The reality is that if you look at your IT department today carefully, you’ll find that most folks there are not working in a job that they originally trained for.  They might have started out writing COBOL.  They may have started out with a degree in marketing.  They might have gotten into programming because it pays the bills while they try to get their band signed (in fact, if you work in Nashville, that’s probably 25%-50% of your entire company’s staff).

This means that your IT staff has adapted over time.  They’ve acquired the skills to keep succeeding.  Given what the IT industry is like, in fact, you can be certain that absolutely any candidate that has worked in the industry for five years or more has adapted and picked up the skills they need for the job as they went, as technology skills typically have a shelf life of just that- about five years.  Adapting is not a bonus in IT- it’s a survival skill.

So what should you be looking at to hire people?  Attitude.  Communications skills.  The ability to fit in your company’s culture.  The key here is to find a personality that works, not just a set of skills.  You wouldn’t pick a dog for your kids based solely on its color, height and weight; you shouldn’t pick staff based on a set of statistics either.

Here’s a short list of useful guidelines and a few questions you can use for each:

• Look for people fit to the pace.  If it’s a challenging position that will have to hit the ground running, look for someone seeking challenge.  If there’s a lot of repitition involved, look for someone comfortable with routine.
• Look for people interested in today’s challenge.  If they ask about advancement opportunities, that’s great; people should be ambitious.  Be sure, though, that they’re interested in the problems you have now.  You don’t want someone looking ahead so much that they’re not doing the job you hired them to do.
• Look for honesty.  Ask a tough question or two, like why they’re leaving their old job.  Anything that smacks of honesty is good here, even if it’s “I hate my old boss”.
• Look for a willingness to take responsibility.  Ask how they would handle reporting a massive budget overrun to an executive.  How they would handle a systems outage at the end of the day.  How they would handle a major and valid customer complaint with your software services.  What they would do if they found out that one of their staff had screwed up a major account.  Watch for answers that smack of ”I would deliver a straight answer, take the lead to find a solution the problem, and report on the results.”
• Find out how the person handles confrontation.  How they would handle the firing of a staff member.  How they would handle it if an executive ever blew their top at them.  How they would handle an irate customer.
• Find out how they prefer to communicate.  Ask how they would handle delivering bad news to someone else on his team.  In another office.  A customer.  How would they handle requesting help from another department.

There are other factors to consider as well, depending on your company, its culture, and the particular job, but this is a good starting point.  How a person handles conflict, how they communicate, how they take responsibility, their level of honesty- all of these things are things that can make or break a new employee, regardless of their technical skills.  Make certain that they have the minimum skills to meet the position, obviously, but  you can always teach technical skills- teaching attitude is much harder, and much more difficult within the context of your organization.

This is a simple concept we learn as kids.  It applies all through life.  It also is an old cliche, and it gets written on time and again.  Nevertheless, I’m going to touch on it here, because it’s so relevent to problems I see so many times in projects.

Goal number one of any project is simple:  Complete the mission.  Do it on time, in scope, and within cost if you can, but if you can’t, the goal remains:  complete the mission.

Your mission is whatever your project scope is.  It is not to complete all the tasks in your project plan.  It is not to be on time with all your tasks regardless of if you’re rushing work to the point that it gets sloppy, that details get missed that may cost the project dearly later on.  Your goal is to complete the mission, and do it well.  Listen to your people when they bring changes to the table for good reasons, whether those changes are good or bad to your project plan.  If you have to adjust the schedule, adjust it and communicate those adjustments to reset expectations with stakeholders.

Keep your eye on the ball.  Complete your mission.

How does one go about building a quality reputation?  Whole stacks of books could be and have been written on the subject, but for our purposes, I am going to stick the basics.  Below are the six simple things you can do to build a reputation that means something to others:

• Meet your deadlines.  Business is time-sensitive.  You miss deadlines, you look bad.  Worse than that, you make someone else look bad.  The next person in the project’s chain, the project manager, the business owner, your boss, the business owner’s boss… if you trip up the project, you trip up everyone.  They won’t like it.
• Own your mistakes.  If you do miss a deadline, tell someone. Tell your project manager, your boss, and the next person in the chain.  They will communicate things out from there.  Be honest, admit the situation, and negotiate for a new deadline that you can meet.  If you screwed something else up, do the same- tell the people it matters to and negotiate how you will fix the situation, and by what time.
• Fix Your Messes.  Again, if you messed up, fix it yourself if possible.  Don’t bring people problems; bring them solutions.  This is especially true if you are responsible for the problem.
• Don’t Make Excuses.  Do tell people why things went wrong.  Do not use it as an excuse.  Tell them what went wrong, and what you think you can do within your control to prevent it in the future.  If it’s out of your control, ask for a meeting with the parties involved to find a fix for the process that led you here.  Own the problem and solve it.
• Share Credit.  When you succeed, solve a problem, clean up your mess, or whatever, be sure to give credit to everyone who helped you. This recognizes the work of others; people appreciate that, and they will remember it.
• Blame the Right Thing.  People screw up.  Things go wrong.  When these things happen, take the time to find out why, then, once again, take steps to solve the problem.  Did someone screw up because they weren’t properly trained?  Did they not have the right info to make the decision they made?  Did something fail?  Was it properly maintained?  What could have prevented it?  Anyone can see a problem and assign blame.  Step up to the plate and solve the problem for the long term.
• Communicate.  Never leave people in the dark regarding things they need to know.  If they get blindsided or screw up, and you could have prevented it by simply sharing information, they will remember it.  A very, very long time.

