Technology and Organizations

In August 2009 Stewart Mader wrote a blog post focused on expanding our thinking of enterprise wikis beyond wikipedia-style documents. As I think about many of the E2.0 projects my organizational design students are taking on this quarter, I’d like to share Stewart’s 8 ideas here and see if we can’t add a couple.

Here are Stewart’s 8 (please see his full post for his explanations. Comments and links here are my own):

• 1. Meeting Agendas
• 2. Meeting Minutes & Action Items
• 3. Project Management

These top three are my top three as well. A wiki is “a website that allows the easy creation and editing of any number of interlinked web pages via a web browser….” They are my top three partially because the use is so straight-forward. We all know what the task is; this is just expansion of how the task gets done. They are also my top three because they are so important — and yet often overlooked in organizational practice. No agenda means that it’s impossible to come prepared to the meeting, yet agendas are left out every day. A wiki approach is emergent and social (and thus at the heart of Enterprise 2.0) and intertwines a simple technology into the critical organizational practices of good project management. Please see an earlier post for some basic examples.

• 4. Gather Input — Keep in mind that wikis are all editable websites/documents. This means Google Docs and Google Spreadsheets are in the mix (as well as other web-based document tools provided by other companies). I see at least two dimensions here: gathering input from a group of people (Stewart’s focus) and gathering information from yourself. Regarding the latter, I recently avoiding paying over $100 for an iPhone/on-line logbook capability by building it myself using Google Forms. Any basic survey can be built in Forms and then the form tool deposits the information directly into the on-line spreadsheet (also available off-line if you are using Google Gears.) The iPhone/smartphone capability comes from saving the survey’s web address as an icon on the screen.
• 5. Build Documentation -- I see this one as being useful both in terms of meeting output and in terms of all written work-products. I have moved from being an evangelist of wikis as how to run group writing efforts to being not so passively aggressive about wiki-based group writing as my only approach. I’ll be the first to acknowledge that you often eventually have to move the document into a real word processor for final formatting -- but I bet this won’t always be the case (and I suspect isn’t the case for purpose-built tools like ZOHO Writer -- hmmm. I’ll have to check out the Microsoft Word support…). I’ll also be first to acknowledge that you and your co-authoring team have to become comfortable with sharing “alpha drafts.”
• 6. Assemble and Reuse Information -- Link away! Not only can you cut and paste easily if you have access to all of your organization’s documents — but you can also help your documents live through links. Linking (rather than cutting and pasting) means that the material stays in sync.
• 7. Employee Handbook -- I was in a waiting room for a while Sunday night and happened to sit by a TV playing Undercover Boss — Waste Management. In the episode, the President & COO of Waste Management, Larry O’Donnell, anonymously takes on a variety of entry-level jobs within his company. This is an eye-opening experience for him and he seeks ways to reduce some of the frustrations he finds in the field. What if he opened the Employee Handbook up as a wiki, at least for comments (and maybe they do…)? Is there risk for misuse? Sure there is a risk, but according to Andrew McAfee (Chapter 6), the incidence of bad behavior on wikis and blogs seems to be inconsequential — these are typically not anonymous.
• 8. Knowledge Base — Stewart distinguishes this use from Documentation in that he faces it externally. He gives an example of a moderated (the company checks changes before they are added) wiki that allows customers to see the help wiki and make contributions.

So, how many items can we add to Stewart’s list? I suspect the number will become quite large as more and more of our work moves to the web, but for a start:

• 9. Make Decisions -- Not only can we gather input, but we can make the decision via the wiki as well. The result is that we can always go back and track how we got to the decision we made.

You knew I’d get to ten…

• 10. Work — Over the last year, my bias has become wiki unless proven otherwise. My documents are in the cloud and I share files or full folders as default. As a result I am pushed to practice TOP Management (weaving together technology, organizations, people) as I think about the tools I have available, the practices the working group should focus on, and the skill set of the people in the group (see discussion of how to do a team audit here). Ideally our transfer of material to the cloud/wiki/team portal occurs passively — as part of just doing the task — rather than as a separate action. For example, if we are communicating via email with attachments of our working document, we have to actively save and sync our work. If we instead just work via the cloud/wiki/team portal the work and conversation are already there — passively with no extra effort.

What I missed?

