Which bucket do you belong to?

Well I have always had this debate running in my mind as to how easy or hard it is to get work done from others in an organization if they aren’t directly reporting to you? Will your ex-subordinate obey / respect you as much as he did when he was reporting to you? What happens to your power when you move to a different organization?

I categorize managers in 3 different buckets, one who are not that skilled and rely heavily on their position to get things done (“A”), second who are skilled and uses very little or no power to get things done (“B”) and third who are a mix of power and skill in varied proportion (“C”). I firmly believe that your personal value system and the company you are working would gradually categorize you into any of these buckets.

You will find more of type A people in organization which are political in nature; these are the people who are at greater risk when they move from one organization to another, because they would have hardly learned anything in their previous job but for being more political. I believe they are the one who find it most difficult to get out of their current company and find a job elsewhere. These are people who get the maximum fake respect from people around them and least respect when they lose their position. You definitely don’t want to be in this bucket.

Type B people are those who believe that if they have to lead they better be one, whom people want to learn from, people give them respect not for the position but for the skills they possess and value they bring to the table. Unlike type A, type B would require you to work hard and continuously update your skills to be at the top. If you are type B, the respect from people around you will gradually increase and would be lasting (irrespective of the fact whether they report to you or not).

Type C are those who are skilled and they take advantage of their position as well, their mix of skill and power would determine how close they are to Type A or Type B. While being skillful and using power as required (based on situation) is healthy, you may want to watch out not getting to close to power, because in a short run, you will always feel that it is much easier to get work done by power but you have to realize that it doesn’t help in long run, it only makes you complacent, increases the fear of change in you and reduces your appetite to take career risk for growth. 

While I am a great fan of type B it is one of the toughest one to be in, it takes years of hard work and iron discipline to maintain yourself in that category, Type A is a danger zone and I see people moving to it in anticipation of overnight success but please realize that is not lasting. Type C sounds more realistic to be in but make sure you are NOT inclined towards power and always have the strive to move to type B.

IT Project Management Role – where does it stand?

Been into project management for over a decade and still the fascination towards it hasn’t ended, Project manager as a role is maintaining a balance among three repelling forces, Organization (senior management), Employees and Customers. If you look carefully the KRAs of each of these forces are mostly opposite to each other. Organization wants maximum margins and Customer good and cheaper service. Organization wants good employees with reasonable cost and employees want maximum pay with good benefits. Customer wants freebies; organization wants everything to be charged as far as possible. Hope you got the drift, now project management role is the one who stands in the center of all these forces and his job is to make sure that all three parties are happy and at the same time projects goals are also achieved. You can debate about which one of these forces are most important to project managers over others but in reality each one has its own importance and project manager should know how to balance among them. You can even add sales & presales into this equation but generally project manager don’t need to worry about balancing or managing them directly.

Entry level to project management is much easier or at least perceived as very easy (unlike programming), hence you find project managers starting with just having fair communication to those who are well versed in 9 areas of project management, the gap is wide open. This is also one of the reasons that you have a lot of project managers in the market but finding a good one is always a challenge, in fact certain traits of good project management like situational leadership, assertiveness, diplomacy, ownership, being non-political  etc are so difficult to evaluate in an interview process. I am not saying you cannot but it is difficult and sometime you also get tricked by the interviewee on theseJ.

In one instance, I got a tech lead into my team from an another division, who claimed he was good in technology but wanted to move to project management, apparently his communication was not good and I advised him to stick to technology having spent a decade there. 15 days into the project and I figured out that he wasn’t even fit to be called a senior engineer, and every time I confronted on his bad performance he use to defend and end-up saying he would wish to become a project manager. As days passed I realized that the guy knew he will not sustain in technology and wasn’t finding a job elsewhere and he interpreted project management as a safe bet to retain his job in the company. The point I am trying to drive is people perceive that if they are half good in communication they can become a project manager, which would immediately give them power to manage a team and they personally don’t have to do much. Part of the reason for this is senior management as well, who tent to allow these people to dwell for a long time in a single a project with mediocre performance instead of reprimanding them and being candid about their career prospects.

