Genius PMO: Make Every Project Manager A Genius (Part II)

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Chris Niccolls

In our last blog we talked about developing genius solutions to problems, by using the TRIZ method.  TRIZ is an acronym in Russian. In English, it translates into Theory of Inventive Problem Solving. This was developed by a Russian engineer, who examined tens of thousands of patents to determine if there were repeatable methods behind creativity. From this research, it was found that there are only 1,500 types of problems and only types of 40 solutions… or 40 questions… that you ask to find a solution. In our last blog we explored the first five of these questions. In this blog we’re going to look at the steps you need to follow to turn your questions into genius solutions.

Once you’ve asked all (or most) of the 40 questions, you should have at least two or three potential solutions. But which solution is best? Well, if the solution was very easy, it might already be in place. If the right solution for your problem isn’t obvious, it is because your first round solutions are not easy to implement or have negative consequences. In our last blog, for each of the Five questions we asked, we came up with a solution, but each had flaws. In a lot of brainstorming sessions the team tends to stop when they see these flaws. You might say that the best solution you brainstorm are just half a solution, and half a solution isn’t worth the effort to implement.

What if we looked at solutions a different way? What if we assumed that all 1st level solutions will be flawed? The real solution comes from identifying each flaw (the “contradiction,” in TRIZ terminology) and developing solutions for each flaw as if it was a new problem.  If you started with three possible solutions, your 1st level solutions might get a rating of 40 to 50. You then repeat the process, neutralizing flaws (but developing new flaws), you now have solutions with a rating of 60 to 70. You repeat this until the solutions are very high quality. You then choose the best rated and easiest to implement solution as your first project.

That’s not too complicated, is it? Now let’s go through the five steps to developing a genius solution:

  1. Problem: Start with the problem you are trying to solve. Get enough information to clearly articulate the problem. In some cases, the problem might be fuzzy (my department needs to cost less, our services are undervalued, clients are unhappy, etc.). You can use the same 40 question brainstorming process to clarify the problem.
  2. Develop Solutions: Use the 40 questions to develop several initial solutions, probably 2-3. Each of these solutions will have flaws, perhaps very big flaws. Remember, flaws are good! If you didn’t see any flaws, you probably missed something important.
  3. Resolve Contradictions: Every solution will l have at least one flaw. Some will have many. Flesh out these problems as best as you can. Each contradiction becomes another problem for you to solve. Of course, each new solution will have its own flaws. You need to repeat these steps until you drive out all significant flaws from your final solution.
  4. Resources: Your solutions will be constrained by available resources. Some solutions may be too costly, or take too much time to complete, or require a resource (space, software, specific skills) that you don’t have or cannot obtain in time. Using these constraints, you can narrow down the possible solutions.
  5. Ideal Solution: Having gone through these steps, you end up with a pretty good solution. And you’ve grappled with the flaws in the solution, so that you are not surprised by unexpected negative results.
  6. Use a Fishbone: Yes, I know that I said that there are only five steps, but let’s call this an implied step. If you look back at the previous five steps you have gone through a lot of the same processes you would have if you were building an Ishakawa (Fishbone) diagram. Think of every TRIZ project as a fishbone with  40 potential branches from the main “spine.” Your job is to get it down to the 2 or 3 most likely branches, and then dig into the details.  Merging an Ishakawa (Fishbone) diagram with the TRIZ 40 questions process is a natural combination, and gives you a very good way to document and store the results of this five step process.

So, there we are. Our TRIZ hybrid gives you a method to consistently create genius solutions, even if the project manager is not a subject matter expert for this particular type of project. There are, however, just two other things to keep in mind when developing your solutions. The first is that it is highly likely that the solution you need already exists and just needs to be customized. Once you’ve fish boned your data,  do a little research (both in your PMO document repository and out on the internet) to find details from similar solutions that others implemented. The second… and last… thing for you to consider is that the most recognized works of genius don’t compromise.  You may need to go through ten iterations to get a good enough solution, but if you just keep digging down and identifying flaws in the previous solution, you can find what the right solution. And that’s my Niccolls worth for today!

Posted in Best Practices, Improvement, Continuous or Not, Learning and Development, Project Management Office, Unique Ideas | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Genius PMO: Make Every Project Manager A Genius (Part I)

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Chris Niccolls

If your Project Management Office (PMO) was staffed only by geniuses, you might get more work done. In the real world, we work with a staff that has limitations… limits on what they know, how much they can figure out on their own and how much time they have to apply their talents to every issue. Wouldn’t life be easier if you could make geniuses when you needed them and staff them on truly inventive projects? This ongoing series will show you how to be a genius, or at least look like one. We’re going to start off this series by looking at the inventive process itself. After all, if a genie gave you just a single wish, you would probably wish for more wishes. So, let’s find out how we can get all the wishes we want!

Whichever school of project management you follow, every PM process starts out with the opportunity to brainstorm and develop new solutions. However, PM itself doesn’t tell us how to be consistently creative. To make it even more difficult, the PM leading the project team may not be a subject matter expert and  may be uncomfortable trying to lead the development of a solution for a process they do not understand. Wouldn’t it be great if a highly talented individual spent most of their life developing a flexible system for figuring out the most brilliant solution to any problem? Well, somebody did!

Genrikh Altshuller was a Stalinist era naval engineer with a problem. During World War II, the Soviets need to produce as much high quality war as materials as possible. New patents could either create better processes to build equipment, or could help build better equipment. Altshuller realized that patents are documentation for inventions, and inventions are essentially distilled innovation. If you could develop a process that drove innovation, you could speed up the development of new patents.

This sounds like a great idea, but how do you create rules for “innovation?” Isn’t innovation about creativity, and isn’t creativity one of those things that you just have to be born with? As an engineer, Altshuller approached this as an engineering problem. He looked at examples of innovation, and extracted a set of rules about how inventions (innovations) work. So, he looked at patents, tens of thousands of patents. For each patent, he identified how the new invention was different from the previous invention it replaced. He then created logical categories and subcategories that described each type of improvement.

When he was done, Altshuller came to three conclusions. First, for every type of invention, several very similar inventions already exist. When you are ready to create your invention, it is extremely likely that it was already invented (but in another field, under a different name) and the other invention might be superior to your own. So, do some research before you try to invent a new solution. Second, every invention ever created (at least up until the 1940’s) was created to solve one of only 1,500 types of problems. The number of problems in the world are finite, and not infinite. That’s a new idea! Third and last, in order to develop the best solution to solve one of those 1,500 problems you only need to answer a maximum of 40 questions or issues. And Mr. Altshuller gave us that list of 40 questions.

