Thoughts on leadership and project management from today's newspapers, TV shows and Internet.
(Plus occasional extracts from the business novel I'm writing on Project Management)
I wasn't particularly shocked to hear the racist statements leave the mouth of NBA owner Sterling. These billionaire sports team owners are rarely pillars of society. And the fact that his team is made up mostly of African-Americans is unlikely to change his ways. He has made his fortune taking bribes as a judge and keeping minorities out of his real estate.
The NAACP awarding him a lifetime achievemant award is embarrassing. Just goes to show what donating tens of thousands will do for you.
But what sort of a punishment does he deserve? For his crooked real-estate dealings, he is breaking the law and deserves jail time. It is illegal to discriminate against races in housing. He gets away with this by bribing the system and using lawyers to stall proceedings. I'd love to see the justice department come down hard on him.
But making racist comments in a private conversation is not illegal. As Evelyn Beatrice Hall said of Voltaire: "I may disapprove of what you say but I will fight to the death for your right to say it."
So rather than fining or kicking him out of the league, let's have him join more of his own peers by making him marry Marge Schott.
Dear PM Advisor I had a real weird experience last week. I'm a consultant for a pharmaceutical company and I am managing a project where my client is outsourcing its packaging to a contract manufacturing organization (CMO). I am just taking over this project. I had a few calls with the CMO but wanted to plan the project with them face-to-face. I met with their director of quality who was extremely rude to me from the first moment. He said he had no respect for me because I wasn't a full-time employee of the pharma company. He told me the pharma company needs the CMO more than they need my client. He accused me of trying to intimidate him while trying to push his agenda down my throat. The meeting degenerated to a stand-off with me saying: "Well, my first impression of you was correct." (He threw me under the bus after my first phone conversation) and him saying: "Same applies to me!" I've never been treated like that in 30 years of experience in the pharma world. I felt like walking out. How would you handle this situation? Flabbergasted in Philadelphia
Dear Flabbergasted,
Wow! First of all, sorry about your experience. That was indeed unfortunate and unprofessional. I'd love to know how you solved it.
Is it possible that you did anything before this meeting to antagonize this CMO before your arrival? It sounds like you did nothing to intimidate him during the meeting so you may have done so during that earlier call. Throwing you under the bus makes it sound like you were called out for some kind of bad behavior on your part. Perhaps you need to ask someone else who was at that phone call what their impression was.
The other possibility is that the director is a jerk. There are indeed people like that in the world and they often gravitate to positions of responsibility where they can force people to put up with their bad behavior. I've met a few jerky quality and regulatory people.
But the CMO needs your client and it's important you tell your client the attitude of the CMO. The CMO needs to get straight the customer/provider relationship.
As to what you should have done, there's nothing like a few deep breaths to defuse a tense situation like this. Allow the other person to speak first. If they refuse, speak first but use the diplomatic approach:
Make a statement both of you agree with and get him to at least nod his head: "We both want to hand over this work to your CMO, right?"
Show how there is an obstacle in the way of reaching this mutually agreed upon goal: Planning the project.
Ask him what he thinks is the best way to proceed.
Work together to remove the obstacle
And make sure he understands that, as project manager, you will be the person he has to deal with and that's easier if you develop some sort of working relationship.
Charles M. Blowis The New York Times's visual Op-Ed columnist.
What a great op-ed by Charles Blow about Cliven Bundy, the racist western rancher! I'll reprint it here in its entirety for reference later. Here is the original link to the NY Times article.
It appears that Cliven Bundy, the 68-year-old rancher and freeloader, doesn’t reject only the federal government; he rejects history.
Bundy decided this week to tell us all what he knows “about the Negro.”
“They abort their young children, they put their young men in jail, because they never learned how to pick cotton. And I’ve often wondered, are they better off as slaves, picking cotton and having a family life and doing things, or are they better off under government subsidy? They didn’t get no more freedom. They got less freedom.”
In an attempt to clarify his comments, Bundy was on “The Peter Schiff Show,” and he made matters worse: “I’m wondering: Are they happier now under this government subsidy system than they were when they were slaves, when they was able to have their family structure together, and the chickens and a garden, and the people had something to do?”
The Mount Kilimanjaro-size amounts of ignorance and offense packed into those two statements boggles the mind.
Photo
Soon after Bundy’s views on slavery and “the Negro” came to light, the conservative supporters he had accrued began to scurry and others pounced.
But I refuse to let Bundy’s fantasies about slavery and projections about “Negroes” be given over to predictable political squabbling. The legacy of slavery must be liberated from political commentary.
Casual, careless and incorrect references to slavery, much like blithe references to Nazi Germany, do violence to the memory of those who endured it, or were lost to it, and to their descendants.
