Is your sponsor really an executive, and does it matter?

Most of our governance best practices place very high value on the effectiveness of the executive sponsor and/or decision board. What if true executives are disappearing?

The role of the executive. whether in the organization or in the specific context of governance, is to make decisions that have significance, can be implemented, and will stick.

The literature assumes that "executives" are as a matter of definition sufficiently well-placed in the organization to provide "top cover" or "air support".  As this story line goes, the executive has a strong interest in the success of the investments (projects, if you will) because they are accountable for that success. They understand the business drivers, and are able to determine the balance between speed, cost and quality. When things need to be smoothed over, a few words between executives can result in a remarkable increase in cross-group cooperation.  When a project manager needs a bit of support, the mere possibility of the executive having to get involved serves as a major deterrent. When project managers have the opportunity of presenting their project at milestone reviews, it can be a make-or-break moment; that in turn provides the governance staff (PM, security, etc.) with the opportunity to help the PMs get through those reviews.  If unfortunate events occur, the executive may be able to reach into some sort of reserve fund, or at least reshuffle priorities across other activities, to allow resources to move to where they are needed.  And, when the project is successful, the sponsor has some ability to set the corporate rewards machine to flowing.

In order to have these capabilities, the executives must:

• Be fully accountable for the success of their initiatives.
• Have the ear of the top executives.  
• Have quite a bit of discretion to act, or not act.
• Have discretionary resources.
• Have some control over their time.  If "managing by walking around" was rare when it had to be written about, it is very much rarer today. I am starting to think that this is the single biggest factor that distinguishes an executive from an overpaid middle manager.

But it has been my observation that fewer and fewer executives have these resources.  Why?

• More meetings, more paperwork, more meetings, more rules, more meetings.  Maybe the flood of "information", all requiring reading, digestion and collaboration, has achieved critical mass. If the executives do not have time to participate meaningfully, how meaningful is their participation?
• Rules.  Ever-increasing compliance requirements are being levied on both the technical work and the basic processes for managing the organization itself.  Organizations are run by rules, not by leaders.  (Of course, one might argue that the events in so many private and public organizations over the past 10 years provide clear evidence that rules are a poor but necessary alternative where leadership is completely lacking).
• As a sub-set of "rules", there is not much in the way of overt discretionary funding.  A lot of deals get made under the table, which undermines governance even further, but the modern executive doesn't seem to have the resources to make an impact on a project once it is launched.  They most certainly do not seem to have any way of rewarding the project team for a job well done, except perhaps to mentor one or two them to more important roles as the executive herself moves up the organization (or to others).
• It does seem to me that executives are increasingly insulated by politics (internal, not partisan) from any real accountability.  They take the bonuses and nobody at the top gets fired, even if things do not go well.  Rocking the boat just gets the executive chucked out of it; sinking quietly yields a generous severance or pension.

What do you think?  Are there lots of enabled executives out there? If so, let's hear about organizations are making that work.

Is your board room just an echo chamber?

Are CIOs (and other executives) simply listening to their own voices echoing off the boardroom walls?

You may want to weigh in on an excellent posting from Jim Anderson on "The Accidental CIO", an occasional (sort-of biweekly) blog that usually has something insightful to say.   This week's edition is about how a CIO can engage in effective listening, and how to tell whether that is working.

I think if the CIO has gotten to that step, the organization is already in the top quartile.  Two-way conversations are important. But a workplace is going to be dysfunctional if it can't even handle one-way communication.

As a consultant for most of my career, and a government manager for the rest of it, my perspective is probably skewed; people don't often hire consultants to help improve things that are working well.  They hire consultants to fix things that are broken.  Very often, the executives want help with better oversight mechanisms (governance!) because from their perspective it appears that the organization is simply backsliding on carrying out their instructions, policies and strategies.  And more often than not once you start poking around you find that the rest of the floundering organization is frustrated that nobody seems to be in charge of it (or there is a little cabal doing back-room deals, which in practice amounts to the same thing).

I've always been astonished at the results of a simple test.  In any open meeting, have people fill out a blank 3x5 card (no hints) with what they think the CIO's top 3 priorities are (this works for any leader, really) .  Then have the CIO reveal what he/she thinks they are.  Then reveal what the people thought.  The revealed gaps - if any - tell you all about whether there is any open communications channel at all.