That’s it? Ask 40 questions and you have a solution to just about any problem in the world? Well, yes. That’s exactly it. Have you ever played 20 questions? One person thinks of something, and the other asks up to 20 questions to figure what it is. Altshuller’s system uses 40 questions (or issue areas) to TRIZ it out… think of a session with the members of your team trying to play “40 questions” to develop the genius solution to your project problems. The more expertise and knowledge you bring to this process, the better the solution, but even if you are not an expert in that area, this process will still create a pretty good solution.

Altshuller’s system is called TRIZ, pronounced “Trees”. Translated into English, it stands for Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (maybe we should call it TIPS?). This 40 question system was developed from tens of thousands of patents. Because patents are for “physical” inventions, the questions are rooted in physical properties: color, size, weight, density, shape, speed, etc. These questions will make sense in your environment, but the greater your personal knowledge of the area you are working on, the greater your ability to customize these questions. In your brainstorming sessions… when your team gets together to develop a solution… greater customization will lead to more efficient solutions. I’m not going to go through the whole list, but we will look at a few questions so that you can see how simple this is.

One other important rule about TRIZ is that you cannot compromise your solution.  In the non-TRIZ world, when you create a solution that doesn’t fully solve a problem, you either go with the best (flawed) solution, or you say, “Well, it doesn’t look like any solution is good enough. Let’s revisit this in a year.” In TRIZ, it is understood that any simple solution will probably create new problems, that in turn need to be addressed. If your first solution doesn’t completely solve the problem, or if it creates new problems, then you initiate another round of TRIZ… and apply it to your previous solution. If your 1st solution created the “invention” that solved 80% of your problem, the next round creates a new invention that improves the original solution by 10%, yielding a 90% solution. You repeat this process as many times as necessary until you fully solve your problem.

Let’s see how we would apply the 40 question method in a corporation. Here, let’s imagine that we need to adopt this process to some sort of document center. Here we go!

  1. Segmentation: Would your center work better if you broke it into segments? Perhaps if you separated out graphic work from pure text work, you could have specialty workers with greater expertise. Would two distinct types of workers improve the service? If you perform transcription (speech to text), moving the transcriptionists out of the main editing room would provide a quieter environment, making it easier to listen to voice recordings. (New Problem: Will having two or more service groups increase administrative costs?)
  2. Taking out: Will removing a part of the center improve it? You have a document center, with all of your workers in one location. Perhaps the customer service staff and the intake function should move out of the center, and relocate closer to your clients. By sitting away from the center, they may become more connected to your clients and more objective about complaints. (New Problem: Does the client have space for these positions? Will they compete with the client for space?)
  3. Local quality: Is the problem and the solution specific to a shift or a location? Your staff works in three shifts, 9am-5pm, 5pm-1am, and 1am-9am. However, the peak “band” of work is from 12:30pm to 8:30pm. The location in this case is a time… 12:30 to 8:30. If you change staff hours and made half of the 1st shift start later, and half of the 2nd shift start earlier, you would have a “saddle shift” that expands your resources when they are needed the most. (New Problem: How will you provide additional seats on the busiest shift?)
  4. Asymmetry: If you made some part of your service asymmetric would it improve? Your firm services four types of customers… US, Europe, all other locations and high-value  accounts. Internal clients in different industry groups may have different needs, but your centralized service offers each group the same services. Consider creating dedicated services for each group… or at least for the groups that use your services most often. (New Problem: Will communication between groups become less efficient?)
  5. Merging: Can you make improvements by bringing together services? Your firm has a main center in your headquarters, and a few workers in branch offices. Staff in branch offices doesn’t have the same access to training and do not have dedicated managers. If you moved all positions into one the main center, you may be able to improve service. (New Problem: Will you face customer opposition to terminating local staff?)

As you can see from the first five, these questions are very general.  You just need to apply them to a specific problem. And you still have 35 other questions to present to your team. Once you’ve gone through all 40 questions, you just have a few more steps to develop your genius ideas. We will go through those steps in our next blog. But for now, that’s my Niccolls worth!

Posted in Best Practices, Improvement, Continuous or Not, Learning and Development, Project Management Office, Unique Ideas | Tagged , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Building Your PMO: The Alpha & Omega of Project Management – Part II

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Chris Niccolls

In our last blog we talked about the two most important project phases for a new Project Management Office (PMO) to focus on, the beginning and end. The last blog spoke about the “Alpha,” the start of a project, and how you can leverage improvements from project starts across all projects. Today, we will look at the “Omega,” the value that you can get from the ending of projects. Talk to any PMO director and you’ll hear tales of projects that go on forever, or never close, or never close properly. By not having a true ending, these project fail to deliver essential benefits to the company. Let’s dive in and see how each of these Omega elements deliver value!