Common Craft’s Explanation of Cloud Computing:

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I’ve known Peter Weill, co-author of IT Savvy: What Top Executives Must Know to go from Pain to Gain, since our days on the faculty at the Melbourne Business School. I was a visitor during my summers, while Peter and his colleague Marianne Broadbent were full-timers and doing the top research focused on IT business value. Peter is now Chairman of the Center for Information Research at MIT. (I hope to follow up with Marianne soon!)

Of course the title of Weill & Ross’ new book, IT Savvy, jumped out at me given my colleagues’ and my work on Systems Savvy. I find IT Savvy to be a beautiful, more organizational-level, companion to Systems Savvy.

Systems Savvy: The human capability to grasp the possible functions of technology tools and organizational practices and how these might be meshed to best effect. People with SysSavvy understand that technologies and practices are intertwined and they know how to make design adjustments to both the technology and the practice to effectively weave them together. We see SysSavvy as distinct from expertise, but more on that when our data are in…. Systems Savvy is critical to the ability to practice TOP Management.

IT Savvy: “…a characteristic of firms and their managers reflected in the ability to use IT to consistently elevate firm performance. Like savoir faire, IT savvy looks effortless from the outside. But IT-savvy firms distinguish themselves from others by building and using a platform of digitized processes” (p. 23).

My reading of this is that IT Savvy firms have managers who themselves have Systems Savvy. While Systems Savvy can be used beyond strategic information technology — when focused on the strategic issues described by Weill & Ross, the benefits to the organization are clear.

Weill and Ross note that IT Savvy is a rarity:

IT-savvy firms are not necessarily high-tech firms. In our research we have encountered only a small number of IT-savvy firms. Without exception, these firms use IT to “wire in” core transactions, and they use the data from their core transactions to inform decision making. Our list of IT-savvy firms includes highly successful new-age e-businesses such as Amazon, eBay, and Google. But long-established brick-and-mortar firms can also become IT savvy. Take, for example, 7-Eleven Japan, United Parcel Service, and Procter & Gamble (p.24).

Though rare, IT Savvy matters:

Our research found that firms that are above average on both IT savvy and IT spending have margins 20 percent higher than industry average. In contrast, firms with less than average spending and savvy have margins 32 percent lower than their industry (p.121)

What does it take to become IT Savvy? A business transformation that includes:

• Fixing what’s broken about IT – broken accountability and decision making
• Building a digitized platform – a base that provides stable core operations
• Exploiting the platform for profitable growth – leading change and driving value from this new asset

IT Savvy is full of clear examples (many based on their own research) and steps to take. Weill & Ross provide an assessment tool and the ability to compare your own firm with others. I found myself drawn in by their ability to answer questions I’ve had for a while. For example, In February 2008 I wrote a post about Southwest Airlines’, then new, boarding process. I was impressed with the success of Southwest’s complex implementation of the required technology, organization, and people components (showing TOP Management) and noted, “I’d also love to hear how Southwest came to manage the process in the way they did. Do they have this social and technical focus for all of their changes?” IT Savvy gives me the answer: Yes, they do!

The top thirty leaders of the company each sit on two or more strategy teams so they can inform their colleagues of services and needs within their own functional area while learning about the operations of other functional areas. The teams propose enterprise IT projects, which are reviewed by the firm’s executive committee in establishing project priorities. Around 80 percent of Southwest’s technology projects are aligned with one of the strategy teams. pp. 87-89.

I used McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 book in my Organizational Design course this term. I think IT Savvy is the perfect next step (rubber meeting the road) for those students who continue on to my Managing Technology & Innovation course. My highest praise: IT Savvy was the first professional book to make it to my B&N Nook.

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Not all TOP Management stories start with a success. Technology projects can develop a life of their own, sometimes to the detriment of what is best for the organization and the individual teams involved. Brett Colbert, now VP of Enterprise Architecture at McAfee, gave me a great example from his early management career at Cisco. This is a story of how it is much more difficult to kill a project than to make the adoption decision — but when the killing is done well it can demonstrate an example of TOP Management by all involved. This is a story of how people and organization/management are tied to the heart of technology development, death, and resurrection — A Phoenix Project

Brett’s story:

A mentor suggested that Brett take on a new assignment: eContact. The project would give him a bigger role and broad visibility given the diversity of sub-teams involved.

