Chapter 1

Environmental soup

No project operates in a vacuum; projects take place within a constantly changing environment. The environment includes all of the surroundings that affect the activities of those who participate in the project. The environment may be limited to the organization or business sponsoring the project, but sometimes other factors, such as government regulations, competition, product obsolescence, labor problems, or employee families significantly intrude upon the team’s environment as well.

You may think of the project environment as a soup which is made up of a culture broth, with company operations adding meat, with other projects adding vegetables, and with various managers providing spice. The corporation provides the stove, the pot, the utensils and pays the grocery bills. As the soup simmers, it continually changes in sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic ways.

The Goal of every Project is to Change the Environment

The purpose of any project is to add something of value to the environmental soup. A project team cannot be successful unless the project manager is politically savvy and sensitive to the needs of the project environment. The project manager needs to collect the ingredients and taste the soup and get feedback from other tasters on whether it is becoming too salty or too sweet, too spicy or lacking a necessary ingredient.

A project leader is most effective when he or she can move easily throughout the organizational environment and help prepare others to accept whatever change the team has been asked to deliver. Ken, my husband, has traveled the world and has very eclectic tastes. But once I set before him a dish that looked like Campbell’s tomato soup and smelled like Campbell’s tomato soup, but was a soup to which I had added several herbs and spices. At first sip, he recoiled with surprise and made that face you see when children taste something they call “yucky”. I soon learned to prepare Ken for what was coming. Now if I’m making a new recipe that looks like something familiar, but tastes different, I say, “This is a new recipe. Tell me how you like it.” Once prepared, he will usually accept the new dish with appreciation. Most people will react similarly to changes in their environmental soup.

A project leader’s preparation activities involve not only talking to others in the environment to prepare them for a change, but also listening to those who have an opinion about the coming change. Not every opinion can be acted upon, but communicating with those outside the team is as critical to success as communication within the team.

The Necessity for Experience

Just as a great chef can prepare a better soup than you or I, an experienced project manager is better prepared to succeed than is a new project manager. While you may learn the principles of project management and political negotiation in class and by reading books, that learning takes effect only when you observe and participate and assess a team project. Every project you manage adds richness to your ability to manage the next project, so if you start small, you can gradually learn to manage larger and larger projects.

Fortunately, most of you have already worked on many more projects than you may realize. Remember all the times you led, or participated in, group activities in high school? Every group interaction, where different individuals play different roles or positions, is a project-type opportunity. From nursery school games through high school simulations and community organizations, most of us have had abundant team leadership opportunities well before entering the work place. Throughout your reading in this book, reach back in your memory to “learn” from what you already know.

The Culture of the Environment

Culture constitutes those common practices that are so pervasive in the organizational environment that they need not be written, but are universally understood. Culture is a product of socialization. Our socialization affects what we value, how we seek power, how we use influence, and how we respond to authority. The culture describes the “what is,” the actuality of how an organizational environment operates: the patterns created as everyone interacts.

In addition to common practices, every culture also has policies, processes and procedures that are the result of persons acting on their own priorities and interacting with others in the same environment over time. Policies, processes and procedures are the result of organizational politics over time, they make up the “rules of the game of politics.” The rules might not be written and they may, or may not, be consistently followed; but players know the rules exist. They represent “what ought to be” as determined by the organization’s leaders.

Do you recall organizing a club when you were in grade school? We did, in the second grade, at Miller Park School. We were too young to be Brownies, so we formed our own club. We met after school at Karen’s house. We only let girls in our club. That was one of the club rules, our club policy. Our process included election of a President, Vice-President, Secretary, Treasurer and Sergeant-at-arms. (Five officers were necessary so that every girl in the club could be an officer.) We also had secret procedures for greeting each other and a secret language, Pig Latin. Our girls club was my first experience in organizational politics. As a club leader, I liked to make up rules. If I could get the rule adopted, all the girls had to follow that rule or they would be thrown out of the club, such a feeling of power. Consequently, our meetings were spent making up rules…and eating.

Policies, Processes and Procedures are corporate rules

Policies are the highest and most general rules governing conduct within the corporation. Policies often affirm corporate commitment to legal and ethical restrictions against discrimination, for example. Similar corporate policies exist in many companies and many cultures. Below is an example of a corporate policy statement of the Louisiana-Pacific Corporation.

Corporate Policy on Protection of the Environment

Louisiana-Pacific Corporation is committed to a healthy environment worldwide by taking a leadership role in our communities to be good neighbors. Our Corporate Policy on Protection of the Environment is a statement of our environmental goals. We believe that sound business practices and efforts to enhance the environment are compatible. Therefore, Louisiana-Pacific strives to:

Meet or Surpass the Requirements of Environmental Laws and Regulations

Ensuring that Louisiana-Pacific employees understand and adhere to all applicable environmental laws and policies.

Educating and training employees and business partners to comply with workplace environmental laws and regulations and assume a role in protecting the environment.

Maintain a Responsible Role in Managing Natural Resources

Committing to be environmentally-conscious stewards of the land by using Best Management Practices recommended to foster multiple-use and the sustainability of world forest resources.

Committing to the wise use of energy, reducing waste and pollutants, conserving resources and recycling materials.

Conserve Nonrenewable Resources Through Efficient Use and Careful Planning

Researching and developing technologies, processes, and products that are environmentally sound and use renewable resources.

Promoting recycling, source reduction, pollution prevention and waste minimization.

Fully Account for Environmental Considerations in Corporate Planning and Decision Making

Incorporating environmental planning when evaluating and designing new facilities or changing existing operations.

Managing the purchase and use of products that may be hazardous, undertaking an environmental review of products before purchase.

Ensuring that Louisiana-Pacific operates safely and responsibly in our communities.

Incorporating environmental costs into financial planning.

Periodically assessing the Company's environmental performance and updating the Corporate Policy on Protection of the Environment.

Most written policy statements are displayed on a business web site. Project managers may find also find written policies in documents issued by the human resource department, the accounting department, the project office or methodology department, and a variety of other places, depending on how centralized or decentralized the environment.

Processes govern how a company does business day in and day out. Processes tend to be company specific, even protected by copyright or patent. Where one process, such as the software development process, is used in many different companies, that process may be written down and marketed by a methodology vendor. Rational Software company markets a methodology, called Catalyst, which consists of a set of inter-related policies, processes, procedures, and information systems for software development.

Most processes originate within individual departments and small groups within a company. These are “tribal” processes, based on experiential learning and agreements among the members of small work groups. In the 1980’s, re-engineering consultants illustrated how such tribal processes cause redundancy and inefficiency within a large corporation. Consultants demonstrated how companies could save time and effort by designing processes across multiple departments with a focus on the goal, the customer and the end result. By the early 21^st century, re-engineered processes, aided by computerized information sharing, brought about marked improvement in American productivity. Much of the methodology used for re-engineering processes can now be studied under the banner of Six Sigma[2] and the Integrated Capability Maturity Model (CMM).

Below is an example of a very simple generic process for a single individual to follow to label a shipment for overseas. In the appendix is an example within a template of a more complex process involving multiple steps done by different persons from different departments.

Labeling

Labeling is used on export shipping containers to meet shipping regulations, ensure proper handling, conceal the identity of the contents, and help receivers identify shipments. It should not be used for advertising purposes.

The overseas buyer specifies export marks that must appear on the cargo for easy identification. Markings needed for the actual shipment include:

Shipper's mark

Country of origin

Weight marking

Number of packages and size of cases

International handling marks

Cautionary markings

Port of entry

Labels for hazardous materials

To prevent misunderstandings and shipping delays, legibility is extremely important. Letters and symbols are generally stenciled on the package in waterproof black ink on three sides of the carton. To avoid any confusion, remove old markings.

Exporters may find that customs regulations regarding labeling are strictly enforced. Most freight forwarders and export packing specialists can provide the necessary information regarding specific regulations.

Unless otherwise instructed by the buyer, label the goods in English. However, the U.S. manufacturer may wish to put cautionary markings in both English and the language of the port of destination. There are many internationally recognized symbols that can be utilized also. Any freight forwarder should be able to provide or instruct you on the appropriate symbols for your shipment. An example of a correctly labeled package is found below:

The above guidance on labeling overseas shipments is taken with permission from the Michigan SBDC publication titled Trade Secrets The Export Answer Book.