There is a lot more to building integrity and reputation, but in a nut shell, this is it.  If you do these six things consistently, people will recognize you as someone with integrity, who is helpful, dependable, and reliable.  Start here, and your career will thrive.

There are business units at companies all over the world right now circumventing their Project Management Offices and/or Project Managers.  Sometimes they just form projects within their departments and try to do it themselves; other times it’s more radical.  I have actually been involved as a vendor to a Fortune 100 where a business unit cut IT out of a million-dollar software project by outsourcing the bulk of the work to us and hiring us to manage it.  This wasn’t done as outsourcing, per se- just a complete and outright circumvention of IT.  The reasons given behind the scenes were that IT’s standards were too strict and that IT took too long.

Given the number of projects out there that overrun budgets and/or timelines, the idea of business units cutting out the Project Management Office, IT, or any other subject matter experts within your company are frightening.  Even if the project succeeds, consider that the vast majority of projects require maintenance and management once they ‘go live’.  This will either be done by the very staff that was cut out of the original project (if the business unit turns to IT), by business team folks whose jobs are actually to be doing something else (if the business unit tries to run it themselves), or by the vendor (thus setting you up with a permanent dependency on the vendor- your business unit did know to check out the vendor’s long-term viability, right?).

This kind of thing is just trouble in so many ways its not funny for any business out there.  Usually this sort of thing going on in your organization is a result of some problems you haven’t been paying attention to.   The question is, how do you quell these things?  First, I recommend addressing your problems leading to this practice, for one, and providing strong vision and leadership can help as well.  Vision and leadership will inspire trust, and a lack of trust in the status quo that others can meet the business unit’s needs is always what leads to these sort of rogue ops.  Second, find a way to embrace the project.  Instead of shutting them down, say “How can I help?”  Get involved. Don’t get in their way; that’s why they are circumventing you in the first place.  When you need to do course correction to get things more supportable or compliant with your corporate regulations (or any legal regulations you must comply with), communicate.  Help them understand why the extra bits are necessary.  Be a partner, not a roadblock.  If you can help people understand that you are there to help, and you show that you can be a help, they’re more likely to come through the right channels next time.

Still, I’d love to hear what other folks thoughts on this.  Any comments?  Can anyone comment on how their organizations are handling this problem?

Fear not, however; here are four simple gut-checks you can make to evaluate if a project is worthwhile.  These are not guaranteed to bring you to the most important projects, but they will help you weed out the red herrings.

• What problem does the project solve?

If you can’t name a specific, real, practical business problem either of your own or of your clients that your project solves, then it isn’t valuable.  The problem should be quantifiable, have a quality factor involved, and have a real cost involved with not solving the problem.  Cars solve the problem of how to travel by land quickly over roads.  The internet solves the problem of how to exchange information and data quickly over a global network.  A communications portal so that your CIO can communicate information about his recent vacation does not solve a practical problem.

• Does the project simplify doing business?

Quite simply, if your project complicates things, then people will not embrace it.  Your staff won’t; your clients won’t.  The pros must outweigh the cons, and they must do it in a manner that can easily be discerned by the people involved.  If you can communicate your vision in such a way as to make the benefits clear, this works, but the benefits must be there.  If it makes daily routine harder, people will naturally work around it.  It will not see use.  And that means that your project will not bring value.  No value, no reason to implement.  It’s that simple.

• Is the Resulting Product Going to Be Easy to Use?

The clocks on VCRs all over America blink 12:00 for a good reason.  How to program them is not completely obvious and transparent, the feature is not absolutely necessary to gain enjoyment from the VCR, and therefore people don’t use it.  Likewise, MP3 players were not really all that new of an idea when the iPod hit.  Relatively new, yes, they weren’t the first to market.  They were, however, the first to market that was easy to use.  Why?  iTunes.  iTunes made it easy to purchase new music, to load music onto the iPod, and so on.  Viola, the MP3 revolution was on.  There were lots of sites you could buy music from, just like portable music players; the iPod and iTunes just made it all easy.

If the end results of the project are not easier to use and understand than it is to just keep doing things the old way, adoption will fail.  As we said before, if adoption fails, so fails the project.  It won’t be used, so it’s not really worth implementing.

• Is It Cost-Effective?

This should be an obvious thing, but too many times it’s not.  I have seen project after project done because it is the will of some executive, without the implementors communicating the costs of the project to that executive.  I often wonder how many of those projects would have seen the light of day if the costs had been known?