I suppose one could vary this to test for upward communication too.  How do you do that?

Can it be that PM best practices -- aren't ?

 I've always found it ironic that the major and minor consultancies around DC are paid billions of dollars every year to continue providing the same advice on best practices that (in the of project management anyway) have been largely unchanged since the 1980s.  There are only a few possible explanations for this:

• Consultants are very bad at providing advice.  
• The advice the consultants are giving is very bad.  In other words, all this project management stuff is just a bunch of malarkey.  
• The clients are incapable of implementing the advice they are paying so much for. 
• The clients do not wish to implement the advice that are paying so much for.  which would mean that they really do not care.  In which case, why would they continue to pay for it?  (And why would we keep giving them all this money for work if they don't care whether it gets done or not)?

Did I miss an obvious answer?

Although the fourth choice (they don't care) seems like an easy answer in these days, I don't think I am ready for that one just yet.  There are too many cases I know of where public servants really are trying to get things done. And too many case where, despite their best efforts, nothing seems to happen.

The third choice (incompetence): the vast majority of public employees are pretty sharp and very hard-working.  Maybe they aren't ready for Silicon Valley or Seattle, but for the most part we're not talking about those skill sets. Federal employees must be able to define, plan and oversee a project, with enough technical knowledge to avoid getting too much of a snow-job.  I think the agencies have lots of people answering to that description. Whether they are allowed to exercise those skills goes to the fourth option. Maybe public-sector IT projects are biting off more than anyone can possibly chew?  Clinger-Cohen and later policies have tried to address that by requiring delivered capabilities within 12-18 months, but that has been largely ignored (see option 4). If we really believe that the public-sector is simply unable to attract the skilled labor needed to manage and execute IT projects that are otherwise perfectly feasible, then we have to figure out a way to get someone else to be responsible for delivering these highly-complex projects.  Not just contracting out - that's what we do now.  It would require a pretty creative solution.

Option 1: I'm not opposed to laying some of this at the feet of the consultancies, which after all have a vested interest in a permanent presence.  So maybe they are providing over-engineered solutions that are theoretically elegant but quite impractical and so never quite take root.  But in that case their advisory services should be equally ineffective in the private sector, where in fact it does seem to work (or maybe we just do not get to hear about those failures?).  Maybe the people buying the services need to take a look at why private-sector IT seems to have moved so far ahead of the public sector.  Or else only the newest or worst consultants are being used on public-sector accounts.  If you agree with option one, then you should be looking at a major business opportunity.

Well, if you're not buying any of that, there's option 2: it's all hocus-pocus.  As a certified project manager and architect, I'm supposed to (and do) believe that these disciplines can work together to produce efficient and effective solutions.  It seems self-evident that an organized approach has to work better than just muddling through. Yet so many organizations seem to operate on that opposing premise, and they not only survive but thrive (even if their projects are frequently fiascos).  Ulp.

In this confusing environment, we must be very clear about the intended benefit of any governance practice.

• If the organization doesn't want it, there will be no benefit from any investment in it.
• If the benefits of governance as compared to the status quo are not crystal clear, then the organization (especially those who benefit most from the status quo) will not want it.

If the benefit is not totally clear, then perhaps this piece of governance can wait while we focus on the parts that the organization will get behind.

What do you think?

The Internet doesn't make people stupid. Incompetent education makes people stupid.

Here's something that must be true.  I just read it on the internet.  Ivan Schneider's article does not really say that the internet is making people stupid, although one could read it that way.  What he really means to say (and does so) is that the internet facilitates a number of social disruptions and people need to be made aware of that potential so they can guard against it.  However, that conclusion is only half-complete.

You'll probably want to know how this topic is related to the overall topic of the blog. Well, if Mr. Schneider is correct, the quality of governance decisions is going to suffer pretty badly if the rising generation of leaders has been made stupid by the internet.  First, let me say that my recent few months of extended exposure to the start-up community allowed me to meet a great many young coders, sales people and business founders. There are a great many pretty smart cookies out there.  You'll be working for some of them soon enough.

