Technology and Organizations

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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So you want to learn how to weave technology, organizations, and people together into a powerful organization… Then set yourself to a challenge. Suzanne Kirkpatrick (Microsoft) says her epiphany regarding the need to work with all three TOP dimensions at once came during Strong Angel III, an international disaster-response demonstration attended by over 800 practitioners from more than 200 organizations across the public and private sectors, government, NGOs, and academe.

Suzanne Kirkpatrick

..an informal demonstration designed as a laboratory for experimenting with cutting-edge techniques and technologies to facilitate improved cooperation and information flow across the civil-military boundary in post-disaster and post-conflict field environments. In order to facilitate creative friction at the interstitial boundaries, the Strong Angel committee chose not to incorporate as a formal organization, in recognition of the fact that the other kinds of organizations participating had constraining policies in place about how to cooperate with one another.

Currently, she is a Program Manager in Microsoft’s Distributed Development Strategy group. Suzanne has extensive experience in cross boundary collaboration in politically complex and technologically challenged environments. She spent a year living in Kabul, Afghanistan with the United Nations Development Programme building public-private technology partnerships. In her work with both the United Nations and an earlier position at Cisco Systems, she developed information technology capacity and information sharing systems for people, governments, and organizations in developing countries, programs to support women in technology, and methods to link local communities to national and international development initiatives. Yet Suzanne says it was during Strong Angel III (she was the informatics coordinator) that the need — demand — to manage technology, organizations, and people as part of a combined equation became explicit in her thinking.

In Strong Angel III, they had all the communications gear, wifi networks, GIS modeling, data encryption, etc. and the most brilliant technical minds — but it soon became clear that technology alone would not be able to support effective cooperation in response to a real, large-scale disaster. They had formal agreements, memoranda of understanding across the many major and smaller organizations — but organization alone couldn’t do it. They had the social network piece, personal relationships and community building efforts — but again, that factor by itself couldn’t support the need. Suzanne notes that filling the “interesting space in-between” is what brought the teams together to be successful.

Her work at Microsoft has reinforced her belief that it’s the space in-between that matters (in my words, how the technology, organization, and people dimensions are woven together). In her research and support of the company’s distributed development teams, she sees that “each case, each team it’s always a reconfirmation… the space in-between, the gaps in the middle of those three things.” Where there are gaps, they try to make the links.

I asked Suzanne why some people may be better or worse at seeing and managing these gaps. She noted both organizational and individual opportunities. If an organization “sets up a culture that encourages that approach, you might see more of that coming to the surface, being more conscious and intentional about that framework and operating in that framework. A lot of orgs understand the importance of one or two of the three aspects [technology, organization, people], and the other(s) are overlooked.” From the individual perspective, she thinks that people “who have had a breadth of personal experience across different kinds of orgs, people, and cultures (versus stayed within software, or stayed in one country)” could be more likely to see the TOP possibilities and weave them together. This breadth of experience in working with complex systems “could expose them to important underlying currents.”

Currents, weaving, linking: The key to TOP Management is to be intentional (Suzanne’s descriptor) about bringing the three dimensions together, at the same time, in a way that supports the need.

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No, collocation in distributed development is not an oxymoron — and I have decades of experience behind my statement. SDForum and SAP hosted a panel for SAP’s global managing directors of their distributed development groups. (Distributed development is how enterprise software (and much other software) gets built.) The decades of experience were provided by Richard Baird (IBM), Cherie Gardiner (Microsoft), Suzanne Kirkpatrick (Microsoft), George Mathew (SAP), Clas Neumann (SAP), and Jeff Pettibone (NetApp) who each talked about the variety of global sites that form the centers of excellence in their production processes. I had the honor of moderating the discussion, which focused on these three questions:

• What technique/tool/strategy have you tried, and then abandoned/adjusted? What was the critical issue?
• What have you learned from other companies about the process of distributed development?
• What are you hoping to do in the future?

Strikingly, no technology tools were mentioned. I know the supporting development and collaboration tools are important to the distributed development model — but tools were not at the heart of these executives’ comments. The focus was instead on organization practices and the motivation and development of the people in their organizations.

When is it worth is to collocate?

• When something is going wrong. One example focused on a situation where two teams were tasked with different parts of project. Instead of focusing on their assigned bit, they become competitive and each designed a prototype of the full model — not an efficient approach (though there could have been innovation benefits if the best of both models were integrated — but certainly not efficient). Solution? Collocating sections of each team with the other. This approach echos one an earlier field study on distributed teams and performance (Babba et al., 2004 pdf).
• When the organizational practice begs for it. Scrum meetings at critical junctures. Certainly many scrum meetings take place in a distributed form, but the energy expected is hard to achieve when portions of the team are up in the middle of the night to participate.
• When you want to learn. One of the execs described how much value his organization had gained from spending time collocated at other organizations. One thought was that this is more likely to go well if you are talking about non-HQ groups (fewer boundaries and concerns to overcome). Idea is that spending a day a week, or a month a year, with another organization will open your eyes to different approaches.

Intentional decision making was another key point in this discussion: Being intentional and explicit about where different tasks are placed; intentional in terms of talent skill set, the career development opportunities provided to the employees, and the life-cycle of the project.

Even without technology examples, this was TOP Management. I expect this panel and audience had a clear vision and control over over their supporting technology options — the interesting discussion for them was for the organizational and people components.

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