Any project should be evaluated for the cost of implmentation versus the cost savings involved.  Not all projects that are worth doing are cost-effective; some things are worth more to your company than money (for example:  things that earn customer buy-in, things that bring value and loyalty from your employees, etc.).  Still, no project should be conducted unless you have some idea what the cost is of the value that you are gaining.

As I said before, these will not end-all solutions for evaluating projects.  If a project does not pass these four basic checks, however, you definitely should do a hard evaluation as to why you are pursuing it.

In most cases, you did not.  This is especially true if the customer is a customer of your company, and your implementation was of your company’s product.  One of the ways to help ensure success of your project is to address your customer’s fears.

What are the customer’s biggest fears?  Here’s a brief list of the top four I’ve dealt with:

1.  Can you deliver what we really want, on time and within budget?

You have to be able to explain, confidently and in simple terms, how you will achieve the goals of the project, on time and within budget.  You have to show that you are open to changes as well (within the scoped process for change requests, of course) to change.  You are to deliver what they really want, not what they asked for.  The client does not always in the beginning understand what he is looking for.  You may have to change paddles mid-stream.

2.  Will the deliverable actually work and fulfill my needs?

At some point early on you need to be able to explain the change to their business process that your product will bring to them and how that change will make things better for them.  Show them the value.

3.  Will I see value from this project?

Projects are long and often difficult.  You have to be able to articulate over and over how the deliverable is going to bring value.  More than that, you need to be able to explain exactly what that value is.  The customer and the team has to be able to remember why they’re doing what they’re doing.

4.  How hard will this be to maintain?

After you finish your project, the deliverables involved have to be maintained.  As the client gains confidence in you and your ability to deliver, their own confidence to do the same may wane.  The more that you appear to be an expert, the less they may feel like an expert.  You need to provide them with a quality, easy to understand maintenance plan that makes them feel confident in their ability to maintain the product in the event that you are no longer available to them.  If you are to maintain the product later, be transparent on exactly how much time, effort, number of maintenance activities, and cost of maintenance involved.  Let them know that the maintenance of the deliverables will not be too expensive for the project to be worthwhile.

1.  People Skills Matter
The number one key in business is trust.  Money is at stake.  People’s careers are at stake.  Entering into business with any unit outside your control- a partner, a client, a vendor, another department even- is scary business.  Winning trust is not just important for making a sale- it’s important for the ongoing process.  If the business owner trusts you, they may buy your product, but what about their IT staff?  Their project manager?  If these folks don’t trust you, they will make your implementation a nightmare, as they try to make certain that your implementation is successful in your organization- by calling all the shots to ensure you do things their way, even if they have no expertise on your software.  If their support organization does not trust you, they will seek their own solutions to problems rather than working with you to make their implementation better.  Trust is needed all the way across the board.

This is where people skills matter most.  Your organization must be able to establish an ongoing rapport at all levels.  Your sales people must be able to reach a good rapport with their business decision makers.  Your implementations and technical people have to be able to establish a good rapport with their IT staff.  Your support organization must establish a good rapport with theirs.  From department to department, this principle still applies- you must have good rapport at all of the contact points in your organization.  This even applies the other way- if the people who you have communicating with your customers and partners can’t establish trust with the people inside your organization, they will be seen as ‘pandering to the clients’, and you’ll face internal problems.

People skills are invaluable in building trust.  Building trust is one of the most important skills in business, and one of the most difficult to teach.  Your ‘face time’ people in your organization should be chosen as much for the ability to make friends with anyone and exhibits good trust-building and trust-maintaining skills as any other skill needed for the position.  Relationships matter.

2.  Initiative Matters
A good rapport is the beginning of any business relationship.  Now that you have the relationship started, though, you have to deliver.  Friendship is about many things.  Business is not.  It’s about the bottom line.  Making money.  Creating value.  Promise what you can deliver, work hard, and follow through.  Anyone involved in communicating who says “Well, I lined them up, now you guys take care of them” is not the following through.

3.  Focus Matters
An important part of being able to deliver is not over-promising and under-delivering. To get there, you have to focus on the right things.  Out of all the markets, all the customers in that market, all the ideas we have, all the projects we have on deck, which ones most deserve my resources?  What has the best bang-for-buck?  If you take on more work than you can execute on, you will fail at all your commitments.  The more different customers you involve when you finally fail, the more customers you will lose because of your lack of focus.  You will constantly be tempted to reach for the next ring.  You will be tempted to enter new, additional markets.  To paraphrase the old wine commercial, attack no market before it’s time.  Focus.  Complete the job at hand before you start a new one.  Identify your most important targets and knock the ball out of the park.  Everything that you promise, commit to it and fulfill that commitment.

If you do this, once you conquer the market at hand, once you please the customer or partner at hand, you will receive recognition and help when you proceed to your next challenge- help in form of income from clients, word of mouth, reputation, all the things that matter and reinforce why you are the best choice out there.

