October 12th, 2005 by Mark Ramm
As I said yesterday, your customers define value, and they don’t care a bit about some of the things that your IT Department does. They don’t care about weekly status update meetings, longstanding ticket reviews, or maintenance of your Ticket Tracking system. They don’t care about all the time you spend fixing bugs repairing or repairing corrupted files.There is a name for all of these things that your customers don’t care about —
waste!Your goal should be to stop doing these things. Don’t waste your time, or your customer’s money. Where you can stop doing them, where you can’t minimize the time you spend on these activities.
Instead do something that your customers care about! Build systems that protect them from having corrupted files, write unit and functional tests so your users don’t ever see that bug. Get response times down to the point where you wouldn’t have enough “longstanding tickets” warrant a weekly meeting.
And once or twice a month take some time out with the whole team to identify ways to reduce the waste that’s still in the system. The story of Toyota shows that even after 30 years of improvement creative people can still find new areas of waste and ways to remove them.
October 6th, 2005 by Mark Ramm
Right now there are hundreds, if not thousands of IT projects heading toward
failure. Chances are you’ve worked on one of these projects, perhaps you’ve even been in charge. You are not alone, in fact according to the famous 1995 Standish Group study, only 16.2 percent of all IT projects are successful.
Unfortunately it’s even worse than that because the study defined project success as being on time and budget and meeting project goals, but said nothing about actually gaining user acceptance, or meeting a business need.
When projects fail, it’s easy to blame the technology — we blame problems with the software development toolkit, problems with the hardware, problems with vendor supplied components, etc. It’s also easy to blame other people, managers blame employees for not living up to commitments, employees blame managers for setting unrealistic schedules.
But the reality is that most projects have a better chance of success if even one person consistently makes the right choices. Whole projects can be saved from failure by a single project team members gently but effectively confronting her manger about an unrealistic timeline, or presenting the project team with a simple bullet point list of the 10 most significant risks the project faces.
There are critical moments in every project that can spell success or failure, and the only reason any of our projects ever succeed is that someone knew what to do and took the initiative to make it happen.
Compound Thinking is all about learning how to be that person. The one who knows the right thing to do, the right time to do it, and has the courage to just do it.