  1. CLOSING: The closer you get to the end of a project, the more that you and other members of the project team become weary and want to move to the next project. Everyone will be tempted to skip steps or take short cuts. The PMO is there to resist this urge. Don’t add any tasks that don’t need to be done, but ensure that everything that needs to be do is done. Like creating a folder of all the closure documents and ensuring that all deliverables are completed.
  2. CONTRACTS: It’s an official part of most closing processes, but it’s frequently forgotten. It’s not unusual that contracts and vendor agreements are left in place. You may remember to close the contract for a consultant who helped on the project, but did you close the contact for a software product that was replaced, or an office that will no longer be used? When servers are retired, what happens to the software licenses? Creating a checklist for different types of projects will help future project teams.
  3. PERSONNEL: The project may be ended and closed well before personnel cuts are made. If the project is the installation of software, leading to reduced staffing, the new and the old processes may need to run in parallel for months. Personnel cuts may be incremental and take a year or more to complete… AFTER the installation has finished. Alternatively, by the time the project  is completed “cut” staff still be on the payroll, but reassigned to other positions. Tracking staff changes in a large group with significant turnover can be very difficult, as staff are continually arriving and departing due to other projects. You need to start the project with a snapshot of personnel(names, positions, status: full-time, part-time, temp, other), and specific names or positions to be reduced (see the last blog for more details). Only use reports from your HR department, not from the project sponsor. Be prepared for complex discussions when the people and positions still exist, but departments claim that reductions have occurred. Be sure you base reductions on reports that the entire team can agree on.
  4. FEEDBACK: Especially when a new Project Management Office is just getting started, you need feedback from the entire team when a project closes. Part of this is in the signoff from each group… a verifiable agreement that deliverables have been delivered, and that a completed project is completed. You also need to get feedback on how well the project went. Did everyone work well together? Are the Project Mangers fulfilling their roles properly? Is there room for improvement?  The PMO itself is one of your firm’s greatest opportunities for continuous improvement. You will not only improve the processes of the PMO, you will also spread the use of best practices, continuous improvement and other methodologies.      
  5. PROJECT SUCCESS: When you close your project, you need to indicate if the project was successful or not. Consider carefully what success means and how you will track this going forward. Were all the deliverables completed successfully? Was the project completed on or below budget? Was it delivered on or before schedule? If all deliverables were successful, the project was on budget and on schedule, did the expected outcome (faster turnaround, lower cost, better quality, development of a new group, expansion into a new market, etc.) occur? Today, as little as 5% or 10% of corporate projects are FULLY successful. All projects should have a report card, with: cost, personnel changes, schedule, objectives,  and results.  
  6. LESSONS LEARNED: Now that you’ve rated a project’s success, is it clear to you why the project succeeded or failed? You may not know the complete answer, but you will probably have learned lessons along the way that will help many future projects. This information is invaluable, yet before a formal PMO is created these lessons are often left undocumented and fade from memory before they can be reused. Document what works and document what should be avoided. Don’t just use these lessons to improve projects, use them to decide if some projects in the project portfolio should be removed, rescaled or re-estimated!
  7. POST PROJECT SUCCESS: Once the project is completed and fully closed out, what happens next? Unfortunately, what often happens is that the group you worked with… the product group… goes back to their old way of operating. The PMO has methods to track the progress of a project, but can (and will) the product group continue to track key metrics after the project is over? They may lack the processes or software to know how well their groups follow processes. You may need to help the group develop these methods (perhaps as a separate project) or you may need to have a follow-up audit, a few months after the project closes. You might be surprised to see what has (and hasn’t) changed in that time!

When every project closes, you have the opportunity to not just ensure the continuing success of this project but to also ensure the success of many future projects. The PMO provides a wealth of information on best practices, poorly performing, corrective techniques, corporate expertise (who are the experts) and knowledge repositories. By mapping the resources, spreading this knowledge and replicating valuable lessons the PMO multiplies the value of each project. At the start and end of each project you will be given access to a trove of information that can deliver great value to your firm… if you use it correctly! And that’s my Niccolls worth for today!

Posted in Best Practices, Delivering Services, Learning and Development, Project Management Office | Tagged , , , , , | 2 Comments

Building A PMO: Alpha & Omega of Project Management – Part I

Posted on November 25, 2011 by Chris Niccolls

Once you are given a mandate to build a Project Management Office (PMO), you will have taken the first of many steps to build this corporate function. But you won’t have years to develop your model, assemble a team of experts, and train the organization. Instead, you need to get started on high-priority  projects almost immediately. You need to focus on a few key elements of the PMO. Of course, you need to know the type of PMO you’re building, and you need to identify the key issues that have held back the success of your firm’s projects. But if you need to immediately launch your PMO, you need to focus on … the start and the end of your projects!

Every tool and process that your PMO puts in place can improve the success of each project. However, the processes that you put in place at the beginning and the end of each project have the ability to improve the success of EVERY project. However, even examining just  these two points in the PMO process covers a lot of ground. So, I’m going to split this into two blogs. Today, we’re going to cover the start of a project. The start of the project cycle, let’s call it the “Alpha”, is where you identify and prioritize the projects in your portfolio. Let’s examine the common steps:

  1. PORTFOLIO: A PMO is nothing without a list of projects, a project portfolio. The ability of the PMO to drive change is dependent on the quality of the portfolio. If the portfolio is filled with projects hat yield very little positive results, or that are not strongly sponsored or clearly defined, even if they are accomplished, the success may not be as great as expected. You need to either review the existing portfolio or create a new one (if one does not already exist).
  2. PROJECT IDENTIFICATION: Business should drive the identification of projects, and these projects should populate the portfolio. Of course, a business unit may not know how to identify projects, other than in terms such as “My department costs too much to operate.”  Whether projects come directly from business units and you then test their assumed value, or if you work with the business unit to define the value of the project, you need an objective method.. a common language… for defining project value and cost, which will then drive scheduling and project success.
  3. PHANTOM PROJECTS: As you transition from the old project process to a formal PMO, you will find informal and incomplete project agreements. These are “real” projects that you have not been informed of, and projects that are not ready but are starting or being completed. You need discussions with sponsors and team members to track down all of these projects, especially those without a sponsor. Expect to find projects that sponsors are not aware of, or have not signed off on. Stop these as quickly as possible, and ensure that ALL new projects have some form of Project Charter (if may be called a contract, an SOW, authorization form, or something else) that requires formal sponsor signoff.
  4. COST ESTIMATION: Cost can be difficult to accurately define, and internal projects often have misleading cost estimates. Not surprisingly, “free” elements are often ignored. The space that the sponsor’s department does not pay for, or the unused furniture sitting in a warehouse are usually thought of as free. But next year when the lease for the free space needs to be renewed or the rented furniture in the warehouse must be returned, cost structures rise. A cost-saving  project suddenly raises the cost structure. When savings are the goal, the financial assumptions must be verifiable. A PMO should have a standard set of assumptions for cost elements, and needs to challenge business assumptions when standard cost elements are missing or are unrealistically estimated.
  5. PERSONNEL ESTIMATION: Personnel are frequently part of the cost saving equation. And just as frequently, the number of positions that are reduced falls far short of the number estimated. Estimating people is very different than estimating dollars. Constraints caused by the need for “minimum organizations” often prevent the reduction of unneeded staff. If you have two workers performing the same task, and you introduce software that doubles the efficiency of that position, you should only need one worker. However, what happens when that one worker is on vacation, or out sick? Who will do the work? Instead, say you started out with five workers. Then you only need 2.5. Hmmm… can you convert a full-time worker to a part-time position, or will you need to leave staffing at 3? What if it is only one worker on each of 5 shifts or locations? Can you make any reductions at all? Understanding personnel constraints, training the firm how to estimate staff reductions accurately, and learning to put specific names or at least positions behind reductions early in the process all drive out inaccuracies.
  6. SCHEDULING: When you estimate costs, you start out with a  common understanding of money… there are 100 cents to the dollar, paper money is all the same size, nickels have different art work but are all worth 5 pennies. Too obvious to mention? Well, what are the common understandings for time estimates? How many weeks does a full-time worker work in 52 weeks? It’s not 52. A worker usually has two weeks of holidays, two weeks of sick time, and at least two weeks of vacation time. So, 52 weeks shrinks to 47. How many hours in a 40 hour week? Did you allow for lunch? What about two 15 minute breaks a day? This is required by law in many states, and it just makes sense; doesn’t every workers leave his desk for at least one cup of coffee and one bathroom break a day? That takes us from 52×40 to 47×32.5 (from 2,080 to 1,528) as a maximum of work hours. Some of your workers smoke, some have more vacation time, or have illnesses that further reduce work time. Still more time is taken up in internal meetings, training, reading emails and other time that is rarely accounted for in scheduling.
  7. HISTORICAL ACCURACY: Project history will tell you how well or poorly estimations worked in the past. Before a formal PMO is in place, historical information may be of poor quality and frequently missing. What little you find will probably show huge variations between estimates and reality for both costs and schedule. Improving accuracy in estimation both improves the value of the portfolio and client satisfaction, which in turn will improve the volume and quality of new projects. Use whatever historical information you find to add an “adjustment” to costs and schedules. If upgrades to accounting systems always tend to be delivered 30 days late and 40% over budget, add this to estimates… until the results improve.

