Pragmatic Dictator

One simple management fact: Staff move on. There are many reasons this happens, not least of which is the lack of additional opportunity to progress and learn.

Given this state of affairs, we need to develop means for handling the fact that staff move on. Typically that focuses everyone on recruitment of suitable replacements that:

• Already possess the appropriate technical skills
• Already have the relevant experience
• Already have the relevant mindset

The key word there is already. It presents us with a number of problems:

1. An equivalently skilled individual will almost certainly move on themselves, because they’ll soon figure out there’s no more opportunity.
2. There are only so many suitably skilled people available.
3. Unless we have a bottomless pit of money, we can only access some fraction of the overall pool of available people.
4. Someone who has the mindset may not yet have developed the skills.

All these factors limit our ability to find the perfect replacement. It follows that we should widen the net a little, look for those that could be what we need with a little training. Training is likely to be a mixture of courses and on the job, with the latter dominating as what is learnt in the classroom must be put into real practice to bring progress and value.

Adopting such an approach brings many benefits including a maintained quality of work and a level of loyalty which translates into good staff retention which in turn reduces the amount of recruitment we must do. Cool, huh?

One last fact: Too many organisations make no serious effort at training, expecting the right people to just walk through their doors. They want someone else to take the burden e.g. universities and give nothing back in return. Such selfishness ultimately leaves them short of the skills they desire incurring costs.

Employment is give and take, give some training and development and you’ll take the rewards.

Let’s say you sell pottery. Your core business is about making that pottery, perhaps to order but there’s a whole load of additional work you must do around accounting and the like. Perhaps you also ship your pottery via surface carrier, this introduces further work tracking customer details (watch our for pesky privacy regulations), working with couriers etc.

Almost from the get go these days you’ll automate as much of this drudgery as possible using computers, essentially creating a one person IT department that supports your business processes. Obviously the bigger the business gets the more automation you will require, perhaps developing custom software to support the execution of your business processes (all that drudge you have to do but isn’t core). Your IT department will have to grow accordingly, hiring developers, project managers etc.

This standard tale of the relationship between business and technology plays out in many an enterprise every day. IT and in particular software development is a necessary evil, an undesirable cost to be carefully managed.

However for a certain class of enterprise, software is the product. Maybe it’s a shrink wrap product or a set of services provided to customers via the web. There will still be a need to have an IT department to support the business processes and it might well develop software of it’s own. There’s a fundamental difference between these two types of software because one of them is the business’ money generator. This software must be nurtured and tended to carefully, one can’t just add features, one must care about stability, performance, availability, scalability and so on. Money put into this effort is not a cost it’s an investment. Fundamentally, this software is not enterprise IT as most know it.

This key difference is oft-missed by management, vendors and analysts leading to confusion and unnecessary mistakes. I’ll cover one such mistake (related to SOA) in a follow-up post.

Technorati Tags: business, engineering, software

Much of what Betfair does must remain secret, however this stuff is a matter of public record so I can share a little with you – couple of excerpts that put a smile on my face:

JUDGE: You will explain to us how you find a matching bet?

OUR QC: I will, yes. That brings me to the little demonstration, your Honours. Your Honours ought have a bundle of material which is entitled “Demonstration of Online Betting”.

JUDGE: How much of this is on the CD?

OUR QC: This is all on the CD, your Honour. On the CD it is – - -

JUDGE: We had a Playstation shown to us in Sony and it was very exciting. Why did you not try that?

OUR QC: This is more fun.

JUDGE: It is one of the most exciting things that has happened in my time here.

…let’s talk about the Internet.

JUDGE: I do not think I have ever seen in my 12 years here longer written submissions.

OUR QC: I do not know whether to take that as a compliment or not, your Honour.

JUDGE: Take it as you will. I mean, the danger of very, very long submissions is that the detail swamps the appreciation of the structure and essence of the point which the whole point of oral advocacy ought to be to try and refine and press upon our minds in the brief time that is available.

OUR QC: Yes, I know all that and that is the way I hope to use the oral advocacy, your Honour.

JUDGE: It is just a response to your threat that you are going to be very long in some of your oral submissions.

…you should see the average system requirements spec.

How many times does something like this have to happen before we understand that:

1. Business isn’t about ethics.
2. Many a lawyer feeds off point (1).
3. The cost of (1) and (2) is a human cost.

And when will we all stand up, demand a change and make sure something is done about it? Next time your tax bill rises or you get bad service from a company who will you blame? Business or yourself for silently putting up with it?

Technorati Tags: philosophy, business, society

It’s an all too familiar story, an overflowing inbox of rapid fire emails day after day. A ceaseless bombardment of meeting requests, news updates, design discussions, status reports, the list goes on. It doesn’t take long for this bombardment to push recipients into pavlovian responses such as:

1. If the subject doesn’t have immediate meaning, delete the email
2. Another status email which surely is like all the previous ones, delete it
3. Another request to a meeting – book it into the calendar without a second’s thought

These behaviours and others are quite damaging to your organization. Potentially useful information is ignored, people end up permanently in meetings, never getting anything done or pausing to think strategically.

So what’s the problem? To echo a previous post, email is a push mechanism and worse, it tends to be an interrupting push mechanism. We are all familiar with bouncing icons or fading dialogues displaying recipient, subject etc of a just-received email. Email can also be problematic to manage:

1. Mailing lists are difficult to keep up to date
2. Getting on and off mailing lists can often be more complex than is desirable
3. How do you find the right people to email to?

So what might we use instead? How about blogs and RSS feeds? Blogs are a fine place to publish announcements, news, status reports etc. We have a wide range of readers, online and offline and managing subscriptions is a key area of focus for these applications. RSS of course gives us a pull mechanism allowing subscribers to choose how often they receive the updates. All that’s left is to maintain a well known page to link the blogs (and you can regularly email a link to that page around) so that potentially interested readers can find the subject matter they require.

It all seems so obvious and yet there are still a mound of corporates out there that haven’t moved to this more balanced approach to information dissemination and co-ordination.

Technorati Tags: management, process