Thursday, January 06, 2005

Management by Reality - Fired on the Tarmac

This past fall season has seen a TV ratings war between the King of Manhattan real estate, Donald Trump, and the mildly eccentric (superficially) Sir Richard Branson. Trump had a second season of his show The Apprentice whilst Branson launched his copycat show Rebel Billionaire.

What was most interesting to watch was the very obvious difference in styles. Trump seems to breed confrontation and his organization is very hierarchical.A hierarchy reinforced with the trappings of power. The final two contestants got to boss around former colleagues whilst they were driven in a chauffeured Maybach limousine and their lackies followed behind in a minivan. Trump dismisses the losers with his punch line “You’re Fired!” The entire season was filled with bickering, Machiavellian intrigue and outright bitchiness amongst the colleagues - particularly the women.

Meanwhile, Branson’s style is collaborative. He allows the losing team to debate who should be up for his “elimination challenge”. Branson encourages consensus whilst Trump encourages finger pointing and dissent. Whilst Trump looks for loyalty to the defeated leader, Branson looks for objectivity in analysis of the defeat. Branson then has the losing elimination pair challenge each other. In the case of an outright loser then he doesn’t have to fire anyone - they self-selected such as the guy who fell asleep during the night whilst camping out in the savannah of Africa. An emotional Branson hugged the guy as he handed him his ticket home on the tarmac before they boarded their next flight. He was evidently sorry to lose such a strong candidate.

The final dismissal with Branson is again non-confrontational - the uncharitable might call it passive aggressive. He simply confronts the two losers on the tarmac at the steps to the plane and hands them a ticket each. One ticket allows someone to board whilst the other is sent on a different flight home to the USA.

One final key difference is that Branson never asks his elimination contestants to do anything he wouldn’t do himself and he often joins them. With Branson its all casual clothing, breaking bread around the table, hugs and emotional support. It wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine his organization is much flatter than Trump’s and his senior managers don’t enjoy the trappings of power because he recognizes that the only power they wield is the power to influence through respect.

When I’m watching The Apprentice, I can’t help but remind myself that it is entertainment and that much of it is setup for the viewer. It isn’t real. It isn’t reality. It’s fake! However, I feel that the differences in style between Trump and Branson are real and really are reflected in the nature of the two game shows. I have made up my mind who I’d prefer to work for. Have you?

Wednesday, January 05, 2005

One Manager at a Time

How do you change the encumbant management paradigm in an industry? How do you generate economic improvement from chaos? Answer: one manager at a time.

So, it always gives me great pleasure to read blogs like this one - where the reader clearly took the main message from Agile Management without having to trudge through all 330 pages. We all know that most people don’t have time to read in-depth cover-to-cover, so it reassures me that at least one reader managed to internalize my message - especially when I spent so long figuring out how to articulate it.

I started to wonder how this could be done in my current team. Actually I started to wonder if we were already doing it. It occurred to me that we have a fixed number of people, split into broad categories of analyst, developer and tester. If analysis is our constraint, then by the TOC I should reduce the flow of work to accomodate that. The problem is - what do I do with my developers and testers? If I just leave them idle then I’m realising no benefit, since I have to pay them the same amount anyway (fixed cost). I’m assuming that I don’t have the capacity to loan them to other projects (partly ‘cos I’d never get them back, and partly ‘cos of the return ramp-up cost). Then it dawned on me that if I had developers who could act as analysts, or somehow shift some of the analysis work to the developers - then I’d be able to speed up and keep everyone busy.

Tuesday, January 04, 2005

Joel On MSF

Recently Joel has expressed his opinions about the efficacy of Microsoft Solution Framework and started a long thread of debate on his site. [This is slightly old news but I’m just back from an emotional zone-out]. Amongst the many replies, I particularly liked this one.