But for the moment let's swallow the conventional wisdom (gained, no doubt, from the internet) that there are a scary number of brain-dead employees and voters out there.  You cannot simply blame that on the internet.

The real symptom is that people (some stupid, some just cynical; you can be the judge on that) say stupid things in a public forum and other stupid people read and believe them. That, of course, has been going on for millennia; the Roman emperors felt that they would remain in power as long as the kept providing the people with bread and circuses. Today, the internet provides these already-stupid (or cynical) people with a wider range for their pronouncements and provides other already-stupid people with greater access to those other stupid people masquerading as educators, journalists, (ahem - bloggers) and of course politicians.

The real way to solve this is not to try and educate the already-stupid people (who have already demonstrated resistance to conventional education) on the internet's dangers, which are already widely known to those who are not stupid.  The way to solve it is in the problem statement: if we can prevent people from being already-stupid in the first place, then they will see these politicians, analysts, journalists and other con artists for what they are.

How do we do that?  We can't do much about the varying levels of gray matter that nature furnishes us with, but we can help people make the most of what they have.  Let's start by stopping trying to convince children and young adults that they don't need to use their noodles at all because someone will make sure they come to no harm.

We need education that includes critical thinking that enables a student to start connecting the dots and, most importantly, to identify when something is poorly supported or biased.  Education that requires some degree of real learning of useful information and requires retention of that information.   Education that does not depend on children to somehow come up with knowledge as a result of group learning exercises.  Education that does not permit the dysfunctional few to impede the progress of the vast majority of future employees, entrepreneurs and taxpayers.  Education where an A is not given just for effort or for having a compelling background story of social deprivation, real or imagined.

This isn't a rant about teachers, for the most part.  Most the problems can be laid on the institutions within which the educators labor despite the obstacles placed in front of them.  We need education systems that do not cocoon the actual educators in layers of union protections that enforce mediocrity - and does not treat and compensate the educators as unskilled labor.  The fact is that most school districts and colleges take in more than enough money to compensate teachers and professors fairly (meaning commensurate with the tremendous responsibility we wish them to shoulder), but it is wasted on layers of bureaucracy and on capital expenses that are more for the sake of competing with other wasteful institutions than for adding any actual learning.

It seems doubtful that the political system, which more than any other depends on feeding rubbish to the masses, has any intention of improving the situation. Anyone think otherwise?

Strategy - just enough to understand is the way to go

My first assignment as a contractor was to write the Strategic Plan for the submarine fleet computing capabilities.  As a former Army officer, about all that I knew about any of that was what Tom Clancy (RIP) had just published in the Hunt  for Red October (yes, it was many years ago), which the Navy acknowledged represented an accurate picture of their capabilities ... 10 years earlier.  Meanwhile, the rest of us had just taken ownership of the IBM AT, the first PC that you could actually use for business in much the way we do today.  It was very hard to imagine where they should be in 10 more years when we could not really absorb where they were now.

Your first opportunity to "do strategy" may have seemed just as high of a cliff to climb.  My boss showed me a process for coming up with a strategy, which I have used several times since, but I recall thinking "is that all there is?".  Of course it is not that simple.  The template is not the strategy.  The hard part is having the expertise, vision and intuition to come up with the right answers to put into the framework.  That skill is what those massive corner-office salaries, bonuses and stock options are supposed to be paying for.  The consultant's role is to help focus the executives' attention long enough, in a structured enough manner, to get those highly-compensated neurons firing.

There is no shortage of books on how to "do strategy" and no shortage of consultants willing to do it for you. You cannot outsource ownership of the actual strategy.  It's fine to get a facilitator, and a graphic artist to sex it up, but a successful strategy is not something people read.  They need to experience the executive team living it, 24 x 7.

A "good enough" strategy makes it easy for everyone in the organization to understand and internalize:

• What things will look like when we have achieved our definition of "success"
• How we will accommodate the significant changes we should expect to run into between now and then
• The few (4-10) major initiatives will we undertake to get there? 
• Are they realistic (do they match the culture and knowledge that we have, or could realistically get)?
• Are they allocated reasonable levels of resources?

If the strategy makes those things clear, then it is good enough.  Everyone will understand, at all times, whether the thing they are doing right now facilitates or impedes the strategy.  If it cannot make clear what the few important things are, then more detail is not really going to help.