There is no modern-day comparison in this country to the horrors of slavery. None! Leave it alone. Remember, honor and respect. That’s all.
How could slaves have been “happier,” when more than 12 million were put in shackles, loaded like logs into the bowels of ships and sailed toward shores unknown, away from their world and into their hell?
How could they have been “happier” to be greased up and sold off, mother from child, with no one registering their anguish?
Sojourner Truth, in her “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech, delivered in 1851 at the Women’s Convention in Akron, Ohio, lamented: “I have borne 13 children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me!”
The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History estimates that nearly two-thirds of slaves lived in nuclear households. However, those families could be broken up on a whim, and many slaves were bred like animals, were raped at will and could marry only if allowed.
How could they have been “happier” to meet the lash, to feel the flaying of flesh, to have it heal in dreadful scars only to be ripped open again until one had, as Sethe, the main character in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved,” put it, a tree on one’s back?
It was not only the lash but also the noose and being chased down and ripped apart by dogs, and all manner of terrors. When the human imagination sets itself on cruelty there are no limits to its designs.
Americans have been trying to justify slavery since its inception, to make the most wrong of wrongs right, to no avail.
Robert E. Lee wrote in 1856: “The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things.”
Others used religion as a justification, quoting verses and patting themselves on the back for saving the souls of the so-called savage.
But as Frederick Douglass pointed out, “The slave auctioneer’s bell and the churchgoing bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heartbroken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master.”
Religion didn’t elevate enslavers; trying to justify slavery reduced religion.
“Happier”? How, Mr. Bundy, could you even utter such absurdity?
The very soil of this country cries out for us to never forget what happened here, for the irreducible record of the horrors of slavery to never be reduced.
Romantic revisionism of this most ghastly enterprise cannot stand. It must be met, vigilantly and unequivocally, with the strongest rebuttal. Slaves dishonored in life must not have their memories disfigured by revisionist history.
America committed this great sin, its original sin, and there will be no absolution by alteration. America must live with the memory of what its forefathers — even its founding fathers — did. It must sit with this history, the unvarnished truth of it, until it has reconciled with it.
This week our Wednesday PMO meeting was another quick one. I hate to waste the time of my team. We talked about our progress against the plan.
We are doing the work we had planned but quite a bit slower than we had originally planned. But we were making progress and were ready to share some of this progress with the steering committee on Friday.
During the steering committee we reprioritized some of our projects, added a new high-priority one, discussed the various change control systems and showed off our templates for status reports and project dashboard.
We liked the status report template but made a few changes to make it specific to the PMO Commercial Projects. It was based on our old Professional Services Report.
We also liked the dashboard but suggested the following improvements:
Add it as a tab to our prioritization sheet so we can have the first column automatically populated in the correct order.
Add variance for budget and schedule
Link the projects to their actual status report so we can get details rather than just the tab that has to be populated by the PMs .
The big things were the staffing of resources against prioritized projects and change control. These generated a lot of discussion and I'd like to give you the benefit of our brainpower.
Resourcing:
We added resources to the columns we had in place before the meeting, figured out what % of time each resource was working on ongoing operations and started adding how much time they should be spending working on each project. We found out that we didn't have enough information so we asked the team to take it back to their offices after the meeting and fill it out for each person.
We also found it useful to add a column that determined how many hours of work we should expect this week per project based on the percentages quoted to the right. This gave us a good reality check.
Change Control:
Our CEO was asking why we needed a lot of different systems to monitor changes. Why didn't every change go through the steering committee. Here were the different systems:
Track-it were requests for IT support that people could assign resources to for things like fixing people's computers, but this also generated new project requests.
Quality Change control for our ongoing operations, especially when they resulted in changes to customer or regulatory requirements.
Professional Services Project Change Notices. These are used when our consultants are working under one statement of Work and our customer asks us to do something additional. We track these under PCNs to ensure we get paid for the extra work when the project is over.
Project Change Control. This is what we were instituting to deal with changes to these internal projects on our Commercial Services side of the house.
Since Professional Services don't steal resources from a limited pool, we have always kept this side of the house separate from the PMO. The PMO is all about prioritizing projects within the limited resource pool and investment dollars the Commercial Services side operates under. When Professional Services gets a new project, they hire more people and each hour spent on the project generates profit because it is consulting. When Commercial Services gets a new project, the limited resources get more work to do and we have to spend as little of the money we have as possible with a hope to generate earnings when the project is complete.
So the PCN system wasn't going to work for the PMO.
The Track-it system needed to operate outside the PMO to fix IT bugs but, when a new project was generated, that project would need to be approved and prioritized within the steering committee. People's time spent on dealing with IT tickets would have to be taken from the time they have available to work on ongoing operations.
The Quality Change Control System, similarly, would operate in parallel, occasionally generating projects which would appear in front of the steering committee.