Joel makes a good basic point. If you believe the spin that accompanied MSF v3.0 then you’d believe that it captures the Microsoft development process and as Joel points out, Microsoft has a unique culture and unique position in the World. It hires really great people, empowers them, makes everyone individually accountable for their own actions, arms them with lots of resources and then allows the results to emerge with a very hands off management style. It’s the combination of the culture, the leadership and the above average quality of the people that make the recipe work. In Joel’s opinion - as a former Microsoft employee who now runs his own firm - that recipe isn’t easily scaled across the industry. And he’d be right! Though there is a lot of value that companies can derived from trying to emulate the Microsoft culture of leadership, empowerment, trust and accountability, without a similar culture Microsoft’s processes are unlikely to succeed elsewhere.

What Joel didn’t realize when he wrote his piece is that MSF v4.0 is being written by me and Randy Miller - co-author of A Practical Guide to Extreme Programming and Advanced Use Case Modeling. Randy used to work at Togethersoft for Peter Coad and between us, we have a bit of a clue about software process and what it takes to succeed in a less egalitarian environment than the Redmond campus. MSF v4.0 is actually a tooling framework enabled in the Visual Studio Team System product. It can be configured to deliver any process. In fact, we’ve already seen a version of Scrum built on the early CTP release of VSTS. Out of the box, VSTS will ship with two processes - MSF Agile - and it’s bigger brother to be named later that will be CMMI level 3 compliant. A stretch-to-fit agile process which will meet most of the process areas in CMMI Level 2 and 3. [Note: CMMI v1.1 not SW-CMM which the SEI has recently deprecated!!!]

I’ll be talking a lot more about MSF v4.0 and Microsoft’s entry into the agile methodology space throughout this year.

Monday, January 03, 2005

The Line Manager Squeeze

Sometimes, objectivity, transparency and effective up-management will have no effect. Why? Because senior management chooses to squeeze the line management to temporarily compensate for its own failure.

Recently, a friend of mine has quit his second job within 12 months. Why? Because “I’m sick of being set up for failure” and “it was the same old b***s*** over the schedule.” In short, a manager being squeezed.

While I was back in Scotland in October, I had dinner with an old college buddy and his wife who had just quit her job in the airline business as a no.1 flight attendant - the cabin crew line management position. Why? Because she was being asked to sacrifice quality of service (i.e. her and her staff’s pride in their job) and staff break times in order to sell more merchandize. In short, the business model of her employer was broken. They couldn’t make enough money from selling airline tickets so they had to try and plug the gap by spending more and more staff time pushing goods on to a captive market. The ever increasing retail sales targets meant that on shorter flights, service and staff breaks had to be sacrificed or the targets had to be missed. A line manager wishing to keep her job had to make herself unpopular with her staff and her customers. Of course, the longer term effect is to damage the brand and reputation of the airline - but what the heck, the executive management will have retired by then, but line managers will still be trying to pay off their mortgage doing the same old job.

The line manager squeeze - setting the line manager an impossible task - is another example of management misdirection. The senior management conveniently divert attention and deflect blame and criticism on to the junior line management. It’s yet another example of why the line management job isn’t to be envied. No wonder so many senior techies prefer to stick to architecture and development and don’t volunteer for leadership training and management positions.

Sunday, January 02, 2005

Happy New Year

I’m hoping to get this blog back on the rails this month. I know a few people have been missing it and wondering whether I gave up. The truth is this past quarter has been challenging for me personally. My father passed away on the day I spoke at the TOCICO conference in Miami. Since then I’ve had to sell the family home in Scotland and overcome a backlog of work at my day job after 1 month on bereavement leave. This past week, my wife gave birth to our second child - Natalie - and we’ll be moving soon to a bigger house, that we just agreed to purchase. So I’ve been busy and focused on family rather than career this past while. Now it’s time to get back to work.

For 2005, I’m intending to write another book. I’ve actually got three projects on the go. One or two of them will turn into books over the next year or so. This year will see the launch of Microsoft Visual Studio Team System and the new MSF v4.0 processes (including the CMMI Level 3 version) for which I’m responsible. I’ll be doing a book about managing .NET projects using VSTS and its reporting mechanisms which include cumulative flow diagrams as an out-of-the-box report. So VSTS enables “agile management”. I’ve also got a book on color modeling in my sights. It’s time to bring back The Coad Method and take it to the next level. The third book is a much longer term project. More on that another time.