Very broadly speaking, establishing a professional PMO creates a more reliable and effective method of delivering projects. To have the greatest impact on projects you need to do more than just establish good practices, you need to establish good REPRODUCIBLE practices. The two greatest opportunities to leverage best practices are at the start and the end of each project. At the beginning getting the estimates right, making sure that all projects in the portfolio should move forward, and ensuring that all projects reflect historical cost and schedule reality… all increase the value of your project portfolio, and kill projects that should never move forward. Our next blog will show you the opportunities you have at the end of a project to deliver value. But for today, that’s my Niccolls worth!

Posted in Best Practices, Decision Making, Delivering Services, Learning and Development, Project Management Office | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

10 Steps To Design A Project Management Office!

Posted on November 19, 2011 by Chris Niccolls

Every PMO Director has a different view on how to start up a new PMO. Most Directors will agree on the plan at 50,000 feet, but  each will have different ideas about the importance of each element and where it fits into the process. Some directors would put the selection of Software at the top of their to-do list. I view specialized project management software as a great performance booster, but not the 1st thing to implement. There is absolutely no arguing that PM software is valuable, but project management can be performed without it. A PMO without specially designed software will be less efficient, but if you are just setting up a PMO you need to deal with larger and more immediate inefficiencies, confusion and bad habits. Focus on the absolutely necessary items to ensure success. The purpose of a PMO is to identify and fill the “gap” that is holding back the success of projects. Having said that, this is a pretty good list to get you started:

  1. History: Your first priority is to collect information on previous projects and opinions from different team members and sponsors. A big part of project management is having historical information to project the accuracy of future budgets and schedules. While initial information may be weak or hard to find, collect as many measurable details as possible. Learn what is done well and what is done poorly, and especially develop an opinion on budget and schedule accuracy.
  2. Gap Analysis: What isn’t working and why? Now that you’ve collected some history, even if it is limited, begin to form an opinion about the most urgent issue. Typically, your big problem will be: budget overruns, missed deadlines, poor communication, wrong projects in the portfolio, missing stakeholders on the team, missing and incorrect approvals, or projects that never finish.
  3. Culture: How were things done before you arrived? You may hear that, “There is no process!” But that usually means, “We don’t have a GOOD process!” Alternatively, there may be MANY different and inconsistent processes. However projects are currently managed, somehow: space is acquired, software is purchased and people are hired. You need to put new processes in place, but you also need to KILL OLD PROCESSES! Remember… you were brought in to increase the control and reliability of projects. In order to do this, you need to know about the old processes so that you can effectively retire them; don’t be surprised to learn that some “informal” processes take a great deal of effort to terminate.
  4. Map approvers: Typically, before a PMO is built processes have conflicting or non-existing owners. When you don’t know who signs off on different items, a “tradition” develops of sidestepping the few processes that are known. High-ranking manager willing to rubber-stamp approvals are found, or sympathetic secretaries become accomplices by “helping” teams  to gain approvals. An effective PMO provides team members with a road map for approval. No PMO starts on day 1 with a perfect map, but over time the map develops and drives uncertainty out of the system.
  5. Estimation process: A key responsibility of the PMO is assurance of on-time and on-budget project delivery. Unfortunately, many team members don’t know how to develop accurate estimates! This causes two problems. First, your project portfolio becomes biased. Projects that cost too much to be worth doing are approved (because they are underestimated), or projects that should move forward are rejected (because too much “fat” was added to the budget or schedule). Second, poorly estimated projects that finish late or over-budget produce angry clients. Use the history data you collected in #1 to develop an estimate modifier. If projects are typically 50% over-budget, use this modifier to increase the final estimate. If the group responsible for this cost (or schedule) disagrees, then it is up to them to provide evidence that THIS project will be different than previous projects. If this modifier is unacceptable… well then we may have already identified your big problem!
  6. Communication: Each individual project needs its own communications plan, but the PMO also needs to drive a communication culture! If you’ve stepped into a situation where projects don’t work well, people are probably angry with each other and don’t communicate well. They may not even want to be in the same room. If the culture deteriorates even further, they complain about “useless emails,” meaning everyone gets a lot of emails that shouldn’t have gone to them in the first place and people who should be answering aren’t. When you get people working in groups again, and help them in their communications, this will improve. Take a look at the next item!
  7. Personal interest: New corporate groups are usually met with the same reaction, “Oh great, another waste of my time!” Because other groups were inefficient, people become cynical of new processes and may be legitimately time-constrained. The firm benefits from the greater efficiency a PMO delivers, but individual team members may not see how they personally benefit. If team members realize personal benefits, project success will rise.  If the PMO functions effectively, and gets teams to work together, the number of useless emails will drop because issues are getting resolved. When a team communicates well, they are more likely to communicate efficiently in email, rather than using it as a tool to document their issues with other team members.
  8. Process: Now that you have collected historical information, spoken to a few people and started mapping approvers, you have some idea of the internal processes of your firm. How many processes are in writing? Are they written in a standard format? Think about a template for SOP’s (Standard Operating Procedures). Find one or two “orphan” processes, and apply the template. Take the process to whoever you think is the owner and see what they think. You don’t need to document the firm’s processes, but you do need to develop support for the development of a process map that will guide project delivery. Not all at once, not all in a day… but find some opportunities to start this process.
  9. Repository: As new processes are developed, you will need to store these SOPs (as well as project material) in a repository. Don’t be surprised if you attend meetings where standards and procedures are talked about, but after the meeting you find out that no one in the meeting has ever seen these standards or knows where they can be found. Or you find that there is a repository, but you’re not  allowed access! Start your own, and make it as public as you are allowed. Make it a model that others can emulate. By providing this resource you may be able to dramatically reduce frustration on project teams, and drive needed changes in the organization.
  10. Draft design: Throughout this process you need to talk to potential stakeholders, future team members, future sponsors and others who will be involved or interested in your PMO. Not every idea can be (or should be) incorporated into your design, but the end product should reflect: the legitimate concerns of the people you work with, the gaps they have identified, and the general culture of your firm. This will guide you in determining if you should build an all-inclusive PMO that owns and staffs every projects, or a smaller organization that provides guidance and training. Or something in between.