I started doing some analysis and saw that pretty much every category related to general project management was broken or in the red: Quality component that’s being managed – No; Code being saved with source control – No; Right level of exec buy-in or change management – No. After about 2 months I went back to Andy [the mentor and overall manager] and said, “Each individual problem is solvable, but altogether it’s not. It’s a death march and we’re way off course.” Andy replied, “I was afraid you were going to say that, I agree with you. A rare occurrence, but we have to stop.”

They were 20 Million USD into this project at the time.

If you were talk to each person individually they’d say yes, kill it. But when you brought people together there was this strong desire to meet the culture of stretch goals that’s embedded at Cisco. People could not resist but to say, “We can fix anything! We can do anything!”

Even the most rational people, when you tried to put the breaks on things, pushed back — even though deep down they knew it wasn’t fixable. It was a big epiphany for me in terms of the desire for people to be able to prove or stay on course with these incredible stretch goals. They lose the ability to judge what’s reasonable, what’s impossible, what’s stretch [doable, but challenging].

Generally when management scholars talk about “escalation of commitment” it’s to say that tons of good money was thrown after bad (think Denver Airport baggage handling system). Not so in this case, though it wasn’t easy:

It took eight weeks to put the breaks on it… with a lot of analysis. Went back through the criteria that make a good project. This is where it got politically challenging. You want to be honest of how bad things are but you don’t want to focus on the people. The people are trying their hardest. You don’t want them to feel bad. We built a lot of collateral around why we were red in so many places. We’d over stretched as a company, group, team.

What was more important than finding a scapegoat was doing a reset. Tried to separate the people from the failure…. They were busting their butts, giving up holidays. Generally the team was doing what it was being asked.

Next came a request to present at the World-Wide IT Managers’ Conference. Brett’s boss said, “This is such an awesome example of success.” Brett replied, “I just killed a 20 million dollar project….” Boss, “Get up in front of 500 IT managers and tell the story of how you killed this thing.” Brett gave presentation and says his friends still laugh about it. Remember, this is at the beginning of Brett’s career. The amount of support from management was critical. They said, “you never learn when things are going great.” Smart management.

Ironically, a year later, after rebuilding their reputation, the same team went after the same problems — structured it right from the beginning. Focused on all of the lessons learned: starting off with change management, managing scope, exec support. Hugely successful. They will harken back that those were some of the greatest days: On time delivery, camaraderie, hitting stretch goals.

I asked Brett, “Given that most escalation of commitment stories end badly, what would you say made this one different?” His answer was the aforementioned management support and the follow-on:

Ultimately jumping back into the same problem and solving it: Having the right people, right roles, right player position…. You may want so badly to solve problem X, team may want to take it on, the business is there — but if you don’t have the right people stop until you do…. If you don’t have an org change management plan, it really isn’t the individual contributor’s problem. If you haven’t managed scope, it really isn’t the individual contributor’s problem.

I opened by saying that this was an example of TOP Management by all involved. It was a technology project with all the risks of technology projects everywhere: scope creep, complexity, etc. What made it TOP Management was the clear understanding that the problems weren’t about the technology. The problems were about the goals (organizational issues) and extreme motivation and commitment (peoples’ responses to the goals). Killing the project required being about to see all three aspects (technology, organization, and people) at once — seeing that there was no hope given the three aspects as they stood — and making a tough choice. Resurrecting the project was also TOP Management. The basic technology goal was still sound. Managing the organization and people issues with the lessons learned from the first go-round tied the process together.

More on Escalation of Commitment:

• Barry Staw: Knee Deep in the Big Muddy (pdf)
• Mark Keil & colleagues: Why Software Projects Escalate (pdf)

I’m always looking for examples of success or failure that demonstrate the tight ties between technology, organization, and people.  Contact me directly or post a comment below — I’d love to hear your story.

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Jennifer Kenny, CEO and co-founder of Social Thought Matters, is a geologist by training.  She notes that geology is systems thinking at its most fundamental.  She’s spent the last 25 years integrating technology and business and this systems background has been critical to her success.   I had the pleasure of interviewing Jennifer this week about her experiences.  (Thanks for the connection, Queene!) We focused on how to help others understand and practice systems thinking, or in my words, how do you help them become TOP Managers – managers able to weave technology, organizations, and people together for effective solutions?Jennifer made it very clear that people don’t learn TOP Management via training.  Training is typically about information people are supposed to learn – you know some information and they’re supposed to learn it.  Systems thinking is better demonstrated through helping people “mobilize their own ideas.”

I asked Jennifer if she could give me an example of how you would do this in a real work situation.