Having developed a strategy that is good enough, the organization has to have the will to follow through on it.  If that is the issue, your problem is not strategy but leadership.

Update on Windows 8 internet access stability

Isn't it embarrassing to convince the family to invest in the latest must-have technology and then not be able to get it to work?  As we learned last month (thank goodness I tested before exposing it to the crowd), your nice new Windows 8 machine has the potential to embarrass you mightily.  Before you jump too quickly to revisit some steps you might have to take to get your nice new holiday computer working properly (i.e. accessing the internet, a pretty much indispensable requirement), here's an update on that story.

Many of the steps I took last month came from a host of different websites in search of a solution that would work.  By now I'm not sure whether some particular actions actually made no difference, but the combination lasted for a month, even getting me through a real-time programming class requiring internet access in a large university lecture hall.

Over the holidays the glitch was back, or more specifically I couldn't get on the internet.  At first I thought it might have been because the whole neighborhood was at home and logged in, but since my tablet was working just fine I reckoned it was the computer.  Theorizing that perhaps the wireless adapter wasn't properly installed (which I am told is fairly common) I took it in to the Geek Squad to see if they could either put a meter of some kind on it, or perhaps just re-seat it.  As it turns out, modern computer design does not envision component swap-out so they just replaced the whole box.  (Hmm . maybe another post is forming on how the entire computer industry is rejecting the business models that made it a multi-trillion dollar industry).

Now for the good news: Microsoft and/or Best Buy have updated their configurations in several ways and very little needed to be done to keep the new box on line and productive.  The security systems do not seem to be in conflict and the power setting that turns off your wireless adapter to save energy has been removed from the default settings (although you definitely want to check that one).  And of course to do so you need to be able to find the Control Panel.

This you can do via <Windows key>-<D>, which gives you the alternate command "charms" (what were they thinking about with different command menus for different views in a system that actually has no documentation?).  Flip the charms out of the right-hand side of the screen (no idea how you do this if you don't have a touch-screen), choose settings, and at long last the Control Panel appears.  Choose the Power setting and make sure this option is turned off in your active power profile.

The other way of doing this is to download the classic shell, i.e. the Windows XP or Windows 7 "start button" which returns control of the process to you, the user.  It also allows you to have more than one window available at a time, and really if that doesn't seem important to you then you'd be much better off with a tablet.

Those minor fixes aside, the new computer has now been running for a couple of weeks with no difficulty and seems to be quite happy.  The good news about Windows 8 is that it boots up really fast: the computer beats my cell phone by a mile in a boot-up race.

Relieve major source of holiday stress caused by your new Windows 8 PC

Call it a supreme act of public service.  You don't really want to spend the holiday season, and the weeks beyond, trying to make that nice new computer work properly. If you're running a business, this could save you many hours of downtime. [PS - here's an update].

I want you to know that this post is not an Appleholic rant; I am and remain a Microsoftie by preference.  I must be, as I have now invested some 24 real hours (not just 2 calendar days) working out how to get my nice new laptop to work.  Not "as I would like it to" - in the internet age (and computers that come without any DVD-ROM drives, a computer that cannot connect to the internet basically does not work at all. And that is what awaits the recipient of the gift of that nice new Windows 8 computer.

Whether you like it or not, you will have to get into Windows 8 soon enough.  I could deal with the reliable XP operating system going out of support, but not with Microsoft's parting gift being a patch that causes intermittent blue-screen-of-death failures.  And considering the age of the beast, it might be that I had a bad spot developing on the drive.  So Windows 8 it is.  Fortunately, most new laptops also have touchscreens so the tablet-like interface will not make you completely crazy poking your finger into a non-responsive monitor. Better yet, although not revealed in the non-existent documentation [tip #1 - get the book!], one can bypass the tablet look and get back to an operating system view that is a whole lot like Windows 7.  Once you have found that view (use the <flying-windows-button><D> command) you can now get to the Control Panel inside the Setting ribbon that pops out from the right-hand side of the screen.  [The Settings ribbon doesn't work that way in Tile World, the main Windows 8 screen].  But there is no program control button (the old Start button that we all hated and now want back) so anything you cannot do from the Control Panel you'll have to find in the program file folders somewhere - or better yet, download one of several freeware that put the Start button back in play! Are you with me still?  Welcome to Tile World) ...  Get the book ...