Before you present your design to management for a final approval, run it by other stakeholders one more time. See how much or how little support you have for your design. How does this compare to the strength of your mandate? If creating a PMO is part of a much larger plan to save your firm from bankruptcy, an authoritative approach, rapid deployment and a powerful PMO may be the way to go. However, give careful thought to how you start off your PMO. No matter how strong your mandate, after your first few projects, more difficult projects with less vigorous management support may enter your project portfolio, and have fewer opportunities for success. If you build in support for your PMO model at the very start, you also build in a higher probability of ongoing project success. And that is my Niccolls worth for today!

Posted in Best Practices, Decision Making, Delivering Services, Improvement, Continuous or Not, Learning and Development, Project Management Office | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Storm Clouds Ahead: Internet Fraud Rises To New Heights

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Chris Niccolls

I’m a big advocate of moving applications to the Cloud. The Cloud is just more efficient for hosting applications than internal networks, and applications developed in the Cloud tend to be more advanced and easier to operate. The Cloud is not the end all – be all of application development, but I’ve found that Cloud services are better managed and more robust. Of course, as with any model, there are tradeoffs. You must surrender a degree of control.  You don’t get to dictate every detail of the Cloud environment; if you do retain control at this level, I’m not sure if you have a true Cloud product. With Cloud applications the surrender of certain controls is what creates the benefits you’re looking for. Moving into the Cloud generally means that you move into a shared environment. You don’t control who is on your network… your neighborhood…  instead you get a good security system to lock your data away from other users. But this week, we learned about a plot by Estonian con-men that almost wrecked the Internet, and destroyed the concept of Cloud computing.

First, let’s be clear that no matter where you are and how you access your applications, you’ve been exposed to Internet con-men. Do you get daily emails about Canadian pharmaceuticals? Ready to start your career as a secret shopper? Have you seen today’s email on mortgage refinancing?  And, sorry to say, another of your uncles in Nigeria has passed away, but he did leave you $10 million. Even inside your secure network the fingers of con-men are still trying to reach into your wallet. Generally, you need to say yes, or send an email or click on a video, but everyone comes into contact with these little scams. In a lot of ways this new attack is not much different. It’s bases on malware, software that infects your computer when you visit an infected web site or click on an email link. Then your computer joins 4 million other infected computers, and does the malware’s bidding.

This particular malware changes how your computer interprets internet addresses. When you do a search in Google, or when you are on a web site with ads, slightly different ads show up. OK. That doesn’t sound like the end of the world, does it? And yet it is. If you cannot trust the Internet to bring you to a certain destination, then it’s like driving on a highway system where criminals have changed all the signs so everyone is getting stranded in strange locations. In this particular case, rather than kidnapping the victims they decided to just sell them boot-leg products and let them go. Why did they choose this particular cyber-crime, well there is a lot of money in Internet advertising. By driving people to the wrong search results and making them see the wrong ads, they got a lot of money from people who may have not known how they did this. This was a subtle attach, making searches that should have displayed  Domino’s pizza show some other pizza company at the top of the list, and swapping ads for their client where a paid advertisement should have been.

Most users might be moderately annoyed, but would be happier if someone wrote some malware to make all the ads go away. But if you want to make illegal Internet money, this is a pretty efficient way to do it. Because it didn’t act like other malware and try to steal passwords or account information, it slipped past antivirus and spyware protection. According to international law enforcement, this is the first time there has been a mass (4 million infected computers) attach on the Internet’s addressing system (called the DNS). The Estonians chose the most profitable, and for users the least damaging, form of crime. But now that this technology is out there, it can be used for attacks: hiding the address of your Cloud services, crashing your servers by redirecting too many users, or a variety of other malicious attacks. If a criminal can control where users go to on the Internet, they can do anything they want to with your users and your clients.

Does this mean that you should stop moving applications to the Cloud? No, it doesn’t. But just as there are nasty new bacteria and viruses constantly evolving in the biological world, new forms of crime (and the technology to support it) are constantly evolving in the Cloud. Rather than fear these threats, learn from them and make sure that your plans for the Cloud account for the current environment. There are always going to be threats out there, and for every new technology there will be a new class of threats and criminals. The Cloud continues to have the incredible potential, but if you’re going to move all of your operations out there make sure that you know how everything works in this new “neighborhood. And that’s my Niccolls worth for today!

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Oracle Solaris 11: Is This The Ultimate Cloud Tool?

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Chris Niccolls

On November 9th, Oracle launched the new Solaris 11 enterprise operating system at Gotham Hall in New York. Whether or not you work for IT, Oracle’s new Solaris 11 just might change the way you work. We all know the drill… a new application is rolled out and their sales reps tell us that if you buy their product the world will be changed. Usually, the results are disappointing at best. Even good upgrades are so over-hyped that few products ever meet our expectations. However, Solaris 11 may be something different. Because of their market-leading  position, even if their product fails to work as expected, their competitors will produce similar features and move the state of the art forward. Solaris 11 is all about the Cloud and getting you to build and move applications into the Cloud. While the “Cloud” has been pretty nebulous in the past, Solaris helps to clarify why hosting a service in the Cloud can help you. Let’s take a closer look.

