, a pm-weenie if you will. They appear to be people who are more interested in schedules, budgets and methods than the results those tools help achieve, which is kind of weird.� It’s like the director of a bad movie who talks only about his fancy zoom lenses,� or that the film came in under-budget. They miss the point.

But the best project managers, including those people who do lead or manage things yet never use the pm title, somehow know instinctively that everything is a project. They know there needs to be a driving force of thinking, a constant source of social energy, a list or a table or a spreadsheet, that makes it easier for everyone to push their own small decisions forward, increasing the odds with every single effort that the results will be good. Good project managers aren’t even necessarily very organized, they know many ways to drive people forward and hold them to commitments, even without a GTD brain implant.

There are many ways to look at all that we do, but the project-centric view is quite potent. Everything in work, and many things in life, have a a goal, a set of constraints, some design challenges, a schedule, a few dependencies, some key relationships, etc.� And it’s hard� to be good at managing, leading, teaching, creating, making or building just about anything if you have absolutely zero skills at project management. To me, anyone who is a writer, a VP, a salesman, a film-maker, a teacher or an athlete does project management of a sort nearly all the time.

When I get stuck, at work or in personal life matters, or I see someone else who is blocked, I say, out loud, everything is a project. If I’m blocked, what are my goals? What are my assets? What are my liabilities? How can I divide this big thing I’m stuck on into smaller pieces, one of which I might be able to tackle? And sometimes just realizing there is a simple easy way to reframe anything into the form of a project is enough to get things moving again.

By Scott Berkun on December 8th, 2009
11 Comments »
Management

Should I become a project manager? (Mailbag)

A recent email from the mailbag echoes other email collecting dust in the mailbag, so I figured I’d beat the rush and answer here.

Hello I will be graduating college in two weeks and want to more about certain careers.� Project management is one of them and thought you might have some insight, based on your blog.� I have a few questions that I hoped you could answer.

Signed – Mr. Student who wants a job

Here are his questions, with answers.

Q: As a graduate how do I get on the path towards project management?

For most of the industries in the world you never start out as a project manager. That’d be like getting off a bus in L.A. and becoming the director of� a $200 million Hollywood film. You have to earn power and experience, which makes sense. Often people who eventually become project managers start out in more junior roles and after earning some experience move into project management. Without front line experience it’s easy for the project manager to have no clue as to what she’s doing, or have no idea how insulting or destructive their decisions are to folks in specialized roles. MBA graduates who enter the workforce with little other experience beyond MBA-structured internships have similar challenges.

There are exceptions. Some schools have programs that focus on management, or even project management, and likely know of corporations that have entry level project manager roles. Microsoft does – it’s called program manager. You start with very small slice of a project and if you do well, that area of responsibility grows. If you don’t do so well, you hit the streets.

2. Are there entry-level type project management positions?

See above. They do exist, but they’re industry specific as they should be. You might need to do an internship, or work for less than you’d like, to get in the door.

3. What skills should I develop to market myself as a project manager?

This is easy: WORK ON A PROJECT. Go make something. Grab a friend a build a website, or a blog, or something. Anything. Build a house. Build a couch. Make a movie. Volunteer your PM skills wherever you can in return for a reference. The best way to market yourself is to get experience, as there is nothing more dangerous for the world than someone who wants to be a project manager but has never managed a project in their life.

If you’re already at work in a non-PM role, tell your boss about your interest to have a more leadership role, and suggest small projects you can manage that are related to your current work. If you’re willing to do it on a volunteer basis, and sell it right, often you can get PM experience without having to risk your current job at all. Then you’ll know if you like it or are good at it, before taking a bigger leap.

4. Any other advice?

If you’re still in college invest heavy in finding other people who want the same kind of work you do. The network you make in school is incredibly valuable. A year or two from now you might be looking for a new job, or still trying to find a PM role, and the number of people you know in the field will help tremendously. One of the best things I got from going to CMU was a circle of friends who went to work in the same industry as me, and could provide advice, job leads or connections I couldn’t make otherwise.

Hello I will be graduating college in two weeks and want to more about certain careers.� Project management is one of them and thought you might have some insight, based on your blog.� I have a few questions that I hoped you could answer:

1. As a graduate how do I get on the path towards project management?

2. Are there entry-level type project management positions?

3. What skills should I develop to market myself as a project manager

4. Any other advice?