Her story:

A friend had taken a new job managing a several-hundred person loan processing support group at a bank. Things weren’t going well with the workflow and the group was working to implement a multi-million dollar workflow technology to solve the problem.  The project was having a rough time and her friend was frustrated with their progress.  She asked Jennifer’s team to take a look as consultants.

Jennifer asked, “What would happen if the people were involved?” Given the friend wasn’t happy with the current work the loan processing group was doing, she wasn’t sure that participation would have much to offer — but ok, give it a shot.  They put a hold on the technology implementation work and instead looked at human cooordination.  About 10% of the group were asked (and agreed) to attend workshops on how to design their own processes.  Note that these were workshops about taking different perspectives (loan processors’, salespeoples’) and learning a new process (how do you learn about the different organizational roles and the related performance goals that people in the different roles work with?). This was not training focused in learning facts/information/details that someone else had prepared.

Next step was for the full group to meet with the Senior VP of the group and Jennifer’s team.  The SVP was clear: unanimous support was needed to move ahead, or the consultants would be out and they’d go back to the earlier approach. …let the tension build…  Did the subgroup that went through the workshops really believe in the new approach?  Was the subgroup able to convey the same enthusiasm to the full group of several hundred?

Unanimous approval.  The participative approach was rolled out to the full group and later on to three other groups.  They kept the hold on the technology and ended up with a minor modification to what they already had.  ”350 people came back to us and said ‘I’m enjoying work I’ve always hated before.’”

Helping this group practice TOP Management wasn’t about training — Jennifer says these workshops were,

joint design sessions… We knew that they knew a 1000 times more about their actual work than we did — training wouldn’t make sense.  Instead, we helped them tap into their knowledge using the common language about their work — mobilization of their own ideas.  Joint design, metrics and analysis.  Collaboration and co-invention is what’s going on. We were precipitating versus leading…  Doing systems work is being able to listen.  Deep listening.

Deep listening was being demonstrated and supported.

[We showed that] the way that they’ve been trained to do was input-process-output.  They had no understanding of the bigger game they were playing in.  We [helped them see] that was how their work had been designed and that was why the handoffs were problematic, no context.

For example, the loan processing group hadn’t understood that the sales part of the business had quotas.  Only by listening did this part of the context become clear.

We also brought the sales folks into design with them. Up to then sales had been the people who screamed when they didn’t get what they wanted.  Next was to show all of them working across an entire system, rather than each person as a single cog.  Then they saw context upon context and why it all connected.  Once people begin to get context, they start looking for it themselves. Gave them the bigger picture.

The results speak for themselves (as measured by the bank’s own customer satisfaction team):

• 13% increase in customer satisfaction in a 3-month period
• 4% increase in responsiveness
• 10% improvement in quality of service for performance in documentation, credit and collateral

This was the first interview where I focused on how you teach others to be TOP Managers.  In prior discussions (here, here, & here) I’ve been more concerned about specific examples, or how people learned to become TOP Managers themselves (here & here).  My take away from Jennifer’s story is that you don’t train people to be TOP Managers — you help them develop their own systems savvy by suggesting new lenses for seeing their own role, the situations of the people around them, how the policies and practices of their organization link to their role and those of others, and how technology can be intertwined — or not.  Please comment below with strategies you’ve practiced or seen for helping others develop the systems savvy needed for TOP Management.

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We all understand that talent, especially software talent, is spread world-wide. We all also have a basic understanding that the virtual work form required to harness this global talent is different from face to face work — even with all our fancy technologies and increased experience at working “together apart.” Successful virtual work requires explicit consideration of the technology tools, the organizational practices, and the people involved — T-O-P Management. For Stuart DeSpain of Microsoft, the intertwining is very explicit in the form of: One Team, Many Places.

Stuart is the Principal Program Manager Lead in the Excel for the Mac group at Microsoft. Suzanne Kirkpatrick had referred me to Stuart as “one of the pioneers” when I asked her if she knew of people who practiced TOP Management. I knew Suzanne was right the minute I got on the call with Stuart.

Stuart, like most of the people I talk to who practice TOP Management, has a strong dose of systems savvy. He is able to see all three categories of his technology, organization, and people options, and then can envision how these options could be intertwined for a strong result. But where did he get this system savvy and how did he come to weave the pieces together in practice?