Last week when I was attending the Scrum certification, I felt project manager role is dead, well not yet but it may reach that stage if Scrum succeeds majorly and gets adopted across the board. In Scrum around 50% of a typical project manager’s responsibilities is taken away and split between product owner and Scrum team leaving the Scrum master to just manage the process, be a problem solver and protect the team from external forces. Good example being if the team is delayed in a particular sprint it is not the responsibility of the Scrum Master but the team. Well, the Scrum master will be responsible if there is a process issue but other than that it is primarily for the Scrum team to figure out how to resolve the delay. Another one, if a sprint needs to be terminated, the deciding authority is the team and the product owner and the not Scrum master. One more, team assigns the tasks to itself and not the Scrum master. Unlike the traditional world where the project manager has around 8 to 12 years of experience with engineering background and has gradually grown to become a project manager, Scrum master can be played by anyone who has Scrum process knowledge and has leadership skills to resolve problems, this can also be one of the Scrum team member (QA, Designer, Architect, Lead) playing a part-time role of Scrum master. If you are project manager, there may be some transformation coming your way. Watch out.

Yet another enigma of project management, how much weight does a generic project management role carry, I mean one who is a project manager without having knowledge in specific domain or technology. I would say very less, try finding a job as generic project manager and you will realize that there are not many options around (in IT at least), lot of big companies look for domain knowledge, smaller ones wants to have PMs with technology knowledge so they can manage both technology and management part of it and one who are willing to hire generic project manager are preferring to hire good B-School grads and train them as they are less expensive (compared to a 10 years experience guy) and perceived to be smarter with a shorter learning curve.

Of course there is lot more to project management role, will write more about in my coming blogs.

My Favorite books

I had cultivated the habit of reading books few years back and there is no stopping it, though I am not consistent enough, I do make it a point to read at least one book a month. As they say learning never ends, books are my primary source of learning. I have over 75 books in my library at this point, some of them are recommended by my friends, some are best sellers, some are recommended by other authors, some I bought while I was just browsing around in book store.

If you want to excel in business, general management, enhance your leadership skills, want to be a great people manager, improve your sales, learn project execution, manage your finances then here are some of the must have books

Leadership and Politics

• Dreams from my father (Barack Obama)
• Audacity of Hope (Barack Obama)
• Story of my experiment with truth (Gandhi)

Entrepreneurship

• Entrepreneurship (Hisrich Peters)
• The High Performance Entrepreneur (Subroto Bagchi)
• Rich Dad Poor Dad (Robert T Kiyosaki)
• One minute entrepreneur (Ken Blanchard)

Operations

• The Goal (Eliyahu M. Goldratt)
• The Goal 2 (Eliyahu M. Goldratt)

Business & Strategy & Leadership

• Blue Ocean Strategy (W. Chan Kim)
• Built to Last (Jim Collins)
• Execution (Ram Charan)
• Good to Great (Jim Collins)
• The Starfish and the Spider ( Ori Brafman)
• Employee first customer second (Vineet Nayar)

Leadership

• Daily Inspiration (Robin Sharma)
• Leadership in the Era of uncertainty (Ram Charan)
• It’s not about the Bike (Lance ArmStrong)

Sales and Marketing

• What they don’t teach you at Harvard (Mark H McCormack)
• Principle of Marketing (Philip Kotler)
• Positioning (jack Trout)
• The little red book of selling (Jeffery Gitomer)
• How to sell yourself (Joe Girard)

People Management
• How to win friends and influence people (Dale Carnegie)

If you are really interested in business current affairs, subscribe to Fortune magazine, it would cost you around Rs. 2400 for a year with 2 magazines a month. My current read is “Thinkertoys” from Michael Michalko on creative thinking.

My experience with Scrum

Scrum so far hasn’t been good for me, and over the course of last 12 months, I have cultivated several negative perception about it.

Scrum implementation in my last project made people overwork, reduced their productivity and created an atmosphere of chaos. It reached a stage where people worked for an average of 12 hours a day and still remained behind schedule. Customer never stopped making changes to requirements and unrealistic sprint duration only added fuel to fire.  User stories were written as the development was happening in parallel and it wasn’t considered to be wrong. Sprint releases happened with P1 & P2 bugs, estimation had to be changed every week, and it was getting harder and harder to manage the situation.

Few months later I decided to attend Scrum training by Pete Deemer (Ex VP Product Management, Yahoo) at Bangalore. I wanted to really find out what went wrong in my last project? What were the mistakes? How much was top management responsible for failure?

After my first day of training I realized Scrum was not just a change in process but a fundamental shift in software development philosophy. Scrum is about trusting more on people than on process, it is about removing the hierarchy and developing self-organized team, splitting traditional project management responsibilities among product owner, Scrum team and Scrum master, more about collaboration and less about power, more about team and less about individuals, you choose your task than someone assigning to you, every team member has a say on estimate.