Procedures are step-by-step directions explaining how to do some part of a corporate process. Companies will often write a procedure explaining how to fill out and submit a form to recover travel expenses, for example. Writers try to make procedures idiot-proof, attempting to explain every step with absolute precision, with the result that many procedures turn out to be vapid and unused.

The following procedure explains how to use the parking brake on a 2001 Volkswagen Passat automobile:

Setting the Parking Brake

The parking break lever is between the front seats. Pull up the lever until strong resistance is felt. The parking brake must be pulled up all the way to ensure that the vehicle cannot move. When the ignition is on, the brake warning light will illuminate.

Releasing the Parking Brake

1. Press and hold the brake pedal while releasing the parking brake

2. Slightly pull up the lever.

3. Press the release button

4. Push the lever all the way down.

When the parking brake is fully released, the brake warning light will turn off.

To see how policies, processes and procedures entwine with culture, let us look into two hypothetical corporations. One represents what we call the “Ad hoc” culture and the other a “Process” culture.

Ad hoc Culture: KittyKitty

The KittyKitty company represents an ad hoc culture. Damian and his buddy, Dorest, built a robot for their high school science fair. They enrolled together in Colorado School of Engineering and started the KittyKitty Corporation in their spare time senior year. KittyKitty has been in business now for three years and employs over seventy people, producing a furry kitten robot, that is fast becoming a nationwide mania. The operations division has been adding new machines daily with a goal to double its production. Just last week the company hired ten more people and the managers are meeting this morning to decide where to assign the new hires.

The kitty robot mania owes much of its success to Damian’s marketing genius. He brings in new orders daily and has just promised Walmart to add four new features within the next six months to secure the giant chain as a client.

Dorest heads the design team, made up of brilliant creative engineers who argue out how to implement each feature. Once they decide upon an approach, the engineer in charge assumes total responsibility for implementation of that feature “cradle to grave.” The company motto is “Do It Now.”

Last month Damian, Dorest and a few others decided to fund a new cost accounting project. The project manager, a new hire, has spent the last two weeks trying to get someone to tell him what they have in mind for the project to accomplish.

The only written policy document is an employee manual that Damian picked up from his lawyer’s office the day they incorporated the company. KittyKitty has no written dress code. The engineers all wear jeans, like Dorest. The salesmen and accountants wear suits, like Damian does. When a policy question comes up that’s not in that manual, someone will usually ask Dorest what to do. Most process and procedural issues are simply resolved ad hoc. The culture evolves as each ad hoc resolution sets precedent for the next.

Process culture: Indemnity Insurance

Indemnity Insurance represents the process culture. Indemnity has been in business for more than a century and it still services the first life insurance product it introduced in 1898. Indemnity now employs 5000 persons in the home office, with 20,000 affiliates in regional offices throughout the USA. Every office has a full set of policy, process and procedure manuals governing every aspect of the business. New pages for the manuals are distributed every two months from the documentation organization tasked to keep each manual updated and accurate. The documentation group also maintains every document on the company’s internal web site. One of the manuals includes the company dress code, including dates when employees may wear shorts, which must be no more than 3 inches above the knee. A separate code governs dress when meeting with clients or prospective clients.

Indemnity insurance New products are very thoroughly researched. The time Indemnity will take to launch a new project may average a year from initial concept to charter approval. The project itself may take another 3-4 years to develop and test a product.

The company motto is “Quality Above All.” It has not missed a stock dividend since 1933.

Unwritten rules can be even more important than the written ones

The two cultures described above represent two ends of a spectrum. KittyKitty is the youthful entrepreneurial culture while Indemnity represents a mature thoughtful deliberate culture. Each culture has advantages and disadvantages. Each culture has some written rules and some unwritten rules.

One of the clearest differences between the ad hoc culture and the process culture is the extent to which policies, processes and procedures are written down, understood and followed by the both management and the workers.

The important thing for the project manager is to know in either culture is what policies, processes and procedures govern the project, as well as who changes and enforces them, how and when.

Learn the Unwritten Rules

In ad hoc cultures, process cultures, and all the flavors between, a manager needs to discern unwritten rules by watching and listening to others. Unwritten rules may be policies, processes or procedures. Some unwritten rules are unique to a particular manager or department, while others are so common they pervade the company. One difficulty of mergers or acquisitions is that misunderstandings arise from undocumented assumptions about who determines which culture will set the new unwritten “rules of the game.” Even within a given company and location the culture and the unwritten rules will differ from department to department. For example, the “culture” of the sales department differs from that of the accounting department. Such differences derive from the temperament of the workers and the daily tasks they perform for the company they serve. Think, for example, how a congenial salesman might manage accounts receivable, or how an introverted programmer might entertain a delegation from a large client.

Culture is the amalgam of individual choices based on dominant values over time. In accounting, for example, facts and accuracy are highly valued. The accounting culture dedicates time and money assuring data integrity and accuracy of data input. Accounting departments value procedure and predictability. On the other hand, in sales and marketing, subtle hunches and intuition are more highly valued in decision-making with rewards for creativity and novelty.

Chapter 3

Project Initiation

The Beginning Game

The Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK) defines Project Initiation as “the process of formally authorizing a new project or that an existing project should continue into its next phase".[10] Formal initiation links a project to the ongoing work of the performing organization.”

The PMBOK lists the outputs of Project Initiation as

Project charter

Project Manager identified / assigned

Constraints

Assumptions

Project Initiation is a critical political phase of a project and most important to project success. In 1787, leaders of the thirteen original American colonies gathered in response to difficulties encountered as they tried to operate under the Articles of the Confederation. Many, such as Benjamin Franklin, saw the opportunity to create a “more perfect union.” For weeks, they argued over the concepts and the wording of the document that became known as the Constitution of the United States. One of the most difficult arguments was over the relative power split between large states and small states. Finally with the Great Compromise, every state, large and small, was allocated two Senators while the number of Representatives for a state was based on population. Similar difficult decisions involved allocation of powers to the President and his executive branch, the Congress with Senators and Representatives, and the Supreme Court. The Constitution spelled out the role and the power of each of these three branches of government.

A Project Charter is the “constitution” of a project. Charter phrases capture and cement the political negotiation that defines the project and the powers of various project roles. Charter wording once authorized is immutable. When a charter is changed, one project dies and another is born. Although the PMBOK lists Constraints and Assumptions separately from Charter, both are as integral to the Charter as the Bill of Rights is to the Constitution.

The Project Charter is that document wherein management authorizes the project as a response to what may be termed a “problem,” an “opportunity” or a “set of requirements". Assignment of a Project Manager fixes responsibility on someone to carry forward the project. In 1787, the Constitutional Convention assigned George Washington to be the first President.

The Project Vision

Prior to creation of a Project Charter however comes the Project Vision. In 1776 Thomas Jefferson penned the vision that guided those attending the Constitutional Convention years later. That vision was The Declaration of Independence. The vision is more than simply a list of goals and objectives. The Vision is a formulation of the new environment resulting from the project. New projects are born from the visions of creative persons and teams.

Quick Fast Messenger Company

For example, John, vice president of the Quick Fast Messenger company, speaks up at a general company meeting and voices the need for better transportation. John becomes the project champion and his proposal is picked up by many others as the solution to their problems.

When the different departments of Quick Fast listen to John they visualize what this could mean to them, but they end up with rather different visions. For example, the board of directors, with a bottom line budget problem, views the solution as a set of new motor bikes. The operations department charged with maintaining old bicycles views the solution as a fleet of reliable new taxis; the messengers see themselves driving sleek, low slung street racers.

One primary role of the Project Champion is to synchronize the various project visions among all the stakeholders and sell them on a common solution. As Project Manager, you can exercise considerable influence by helping the champion form and communicate a coherent feasible project vision. You thereby are giving life to the ideas that will govern wording of the Charter and the ethical guidelines the Charter will lay down. You are doing politics.