4.  Responsibility Matters
When you make a mistake, own that mistake.  Make it right with the customer.  Acknowledge the customer’s concerns with your mistake and the possibility of more mistakes.  Fix the problem, identify how to prevent it in the future, and communicate.  Most importantly, do it in that order.  Don’t promise that “it will never happen again” if you have no idea what you are going to do to prevent it yet.  Failing, promising, then failing again just ruins your reputation.  Now you’re a failure *and* a liar.  Don’t panic when you make a mistake; mistakes happen.  Resolve the mistake and move on.

5.  New Opportunities Matter
Expansion is always easiest down the path of least resistance.  Your existing customers are the easiest to sell additional products to.  Your existing markets are easiest to sell in.  Your existing products are easiest to expand.

Look for synergies between your products and offerings.  When possible, increase them.  Yes, I am as tired as anyone of the word synergy- but, in this case, it applies.  If you are remotely focused, your existing products, projects, process improvements, projects… they should all have a crossover somewhere, or be near having a crossover.  Look for ways to take advantage of these things to increase revenue and increase the value of your products.  Product A may not have any value to people who buy Product B as is, but there may be something you can enhance about either Product A or Product B that brings them together and makes them both more valuable.  Voila, you’ve created a new market for your products for a small amount of effort, and in an area where you have a high chance of success- with existing customers, in a market where you have a presence already.

How does this apply to your internal departments?  In many ways, it is the same thing- you probably have existing products, processes and projects that increase productivity and value to your company.  Look for ways to marry these up to increase value to the company with less effort than having to create whole new projects from scratch.  Keep your maintenance down and your focus high as you expand.  Familiarity with the existing product also helps you drive internal adoption easily.

6.  Service Matters
Everyone is in the service business in some way.  If your job in the company is to do something that you can identify no customers for, then I would suggest that what you do for the company has no value.  If you maintain something, there are people who depend on that something- those people are your customers.  If you write documentation, you have two customers- those who distribute it, and those who use it.  Put your customers first and deliver.  If you are in management, make sure all of your employees are delivering.  Everyone should be focused on their customers.  At the same time, the customer is *not* always right.  If maintaining a customer is costing you more than the value that the customer is bringing to you, then sometimes the right business decision is to reduce your market and let that one go, so that you can focus on your value customers.

Sometimes in our quest to get those who are not motivated to do their jobs, we can destroy the motivation of our loyal employees, those who does want to do their jobs. Here’s three big mistakes people make:

1) Big Brother is watching
The power of IT has made monitoring both popular and easy- monitoring web traffic, email, putting in cameras for physical security, guard stations, badges, biometrics… the list of things we do to watch our employees and protect our assets goes on and on.  There is a fine line you must walk, however.  When you watch your employees, they feel untrusted.  Showing a lack of trust in others usually leads them not to trust you in return.  They will suspect your motives.  What are you up to?  Why do you keep watching them?  Why don’t you trust them?  If you don’t trust them, why don’t you just fire them?  Are you looking for reasons to fire them?  Going overboard with monitoring is a quick way to an unhappy, high-turnover workforce.

2) Which way does the wind blow today?
Consistency is a key in leadership.  People only follow people they trust.  They must believe in your competency and ability to achieve goals.  This includes having the self-assuredness to stay the path.  If you took a cab, and the driver kept changing his mind on which way to go to get to your destination, you’d quickly suspect something was wrong, wouldn’t you?  Would you even trust him to get you there?  Even if you did, would you think he was getting you there the best way possible?

Inconsistency in logic, goals, rules, or even just daily behavior can undermine people’s trust in your leadership.  If a leader appears not to be leading consistently towards a single goal, odds are that the leader’s followers think he doesn’t know how to get to that goal.

3) Forgetting the little people
If you have hired well, your staff probably has a lot of knowledge on board.  Some of the people you hire to be specific experts in an area, like developers, systems admins, and such, while others have knowledge because of their experience.  Customer service personnel often hear things about what the customers think of a product that your business analysts will never get the customer to say in a focus group.  The people in the trenches will always have perspectives that can’t be found in amongst your design teams.  Always include the perspective of others in decisions, especially if it is their job to know something about what you are deciding.  Excluding experts makes them feel like their opinions are not valued and question their value to the company.  If your job is to be an expert in a subject, and you feel that your opinion is not valued, then you feel like you are not valued.

If you do not show your employees that you value them, they will quickly lose respect for you. How can you lead people effectively if you have no respect for them? How can they trust you to look out for them and the things they want to accomplish?

All three of these things boil down to one thing: achieving credibility and respect with your employees.  You cannot lead them without their respect.  You cannot motivate them without credibility with them.  Protect and nurture the respect of your employees. Work to earn it.  If they will respect you, they will follow.

It can also lead your employees to sneak out the back stairwell fifteen minutes early every day.  To provide customer service that leads customers to look elsewhere.  To steer their talented friends away from your company and instead solicit them for job leads to getaway  from you.

One key to morale is having the respect of your employees.  Here’s ten important things to build your employee’s respect for you:

 1.  Give Credit.  When your employees bring you ideas, always give them credit.  They believe their ideas are important.  They also believe that their ideas are tied to their career advancement.  If you take credit, then in their mind you are stealing from them and robbing their careers.  You’ll be branded untrustworthy in an instant.