Until you get your Windows 8 machine tamed, if you have a tablet, it's a good idea to keep it handy so you can tell whether the wireless service is actually down, which does sometimes happen.

I can't say that the following actions will completely eliminate your issues, but at last I have 2-3 days of stable operations now.

1. Download Windows 8.1.  Make the store do it to save yourself a few hours of aggravation with monster download.  And don't let them put just any old virus package on there; the package must disable the Windows security packages (Defender and Firewall) or it will be a waste of money (see below).
2. Preferably before leaving the store, go to your wireless adapter properties (in Device Manager) and under the Advanced tab, in Power Management, un-check the block that allows the system to turn off the wireless adapter as a power-saving feature. Now at least 30% of the time you won't get disconnected from your perfectly-functioning router.
3. Download another browser while you can.  Better yet download 2, just in case.  but... much as people love Firefox, it has a problem for this purpose, which is that it calls on services actually implemented in Chrome and Internet Explorer. Since IE is helping to create the problem, and there's no point in calling Google is the system isn't letting Chrome operate, Firefox just adds layers of complexity at this point.  Besides, I didn't find too many posts on how to fix this issue in Firefox, just Step 2, which is only part of the problem.  But suit yourself.
4. Go into your new browser and if it is also new to you, then let it pick up your IE bookmarks (before you uninstall IE in step 6).
5. If your browser of choice is Chrome, then in the settings Advanced section disable the option for predicting the next screen {huge difference]. 
6. In the control panel, go into Add/Remove Programs and disable Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, you cannot uninstall it, nor can you replace it with a working version of IE (such as 8 or 9).  [If you are stuck having to use the 2 or 3 sites left in the world that only operate on IE, all of which are operated by the government or by Microsoft, then you'll have to leave it in place, but it appears to me that disabling IE-11 and therefore all of the other windows activities that default to IE-11 was one of the most successful steps].  Now go into Control Panel again and set your other browser as the default for "all of functions that it can perform"; just setting it as the default browser when it installs only reallocates about 1/2 of the functions.
7. Your browser still will not open websites that your tablet tells you are working just fine. Download another firewall program.  I can't vouch of which ones will or won't work but one of the problems appears to be that Windows Firewall is set up to block everything except what is on its VERY short white-list, which basically translates to *microsoft* and *msn*.  You don't really want to have to enter every site you might want to visit before you visit it.  Nor do you want to get into the actual rules engine behind Windows firewall.  I am not flacking for AVG here, just telling you what worked for me: AVG is working just fine, and it has the advantage of disabling Windows Firewall as part of its install. Otherwise you have no GUI checkblocks to disable Windows Firewall, although you can open up the console and turn off the monitoring, which may or may not have the same effect.  While you are at it, disable Windows Defender (through the Control Panel programs section).  Now you won't have a collision between security systems.  Now install the new security system.
8. You may still find sites that will not open.  A number of sites open as regular HTTP but somehow switch themselves to HTTPS and these seem to have difficulty opening. In the Windows Internet settings (from the Control Panel), open the advanced security settings and enable SSL 2.0. Doing this seems to work, but MS turned it off as a default for a reason; I am sure the CISSPs will have a cow over this idea and your comments are welcomed - the blog could use some flame traffic!  
9. After all this, your computer may still be dropping off the network randomly.  Go to the computer manufacturer's site and get their version of the driver for the wireless adapter.  It may be older or newer,never mind, just do it.  (You could do this step earlier but the downloads can be huge, as you often don't get just the one driver in the download). Then launch it manually (which will override the Windows build that your store did).  I learned in this process that the Window's "search for latest driver" button always responds with "the best available driver is already loaded" if it finds one, and it will not find one that is inside a zip folder.  In future, whatever your system tells you based on Microsoft suggestions, always go to the manufacturer's site first; sometimes MS enhancements are too generic for your particular model.

After step 9 I have achieved 36 hours of stability and good speed.

If it saves you the days I have put into this issue so far, and helps you avoid looking like a tool while the kiddies are whining about not being able to use the new computer, then it may be worth it.