The Project Charter

The purpose of the project charter is to record the vision and set up governance procedures for the project. During the project initiation phase, the key stakeholders and the project manager negotiate the project charter. If the leader is a contractor, the charter becomes part of the contract; but even if the leader is an internal employee, the charter is an essential first step.

The charter clarifies the roles of the players, the span and nature of their authority. The table below contains a sample section from a Project Charter. This section briefly defines the role and scope of different political players in the project.

The Corporate MIS organization will operate the project guided by a Project Steering Committee including the Project Champion and Project Manager as well as a Representative from each affected Business Department.

The Project Manager will construct and maintain a Project Plan to coordinate project activities, make the plan available to all project participants, and escalate Issues whenever the plan is at risk.

The Project Manager will staff and manage the Project Team within guidelines approved by the Project Steering Committee and the management of corporate MIS.

The Project Team will construct and maintain a web site with up-to-date communications on project plans, decisions and schedules as well as project requirements and issues.

Each Business Department affected by the project will name an Executive Representative and an Alternate Representative to the Project Steering Committee and will agree to abide by decisions taken by that board.

The Project Steering Committee will provide an opportunity for those individuals affected by the project to review and comment on anticipated changes before those changes become effective.

The Project Steering Committee will confer no less than once a month to make timely decisions involving business needs, project requirements, resource allocations, issues and changes to business processes.

The Project Champion will allocate funds to accomplish project goals based on cost estimates from the Project Team as approved by the Project Steering Committee.

The Project Manager will maintain an Issues List open to review by the Project Steering Committee including written comments from persons affected by the project.

The Charter should answer questions clarifying team leadership, including:

Who will form the project team?

What budget(s) will cover project costs?

To whom will team members formally report?

What are the process and criteria for hiring consultants?

Whose budget will pay for current employees who are assigned to the project?

What is the process for adding and removing members from the team?

Who is involved in setting milestone requirements?

Who controls the timetable for milestone deliverables?

Answers to such questions should be incorporated into the charter. The Charter then will define the governance, the ground rules, for the project. The charter is important to guide the project team and others in the environment throughout the project. The project charter summarizes how to play the political game. It sets the goals, the boundaries, the ethics and the rules.

The Political Game

Corporate projects bathe in corporate politics. Politics is the name of the game in every project management meeting. As project principals, we may play the game well or play it poorly, but we are in the game.

Politics can set you free

While many of us may think that we do not like politics, we do like freedom. We like the freedom to make our own decisions about the issues that matter to us, especially about how we spend our time at home and at work. When what you do at work affects what I do at work and what others do at work, we exercise our political skill to negotiate for the freedom to do our work as we see fit.

Whether our work involves planning a church supper or a global technology implementation, we participants have to work out some agreement about who does what and when. For a progressive dinner project, specific issues may be obvious. For example:

1. Who gets to decide the menu?

2. Who has to do the dishes?

3. Who buys the food?

4. Who takes up the collection?

The authoritative answers to such questions, the political decisions, result from the power of the individuals involved. Power may come from tradition, from skill, from rank, from money, from personal relationships or other sources.

1. Tradition: “Smith, the treasurer, should take up the collection. He always handles the money, just as his father did.”

2. Skill: “Halley will buy the food; she always knows the right quantity.”

3. Money: “Georgia, the banker’s wife, has offered their home for the main course. Ask her to choose the entre.”

4. Rank: “See if the Youth group will do the dishes.”

Regardless of the size of the project, how we use power—especially how we work with others toward mutually acceptable decisions--will determine just how much freedom we have to do what we want, and avoid what we’d rather not do. Science fiction author Robert Heinlein, in a productive way to think, calls politics the “ultimate adult sport.”[11]

The game is the same one you played as a teen-ager to maximize access to the family car and minimize time spent doing chores. Whether your task is a family outing, a community supper, or a corporate project, the better you play the political game, the more fun you can have.

“But, I hate politics.”

Why do so many people say they “hate” politics? What image comes to mind when you hear the word, “politics”? Do you see the face of Bill Clinton or Richard Nixon? Do you snicker or lament at the thought of a pregnant chad and the voting controversy in Florida? Maybe our words and attitudes hide important realities from us and hamper our leadership effort.

We, who spend our lives working corporate projects, see ourselves as people just trying to get a job done. We’re logical. We plan. We organize. We execute. We don’t “play politics.” And when someone does “play politics” with our project, we can be hurt. Our project may be hurt as well. We see no necessary correlation between “political success” and technical expertise. No wonder technicians, particularly, tend to say they “hate” politics.

Whether you’re someone who tries to avoid politics or one who loves the game, this book can teach you how to get more of what you want, when you want it, and to contend with fewer obstacles along the way. With a little encouragement and some practice, almost anyone can learn to play politics successfully and within the bounds of their moral and ethical values.

Each team leader coaches a project team playing a political game. All teams within the project environment make up a league. Each team’s goal is to achieve its portion of the project vision. If the vision is unclear, the goal posts may appear to move from day to day. If the project direction is not specified, team members will be scattered in their search for the goal posts. If scope and constraints, like the area of the playing field, are undefined, team members will have run-ins with other players or spectators. If the rules of the game are vague, arguments will break out. And all of this becomes even more stressful when your team depends not only on your own teammates, but also on all other teams, in order to achieve the end goal.

Organizational Planning

“To centralize or not to centralize? The discussion is never resolved, but the balance of emphasis is constantly shifting on the fulcrum of truth.”—Antony Jay[12]

Once the project manager understands the environment, including the culture, and understands the project charter, the next step is what the Project Management Institute (PMI) calls organizational planning. Organizational planning orders the relationships of the various teams involved in a project. These relationships will be matters of power and we manage power through politics.

At its most basic, organizational planning results in the following deliverables:

Role and responsibility assignments

Staffing management plan

Organization chart

Supporting detail.[13]

The Environment: Organization type

Most organizations are either line organizations, project organizations or matrix organizations.

A line organization is based on a hierarchy of managers responsible for ongoing operations supported by staff organizations which exist to serve the goals of the line. The US military is a typical line organization. Many companies with different lines of business will be similarly organized.

Companies that produce products typically have a line organization structure. Staff functions are those which need to serve all the lines, such as human resources and accounting. In a for-profit company, line managers will be responsible for the bottom line profitability of their line of business.

In service based businesses such as architecture or information consulting, the project organization is more common. In such a business, a senior manager will be responsible for one or more projects and the staff on those projects will report directly to the project manager. Each project manager then has responsibility for personnel development as well as for project delivery.

Often businesses operate a matrix structure with both line of business and project type organizations. In such an environment, the line manager may be responsible for personnel issues and for hiring. The line manager would then assign persons to work on a project for a particular period of time. The project manager would need to negotiate with the line manager to obtain persons to staff the project team. In a matrix structure, project resources will formally report to a line manager, but the project leader will assign project work.

Most large corporate projects today operate in a matrix environment. In a matrix setting the leader needs to be sensitive to a larger array of political arenas than in a project or line structure. In a matrix structure, the project manager may have little written authority, but needs to rely primarily on personal relationships, “personal power.”

Project Prioritization

One major aspect of organizational planning, not covered in the PMBOK, is project prioritization. Lack of prioritization is the unmentionable, ubiquitous operator that may have doomed more projects than any other. Prioritization requires politics; it is the authoritative ranking of a project’s right to draw on limited corporate resources. If two or more projects are operating simultaneously in the same budget environment and if organizational planning does not rank order the projects, or provide some other authoritative mechanism to allocate resources, then project leaders are left to fight among themselves for their project’s share of resources. When a large organization does not have a grasp on how much effort each chartered project will require, and how many resources are needed to maintain on-going business operations, then one project’s staff may be pulled away at any time to work on another project or on regular production. Such actions alter the relationships on which effective and efficient use of corporate power depends.

The Project Champion is the person responsible to provide adequate resources for the project. If a business does not have a legitimate process to allocate limited resources, then the role of the project champion becomes very much like that of his namesake, the medieval champion. Medieval knight champions would ride repeatedly into staged contests for the favors of royalty. Prioritizing in this way may not be illegal or even immoral, but the contests are costly for the champions. Further, when the corporation needs to rally its warriors to best the competition, it may discover that half of them lay wounded or dying from internal funding battles.

Despite a clear Vision and a sound Charter, any project will fail if players lack adequate resources. Champions and project leaders must understand the why and how of power, influence and authority to assure that their project teams will be adequately supplied.

Chapter 4

Power, influence, and authority

Our purpose in increasing our skill in corporate politics is to enlarge our opportunities to achieve our goals. To improve, though, we need to know our goals and our people. First we must clarify what we want to accomplish in the long run and the middle term, for where we lack such goals, we also lack power. To the extent that we focus on only the near term, on only the next task on our list, we will use our power unwisely and sacrifice future influence. We will not accumulate the resources and build the relationships we will need.

The first point in using power is not necessarily to win a particular battle. Keep your powder dry. If winning disrupts or destroys working relationships that your future success will require, winning would be a Pyrrhic victory. Second, we need to know the people we work with and those we work for. Our room for initiative, maneuvering, and speed depend upon our motivating people. To “have” human resources we need the grant of authority from above. But to motivate human resources requires that we master some ways to think politically about peers and subordinates that will improve our ability to influence them.

Organizational planning requires that the leader skillfully manage power. Many modern organizations operate projects in an environment where the authority of the project manager is unclear. This is especially true in a matrix environment where team members report formally to someone other than the project manager, where that someone assigns them to a project team and may even assign them only part time.

Especially when the leader’s authority is vague, and especially in ad hoc cultures, the leader’s personal relationships becomes the currency he or she needs to overcome obstacles.

Power: Capability and Influence

Power as Capability

Power: Some crave it. Some profess to despise it. All have it. Discussing the use of power, having influence and maintaining authority are difficult because working definitions vary. Is power “achieving purposes” or “getting someone to do what he otherwise would not”? Discussing power is especially difficult with Americans because of their experiences with it. Power has been something associated in many American minds with military coercion or with the “dirty” side of political life. Some believe “Power politics is nasty business, best forgotten or at least left to others.” By not thinking about it, many believe that they can avoid the sometimes difficult choices that come with managing power. But without power, we can not manage and we have little or no freedom to act. The only thing worse than having power is being powerless. Power signifies and facilitates the combining of purpose and ability to have effect.

Finding Power

While new business books regularly appear to guide managers in the ways of politics and organizational power, a recent publication date does not guarantee a quality management text. Power and politics have been the subject of books at least since Biblical days, and probably of folk wisdom long before. Here we can only touch on its import. Books listed in the bibliography by Harold Lasswell[14] and Blaine Lee[15] have more to say to anyone who wishes to lead a successful project team. We will concentrate on application of such concepts in a business setting.

As a piece of jargon, “power” has fallen prey to Gresham’s law; no matter how carefully one tries to define it, vernacular uses always overwhelm the formal definition. “Power,” as a term is widely discredited because of at least three errors we can make with the term.

Errors in conceptualizing “POWER”

Power interpreted as coercion.

First, the term power we too often associate solely with the coercive action or abilities of political actors, those who have the physical or economic might to compel others to do their will, in the short run, anyway.

This emphasis on coercion has led to concentration of analytic energy on the most obvious and potentially final form of coercive ability: physical force—and only somewhat less on economic or psychological force. Force may be a necessary part of winning a zero-sum game, i.e., any game with only one winner, such as football. Such games form the basis for popular but incomplete views of power.

The zero-sum game analogy overlooks the reality that political efforts most of the time are not confrontational.[16] Most of the time, players’ purposes can complement or overlap; they may also coincide. The game may have a positive sum, where all players benefit.

Where pursuits of purpose and achievements coincide—a win-win outcome--some persons perceive the situation as lacking political import. To such individuals, politics is conducting and ironing out disputes; no dispute, no politics. And the dispute either requires force or the threat of force lies just beneath the surface of the relationship. We want to stress that one can prove such a view of power only to someone who already holds it. The proof will hold up only as a self-fulfilling prophecy, not as an independent reality.

In a corporate project setting, force implies the ability to remove a player from the project or somehow neutralize his contribution. Force may also be the threat to cut funding or change the goal in some unpopular way. Of course such things happen. But playing the political game effectively can reduce their likelihood and impact.

For example, let us assume that Jane is a new project manager who needs to hire a Database Administrator (DBA) with scarce skills. Dick manages a team where Ron is DBA. Dick and Jane both report to Sam. Assuming a zero-sum game, Jane might threaten to walk out unless Sam reassigns Ron from Dick’s project to her project; she might thus force her way and leave Dick with the problem of hiring and training a new DBA. Assuming the potential for a positive-sum game, Jane and Sam would talk with Dick about her hiring problem and her desire to have Ron on her team. Together, Sam, Dick, Jane and Ron would work out a positive solution that met shared interests. Perhaps they would agree that Ron should hire and train a new DBA from outside the company. Then Ron and the new DBA would back up each other on both projects, leaving Ron to decide whether to join Jane’s team or stay with Dick.

For the political scientist, power is independent of personal opinions about whether the game is positive or zero-sum. Power may coerce in a conflict or it may permit project participants to cooperate. Such cooperation is significant in corporate political life. All actors in an organization may increase satisfaction, without reducing each other’s chance and ability to continue the game. Playing the positive sum game of politics in projects can lead to a result where everyone can win. By winning all have increased power available for the next game. Playing only the negative game will shortchange everyone, even the temporary “winner.”

Power as an end in itself

A second error discouraging people from using power appropriately in a business setting comes from its abstract postulation as a status linked exclusively to some title to which a corporate manager may aspire. Power is seen an end in itself bestowed at the same time and place as the corporate title. In typical journalistic discourse, power is something to which a chosen few may arrive and of which only one may have the “most.” The error of this view is explained below.

If one conceives of corporate officers as “powerful” based strictly on their title, one can falsely assume that power is a universal magic wand, effective for removing any obstacle. Unfortunately power does not work that way. When a titled manager is unable to master a situation within his defined scope, he and others may search for a scapegoat, a saboteur or a conspiracy, a la Harry Potter, to explain how the magic could fail .

Leaders themselves will stumble when viewing power this way. Assuming they are powerful in the abstract, they will attempt to use their power in a setting or for a goal where it is invalid.[17] They may learn painfully of their empirical oversight and definitional deficiency. As every corporate manager knows, or should know, a title never permits a person forcibly to coerce someone on his staff to do or say anything that the staff member is unwilling to do. That violates the rules. Corporate power lies in one’s ability to cajole staff to move in whatever direction the leader wishes, without eroding the working relationship, thus keeping the “cost” of future action low. Though a coercive act may succeed for the moment, subsequent costs will erase any benefit. When a relationship is thus severely strained, the manager, the employee and the company all “pay” in productivity. Payments take the form of stress, passive aggressive activities, and eventually by parting company, discarding the benefits of experience, and having to do retraining.

If a manager luxuriates in her image of being powerful, if she declines to define carefully the purposes for which she expends power, she will one day discover her power vessel to be empty, useful in the inverse of its presumed volume. Power, like a living thing, must be nurtured.

Power as Fungible

The third error in defining power is a direct result of the second. If power is conceived of as a “thing,” this error is to treat power as a commodity. Some persons erroneously believe that power relates to politics as money relates to economics. Money is “fungible,” something collectible and spendable in commonly recognized units. If power were fungible it would be reliably quantifiable. Actors could be reliably rank-ordered by their power holdings. If power were to its social impact what money is to purchasing, we could get past the barter stage in politics. As it is, we have power useful only in bargaining ( to coerce) or in negotiating ( to collaborate). Both activities overflow with ambiguity.

The “barter” character of politics stands out to some in corporate life as an invitation (or moral requirement) to use “force” (unlegitimated power) to “purchase” ends. To others, this version of reality begs for creation of the new “central bank” of political adjustments to set the terms of exchange, standardize the units of exchange, and regulate the flows of power. Though some components of power such as budgets, number of persons, or tangibles such as offices, are fungible, the needs of project order and justice require a deeper understanding of the nature of power. We need to escape either the belief or wish that power be fungible.

Using POWER

Every theory of leadership must in some way discuss power, and no discussion of power makes sense without politics. Politics is the application of power for a purpose, whether it is applied within a team, an organization, a corporation or a state.

Theories differ over what power is, who has it, who should have it, and what having it means. Power is amoral. It is the “means” part of the means-end equation. It is best understood as a relationship of persons in a given setting at a given time. Power can refer to a relationship of human beings subduing and commanding other human beings and nature for their benefit. Power can also refer to a relationship of human beings cooperating with other human beings and nature for the benefit of all.

To enlarge our understanding of how to use “power as relationship” we may factor the construct into four questions about a given setting:

who are the actors,

what are the issues,

how much do the actors affect each other, and

over what period of time?[18]

The pertinent point of these questions is that power is setting-specific. How easily being powerful in one setting translates to power in another setting is critical information, but the translation is not always obvious. A given actor is in multiple relationships in numerous settings dealing over time with issues varying in saliency; the actor’s power potential varies with the features of each setting. What an actor has in inventory that will work in pursuing chosen ends depends heavily upon the actor’s relationship with other actors in the situation.

As an example of trade-offs in the use of power, let’s say that Paul, a Chief Financial Officer (CFO), sets an objective for his organization to achieve information independence. His long term goal, his interest, is to control all the financial information within the corporation. Then he discovers that to accomplish the objective of information independence would mean cutting himself off from important allies among his peers, particularly the Chief Information Officer (CIO). Paul then faces a decision: what priority to give this objective given its costs. To decide he has to ask questions such as the following:

Is the relationship of the CFO organization with the CIO organization worth more than having sole ownership of financial information?

How “bad” is CFO dependence on the information department?

How much time do CFO people spend collecting, refining and revising information as a result of depending on CIO people?

How valuable is the information the CIO’s group provides for the CFO group?

How valuable are the services the CIO offers?

How important are the outcomes of the CIO’s decisions re financial information?

What would it cost the CFO if he fails in his attempted takeover of financial information?

Without carefully refining values and interests into such objectives, one actor will find other actors imposing their objectives on him. Without objectives, an actor will lack the particular kind of power needed in a given situation, or be unable to apply appropriate components of power. Power is a function of a relationship of persons; it is not teams in a ball game. We talk of “actors” in the political game, because the “game” itself, being positive sum, is like an impromptu stage production.

JUDGING capability

In practical terms, we study power relationships so that we may better apply the power we have to the goals we seek. Applying power involves judging how much power we have and how much power is available to our allies and our opponents. We can learn to judge power by viewing it from varying perspectives. Since power itself is invisible, we are in the position of a group of blind men trying to describe an elephant. One touches the tail and says “An elephant is like a snake." Another touches the trunk and says, “An elephant is like a hose." A third touches the leg and says, “An elephant is like a tree."

As students of power, we can distinguish between power as potential and power as impact. Power as potential is “capability”; power as impact is “influence.” Capability is power-for-something when that “something” is known. Thus one can say that Sam has the capability to reassign Ron from one project to another. Influence is power independent of the “something." Influence is power within a specified relationship. Thus one can say that Jane had sufficient influence over Sam to get him to reassign Ron to her project. Calculating influence can be more difficult than calculating capability. Miscalculations can be disastrous for the relationship. For example, if Jane had misjudged her influence over Sam, when she threatened to quit if Sam didn’t transfer Ron to her project, Sam might simply have accepted her resignation.

Decision makers doing a “power judgment” may distinguish further between an “influence attempt” and “influence effect.” As a manager you may distinguish between “the ability to get others to take you into account” and the fact that “others take you into account” even if you make no “conscious” influence attempt. For example, Jane might have mentioned to Sam that Ron would be an asset to her project. Sam might have then taken it upon himself to arrange to transfer Ron to Jane’s project. That others see you as a potential element of their power increases your influence. Because Sam viewed the success of Jane’s project as important to his own capability, Jane had influence over Sam.

Judging power, yours and others, has two stages; in this it is somewhat akin to assembling a new bicycle. With an unassembled bicycle one usually receives a parts list. But checking the parts against the list does not produce a ride in the wind, even if all the parts are in the package. One needs assembly instructions (a plan), assembly execution (implementation) and operational skill (practice in the art of balancing).

Influence

Since influence is power within a specified relationship, the makeup of influence is difficult to describe. Parts of influence reside in the influencer and parts in the influenced.

influence through Charisma

The parts of influence that reside in the influencer may be called charisma. Some people have such charisma that they exude an almost visible power over others independent of the setting. Ken describes the time he met Edward Teller, the “father” of the hydrogen bomb. Teller’s charisma was such that Ken could almost feel an aura around the man. Upon walking into the room, “Teller held a command of the situation that was clearly different from anyone else I have ever met. I’ve been close to Nixon and Carter and Putin and others, but no one else had the charisma of Teller.”

We would not pretend to say whether the Kirilean effect or something else is responsible for the varying amounts of charisma. But realize that charisma is not only in your imagination. It is real and can be powerful. For us, normal mortals, charisma plays a relatively minor role in our influence on others, but with effort we can enhance our own charisma. By adding to our prestige and our reputation, we increase our potential power, our personal power. Kay once participated in a group called the “Imposters.” The name arose from the discovery that all of us felt as if we were “acting” in our corporate and consulting positions. We felt as if we had somehow attained positions of influence beyond our capability. Other persons looked at us as having more influence than we felt we were capable of handling. We were inexperienced in using our own power and thus had to “act” a role, like children walking in their parent’s shoes.

Acting your role is an element of personal influence. No one is talking about acting “stuck up” or “throwing your weight around.” Enhancing your charisma is a matter of presenting yourself in the best possible light and exuding a confidence you may not totally feel. People willingly follow someone who looks forward and concentrates on solving problems in a non self-conscious manner. People also respond to those who are clean, physically healthy and attractive. Being attractive is culture-dependent as a peek at old National Geographic magazines can readily illustrate. As a leader, try to emulate those in the corporate culture who have more influence than you do. You may choose to dress as they do, use their favorite words or sentence structure. Others can be your mentors, whether they know it or not. To the extent that you successfully emulate those with influence in your corporate culture, you will gain more influence yourself. Not to underestimate the importance of charisma, but more often our reputation and our personal relationships determine the extent of our influence. These we can nurture and increase in number. We can be architects of our capability—through politics.

influence through personal relationships

Day in and day out as we work with people, we either build up our influence with them or we diminish it. Every smile, every pleasant gesture, every time we deliver on schedule, our influence increases. Every time we make a decision based on what we know is ethically right, our influence increases. We build our capacity to influence with those who work for us, with our peers, and with those we work for. As we build influence with our peers, we enhance our relationships with the people who work for them and the people they work for. We build influence with customers and with suppliers. No one knows what life will bring in the future. But whatever comes, personal relationships are essential to success.

Occasionally both men and women are reluctant to take notes, or draft documents at work, because they do not want to be type cast as a “secretary.” But documenting decisions can be one of the best ways to build up one’s influence. By carefully recording meeting options and decisions, policies and processes, you build credibility as deliberate, as a thoughtful resource for others, as committed and loyal. You also will remember more of what took place in the meeting. You can use both your memory and your credibility to enhance your influence during later discussions and meetings.

Authority Limits set by Charter

While accumulating personal influence by building relationships, the successful project manager will also step deliberately through the project initiation phase to codify, or document his capability. Documented authority does not always translate into useable capability, but the legitimacy conveyed by a formally accepted charter document can significantly enhance one’s potential power. Considering that the charter is the constitution for the project, the charter defines the authority for a person to act on behalf of the project. You’ve probably heard the sayings, “He left a power vacuum” and “Nature abhors a vacuum.” These aphorisms remind us that if a leader does not exercise power within his span of authority, someone else will. If a leader abdicates his role by not using power, followers will look to someone else to lead them. They will invest someone else with the power of influence. A successful project leader acts skillfully within his authority using both capability and influence.

Even when the leader acts with skill, other players will challenge him or her. In some challenges, the players will use power of their role as set out in the charter, but other challenges may not be authorized. By overtly referencing his charter authority, the leader can meet such challenges on solid ground. Limiting the use of certain powers to certain roles within a project is a basic function of the charter document. A charter document thus alleviates uncertainty and prevents misunderstandings. It also can function to keep a leader from overstepping the bounds of his authority.

The charter should also set up a project decision-making organization, such as a steering committee, that meets regularly and provides a forum within which stakeholders can monitor project progress and can communicate their preferences and their gripes. The forum allows everyone an arena within which they can deploy power to influence the project. We will discuss how to use such a body in the chapter on Norming.

Building up Power Potential

In your role as a principal in a corporate project, building your power base is a personal outcome of a positive sum game. The more good decisions you make, the more your power potential grows and, with it, the more you enhance the likelihood of project success. When your project succeeds, your influence grows. With influence comes power as potential. Power potential in projects is the potential to affect Work Flow, Cash Flow and Information Flow. To build up Power Potential, you must maneuver to succeed in all three flows.

Project Power affects Work Flow

As the name implies, the base of any leader’s power is in the many persons who make up his constituency. A corporate politician can be a figure of authority and influence for these persons, whether they rank above or below in title and capability. Leaders in today’s corporate projects may be executives, first-line managers, individual contributors or administrative assistants. To the extent that someone will do what you ask them to do, you have power potential with that person, i.e., you have the capability to affect what work they do. If people report to you on the organization chart, you have the authority to tell these people what to do. That authority gives you power potential, the capability to affect what work they do. But regardless of rank, if your role gives you the authority to require them to fill out a form or follow a procedure or attend a meeting, that authority gives you power potential, i.e., you can influence their workflow.

The more persons who respond to your workflow direction, the greater your people power base. But your power base not only is measured in the number of individuals who respond, but also in the amount of time each must pay attention to your demands on their time. The more they understand “potential power,” the more positively they are apt to respond. The more you understand “potential power,” the more carefully you will apply your influence. If you use potential power to make frivolous demands on co-workers, your ability to make such demands in the future will rapidly diminish.

Discussion Example:

To discuss the use of power and influence in a practical vein, let’s consider this example from a software project. In a software project, configuration management keeps track of all the software “pieces parts” and then fits them together to build a system that functions as it ought. Programmers write the individual software parts and usually have to turn them over to the configuration managers before a build. For the sake of discussion, let’s say the configuration management (CM) clerk, Bill, has authority over programmers, like Mary, who want to put their code into a build. Bill’s authority is limited by time and place; it is limited to either accepting or rejecting a software part. Bill does not have the same authority as George, the Programming Manager, but Bill can certainly affect work flow and has a position of power in the project.

Sam – Chief Information Officer

George – Programming Manager

Tom – Configuration Manager

Bill – Configuration Clerk

Mary - Programmer

Now let us assume that Mary’s module has just failed system test and Bill refuses to accept Mary’s module for tonight’s system build. Mary says that some of her changes are essential for tomorrow’s work. Mary is upset with Bill, because of what is happening to her freedom. Mary asks George to talk to Tom, Bill’s manager, asking that Tom override Bill’s decision.

Let’s think about the options and possible outcomes in this short political drama.

1. George may refuse to ask Tom to put the module in.

2. George may ask, but Tom may refuse to override Bill’s decision.

3. Tom may accede to the request and command Bill to put the module in after which

Bill may do as he is told or

Bill may refuse.

In the case of option 1: Mary loses power potential by having to take her problem to George. If it turns out that tomorrow’s work is wasted without Mary’s module, George also loses power in the eyes of Sam, his boss. Tom and Bill do not lose power, because they followed procedure within their authority.

In the case of option 2: George and Mary both also lose power, because they obviously thought they had the potential to influence Tom in a way they could not. Mary loses because she put George in an awkward position. George loses because he put Tom in a difficult position. Even if it turns out that tomorrow’s work is wasted without Mary’s changes, Tom and Bill do not lose because they were following procedure and were within their authority.

In the case of option 3: Both Tom and Bill risk losing power. Bill can lose by having Tom override his decision. Further Tom can lose the most because Tom’s power potential is made up of the sum of all the power potential of all the clerks, like Bill, working for him. When Bill loses the potential to change the workflow of Mary, the other CM clerks lose as well , since every programmer will want Tom to override decisions with which they disagree.

George and Mary may or may not gain power potential as a result of the “win” in option 3. If Mary’s module is indeed essential to the build, even in its crippled form, George may gain by taking a risk and saving project time. On the other hand if the flaws in Mary’s module ruin the build and disrupt the project schedule George, Mary, Tom and Bill all lose in the eyes of Sam and other project participants.

Work Flow Allies

Now let’s talk about how experience and influence and allies may affect the power potential. Let us say that Tom regularly listens to Software Development managers, like George, plead with him to overrule procedure and clerks when modules fail system test. Tom’s power potential will grow or diminish based on the proportion of his decisions that move the project forward without undo cost.

How is Tom to enhance his power potential? Somehow he has to be able to predict whether the module in question is –indeed—essential and whether it will ruin the build. Tom cannot himself know the answer to that question. Tom must rely on George to ask him to override Bill, only when absolutely necessary. Tom will have a tendency to hide behind his authority, because Tom has the most to lose.

But if George becomes Tom’s ally so that Tom can rely on George to ask for an exception only when the exception is necessary, only when it is “worth the risk,” then Tom may regularly accede to George’s requests. If so, Tom has agreed to enhance George’s power potential, because it does not cost Tom to do so. The result is that the sum of power available is positive for the team and the project.

Project Power affects Cash Flow

Project Power affects Information Flow

Chapter 2

Gather the right persons for your team

Use past performance as a guide to the future

Just as in professional team sports, no other single factor counts for as much in building a team as the selection of appropriate individuals to become team members. A team leader, like a team coach, is always on the lookout for congenial team players. Some successful team leaders will go to great lengths to find just the perfect fit for the team position they need to fill. For example, they may call upon friends from prior teams or assemble a set of players from around the globe to help them tackle new assignments.

Once a person has gained a rewarding experience from serving on a high performing team, this person may attempt to reassemble the team, even long after the project is over. He may be able to convince his former teammates to join him in a promising new project setting. Quite often, the former teammates will even be willing to relocate just to regain the rewarding experience of participating on a high performing team.

In general, a project team leader needs to recruit individuals who can bring in the following assets:

Necessary knowledge and specific technical skills

Experience in the project environment

Credibility among stakeholders

Willingness to listen and learn

Problem-solving ability

Communication skills

Political connections

Enthusiasm and a positive outlook on life

Time availability

Mature coping skills

Specifically the leader needs to find individuals whose problem solving preferences match the needs of the team and the project. For this reason we will spend some time discussing individual differences and how they impact the team.

MBTI describes problem solving preferences

If we were building a professional baseball team, we would use both a player’s preferences and previous experiences and/or credentials to decide whether to assign him shortstop or catcher or first baseman or pitcher position. People just work better when they play a position that suits their temperament and preferences and a position in which they have some experience.

The teams in business projects engage in problem solving. The Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) gives us the vocabulary to discuss problem-solving preferences and thus determine how that person might best contribute depth and breadth to a team. Working from the discoveries of psychologist Charles Jung, on patterns of human behavior, Isabel Myers developed a very sensitive instrument for describing common problem solving behaviors. This instrument is called the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory or MBTI. Since teams form to achieve goals, and since goals involve solving problems, the Myers Briggs Type Inventory can guide us in forming teams and in placing individuals in team positions where they can fully utilize their own natural strengths. Knowing someone’s Myers-Briggs Type can also help us avoid putting someone into a no-win situation.

The MBTI Model

For a broad discussion of the MBTI, and how it can help in leading teams, refer to one of many books on the subject. One excellent reference is by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates titled Please Understand Me: Character and Temperament Types.

Before we discuss the MBTI, however, to avoid misunderstandings, let’s discuss what a “model” is, how it can be useful, and why it is limited. A model, such as a model airplane, is a simplification of reality. The purpose of a model is to help us as normal human beings understand complex realities. The model shows only the bare bones of what we need to learn. Models give us a general understanding of sophisticated scientific principles. Think about a model of our solar system with planets revolving around the sun. While the reality may be far more sophisticated than a simple picture of spheres and circles, the model shows us insights we might gather in no other way.

Human psychology and temperament are vastly complex topics. The MBTI can help you understand yourself and others, but it cannot and does not pretend to present the full picture of a person.

Differences in temperament.

The psychologist Carl Jung identified four pairs of preferences on which the MBTI is built. Each preference is characterized by a capital letter. The four pairs are

Extraversion - Introversion,

Sensing - iNtuition,

Thinking - Feeling,

Judging-Perceiving.

The important focus here is Preference. We prefer to use one or the other of each pair as we solve problems, but we are able to use the side we do not prefer. Our preferences are comfortable for us. But if we practice operating outside our comfort zone, we can become more adept and flexible. With age and experience, one’s abilities can increase in all eight areas.

The preferences are paired along these four continuums. One person may strongly prefer extraversion, someone else may be an extrovert, but her preference may be weaker. I may sometimes prefer Judging and sometimes Perceiving, so that in one situation I may behave as a J in another situation as a P. My father on the other hand is a strong J, very quick to Judge.

Extroverts are energized by contact with other people. They get lonely without others and have a tendency to “think out loud.” An extrovert may not know what he is thinking until he says it. The introvert, on the other hand, may spend a long time composing a sentence in his head before speaking. While the extrovert is sociable, the introvert is territorial and needs space. The introvert needs a place to be alone, to read or meditate to recharge his batteries. About three-quarters of the general population in the U.S. are extroverts, and one quarter, introverts.

The S-N spectrum governs primarily how and when people seek out information and what information they trust. On the Sensing-iNtuition continuum, 75% of people have a natural preference for Sensation with 25% for iNtuition. These preferences, report Keirsey and Bates, are responsible for more miscommunication and misunderstanding than any other.[20] The “sensible” person wants facts, trusts facts and remembers facts. He is grounded firmly in earthly reality, interested in experience. When the picture in his head conflicts with the tangible world he perceives, he trusts the tangible. In fact those who trust strongly in their senses cannot fathom how others can even operate on intuition. They may view the iNtuitive as incompetent or irrelevant. Meanwhile the iNtuitive speaks of metaphors, daydreams, fantasy and the future. Future possibilities lure the N’s imagination into complex concepts and ideas. The iNtuitive lives in anticipation and in the world of ideas and models.

The T-F, Thinking – Feeling, spectrum governs how people make decisions. On this spectrum, more women than men, in a ratio of 6-4, prefer deciding on the basis of personal impact. That is, 60% of women are “from Venus”[21] and are considered to have a Feeling preference while 60% of men are “from Mars” and report a Thinking preference, making decisions based on hard, cold principle. It is not that the Thinking types feel any less than Feeling types do, it is just that they value the general rule more than they value the feelings of a particular individual. One classic T-F question concerns whether or when the doctor should tell a woman she has terminal cancer. The Feeling preference is first apt to consider the impact such knowledge will have on the woman and whether knowing would make her condition worse than it already is. The Thinking preference is to concentrate on the need for final arrangements, costs and benefits of alternative treatments. Both the T and the F logically weigh the consequences of the decision.

The last continuum is between Judging and Perceiving. Judging types enjoy closure while Perceiving types want to keep their options open as long as possible. Judgers tend to establish deadlines and take them seriously. Perceivers may operate on Hispanic time. J’s and P’s appear evenly distributed in the U.S. population. Judging types have the idea that work comes before everything else. Perceiving types would rather play. P’s are more process-oriented while J’s are outcome-oriented. J’s tend to appear more self-confident than P’s, perhaps because J’s are less open to the possibility of failure. P’s are especially tuned to the reality that making one decision means closes off other alternatives. J’s are more sensitive to the risk of not acting to produce something—now.

The Role of Temperament in Leadership

For our purposes Keirsey and Bates have characterized how temperament plays a role in leadership. They have selected four common types which they characterize as follows:

The Sensing/Perceiving (SP) Leader is a Negotiator. SP’s negotiate with ease and have the highest sense of reality. SP’s function well in the role of troubleshooter, or diplomat. He or she deals quickly with concrete problems, welcomes change and demonstrates keen observation. In the right situation such a leader can be invaluable. On the other hand, he may seem unpredictable to colleagues and subordinates. One weakness of a Sensing and Perceiving preference is the tendency to “forget” commitments from the past, while getting caught up in current issues. He or she is best at verbal planning and decisioning, but needs a support staff to keep him or her organized and to schedule “unpleasant” tasks.

The Sensing Judging (SJ) manager may be called the Traditionalist or Consolidator. He or she is good at policies, rules, schedules, routines and hierarchies. Sensing-Judger’s are duty-bound and have a tendency to resist change. They are orderly and on-time, and dependable and even-handed. A traditionalist manager may withhold recognition unless he or she believes it is fully deserved.

The iNtuitive-Thinking (NT) manager is referred to as a Visionary Leader. The Visionary seeks and enjoys complexity; avoids redundancy. He expects a great deal from himself and only a little less from others. A managerial strength of the iNtuitive-Thinker is the ability to visualize systems and design changes. While the visionary is focused on principles and change, he or she may be oblivious to the feelings of others appearing cold, insensitive or impatient. Normally the NT is an excellent decision-maker and can be counted on to remember and honor prior commitments.

The iNtuitive-Feeling (NF) manager is called the Catalyst leader by Keirsey and Bates. He or she has the capability of drawing out the best in people. The iNtuitive-Feeling leader is the natural democratic leader and a participative manager. The catalyst leader has a tendency to let other people’s priorities dominate, but has a personal charisma and is able to inspire others. He or she may be the very best type at giving appreciation and is motivated by positive comments of others. A weakness of the NF is trying to please all of the people all of the time, but the NF is outstanding at public relations and can be an excellent spokesman for the organization.

“Each style of leadership has its own unique contribution to make to the working situation. SJ’s lend stability and confidence. SP’s make excellent problem-solvers and lend excitement. NT’s provide vision and theoretical models for change. NF’s lubricate the interpersonal fabric of an organization and can predict the social consequences of the NT’s theoretical models.”[22]

As we move more toward self-directed teams and toward teams of specialists where each person has a leadership role, we can see the value of having a team that combines a variety of preferences. Each person can then bring his or her unique abilities to bear on the situation. Each member of the team becomes a leader in his or her own sphere of influence.

The Cali Case, that appears near the end of this book, describes the actions of several leaders. They illustrate the preferences of their leadership type:

Mac SP

Cali NP

Ed NT

John NF

Martha SJ

Jan SF

Debra FP

The Cali Case is a short story illustrating many themes that appear throughout this book. Read it now, or later, or both.

Chapter 1

Leadership by Steering

What is Steering Behavior

Imagine a blind man driving a car; his eyes give him no feedback on where the car is going. He may hear a siren or the honk of a car, but he can not see the road or dangers in his path. A project leader who does not always have eyes, ears and intuition open for feedback cannot steer a team any more than a blind man can steer a car. Steering behavior consists of occasional tiny adjustments based on intelligent mental processing of sensory evidence. When steering a car our senses receive many times more input that we do not act upon than input we do act upon. We see children playing in their yards, but we do not stop or steer away, unless we see a ball or a child coming into our path.

After the Norming stage, the leader knows what activity is natural for our team and for the environment. Intervening unnecessarily in a normal steady performing team situation will destabilize that situation. The result would feel to the team like occupants feel when the driver of an automobile swerves first one way and then another.

The Project Team Leader’s Role

Gathering feedback

The team leader’s role in a high performing team is constantly to watch, listen and hear what is going on in and around the team. Some leaders, when they see the smooth running nature of a high performing team, decide to take on a piece of the project and they become involved in the day to day problem solving activities. But, too often their problem solving becomes a distraction from their real job which is to watch and listen to the team and the environment and the culture to keep the team on track toward the project vision. Productive team members are doing heads down hard work. They can only do that work most productively if they have someone else watching the road in that environment and steering a path for the project.

How common is it for a leader to get involved in a problem issue and convene with the issue participants behind a closed door? If that situation becomes the norm rather than the exception, the leader is shutting out feedback from other team members. Every time the door is closed, or the leader pushes away a team member, every time a leader is “too busy right now”, that leader risks deafening himself. Every time a leader zaps a relevant email without reading it, that leader risks blindness.