 2.  Reward hard work.  This should be a corollary to item #1.  People feel what they do is valuable.  Prove to them that it is, and they’ll keep giving you more of it.

3.   Keep your promises.  If you don’t exhibit integrity, don’t expect your employees to do so.  This is especially true when it comes to pay, benefits and advancement.  Remember, we all come to work ultimately to gain something for ourselves.  Take that away and you take away their reason to keep coming.

 4.  Respect time off.  Days off from work are about our personal lives.  What we need in our personal lives are what keeps us coming back to work.  Don’t disrupt vacation days, weekends, and holidays unless you absolutely must.  If you have to, be frank and open about the business reason you have to do it, and be equally frank and open about exactly what you, and in turn the company, is going to do to ensure it doesn’t happen again (then see #3).

5.  Don’t push unreasonable deadlines.  Your employees know how long it takes to do their jobs.  That means that they know a deadline is unreasonable the minute it comes out of your mouth.  They know you’re asking them to work long hours from now until that deadline comes.  And they have from now until then to fume about it as well.

6.  Don’t Micromanage.  It’s vital to keep up with your project schedule and deadlines.  It’s not vital to know what percentage complete your team members are at on day two of a two month project.  It’s also not vital to know what they’re doing from minute to minute.  If you watch over their shoulders, they believe that you do not trust them.  That means they won’t trust you.  Take a deep breath and keep your eye on the goals.

7.  Stand back and let them work.  Either your employees know their jobs well, you did a lousy job providing them with the training they need, or you did a lousy job hiring.  Do you trust yourself or not?  If you’re watching them and interfering with how they do things constantly, then guess what the answer is.  Guess what else?  They don’t trust you either. 

8. No favorites.  Your team is your team.  It may have stars, but it doesn’t have favorites.  If coaches only played players they liked personally, can you imagine what professional sports would be like?  Treat your employees equally.

9.  Keep work about work.  This is a corollary to #8.  Keep your personal life out of the workplace at a reasonable level, and allow your employees to do the same.  Also, don’t ask your employees to run personal errands for you.  You wouldn’t pick up their dry cleaning, why should they get yours?

10.  Never discuss one employee with another.  People’s problems are personal.  That includes problems that they’re having with their jobs.  Don’t air their dirty laundry.

This is where Change Management enters the picture.  We’re all familiar with the premise of Change Management:  identify the change, identify the impact of the change on the project, and get sign-off.  How good of a job are you doing at that second part?

Evaluating impact must weigh several things:

• Effect on the project timeline
• Effect on the project cost
• Effect on other projects in the company

What’s that third one, you say?  Other project in the company?

Unless your company just has available resources sitting around, then yes, every change to your project affects other projects- in both time and money.  The money for your change has to come from somewhere.  So does the labor.  Adding to your project must therefore, reasonably, set back other projects.  Even if you work overtime to make your project happen, you take away capacity of all of the potential overtime that could be used for other projects for things like recovering from falling behind schedule, getting ahead of schedule, or even, you know, even change management.

In a nut shell, all changes to your project not only impact your project, they impact the company as a whole.  Never forget to assess that third step and, if the impact is significant, get executive sign-off.  Don’t forget to include the need for executive signoff on signficant project scope changes in your Change Management plan as well.

Get the customers involved. Choose a pilot group of customers to work with. Agree with them that you will hear their needs and will accomodate requirements that fit within your production schedule and shows a real ROI. Have your folks sit down with them and work out the ROI. Sometimes when the customer sees what they will gain from the feature, it’s not really worth it. Sometimes, on the other hand, you believe that you know the customer’s business, but you find out that you’re dead wrong- the requirement they’re asking for is a major ROI coup.

This approach not only helps you do two things. First, you build products that include only the features that show real ROI value to your customers. You leave out things that seem cool, but in fact have little value. Secondly, you develop real numbers to back up why some features are good versus others. When questioned about why a feature matters, you can lay down hard numbers. You can also defend why some features were left out- and why those features in competitor products look cool, but in fact do not work out to the savings that they appear.

The end result? You build smarter products that match up with your customers real (not perceived) needs. You also build formidable marketing and sales data backed with ROI figures. When it comes time to knock on doors and sell, you aren’t armed with market buzz- you are armed with hard numbers, case studies, and hard facts from the real world. Not only is your product better, you can prove it.

As you have probably experienced, this is almost never the case.  The numbers say the engineer has time; he never actually does.  We usually blame this on poor estimates.  I propose that it’s something else that we sometimes forget:  the limits to multitasking.

Research has shown that humans are not particularly good at switching contexts.  People like Gerald Weinberg and others have done much research to prove it.  The commonly accepted table for this is below:

(original version of this graph shown here, where Coding Horrors also writes on this topic).

What does this mean to you?  Should you stop having people multitask?  That is not realistic in most business models.  If you have a task that requires 20 hours a week, then a 40-hour a week employee needs something else to do all week.  What you need to do is keep up with how people’s time is distributed, and allow for the multitasking factor.  If a person is on 2 projects, then 20% of their time will be consumed by changing gears between.  If they’re three projects, it will consume 40%, and so on.  Adjust your schedule accordingly, and talk to their managers if you foresee problems.

And if you have to, share this article with them to help them see your point.

This natural tendency in management affects your business in a number of ways:

1) If you are paying attention to the reports coming in, you will tend to react immediately to any bad numbers that come in. You will trace down the core reason and try to solve that problem.

2) Your employees will worry about the numbers that they present you. They will believe that if the numbers are bad, you will be upset. This leads them to do things like make decisions based on how they will affect the numbers rather than how they will affect the business.

3) If your managers are asking you for the numbers you are collecting, you will tend to worry about the numbers rather than the business as well. If you don’t, you will after the first time that your manager comes into your department on a fact-finding mission over why the numbers are bad.

As listed above, one of the themes of collecting performance figures of any type is that they can lead you to make decisions based on the numbers rather than the business situation. Collecting performance figures is a valuable tool for determining how well you, your department, and/or your business is doing, but it is dangerous. It can lead you to make decisions for the wrong reasons. Ways to avoid this are:

1) Be sure you are measuring the right things. Don’t worry as much about things that aren’t at the core of what you want to manage.

2) Be sure that you keep the numbers in perspective. If a given number is bad, why is it bad? Is the reason behind it a good thing or a bad thing?

Remember above all this thing: performance measurements are for setting off alarms. An alarm is a signal to check on things. It does not mean the end of the world. Always manage by what’s behind the numbers, not the face value.

Let’s consider a basic example.  In company X, wait time for customers calling in for support is way up.  The call center is packed; there’s no room to add staff.  Even if there was, there’s no budget to do so.  The busy season for customers is coming up; everyone knows that call volumes will be up soon.

So what happens?  Management announces that they will start monitoring call times.  They want to see the amount of time per call reduced.  Armed with this mandate, help desk managers start communicating this to helpdesk workers.  Get the call times down; you will be graded.

What will this lead to?  In my experience, this will usually lead to the helpdesk workers working harder to end the call and working less hard at properly solving customer problems.  The result will be more repeat callers and more frustrated customers.  In the mean time, call times will go down.  Call volume will go up.  Everyone will point to the fact that they correctly predicted that call volume will go up and pat themselves on the back for successfully getting call times down.  In the meantime, they’re ruining their relationship with their customers, and they don’t even realize it.

What was the right thing to do here?  One good solution is to launch a specific effort to improve the analysis going on at the helpdesk, so that you can reduce call times and reduce repeat callers.  Look for ways to make your people more efficient- don’t just mandate it with a statistic.

The lesson here is be careful what you monitor and how you monitor it.  Monitoring a statistic will usually make the statistic better, but it will not typically solve any actual business problems.  Monitoring should always be accompanied by a specific plan to do what you are monitoring better.

Let’s begin by considering why uptime is so important. Users love reliability in computers. If their PC crashes, they get upset. If they do it too much, they’ll change operating systems, buy tuning products, hire service techs, even buy whole new computers. If local applications crash, they will get rid of them and buy a new one. The same thing applies to web applications and websites, even free ones. If it is unreliable, users throw it away. The logic is that if the service is worthwhile, someone else more reliable will provide it (and they’re right). Why on earth do users dispose of websites, computer programs, and even whole computers so easily over reliability? The reason is simple- computers are replacement tools. There is little that end users do with computers that they cannot do some other way. I can write by hand, do spreadsheets by hand, databases by hand (it’s called a filing cabinet), get music by hand (CDs), get video by hand (television), mail by hand (snail mail), talk to people by hand (telephone, face to face, etc), research by hand (books, libraries). Computers, for the most part, replace other processes because they are faster and easier. If it is not as reliable as the process it replaces though, then as a user I might just go back to the tools I had before. With more experienced users, if it’s not reliable, I just wait for something that is, because I know by now someone else will take the idea, run with it, and build something more reliable. Reliability is a major way that you can lose a customer/user.

This illustrates my first point- uptime in and of itself does not matter. Being up when the user wants it to be up does matter. So I ask this question: In today’s era of web analytics, why do we believe that our systems need perfect uptime? Using web analytics, I can see what times of day how many customers are on my site. I know that if there are five user sessions between 1 am and 2 am, I have five customers in that time. I should treat these as five seperate customers whether or not they are unique users because a repeat customer is, quite frankly, as good as a new customer. Anyone who uses my service five seperate times in an hour loves it enough that they not only represent themselves as a customer but also future customers that they will recommend my service to and bring me. This is especially true in a startup world where you are trying to build market share. I also do not want to base it on page hits over sessions. If one customer is a heavy user, I kind of hate to make him mad, but on the other hand, a heavy user is a dedicated user. He will more likely wait for the system to come back online. Better to annoy one dedicated user who clicks a lot than fifty customers who were just checking out the site. Unique customer experience sessions are the key to measuring customer service.

Using this knowledge of my users’ average habits over time, I can count sessions and project them over a 24 hour graph (or by week, or month, or whatever is best for your business model). Now that I know this, I can base my uptime expectations against that chart. Armed with this, I can expect my uptime to cover a specific percentage of user sessions, such as “The system must be available for 99% of average user sessions in a given day”. It doesn’t matter nearly as much if my servers are down for seven hours if I know that less than 1% of all user traffic logs on during those hours. I care a lot more about five minutes of downtime during an hour where 78% of my website’s traffic occurs. Using this kind of logic gives real meaning to my uptime planning. It also is very practical in a worldwide economy. I know people who think it’s okay for their website to be down at 2 am. It is if your customers are in the same time zone, but what if you have a sizeable foreign userbase? For that matter, what if your userbase happens to be a lot of night owls? You need to know when your site is getting hit, and be up during those times.

There is a second thing to consider in calculating ‘uptime’. Quality of Service must be considered as well. All bad customer experiences count against you. An unacceptably slow website experience can be said to be just as bad, therefore, as true downtime to an end user. I recommend setting a minimum response time for your website or web application and, if you have the capabilities, monitor its response times through automated tools. Poor response times should be counted against your uptime statistics equally to true downtime. If you do not have access to these sorts of tools (and they’re not simple to implement and can be expensive), then stick to pure downtime for your equations.

This system is, of course, not perfect. If you are planning a major marketing push, you must adjust for the increased web traffic and plan your marketing information releases against your server traffic. Don’t announce a major release of new features during peak uptime, for example, because the increased traffic may tank your servers, and if you plan a major release during a lull in your usage, you need to adjust your chart for predicting usage so that your admins realize uptime will be measured differently while the push is on. You also have no control over some press, say, for example, if Digg or Slashdot suddenly tells the world to go look at your neat new service and send you 10,000 hits in an hour.

This idea may need some adjustment and tweaking still. It’s somewhat of a shot from the hip right after inspiration struck. Please, if you know of ways to refine it, comment on. I’d love to see a discussion started that fleshes out what is hopefully a good alternative to the burdensome “five nines” way of doing web business today.

There is no question that word of mouth has done great things for Facebook’s adoption and in turn its value.  People have loved the application for allowing them to do a very simple thing:  talk about themselves, keep in touch with friends, and make new friends.  I daresay that items 1) and 3) there are the key driver of any social app; people want to talk about themselves, and people want to think that what they say about themselves is so interesting that people can’t wait to be friends with them.  It feeds all of our inner egos and/or self-esteem.  Their original target market is teenagers, who are, as we all know (particularly parents out there), all about trying to identify who they are and wanting acceptance from peers.

That same word of mouth recently bit Facebook.  Their Beacon program’s online tracking showed a gross misunderstanding of their customers by violating several important tenets:

1) Users in today’s internet are nervous about privacy

2) As any parent knows, teenagers (one of Facebook’s major markets) are really paranoid about their privacy

3) The way that Beacon worked, sooner or later it was going to show up as spyware in any number of security apps- and people were going to block the service anyway, and then they were going to fear Facebook as a result (my security software told me it was bad!)

Facebook broke an even bigger rule with this program, however:  at some point, they stopped thinking about their customers as people, and started thinking of them as sources of information.  Many companies have done this.  You know of a way to get information from your data sources, and you decide on a new feature or revenue source that you can generate from that information.  Too often in this situation, companies think of revenue rather than the customers.  Facebook did this when they decided to make people’s purchases public for the world to see without the ability for the customer to approve or edit the feed.

I am all about revenues and making money from customers.  That’s what free enterprise is all about.  Still, you must always remember what your customer’s core values are.  Evaluate them.  Write them down.  Put them on your wall.  Violate their core values, and not only will they abandon you, they will rebel.  Word of Mouth is the number one advertising method out there.  Don’t turn it against you.

1) a reliable web server
2) reliable power for the web server
3) reliable physical location for the web server
4) reliable network connection to the web server
5) failover capability in the event that the web server fails
6) reliable backups in case the server crashes
7) physical colocation of servers in the event that one server site is damaged in a disaster
multiple network connections in the event that a network connection fails
9) personnel who are experts on each individual component of your website (available 24/7)

and so on, and so on…

See what I mean? Unless you have the budget and manpower to support a 99.999% uptime, you are wasting paper if you set that as your SLA goal. In fact, if your business falls too far short of the goal or the goal sounds too unrealistic to your people, then I guarantee that eventually your staff will become pessimistic about it. The uptime will become an unhappy point with them, an inside joke in your company, and it will tarnish the reputation of anyone who was foolish enough to sign off on it.

This line of thinking applies to other goals in your company as well. It is important to think high and stretch your people. Challenges make your people stronger. They make your company better. If you are not stretching your people, you may risk your competitive edge. Setting too unrealistic goals, however, will simply set your people up for failure- and they will remember you for it. Being set up for failure is demotivating.

For that matter, setting too many ’stretch’ goals is just as bad if not worse than setting one unrealistic goal. Your people will get sick of every single win being a struggle to the finish. They will start to whisper things like “Who does he think we are?” and “Sure, just pile on more to the load, I’m stretched too far now anyway!”. Do you want to be thought of that way by the people you lead? Or, to be more specific, do you think your people will follow someone who they think these things of?

Never set goals that you or the people you manage do not have the resources- time, money or otherwise- to reach. Stretching is good for your business. Jumping off cliffs without a parachute is not. Others can see whether or not your goals are reachable given the resources available. Your people may see this as lack of respect for them (”He thinks we’re miracle workers!”), lack of ability to plan (”He doesn’t care how many hours we work!”), or a lack of knowledge (”Doesn’t he know that can’t be done with what we have?”). They will mistake it for incompetence, and your credibility with your people will take a huge hit that your ability to lead them may never recover from.

So why does this matter to you?  “I’m not in sales and marketing,” you say.  It matters to you if you have a job anywhere, doing anything- or even if you don’t.

Word of Mouth spreads people’s opinion of you.  It spreads their opinion of the work you do, of your team, of your project, of your department, your company… it goes on and on.  Looking for a job?  If your friends and past coworkers do not respect you and your work, you won’t be getting help from them- even if they say that they are helping.  Networking has been shown to be one of the #1 ways of landing a new job, and if you haven’t painted a picture of yourself positively with those who know you, you’ve cut yourself off from that market- or worse, turned it against you.

How about your next review?  Expecting a raise?  Do you think that if you have a poor image with your coworkers or customers that’s going to help you?

Funding for your project?  If the buzz around the company water cooler is that project X is hot, but no one’s heard much about yours, you might be in trouble.  Funding for more staff for your department?  Not if word of mouth says your department isn’t contributing value.

You should care about your reputation no matter what you do for a living.  Even garbage collectors have bosses who have to listen to complaints- and who hear praise.  What they say about reputations is true, too- they take years to build sometimes, but they come apart in seconds.  People are more likely to talk about negative things because they like to complain.  If you are consistently bad, everyone will know.  People talk about inconsistencies because they notice them.  If you do a good job normally, but make a screwup, they’ll notice that (of course, if you handle your error well, they’ll talk about that- which can do you good).  Most of all, people love to talk about their problems- so if you cause people problems, expect the word to spread.

On the contrary, integrity is admired.  Help is appreciated.  Value your working relationships with others and try to bring value.  Act with integrity and be fair.  Strive to be not just ‘a good employee’, but the kind of person people want to work with.  You can’t afford not to.

I love this tool and have used this concept for years.  Not just as a fun tool, but as a very serious tool.  Meetings seem like a way of life in some companies, and you can easily spend tons of time in them, but you always have to ask yourself the cost, especially if you are holding those meetings to solicit information to help you make decisions.

I was once involved with a series of meetings that centered around studying and deciding whether or not to make a business decision that was going to cost our company around $10,000.  That’s not a small investment and worth talking about.  Still, after a few weeks it was out of hand.  We were including too many people and agonizing over the decision too much.  I brought the problem to the attention of my boss (the ultimate decision-maker).  The conversation was something like this:

“Hey, we’re spending a lot of time on this.”

“I know, I need to make a decision, we need to think a bit more about it I think.”

“Well, think fast, you’ve spent $5,000 on this decision already.”

That got his instant attention.  It was a rude jolt, to be sure, but it was a needed one, and well-received.  He asked what I was talking about.  I pointed out the number of hours in meetings, pointed to the average cost per person’s time that we use for pricing project resources for the people in those meetings, did a simple math calculation, and poof.  $5,000, give or take a few hundred.  That ended the meetings right there.  He made the call the next day based on the information he had.

Being cautious and risk-averse is a reasonable approach to doing business, but never be so cautious you overrun your costs just trying to make a decision.  Keep your meeting costs in mind.  Calculate the estimated cost of a meeting BEFORE you call the meeting, then decide if what you’ll be accomplishing in that meeting is worth the cost.

The consequences of mistakes in business have grown such that most business people I know have trouble seperating the facts in a decision from the spin that will be put on the results later on. They frame every possible decision in terms of how it may look to the press, the stockholders, the SEC, the customers, the VP down the hall, the list goes on and on. When we do this, we can’t think clearly about the issue itself. It’s even worse when you are in a meeting. Every time someone puts a possible outcome on the table, there’s a whole room full of people spinning it in every direction to find how it could come out badly, squashing the idea. Keep doing this, and you will often find that you have no good solution whatsoever. Even if you don’t, the only decision you will arrive at is the one no one can say anything bad about, which usually means no risk. No risk in business equals no innovation.

What happens is that people confuse possible fallout with substance. Put your spin away. Try leading your meeting off with something like this: “First, let’s decide what to do. We can decide how to sell it afterwards. If we don’t, we’ll spend all day selling and never have a product to sell.”

Set the stage right. First, you all need to decide what to do based on the facts and non-political risks involved. After you have done this, you can think about how to present your decision and do any political damage control. You cannot make the right decisions, the tough decisions in life, if you worry about how you’re going to sell them first. Make your decision, then sell it. This is what leadership is all about.