I posed the following to Stuart:
“It would help if you could tell me a story or relate to me an experience you have had in which you learned an important lesson about technology, organizations, and people. Something where you learned something that you wouldn’t find in a book.”

His initial response was that he didn’t think he’d approached the issues systematically. But as he got into his example — the expansion of the Excel for the Mac group — I could see both an explicitness and intentionality around how he thought about the group’s overall design and practice:

[Virtual work is] part of our DNA: For fifteen years the Mac business unit has spanned two locations: Redmond [Microsoft HQ in Washington state] and Silicon Valley [California]. This was not so much a plan, it’s just how it happened. So we’ve built up a lot of comfort with the phone and video conferencing. That [background] helped us think about building additional capacity abroad….

We decided that one of the big centers of talent was Beijing. Great graduates, eager people…. our challenge was to set it up right. I’ve observed that when engineering campuses aren’t located across the street from each other that there’s a desire to treat the [away] campuses as vendors: give them specific tasks, throw them over the wall… “call us if there is an emergency, otherwise, call us when it’s done.”

I didn’t think that a “vendor” approach would work well for us. We really couldn’t just box up Excel as it’s an integral part of a system; it’s part of Office. We wanted to do it right. Initially leaders sat down as a group and set out clear a vision statement as collective: One Team, Many Places. We use this phrase all the time: presentations, meetings… hammering that that is what we are. Not Excel in Redmond and Excel in Beijing. An Excel team across many campuses.

Catchy phrase and the key to effective distributed development success. The phrase acknowledges the role of people in TOP Management. As people we focus on people who are close to us. We have to work, be intentional, to focus on people who are afar.

But Stuart and the Excel team didn’t only think about the social psychology of the situation. They also carefully considered the role of technology tools and organizational practice.

We worked hard on how to translate that high level goal into very specific unifying actions. At every stage — One Team Many Places. How are we going to deliver that no matter the situation? Travel, teleconferences, other tools… We settled on the idea of summits. The idea is to treat it like a trade show. Every six months one side or other would fly — spend a week, like a family reunion, catching up. If there were presentations that one side or other didn’t get to see, we’d show them. We’re walking into our 4th summit next week.

Even more impactful are the one on one or small group interactions. These lead me to see a lot of benefit to sharing a meal or drink or social experience. Summits included a lot of activity around tech problems, but evening social experiences bond the team so they think of themselves as a single tribe. Our pulse for summits is about every six months. But in a team located in the same hallway you’d see people once a week or daily….

To manage the time between the summits they focus on individual travel from both sides and high interaction teleconferencing. Even the teleconferencing is intentional, not just casual. The team is well aware of how one side could dominate the conversation and that there may be compromises due to bandwidth issues, configuration, the need to use the screen to show software features rather than faces, etc. There can be a heavy premium to using video, but they think it’s worth it and design practices to manage the complexity:

We made it clear that it’s worth 15 minutes of set up if that’s what it takes. We have a note taker who scribes the meeting and projects the notes as subtitling. In addition we have an instant messaging conduit — if someone can’t interrupt another way, they can use that.

The note taking and additional instant messaging conduit are their “fall backs.” The team is well aware of the limitations of video conferencing and actively manages the process to get keep the best “pulse” for the team no matter what the communication mode. They actively weave together each of the technology, organization, and people dimensions of their work and interaction.

I asked Stuart how he knew that they needed to focus on One Team, Many Places. Basically, where did he get this systems savvy? A critical experience seems to be the key, as it was for Earl Lawrence, Eugene Lee, and Suzanne Kirkpatrick. Ten years ago he’d worked on a team where his group was in the role of being the smaller, afar portion of a virtual project. The “center of decision” was not at his site. Objectives would be set, then change, then change again. “We were miserable. We were disconnected from our own fate.”

Hindsight has been valuable. On reflection Stuart says he came to understand that the partner company was great, but didn’t yet understand how to work with remote campuses. What his local group thought was an issue of lack of communication given their remote location really had more to do with the youth of the partner firm. They were still in a growth mode that meant objectives would change:

It had nothing to do with geography, just their being a new company. If we’d just talked about it, if we’d gone out for drinks during a visit and just talked about the mission. It we’d had the single conversation it would have changed the dynamic.

So, Stuart says he is always aware of that experience and is sensitive to the fact that the larger portion of the team will always be perceived as “where the good stuff happens,” unless there is intentional effort to be One Team, Many Places.

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