I’ll leave the technical detail to other Bloggers. Instead, I want to look at the structural changes Solaris 11 will bring to big corporations… your corporation. Solaris 11 is dedicated to being the world’s premier Cloud Operating System (OS). This was the theme at the launch. It may be a private cloud, a public cloud, or an internal cloud, but Oracle wants you in the Cloud. For our purposes, the “Cloud” can be defined as:

  • Distributed architecture: The operating system runs on servers, desktops, and other technologies. Processing and storage are distributed throughout the entire system, with most processing and storage happening on powerful servers and the “easy” processing of the client interfaced managed by laptops, iPads, smart phones and other devices that the user touches (although these devices can dynamically take on a larger role, when needed).
  • Designed for sharing: The system is built to maintain security between different customers when they share the same network or even the same hard drive. Sharing is a strong, well-managed core feature and not a “bolt-on” afterthought.
  • Scalable: Designed to be easily expanded or reduced in size, with little or no impact on user activities.
  • Efficient: As the system grows, it becomes more efficient and the cost for a given level of service or storage goes down. Which is why there is so much talk about everyone moving to the Cloud.

Oracle would probably make the list a lot longer, but these are the essential characteristics that drive that last and most important item… efficiency (and lower price). OK… good. But what does this version of Solaris deliver that is so important? Well, this greater efficiency comes from fixing a lot of bad habits and problems that have confronted IT. It is difficult to say if Cloud services focused on fixing these problems, or if by building in the Cloud a lot of problems were fixed indirectly. It’s a chicken and egg issue where the answer is, “Who cares!” The result  is that you benefit, and specific features of Solaris 11 will further increase improvement and force competitors to adopt similar features. Such as:

  1. De-duping: Big network have duplicate files. Backup files are examples of intentional duplication. Examples of accident duplication are: every member of a team storing copies of a document, emails copied to many users, local servers storing copies of files from distant servers to speed up performance, forgotten files, and on and on. This raises the cost of: storage, restoring crashed servers, backup equipment, bandwidth (to move around duplicate copies), etc. Because Cloud services are always moving data around, good Cloud products need to know where everything is and need to test that the files you’re moving around is the right file. Not surprisingly, during all of this testing and moving the system constantly runs into duplicate files. Solaris has used all of this intelligence on your data to identify duplication and allow you to reduce it. Duplication varies, but 10% to 80% of total storage may be duplicate data. Control duplication and you can reap a HUGE reduction in cost and improvement in performance.
  2. Automatic updates: This has been out there for a long time, and little by little it has improved. Solaris 11 provides extensive automatic updating and recommends future updates, as well as automatically checking packages of updates to verify that they will all work together. Updates (and rollbacks from bad updates) will take less time, and fewer techs with fewer skills to manage the process. That directly translates into lower costs.
  3. Fewer desktop apps: By making the Cloud a more attractive location for applications, the desktop contains less software and less data. Overall, it takes less effort to maintain software.  And again the total amount of resources needed to maintain our environment drops.
  4. Faster reboots: In very large and complex networks, when it is time to reboot the entire system everyone holds their breath and hopes to God that it all comes up all right. Because there are so many possibilities for unpredictable interactions, do very extensive testing and create elaborate plans (and add on massive amounts of staffing time) every time a reboot happens. Shorter, more predictable reboots mean lower maintenance costs.
  5. Dynamic reconfiguration:  Many network have some form of on the fly fixing or self-healing. Solaris 11 allows you to make more changes and fixes without downing your network. Solaris provides tools to identify and resolve potential problems before they happen: low on storage space, about to exceed bandwidth, running out of processor capacity, or signs that a device is about to fail. Solaris has the ability to read obscure error messages, interpret them and communicate with your staff in plain (plainer?) language about network problems. “Intelligent” features rarely live up to their hype, but Solaris is state of the art for providing useful information on the state of your network. Preventing network failures almost always cost less than fixing a failed network.

Solaris 11 is a powerful operating system that furthers the argument for moving applications to the Cloud. Solaris is a good option for large companies with different applications and operating systems coexisting on the same infrastructure, to simplify their networks, and reduce: downtime, maintenance time, and support staff. Oracle is only one of many players in the Unix Operating System Market, but Oracle’s nearly 50% share of the database market will drive users to Solaris, and dramatically both reduce long standing inefficiencies and move maintenance tasks from people to automated systems.

If you mange an IT department, you should take a look at the cost of duplicated files and maintenance and work with your project managers to see if there is a business case for converting systems. If you are a service provider that has high IT bills, you should start talking to your Project managers and IT groups to understand just how  much of your costs come from avoidable expenses. Solaris is just part of a much larger wave of changes in corporate computing, but it something that you need to keep an eye on. At least, that’s my Niccolls worth for today!

Posted in Best Practices, Common Sense Contracting, Decision Making, Delivering Services, Improvement, Continuous or Not | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Supercharging PMOs With Networking & Technology

Posted on November 2, 2011 by Chris Niccolls

In  our last Blog we talked about the challenges facing project management and performance improvement programs: projects running over-budget  and behind schedule, projects that never reach completion, growing your group and maintaining high quality and high payback results. We also discussed that the most visible trend in project management is the move towards higher credentials. Not necessarily the worst trend, but definitely not the most effective move for most project management groups (see the last blog). Today, we’re going to talk about some alternatives.

In our last Blog I compared the management of a Project Management Office (PMO) to a gold mine. As you continue to take the gold out of a gold mine, the cost to extract every additional ounce of gold from the mine increases (or performance declines). The only way to turn this around is to change your own processes to increase productivity. In other words,  the PMO must use project management and process improvement techniques to improve productivity. The best option to drive ever increasing performance is… surprise… technology! The two best technologies to drive higher performance are: project management software and social media sites.

The first, project management software, is pretty easy to understand. Even basic project management software can take over a lot of simple functions that take up a lot of time: storing the schedule, sending out notices when deliverables become due, reminding PM’s about upcoming events, maintaining mailing lists, etc. PM software is not only very good at performing these functions, but it can free up a lot of time for higher-level  functions. Full-featured PM applications identify and analyze project interdependencies, which is increasingly on larger more complex projects, and with clusters of related projects. In my own experience as a PMO director and in speaking with my peers, managing interdependencies and interactions between projects is one of the most important aspects of PMO management. The bigger you get, the more interactions you need to manage, and the greater the chance of cascading project failure if interactions are not properly managed.

A good project management application will have many more features, and there are many applications to choose from. Take a look at what is constraining your projects, or is not working as well as possible and find application that will drive a higher level of success. Once you have the right PM software in place, now you want to start working with a good social media site.  Some of you may be thinking, “How can Facebook help me with a global software upgrade, or the roll-out of new service centers to our branch offices?,” or any other project for that matter. Well, while some businesses have claimed great success with Facebook,  MySpace or Twitter, I  don’t think they have the right features for project management. Instead, I would turn to Linked-In and emerging networking sites like Op-Spark.