The meeting was a success that ended in 90 minutes.
The Times graphic department did another great job, showing a lot of data in a clever way. How have American's incomes increased (or decreased) over thirty years by percentile compared with other countries. I'll let the graphic speak for itself:
Pretty cool, huh. If you want to read the article, click here.
Dear PM Advisor, I'm having difficulty with a particular team member who wants to keep adding features and improvements to the product. This keeps adding time to the project. He says he is doing his job by adding quality to the product. He is the Quality Director. What do I say to that? Stymied in Syracuse.
Dear Stymied,
Give him the definition of Quality. The degree to which a set of inherent characteristics fulfills requirements. If you received x amount of money and y amount of time to fulfill z amount of requirements, it is not within his purview to add to this list.
It appears that he is changing the grade of the product. There is a key distinction between quality and grade. An i-phone is a higher grade than a flip phone when it comes to making calls. But a flip phone that never fails to make calls is a higher quality product than an i-phone that has a few glitches in this function.
Make sure the Quality Director is not adding features or gold-plating the product. You signed up for x, y and z and he lacks the authority to unilaterally increase any of these project constraints simply because he wants to increase the grade of the product.
Once they were out of sight of Dale, Gwilym and Grainne held
a hasty discussion. “The roads are no longer safe,” said Gwilym. “That Dale
might tell him which way we went after all. He is scared of the knight. We have
to hope we have at least a day before Palomides hears where we are. By then, we
need to be off these main roads and traveling along open country to Glastonbury. We should be
safe once we arrive there.”
“These carts won’t be much good in the open country. Too
many hills, valleys and rivers. Do you know the country here?” asked Grainne.
“I know the main roads. They cut through forests on our way
here. I don’t know if there are secondary tracks through them.”
“I know the forests. If you can get us to the forests, I can
keep us safe,” said Grainne.
A few hours later they saw a track leading off the main road
that showed promise of being more than just a farmer’s drive. They took this
and then began an odyssey of tracking their way back and forth across the
countryside, through farms and hamlets, around rivers and forests, up and down
hills, fording small streams, backtracking around the occasional steep valleys but
always heading generally west.
Whenever they approached a settlement or even a farm, Gwilym
would hide under covers in the back of the cart. His face was on the coin and
he didn’t want to attract attention to their group. The sight of a beautiful
woman alone in a cart attracted different attention and Bleddyn would sometimes
have to stand and draw his bow to discourage the lewd advances.
They traveled this way for a week, making slow progress toward
their destination. Then they reached the edge of a great forest, one that was
known to all as a dangerous place, pierced by only one Roman road from east to
west and another from north to south. There were other trails reputed to be
stalked by bandits. It would take two days to pass through the forest using the
main roads. People spent the night at the crossroads where there was a small
settlement and a contingent of the king’s soldiers. This was the place Gwilym had
stayed on his trip from Huish to Airmyn.
“Palomides may wait for us there,” said Gwilym to Grainne.
“That’s good,” said Grainne.
“Why?”
“Then we can take the Roman road almost to the crossroads,
skirt around it and return to the road later.”
Gwilym thought about this and but was concerned about the
logic. “But that’s only if he knows we must come this way. He doesn’t know our
destination. No. Thinking about it more, I think he’ll place some trusted
henchman there while he continues patrolling the roads to find us.”
“No-one has seen you since Edithvale. How will he find us?”
“At Edithvale they saw who I was traveling with. He’ll be
spreading the word about you, the boys and the two carts. He probably went down
the road that Dale pointed until he reached a settlement and asked there. He
would have found out we didn’t come through. Then he would have gone back to
the fork and done the same thing down the other road. We didn’t pass through
any settlement before we went off the road. If he’s a good tracker he would have
gone back to the fork and started making circles on his horse, stopping at
every farm and asking about us. Eventually he would have come to places that
had seen us and figured out our direction.”
“Where is he now then?”
Gwilym thought hard for a while in silence. “He may have
figured out by now which direction we are traveling and that we must pass
through this forest. The forest is the neck of the bottle. We either go through
it on the road or around it. It will be easy for him to post a few sentries at
some points around it looking for us to skirt it and one at the crossroads to
catch us there. He hates to stand still so he will be patrolling the roads and
outskirts.”
“Then we are in danger here. We can only be safe taking one
of the old tracks through it.”
“That’s dangerous. They’re a haven for bandits.”
Grainne pointed at the trees. “That’s an oak forest. I can
protect us there.”
“Do you know any paths wide enough for these carts?”
Grainne looked at the carts. “With a little work, probably.
Follow me, Bleddyn!” she yelled behind her and crossed the last bit of open
field and plunged the horses into the dark.
To read the entire first draft in one shot, click here:
