SQT Blog

You may have seen the article on Padraic O Maille in yesterday’s Irish Times Health Supplement.  I would highly recommend the book he wrote to anyone in any walk of life.  It is a wonderful story well told, intertwined with great advice and tips that will help you through the tougher days in life and in business.  I guarantee it will make you think and live differently.

If you only read one book this summer – let this be the one.  Highly Recommended.

 

Many people start every year with great dreams and goals only to end the year with many of them unfulfilled and great plans that never got off the page.

The reason is simple – the achievement of goals requires one thing above all others, Smácht. It’s the Irish word for discipline. You need the Smácht to define your goal and you need someone to keep you accountable to achieving it – little by little, week by week.

This is why Pádraic Ó Máille set up Smácht, a network for business people all over Ireland with one thing in common, they want to put Smácht on their goals and make things really happen in their business and their life for the better.

Smácht Mór was recently held in Galway attended by over 200 business people from every walk of life. It was a day packed with ideas, tips, stories and life lessons from seven inspirational speakers; Pádraic, Tom Murray, Bobby Kerr, Joan Mulvihill, Annette Houston, Anne Tobin and John Concannon

When you have a day that starts with a session on “Put Yourself in Danger of Getting Business” you know you better stay focused!!!

The overall theme for the day was ‘Direction’ and the purpose was to inspire delegates to review the direction of their business, career and life. Padraic reminded us that by changing the angle of a golf club by as little as one millimetre, can make the difference between a hole in one and ending up in the rough. The same is true in life. Small changes, applied consistently over time, can make a massive difference in the results each of us will achieve in the future. But only if we actually begin those changes now. Apply Smácht.

Here is just a small flavour of the pick-ups from the day;

• Set realistic goals, keep them short and simple (although there was another point of view in the room that suggests goals should be big and “scary”!!!).
• Record your victories.
• Learn from your mistakes and move on fast.
• Innovate constantly – there is always a better way and savings to be made.
• Surround yourself with positive people.
• Integrity is what people will remember – don’t do anything you will regret.
• People buy from people, not companies.
• Without deals, a business will not grow. Deal making is the art of letting other people have your way.
• To succeed in sales, you need to ask the right questions.
• Resolve this year to live like a Buffalo charging head on into your worries and fears – thereby minimising your exposure to adversity.
• And finally….Be remembered as an example, not a warning.

Lots of food for thought…

If you would like to learn more about Smácht go to http://omaille.ie/2015/02/the-smacht-edge/

Regards

Siobhan

Are Your IT Project Managers Costing Your Organisation Millions?

We believe that the current view of best practice in IT Project Management is flawed.  As a consequence, failing to rectify the situation can add millions to an organisations cost base. There is a myriad of things that can go wrong when replacing a core system. However, if the training, tools, practices and disciplines that are deemed best practice for project managers [PM’s] are fundamentally flawed and failing organisations, then the situation is greatly and dangerously exacerbated.

The key to successful IT Project Implementation, is to develop a dynamic system of processes and practices that can quickly and effectively respond to constantly emerging risks.  Some experienced PM’s break the ‘rule book’ and intuitively intervene in the delivery of a project in a way that prevents disaster.  Such PM’s are the treasured few. For the most part the moves they make and the actions they take are instinctive; ask them to give their thinking for why and when they intervened and they will struggle to explain themselves.

In this article we describe and codify some of these ‘intuitive’ interventions and explain the rationale for their use.  Our aim is to show that there is an alternative way to manage large enterprise wide IT implementations and in the process, save organisation millions of dollars of cost and substantially reduce project risk.

Our findings are based on interviews with Ennovate’s Directors in which we capture their experience of project managing dozens of separate IT implementations across Europe and Ennovate’s experience of providing a project recovery and client-side advisory service for enterprise-wide system integration.

Ennovate’s approach to IT Project Management is to:

1. Develop a single page project view of the Project that is simple and easy for all to understand and to avoid the tendency to manage the implementation at task level.
2. Create short and real milestones every 6-8 weeks. We believe that this is essential to achieving high levels of productivity.
3. Set-up a project ownership structure with single owners and develop a direct style of meeting practice that focuses on owners’ reporting exceptions.  Ennovate’s approach to IT Project Implementation is to use these meetings to design real-time corrective interventions.
4. Design and implement early prototyping by getting business stakeholders to own usability designs and gain their early participation in prototyping.  Ennovate’s aim here is to move the technical team out of a mindset of perfect build and test and into one of learning together
5. Encourage project conflict. If managed well and all stakeholders are made to focus on the project goals, encouraging project conflict is a powerful method of keeping the project real and promoting the necessary pragmatic trade-offs.
6. Avoid the natural desire to over-specify and resist complexity.  Both users and technical staff  need to be managed away from this inherent tendency.
7. Facilitate changing scope by ensuring project goals remain alive in the project yet promote pragmatic negotiation of scope as part of the project delivery.

In summary, we advocate promoting a candid style of project management. This is one that seeks commitments and clarity at every opportunity and does not tolerate behaviour that deflects from the projects overall goals. A sharp focus on the projects final outcome is maintained and individuals are coached and mentored to take personal accountability and pride in their contribution.

1. Develop a Single Page Project View 
   Large IT projects have a typical pattern starting with business requirements and then going through technical design, build and configure, various iterations of testing, migration and ending with user acceptance.   Each phase involves tasks and assigning task ownership.  Typically, reporting focuses on progress at task level with some level of interpretation during the aggregation process required for summary reporting.  This approach, deemed best practice by project management authorities, does not take care of the problems with interpretation and aggregation, nor does it lend itself to keeping a simple coherent view of the project that all project members can understand and relate to.Our approach, based upon Commitment-based Management is different. We focus on building a top down, single page view of the project.  First we develop a unifying project goal and maintain this throughout the project.  We work with the project team to design their promises and help them relate to and understand how they contribute towards the project goal.  This results in a simplified programme structure with clear accountability and commitment to the projects success.  Reporting focuses on how the team are doing against managing their promises and the actions required to keep, renegotiate or support each other in delivering upon such promises.  In doing so, the project is focused on the future, maintains simplicity and unity to the overall project goal.  Another outcome is that the project reporting requirements are simplified and the work of the project office moves from simply reporting and interpreting progress to value adding activities such as supporting the team in managing the delivery of their commitments.
2. Real Milestones every 6-8 Weeks 
   Projects with a six-month-plus duration and a large and diverse range of interested parties, have a difficult time maintaining the momentum and energy of all involved.  This can mean milestones are fudged resulting in the erosion of trust between the project team and their stakeholders.Our approach builds upon a project team that understands the overall project goal and how its promises are part of that goal. Ennovate then design and plan 6-8 week milestone deliverables.  In addition, we introduce an operational meeting practice that focuses on the commitments pending and actions required to safe-guard them or re-negotiate them.  In doing this, the project team focus on outcomes required from each milestone and maintain high energy levels and conviction.
3. Promote an honest and straight talking meeting practice
   In our experience all projects have a tendency to slide into working in silos.  When teams operate in silos they move away from having a clear goal of the greater project good and look to focus on their own deliverables.  The sum of their deliverables inevitably falls short of the required overall project goal.  The team fragments, with each deliverable competing for limited resources.  Project managers and leaders can fall into the trap of refereeing or making priority calls based on the strongest personality’s representation.  Furthermore, this tendency, when it extends to the business community, creates additional work. Users begin to focus predominately on their own needs and end up specifying nice-to-have requirements in the name of future proofing.  This leads to unnecessary workload and unnecessary development effort which results in spiralling implementation risk.In Ennovate’s experience, the typical response to this situation is a generic cry for charismatic leadership.  This is helpful, but does not ensure success in preventing silos from emerging.Our approach is to get the project team to maintain focus on the overall project goal.  Our operational meeting practice provides a process of renegotiating commitments / promises and is a practical way of ensuring that the team is in regular dialogue on the projects goals, the interdependency of their promise on others and vice versa.
4. Encourage Business Stakeholders prototyping as early as possible
   IT Projects based upon the traditional project management frameworks, are designed and implemented in a way, where the requirements are handed-off to project technical team members and little is heard from the development team until they are ready for the users to re-engage at acceptance phase.  This approach generates a number of risks, one of which is that the business moves on and the original requirements are no longer relevant. Business users compensate for this situation by putting forward extensive and very often, unnecessary requirements, while technology delivery teams build completly over-engineered solutions. The consequence is additional time and risk introduced into the project with the likelihood that the business community begins to lose interest in the project.  The challenge here is how do you maintain business community commitment and prevent this from happening?Ennovate’s approach is to bring the business into the project. We introduce a dynamic change management practice through the design and build phase and maintain a practical perspective on requirements and changing business needs.  In addition, we look to push through an end-to-end transaction early in the project cycle.  This sharpens the overall project deliverables and gets the business community meaningfully engaged earlier in the process.  This also gets the users and core project team focused on real issues that can be resolved pragmatically.
5. Promote Project Conflict Projects tend to be a microcosm of the organisational structure and represent the organisational culture in a magnified way.  When things go wrong, which is inevitable, the success in managing such conflict will be critical for getting the project delivered against its goals and time commitments.Some see conflict as a bad thing, Ennovate do not.  Healthy teams bring disagreements and conflict out into the open and deal with it.  Our style of working is to encourage openness and candour to get conflict out early and deal with it.  Our project teams are trained to deal with conflict and listen to the breakdowns in order to design constructive exchanges that help re-align the team to their stated goals.  In fact, regularly encouraging disputes to occur and resolving them, quickly adds to the team morale and their sense of creating a real difference.
6. Resist Complexity 
   Managing scope, budget and timelines is a mandatory competency for all project leaders and managers.  However, the training project managers receive and the commonly held best practice for project risk management, is to eliminate and minimise scope creep.  In our experience, this has the opposite effect on managing scope, budget and timelines.  For instance, when a project manager receives a new requirement or change request, the project managers natural instincts are to encourage the functional designer to over specify, conservatively estimate effort and scope and negotiate to eliminate as many changes as possible.   The result of this situation is extra redundancy in scope,  an unwillingness to accept change and an emerging distrust between the users and the project team.We see budget, timelines and scope as a series of commitments that need to be negotiated and managed throughout the project.  Our focus on managing these commitments are forward looking.  By getting the users to work with the project team and make commitments by giving them a forum to discuss in the various meeting practices, we keep the project alive to the concerns of the customers. This approach minimises wasteful, non-value add activities that have a tendency to creep into projects based on the emergence of distrust between the various stakeholder communities. The result is a project implementation that delivers the business benefits at the minimum effort and cost.
7. Promote Pragmatic Negotiations and Scope Changes
   The success in all projects boils down to the team’s effectiveness in managing change.  The commonly held view in project management is to get buy-in from all parties and negotiate change through a series of change control practices that escalate upwards to a steering group based on the impact on project scope, budget and timeline.  As mentioned above, project managers are risk adverse by nature and see change as a potential threat to the project’s success.  In fact, some even get territorial and fanatical about maintaining the status quo, i.e. make a strong case for minimising change.Ennovates view is different. Our team is trained to see that changes are necessary to a projects success and introduce ways of managing change through negotiation with all stakeholders, building trust in the process.  When this happens, change becomes part of the mind-set of the project team. Only changes that are required by the business will be proposed, the opportunity to remove requirements that are no longer necessary will exist and costs associated with managing change will be minimised.  In fact, pragmatic trade-offs that swap one requirement for another is key to successful implementations and results in reduced effort and cost.  Such change management practices will help ensure that the project delivers upon its commitments in an effective and efficient manner.

In summary, do not be afraid to ask any system integration partner to tell you about their success rate and do be prepared to probe behind their answers.  The truth may surprise you, provided you get to it! What the project management industry does not tell you is that replacing a core system never goes to plan, will cost more than your most generous estimates and demolish any contingency you might have, causing huge business disruption in the process. Ennovate’s approach and experience tells us that we can dramatically reduce this risk.

Submitted by Ian Duncan, Ennovate, SQT Strategic Change Management tutor

How To Avoid Change Failure | Mind The Gap From Change Design To Execution

In this article, we discuss the challenges, traps and blind spots facing change and transformation leaders and map out the five things all change programmes need to do to avoid failure.  Our advice is applicable to all change programmes irrespective of size and scale, namely:

1. Change the composition of the change team at the execution stage.
2. Assess the change members belief and passion for the change goals.
3. Introduce new management practices.
4. Recognise and reward the right behaviours.
5. Be guided by the vision and ideals when making change adjustments.

Transitioning from the design to execution phase is fraught with risk.   To start with, if you have created a comprehensive transformation strategy, it will include a strong and compelling vision, end state design, detailed plans and roadmaps and a solid project governance structure. You and your team will be feeling good and will probably have generated the essential momentum and demand for the next phase.  However, if you have not achieved these design outcomes, then you do need to revisit the situation and invest in getting the set-up conditions re-configured and properly rooted.

The next stage requires two significant steps. First, successfully on-boarding colleagues beyond the core project team and second, driving actions and getting relevant things done.  This is where a transformation programme gets a reality check.  We outline below, five key recommendations that address the issues that arise, in moving beyond the transformation design phase.

1. Change the composition of the Change Team. This may seem foolhardy, particularly if the design phase was a major success.  This counter-intuitive approach reflects the fact that many of the skills and competencies required to design a change programme, are no longer required once you move into execution.  In fact, one of the biggest risks is to continue to over invest in the analytical capability of the team and then expect that this team can and will deliver the change.  Change at the implementation stage, is about investing in the emotional management of change. It quickly becomes about doing and not about thinking.  Whilst it may appear easier or simply about getting lower level people involved, it is one of the most difficult aspects of change.  Bringing on-board pragmatic doers, and key influencers from the mid-levels within the organisation, requires discipline and skill. It needs good listening skills and the ability to coach and mentor. The change leader needs to win the hearts and minds of the extended team and transfer the passion that the leadership team possess for the change programme objectives, to the wider team and employee groupings.
2. Assess the change members belief and passion for the change goals. It is one thing to have the ability to design great change programmes, but what if the passion and commitment is not there for the implementation?  Some team members are more comfortable planning and designing.  Furthermore, they may see themselves as managers who do not have to rollup their sleeves and get stuck in.  Keeping such team members engaged is a mistake.  Transitioning into delivering requires the leaders and members of the change team to walk the walk.  If they do not feel passionate about the programme goals, vision and destination for the change programme, they will not be able to bring along the wider team.  Recognising this challenge and addressing it now, is important.  Either the team needs to develop conviction for the programme or accept they need to move on.  Most hired consultants don’t invest in the required passion, and therefore, most organisations simply don’t get this from their external partners.  As organisations move from planning to execution, it will prove timely to replace resources and invest in injecting passion, conviction and belief into the team.  We strongly advocate using diagnostic listening and Commitment-based Management as the basis for assessing and injecting passion into the team.
3. Introduce new management practices. Once a change programme moves into the delivery phase, it requires a change to the project pattern and short-term rhythm and focus.  There is a requirement to shift the programme into getting things done.  The governance structures need to be reinvigorated.  The types of meetings, their frequency, content and structure, need to reflect a focus on getting things done and short-term outcomes.  Introduce high levels of personal accountability to deliver short-term action based results and track these actions through to completion.  Focus meetings on exceptional reporting. Do not tolerate those who deflect energy and determination to achieve the programme objectives or who are not forthright in coming forward and declaring a lack of progress.
4. Recognise and reward the right behaviours.  Stay attuned with the progress of the programme and reward team members that get things done.  Knowing what needs to be done, should be replaced by doing what needs to be done.  Introduce real-time training and learning.  Do not punish those that are trying but failing. These team members need to be managed carefully to see if they can become competent or, if not, they need to be sympathetically and carefully moved off the programme.  By adopting this approach, change and transformation leaders will demonstrate they are ‘walking the walk’ and stand as exemplars for the behaviours of the change team.
5. Be guided by the vision and ideals when making change adjustments. Implementing change requires hard work to change people’s mind-set and perceptions.  There are winners, losers,  resistor’s and advocates.  Successful change implementation works through the impact on individuals.  Individuals transition through several psychological stages when changing.  Therefore, even well constructed plans can never predict with accuracy, the human aspect of change.  The practical question remains, when is it okay to adjust the plan and revise the end destinations?  There is no black and white answer, however, leaders should ask themselves, ’does such an adjustment undermine the overall vision or ideals that underpin the rationale for the programme?’ If the answer is yes, then the adjustments need to be re-examined and changed.

Submitted by Ian Duncan, Ennovate, SQT Strategic Change Management tutor

Question:
How Do You Improve Strategy Execution Capability?

Answer:
Improve The Quality Of Your Meeting Practices; Eight Ways To Improve Quality Of Your Meetings

Our claim that the quality of an organisation’s meeting practices is a lead indicator of the leadership’s ability to execute strategy.  Put differently, organisations that improve their meeting and coordination practices, greatly increase the likelihood of delivering on their strategic objectives.

Ask any manager why they attend meetings and you will be surprised to hear just how many managers attend them without any understanding of their role in the meeting. It is common for meeting attendees to have little idea if their participation will deliver on their expectations and in addition, what they will take away in terms of actionable deliverables.  Clearly, meetings like these are contributing little towards the attainment of organisational goals. Further, ask most people what motivates them to attend meetings and you will learn that many people are driven by a need to be seen to attend, to know what is going on and a concern not to miss out on some knowledge that their peers have acquired.  Such a meeting culture as this is depressingly uninspiring.  However, allowing it to continue is not an individual failing but an organisational malpractice that requires leadership and courage to rectify.  A failure to put in place strong and appropriate meeting practices can end up costing an organisation literally millions.

In writing this article we conducted some research. This revealed a good understanding of the efficiencies to be gained through benchmarking and workflow analysis. However, the research also revealed a distinct lack of management literature and quantitative evidence regarding organisational waste due to poorly designed and ineffectual meeting practices.

There is a basic lack of understanding concerning the organisational cost incurred through weak coordination, poor cross-functional alignment and badly conceived and run meetings.

Well-run meetings are an important aspect of work place coordination and are vital to drive forward organisational strategy.  If done well, they connect executive teams, managers and employees to the organisational mission. They create meaning and purpose for individuals and bind them to organisational objectives.  Crucially, they also create understanding, can be highly motivational and generate the ‘corporate energy’ that drives organisations forward towards delivering on their strategic goals.

We believe that the quality of an organisations meeting practices is an effective barometer of an organisation’s leadership capability. Thus, the quality of an organisation’s meeting practices is a bi-product of its leadership quality.

Where organisations build their capability to run effective meetings effectively, they dramatically improve their ability to execute strategy.  Using a discipline called Commitment-based Management to design and manage meeting practices, is a very effective way to build management capability and dramatically improve the effectiveness of an organisations meetings.

We consider that there are eight conditions necessary to set-up an effective meeting practice and create high performing teams. They are as follows:

1. Get the right attendance: Every person attending has clear responsibility and authority to make decisions. In practice that means no one in the room should have to seek authority from others not attending and no one in the room is there without clarity of purpose.
2. Clarify the Goal and outcomes required: Ensure there is a clear articulation of the goals and purpose of the meeting and circulate this to attendees in advance and ensure people understand the meeting context.
3. Promote conflict:  It is healthy to publically debate the right things to do and meetings are a perfect forum for these discussions.  Without robust debate, individuals may not commit themselves to the outcomes sought. This results in passive resistance and non-effective actions and follow through.
4. Seek individual commitment:  Each request for action is personal to an individual. By asking them to directly take responsibility for an outcome you are making them personally accountable for its delivery.
5. Openly discuss what individuals need to be successful: In delivering on actions, if an individual is unclear what is required of them, suggest they reconsider the original request and come back with a formed view of what conditions need to be in place for them to be successful.
6. Hold individuals accountable for their commitments: When a commitment is due to be delivered on, ensure it is accepted as being complete, and that the requestor to declares their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the result.
7. Only discuss exceptions and the future action required to deliver on the original commitment:  Do not waste valuable meeting time on reporting progress but instead, save that for a written report, circulated to meeting attendees for review prior to the meeting. Instead, focus on areas that are not achieving the right outcomes in relation to the commitments made.
8. Be supportive and encourage people to take on commitments: Praise success and do not punish the holders of under or non delivered commitments. Instead, focus on how to avoid the situation reoccurring in the future. Use one-to-one check-ins to unearth problematic commitment holders.

In reality the conditions will not be easy to achieve. Ennovate adopts a pragmatic and flexible approach. This tailors adherence to the eight conditions, to the length and difficulty of the journey the client organisation needs to undertake to create the conditions for an effective meeting practice.

Changes to practices in the workplace require individuals to change their behaviour.  Whether it is a conscious decision or not, all individuals make trade-offs when deciding to change their behaviour.  For the individual, the benefit of a change in behaviour needs to outweigh the opportunity cost of giving up a behaviour that has benefited them in the past. To achieve a successful execution of strategy, a key requirement for leaders, is to tie together the personal benefits of individual changes in behaviour with the organisational benefits.  This essential alignment of personal benefit to organisational benefit requires one-to-one coaching between the meeting leader and the individual attendees.

Engaging in working to build this alignment is the foundation of effective meetings and is inextricably tied to the effectiveness of commitments made within those meetings.  Creating a purpose and meaning that explicitly links an individual’s actions to the attainment of an organisational objective, may be all it takes to drive a fundamental improvement in strategy execution.

Submitted by Ian Duncan, Ennovate, SQT Strategic Change Management tutor

Leadership is such an interesting field of study and one which has intrigued philosophers, business giants and politicians amongst others for generations. There has been much written about these leadership qualities and what makes a leader one which engenders willing followers who share and actively engage in the vision and purpose of the organisation .

The one constant in many of the different insights and definitions of leadership quality is the importance of conscious awareness of who I am and how I am around those I work with. The understanding and importance of this has been widely supported over the last number of years through the work of many different modern writers such as Daniel Goldman’s Emotional Intelligence theory to Stephen Coveys 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

However the notion of conscious awareness of ourselves dates much further back to philosopher Socrates whose life was dedicated to” Knowing Thyself” and living an examined life; to the works of Shakespeare that constantly explored the truth in who we are through his plays and writings. He gave us the insight “to thine own self be true”.

While these are deep questions and widely known thoughts, they are also constant reminders that the privilege of leading others is not a superficial undertaking – the learning from which, for the individual leader can be both immensely rewarding and stretching.

Life and circumstances provide us with opportunities to examine how we approach our interactions with the people we work with and therein how to be more effective in what we do.

In our programmes Gina and I invite personal and group reflection on the question of our own self-awareness as leaders. We encourage people to safely step into the space of what we know about ourselves in the context of how we are with those we interact with and to examine what this tells us about ourselves. It is constantly amazing and a privilege for us to experience our learners embracing this exercise and to witness the reflection it invokes.

Self-awareness is not a one day a year event, and the invitation and challenges are to each day consider the effects of our actions and our way of being on others we lead and interact with. The truth is we will are never far from the receiving end of this, as we typically always get back what we put out. The key is to know this, watch for it and ask ourselves is this serving us and the original purpose we started out with; for ourselves, the people we lead, and the Organisation we serve and represent.

Maire Murphy and Gina Ryan are Trainer/Facilitators for SQT’s Leadership and Personal Development training courses. Maire and Gina also offer One to One or Group Coaching and DiSC Profiling as an additional Self-Awareness tools.