Let’s look at how Linked-In can help you. Just about every PM or improvement school (Six Sigma, Agile, Scrum, PMP, Prince2, SDLC, etc.) tells you to make use expert opinions at some point in the project life-cycle. In the past, we were limited in how much we could use expert opinions depending on who we knew or which experts we could afford to hire. Linked-In has vastly increased our ability to obtain expert opinions and decreased the cost. Linked-In has 150,000,000 users (and growing). If you put a little effort into building your network, you can reach out to a vast number of experts in just about any field, no matter how specific. Linked-In allows you to perform comprehensive searches on the skills, education and interests of other Linked-In users so that you can find the specific individual (or individuals) with the skills you need. You can find the professionals who already completed the very project you are working on now. If you can’t find the expert you need, you can ask questions in the “ANSWERS” section, or in a professional group to identify who has the experience you need.

Linked-In allows you to build huge, comprehensive, networks of experts with very specific skills and experience. If you build a big network you can ask that network questions like, “What is the average cost for a project like this?,” or “Do you have experience in deploying this product,” or “Tell me your experience in working with this vendor.”   Or any other question that will help you to move a project forward or successfully close a project. You can ask about secrets of success, and you can ask why projects failed. You can even ask for opinions on consultants and vendors you plan on hiring.

Networking was around long before the Internet, but Internet based networking adds two incredible benefits. First, the numbers are so large (150,000,000 Linked-In users) that with just a little effort, you can find any skill you want. Second, everyone on these networks WANTS TO BE FOUND. Unlike finding experts in the phone book, or through a Google search, professionals you find on Linked-In… want you to talk to them! They are so keen on having conversations with people about their professions that they have taken the time to write their profiles and update you on their activities. This population truly wants you to contact them! If all you get out of Linked-In is the occasional conversation with an expert that can tell you what you shouldn’t do, and thereby remove projects from your portfolio that are doomed to fail or redesign projects so that they can succeed, you will significantly improve the effectiveness of your organization!

We need to remember that even though project management and process improvement provides us with phenomenal tools, most of these tools are old… very old. Six Sigma and the Project Management Institute (PMI) were founded in the 80s. The tools they use were developed between the turn of the last century and the 50s. Some techniques go back even further. Not just project managers use these tools, and many of the concepts of efficiency, measurement and improvement of processes, budgeting and scheduling, and management of communications are used in a variety of positions outside of the PMO.  In order to drive greater efficiency, or even just maintain existing productivity, we NEED to use new techniques and new technology. Project management software and professional networks built from social network sites are our best bet to energize our PMO’s and increase the success of our projects. And that’s my Niccolls worth for today!

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Have You Mined-Out Your Project Portfolio?

Posted on October 31, 2011 by Chris Niccolls

Tunnel Construction

More than ever before, corporations are focused on project management and performance improvement techniques to fix long-standing inefficiencies in operations. The problem is that as these methodologies expand throughout major corporations, executives are finding that Project Management Offices (PMOs) and other improvement groups have their own problems with inefficiencies.

Not every project comes to a successful conclusion. Projects are completed late, come in over-budget, are only partially completed or have their benefits overstated or badly estimated. Some projects may even complete successfully, such as a more effective way to manufacture a part, but the new process may not make it into production. Needless to say, the C-Suite is not happy. According to one study, 67% of corporations feel that project results are inadequate. Today, we’re going to look at why PMO performance can decline over time.

The most visible trend in corporate project management/improvement is a rising requirement for technical certifications. Generally, more education or training or testing and certification is a good idea. More knowledgeable workers, are usually better workers. However, like every other solution, education has its limits and no one solution will fix every problem. The question is, “Is higher education and more certifications the most effective way for a new or growing PMO to improve results?” Let’s take a closer took:

Cost: Raising the requirements for certification and education has a cost. For a new PMO that is building its initial staff, there is a temptation to request as many qualifications as possible, because you don’t know if or when you will get more staff. Raising the bar for educational requirements means higher pay, more training and testing. By all means, ask for the right qualifications, but when you ask for more… are you sure it will deliver a tangible benefit?

Time: If you have an established PMO organization, it takes time to train everyone. Don’t just account for the time to attend classes and pass tests. If you believe that this training will change the performance of your group, you need to allow the time for the training to be absorbed by the trainees (three months, six months?), time to re-write your group’s documentation and processes so that they reflect better management of projects, and the additional time that every project will require when you follow a more rigorous set of procedures.

Effectiveness: Ultimately, will increasing the requirements for every project manager prove to be the most effective way to improve the success, the cost and the timeliness of projects in your organization? Does your PMO lack an understanding of how to management projects or does it not follow its own procedures? Will education of the staff change this, and by how much?

When a PMO is implemented in a corporation, it rarely leaps fully formed into production. It takes time to sell the idea to the firm, and the first version of the PMO is usually quite limited. Still, even a limited organization can have a big impact. The earliest projects in your portfolio likely to have: a high degree of urgency, strong agreement, and exceptional visibility. When PMOs survive this first round of projects, it sets a pretty high bar for expectations, in terms of savings and impact on the organization. But these early projects were less complex and enjoyed greater support than many of the projects that followed. Your PMO is becoming better skilled. However, the change in the quality of projects makes it appear that your results are flattening out or are on the decline. When seeing this trend, many PMO managers assume that boosting of skills and training can overcome increasing organizational friction. And it might. But there may be better options.

Rather than focusing on the qualifications of your staff, let us instead consider the value of the projects in your project portfolio. Project management bears a great deal of similarity to gold mining. Gold strikes are often “one-offs.” The gold could be a single nugget, or it could be a vein of gold that runs for a few inches or for miles. What you can see today only hints at all that is in the mine, because the mother lode hidden out of sight. Some mines don’t have a single vein of gold, instead the gold is scattered throughout the mine in tiny particles. Some of the most successful mines were “mined out,” but later revisited when new technology could profitably work a mine with lower concentrations of gold. Early success in your PMO may have “mined-out” the easiest, most profitable and least resisted projects. As your PMO expands, the decline in benefits and project success rates may merely reflect the changing concentrations of “gold” in your project portfolio, leading to a declining value per project.

Demanding more credentials can bring about some improvements, just as digging deeper might deliver more gold. But, if your PMO already contains a good deal of expertise and consistently follows its processes, the degree of improvement from adding more skills may be very incremental. Especially if the source of your decline is the changing nature of your projects, rather than the expertise of your project managers.