At the training, I did some good exercises, which made me comfortable in various aspects of Scrum like product backlog management, sprint planning, sprint reviews and retrospection, backlog refinement, sprint and release burn down charts, daily scrum etc

At the end of second day I reconciled my thoughts on why the earlier agile implementation failed in my organization. Here are the key reasons

• Allowing product owner to change feature description during sprints, which completely against the rule of Agile. You can change things between Sprints but not during Sprints.
• Not building a self-organized team but allowing project manager and tech lead to boss the team, assign task and do estimate without consent from team.
• Didn’t retrain the Project Manager to a Scrum Master, so that he can manage process, protect the team and solve problems only.
• At the end of every sprint you are suppose to inspect and adapt, and this was completely missing due to lack of time and process know-how.
• Team was always over-committed by top management and managers to client.
• Sprint duration was wrong knowing the size of the project, it was like one-fit-all projects
• Customer wasn’t trained adequately on Scrum
• Overall insufficient knowledge of Product Owner, Scrum Master and Team about Scrum

While I agree that Scrum is a better way of building software it has its own set of challenges with respect to appraisal in a decentralize environment, finding trust worthy self-organized people, integrating multiple Scrum teams working on a single large project.

My advice to companies would be to implement Scrum in a slow and steady fashion than implementing Scrum across the board without enough time to reflect and adapt from each Scrum project.

Account Management

Account Management

Thought account management was tough? Well here is the framework I follow, see if this helps you in your job. This framework isn’t very generic but inclined towards account management in software services industry.

What is Account Management? A lot of people confuse Account Management with Delivery Management, which is not correct. Account Management is a process of penetrating customer account and finding new avenues for generating additional revenue, building long lasting relationship with customer, acting as an alternate point of escalation apart from Delivery. In other words it is a salesman job but instead of focusing on new customers, you focus on improving revenue from existing customers and making sure that your customer delighted from your services.

Profiling

When you take up a new Account just make sure that you profile the account in detail, typical questions you should raise are

·         Business model of your customer?

·         Customer Revenue? No of employees? Business Locations?

·         Board members? Management team? Key stakeholders? Decision Makers?

·         What do we do for them? Team involved? Revenue per month? Opportunities?

·         Customer Satisfaction? Current Issues/Resolution?

·         Projections/Targets?

Building Rapport

Once you gather this information, it is best to have a face-to-face meeting with your stakeholders to understand them better and build a rapport, without a good rapport it would be hard to gain good insight about your customer.

During your meeting with the customer try to understand what you are doing well? And things which you are not? If the customer is fairly happy with your services, it is possibly a good time to check if there are new opportunities coming by and work accordingly.

See if you can take the customer out for lunch/dinner, informal conversation are far more engaging than the formal ones.

I have witnessed account managers, who land-up on customer site with zero or less than required preparation and they end up asking pathetic questions, which only makes them look bad. Asking intelligent, thoughtful and meaningful questions makes you look good in front of customers and you are considered to be valuable resource than just a manager.

Sometimes it may take multiple meetings to build rapport, be patient and wait for the right time. Don’t try too hard; customer may feel you are pushy.

Idea Generation

Can you increase profitability and productivity of your customer, one of way to do so is to study the needs of customers, study their industry, study their current products, study their competitors and see what else you can provide them which would help them. Come up with new ideas, detail them and showcase these ideas to relevant stakeholders explaining how this would help them.

Ideally your presentation should describe the idea, value proposition, mockups, schedule and cost involved in the project, this would help stakeholder in quicker decision making.

A lot of time account manager and delivery team rely heavily on customers to tell them the exact requirements. If your customer is clear on what is needed you are lucky but if not then it is best for you to take a consulting approach and tell the customer what needs to be done than just giving-up because your customer is unclear.

Sometime customers aren’t able to provide you much needed information because they may be busy, you got to treat this as an opportunity to impress the customer by taking the initiative to come-up with first level requirements and proposal, a lot of time this also helps in knowing what the customer doesn’t want.

Who is the decision maker?

Once you done with your initial analysis of the account, it is time to identify the real decision maker and see if you can make a contact with him. Real decision is the one, who actually decides whether to buy your services or not. Your odds of winning a new contract or renewing a contract is much higher if you can establish a direct contact with the real decision maker. In the event you are not able to meet the decision maker, make sure you provide all the required information to your immediate stakeholder so he looks good in front of his boss while presenting your case.