Lets go back to our analogy of the gold mine. If your mine started out with a big vein of fold, but that vein was quickly exhausted, continuing to use the same mining techniques or even “doubling down” and increasing your mining operations may not be very productive. A gold mine may change mining techniques over a long period of time, changing techniques as the extraction of gold changing the mine from a large vein, to pickets of gold nuggets to fine particles trapped in tons of matrix materials and earth. A PMO may start with high-visibility projects with big benefits, powerful advocates and universal support. Over time, this vein of projects may be exhausted, and you will move on to projects that are perhaps less connected, sort of “nuggets” that may not be quite a high profile or high benefit. When these projects become less frequent, they may be replaced by projects without a specific financial or performance benefit (“cost of doing business” or mandatory projects, required by a law or regulation, or perhaps by internal rules). Other projects may have increasingly difficult politics or other constraints.

Over time, a PMO might need to change techniques, as success in projects becomes more elusive. Matching the process to the project, and the PMO to the culture, is important. Well-known tools such as the Project Management Institutes PMBOK is not a true methodology. It is just a body of knowledge…. a cookbook. It is up to the PMO to take these tools and convert it into a methodology that works in your organization.

Unfortunately, when we look at the numbers it appears that most PMO’s have failed to match their methodology to their project portfolio. One source claims that only 5% of projects are completed on-time and on-budget. A study of Six Sigma projects identified a failure rate of between 30%-80%, and studies of PMP led projects provide similar failure rates. Remember that many studies only use one or two criteria for a successful project or are based on a vague definition of success. Fully successful projects (on time, on budget, with the expected return on investment) might be even harder to find.

PMOs are almost always a big advancement over whatever process they replaced. However, as many of the PMO managers know, few pre-PMO efforts produced any reliable project statistics. The development of PMO is a BIG step forward. But the C-Suite is not always aware of these nuances and is unhappy with the results that most PMOs are delivering.

When your mine starts to run out of gold, what can you do? Well, the first thing you can do is to read my next blog! Hey! This is a big subject and takes more than one blog to solve! In
the next blog, we’re going to look at how technology can help us find new value in our gold mines…. Ummm… I meant project portfolios. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it… and that’s my Niccolls worth for today!

Posted in Best Practices, Delivering Services, Expectations and Rewards, Improvement, Continuous or Not, Learning and Development, Unique Ideas | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

4th Sigma: Napoleon’s Rabbits & Identifying Best Practices

Posted on October 10, 2011 by Chris Niccolls

Don’t you hate it when an overblown public debate is started by the questionable use of a single phrase or word (probably half of the debates in Washington these days)? However, there are times when just one-word  matters. In, “The Book Of General Ignorance,” by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson, amusingly challenges what we think we know. The answer to the question, “What’s the word for Napoleon’s most humiliating defeat?,” is not Waterloo but is instead rabbits. Why? Well, after Napoleon defeated Russia and signed a peace treaty in Tilsit, he wanted to celebrate with a (rabbit) hunting party. Since the French consumed the last wild rabbits long ago, new rabbits were released in the woods. Unfortunately, these were domesticated rabbits (another one-word  mistake!) and didn’t
know how to feed in the wild. When Napoleon’s party arrived, these starving rabbits all had the same thought, “The little guy with the big hat must be here to feed us! Charged by thousands of rabbits, Napoleon fought a brave retreat to his carriage and locked himself inside until he was rescued. Not surprisingly, this story is rarely mentioned in official history books.

Sometimes a single phrase does matter. If I were to pick the most misused phrase corporate managers deal with, it would be… best practices. Every manager is told that they should follow best practices. Who signs up to follow “worst practices”? But then you’re told that peers are doing something that you’re not, so you must not be following the best practices. Well, if everyone else is doing it, it may be a standard practice, but it’s not a
best practice. Then again, if everyone else in your industry is following a practice, who are you to say that they’re not right? I thought we would clear this up by going over the four rules of best practices:

  1. Standard is never best: If everyone is doing exactly the same thing, then no one has any advantage. Then, by definition this can’t be a best practice. There’s always a better way to do just about everything. New technologies and techniques are constantly being developed, giving rise to new best practices every day. Of course, today’s standard may have once been a best practice, but probably not anymore. Why?  Because…
  2. It takes time to become a standard: Let’s take corks, they became the universal standard for closing a wine bottle. It took centuries for adoption, but by the 20th century 99% of wine bottles used a cork. Corks were an improvement on the devices they replaced, but corks have a high failure rate when compared to any other beverage. Yet, the assumption that corks were the “best” practice held
    back the adoption of much better solutions. By the time the next-best  solution is universally adopted, something better will probably be available because….
  3. The best practice hasn’t been adopted yet: Something better is always on the horizon. Finding that something new is every project manager’s goal. Looking at our cork issue, the screw top cap is a better solution, but some might say it’s unaesthetic or broadcasts “low quality.” Synthetic corks that never dry out came a bit later. Today, glass corks are beginning to show up. Whichever one winds the only thing that we can be sure of is that by the time one of these best practices becomes the standard, the next-best practice will be waiting to be discovered.
  4. Different… even better…  isn’t always better: Just because you’ve broken from the pack with a different practice, doesn’t mean that you’ve found a best practice. If there is an industry standard, develop a benchmark so that you know if the new practice is measurably better. Are there any other competing or emerging practices? For example, in our competition of new corks, does one device clearly dominate in terms of cost, aesthetics and reliability? Is there a tightly contested field of multiple better practices, or does any one solution stand out and the best?

Best practices are more than a question of semantics. Whatever the industry has standardized as a practice is probably an obsolete best practice. If you adopt a best practice used by a significant minority of your peers, it may still be a best practice, but it’s value is already fading. The most effective best practice is the one that has just been discovered, but it is also going to be the most controversial. If you think you have a best
practice, understand how well competing practices work, and clearly measure the advantages of your new practice. Even if your new practice has a clear benefit, do competing practices provide more than just one type of benefit?  Make sure that you understand the strengths and weaknesses of your practice.

Remember, when you put something new in place it’s perfectly natural for others to challenge you to explain why you chose to be different. Being able to explain and measure the benefits that make your practice the best practice will allow you drive change, and improvement, more quickly. So, if it’s choosing the best cork or feeding the rabbits, never stop pursuing your best practice! And that’s my Niccolls worth for today!

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