Proposal

Foremost qualify the opportunity by checking if your customer has enough funds, time for execution and real need. Once you are done with the qualification process, make sure that your proposal presentation covers the following.

·          Executive Summary

·          Scope of the project

·          Proposed team structure

·          Cost and Timeline

·          Assumptions

·          Engagement Details

·          Relevant Past Experience

·          Process to be followed

·          Value Proposition

There is lot to account management, will cover more in my upcoming blogs.

UHF RFID's Key Constraints - My 2005 experience with RFID

Before deploying a UHF passive RFID solution, there are a number of critical parameters to consider. Listed below are a dozen essential ones to bear in mind

1. Make sure the materials being tracked at a particular portal are of similar type. For example, cartons, trolleys, pallets, glass materials, documents and metal or plastic bins cannot be tracked simultaneously using a single portal. Since the RF energy level backscattered (reflected) by passive tags placed on different materials varies greatly, it is virtually impossible to have a single reader power level give a 100 percent read rate for all materials.

2. Make sure the tagged materials or objects travel in a defined pattern, and that they are not being moved by multiple modes of transport such as forklift, people and metal or plastic trolleys. There needs to be just one transportation mode—or perhaps two, at most—well tested for a 100 percent read rate.

3. When using tags based on different standards—EPC Gen 1 and EPC Gen 2, ISO or other vendor-based tags, for instance—make sure to test all of them, as performance can differ significantly. You’ll find it difficult to configure the reader power level at such an optimum level that it supports all types of tags with a 100 percent read rate. Ideally, try to use a single standard and single vendor in one portal.

4. Orientation is one of the biggest factors for providing good read rates, even if you are using dual dipole tags, which perform better in all orientations.

5. Different tag sizes, shapes and encapsulation provide varying RF energy levels. Hence, I recommend utilizing a single size and shape unless it is not possible to do so. Define a proper document on the encapsulation standards and materials used, so that the same specifications can be followed whenever more tags need to be manufactured.

6. The positioning of interrogator antennas is very critical, so make sure all antennas are placed scientifically, based on polarization and tag orientation. Conceal all antenna wires properly using insulation, making sure they don't overlap each other. Otherwise, this may lead to power loss and impact the read range.

7. In some cases, RFID passive tags received from vendors can be damaged during manufacture, in transit or when encapsulated. Thus, it would be wise to test each and every tag before placing them on objects. This way, you can avoid a reduced read rate due to damaged tags.

8. When performing a test for read rates, make a point to understand the radiation pattern of the interrogator antenna rather than just doing a trial-and-error test with the tags. An optimum combination of tag orientation, antenna direction and radiation pattern provides the best-read rates.

9. Keeping the UHF RFID tags in close physical proximity to each other can render some tags ineffective. Nevertheless, a more complex signaling algorithm, such as frequency hopping, can actually help increase performance levels.

10. If you plan to apply UHF RFID tags to liquid-based items, such as bottles of juice or water, understand that the effective read range of these tags would be drastically reduced as shorter-wave tags are more susceptible to absorption by liquids. Nevertheless, read range can be improved marginally by having a spacer between the tag and the object.

11. An RFID tag's lifespan can vary, depending on the application, business processes and other environmental factors involved. For example, in the supply chain, tag life may end once a product reaches the consumer; in cases of assembly line tracking, the end-point may be when the finished good is produced; and in asset-tracking scenarios, a tag's lifespan may be most subject to wear and tear. Whatever the lifespan, RFID solution providers need to simulate the various internal and external factors that can impact tag performance over a period of time. For example, what are the minimum and maximum temperatures that a tag can withstand, and for how long? And what would the impact be if the tag were physically handled—that is, removed from one object and reused on another—a thousand times per year? Answering these questions can help determine the kind of tag and encapsulation required.

12. Finally, when using a handheld UHF RFID reader for discrete item-level stock taking, make sure to set an optimum attenuation so the handheld interrogator doesn’t read superfluous tags. In such situations, a reader fitted with a circularly polarized antenna and set for high attenuation (low signal strength) would be ideal. In applications involving a search for out-of-sight objects, however, a linear polarized antenna with high power would be a preferable choice.

There are, of course, other parameters to consider when implementing a UHF passive RFID solution. Still, with these 12 critical constraints in mind, the process becomes that much smoother.