But leaders can become deaf without closing their door and without being “too busy”. IF a leader ever puts down a team member in an unkind or abrupt fashion, that leader becomes more deaf. When a leader scowls at an employee, that leader becomes more blind.

Only when a leader shows trust, allows diversity, reveals caring feelings, listens empathically and models congruent behavior, will that leader receive the feedback necessary to steer a high performing team. Openness and trust enhance feedback pathways; and allow the leader to stay alert, in tune with the team.

In sum the leader who would steer a jelled team is always asking, “What feedback do you have for me.” After receiving feedback the project leader, like any other manager, is responsible for delegation, control and coordination with the rest of the organization.

Control

Managers inevitably either control too much or too little. In an ad hoc culture, the managers tend to intervene too little and placate their teams. In a process culture, managers commonly intervene too much and then blame the team for not conforming.[34]

With a high performing team however, in an effective steering mode of control, the manager intervenes with a light touch as necessary based solely on feedback. The steering manager controls his team, not to enforce conformance to an arbitrary standard, not to make himself feel better, but only to keep the team performing optimally and on track with the project vision. Feedback tells the manager what the situation really is and what the team really requires.

Coordination

Whether the project is large or small, whether the project leader is responsible for five people or five hundred, coordination is second only to listening in priority. The purpose of delegation and control is to coordinate the activities of multiple people toward a common vision.

On a high performing team, coordination is accomplished by selectively communicating to team members feedback the leader has gathered about the environment, the culture, the vision, the goals, the objectives, the risks, and the opportunities. The leader’s role is to gather as much feedback as possible, filter it for relevance, and pass on what the team needs to succeed.

Delegation

According to Katzenbach and Smith, the most important way to build a team is to delegate challenging work.[35] People differ by temperament in what they consider a challenge. SP troubleshooters may be most challenged by the task itself. NT visionaries are concerned about communicating the challenge. For the SJ organizer, the challenge must be clear and precise. While NF team-builders want challenge and clarity too, they are less interested in the task than in presenting the task in a humane protective atmosphere.

A story about delegation

Several years ago when my husband was in graduate school, we were invited by one of his professors, a Dr. Beardsley, to live in their house for a month while he and his wife, also Dr. Beardsley, traveled to Yugoslavia. The house was a stately brick Georgian in Northwest Washington D.C. We were thrilled at the opportunity. The Beardsleys were quintessential academics. They shared their home with a large seven-toed cat, named Peter Septimus, earl of Beardsley. The house was filled with books and the litter of wealthy, aging, childless individuals.

I was young, entranced with the house, and totally into what my husband calls nesting behavior. First, I started to clean the kitchen. As I washed part of one wall, I realized that the dusty green color had originally been much brighter. Oh how grand, I could thank the Beardsley’s by returning their kitchen to its original splendor by diligent application of elbow grease.

Now Mrs, Dr. Beardsley had told me not to worry about cleaning. She had a maid who came twice a week and had been cleaning their house for decades. Nevertheless, I could see that this maid who hadn’t washed the kitchen walls in decades, needed some direction.

Since I would be at work when the maid arrived, I carefully filled up an entire page of yellow paper detailing what I had already done, what I planned to do and what I wanted her to do. I listed all the tasks in priority order and said not to worry about what couldn’t get done in one day. Together we would accomplish the list over the next couple weeks. I took care to word the message in very polite and courteous manner and left it on the kitchen table.

The next day when I came home the note was gone but none of the assignments I had given the maid had been finished. I was baffled. Later that week, the next door neighbor dropped by. After we had chatted for some while, the kind lady explained something to me. The Beardsley’s maid had come crying to her a few days ago, in her hand a crumpled yellow paper. She said, please to tell me that she was quitting.

The neighbor asked, “Did I realize that Beardsley’s maid could not read?” I was mortified. The neighbor had mollified the maid by telling her to take the day off, then to return the following Tuesday to her normal routine. The neighbor told the maid that she would talk with me and that we all would work this out, because the Beardsleys would be home soon.

I learned a life lesson that day and will always think carefully before assigning someone a job to do. It is so easy for us to assume that other people are just like us. We assume they know what we know. We assume they have the same values, the same skills, the same motivations as ourselves. Such is not the case.

Rewards and Recognition

Think about a successful amateur athletic team. What inspires them to work hard? To what rewards and recognition do they aspire? The goals in sports are utterly arbitrary.[36] But people on jelled teams can get so psyched up that you have to remind them that what they are striving for is not the moral equivalent of war. In a modern corporation very little work is actually done as a team. Individuals working alone achieve almost all the objectives. But team spirit is necessary to get people pulling in the same direction. The jelled team itself is the reward. A good team feels a sense of being special. They exude an air of being elite. Team members feel a joint sense of ownership of the product. They take obvious enjoyment in their work.[37] Participating on a jelled team is its own best reward. The jelled work group may be cocky and self-sufficient, irritating and exclusive, but it does more to serve the manager’s real goals than any assemblage of interchangeable people parts ever could. [38]

A simple formula

Although we all know there is more to it than this, a project team leader can think of his or her role as

1. Select and recruit the best people for the job

2. Lead them through the four stages of team building

3. Listen to feedback from the team and the environment

4. Lead the team and stakeholders to make good policy decisions

5. Carefully select times and places to intervene via steering

6. Craft congruent communication well suited to your audience.

Introduction to Decisioning

Decide for success

Leaders become good leaders when they make good decisions or when they facilitate good decision-making. Often a business leader will hire a person and delegate specified decision-making to that person. Other times a business leader will bring together a group of people, assign them separate roles and responsibilities, and empower that group to make specified decisions. Thus the leader can “institutionalize” a decision-making process. Many institutions can make better and more timely decisions than a single leader because they can

apply more breadth of judgment to each decision.

apply more breadth of information to each decision

assure that decisions are made in a timely manner

assure that decisions are communicated in a timely manner

assure that stakeholder interests are taken into account

reduce project risk.

Institutionalized group decision-making has long been popular in government, civic groups, profit-making and non-profit organizations. Group decision-making is essential when projects are involved. An individual manager may be perfectly capable of making good decisions for a manufacturing operation, performed in the same way day after day. But projects, by their nature, are not routine. Projects involve doing something different, something new. Projects need the creative input of many persons and many groups. Projects need teams. And teams need decision-making institutions that offer the mechanism to efficiently involve multiple persons in decisions related to their area of expertise.

Amazon.com carried the following review of Robert’s Rules of Order from an executive in Prince Edward Island, Canada, dated January 3, 2002:

This book was originally published over a century ago and to this day is still the number one publication on parliamentary procedure. For anyone in the world of business this is a must have book. We NEED rules and order, for without them we have absolute lack of organization and complete and utter chaos. Over the years, I have been a director and chairperson on a great number of boards from charitable organizations and government boards to corporate boards; "Robert's Rules of Order" has always prevailed. Regardless of the type of organization, if you are in a position to sit as a member on a Board of Directors, this book is one you definitely should read. Do not assume the chairperson has all the answers and required expertise. In many cases that expertise is clearly and sadly lacking. Keep a copy of "Robert's Rules of Order" tucked safely in your briefcase, you may need it sooner than you think!

Robert’s Rules refers to a “Deliberative Assembly". Teams as well as boards of directors need to make decisions together, in a deliberative assembly. Robert has the procedure down pat, but there is much more to group decision-making than procedure. Making corporate decisions well requires a thoughtful process worthy of thoughtful management. Good decisions are necessary for the proper ordering of society and for managing risk and for producing high quality products. Today’s leaders need to broaden their armamentarium with a vast array of tools for decision-making. Robert’s Rules of Order is just one such tool. In this chapter we will talk about many tools, when and how they are useful.

For generations, political science has studied governance, how groups make decisions. No political science lesson of the last century is more important than the one most closely associated with the USA, that lesson being the importance of freedom and representative democracy. Autocratic decisions made solely by high-level corporate officials were and will always be dangerous and demoralizing. Sometimes senior leaders need to make autocratic decisions, but more often they need to establish the institutions and processes whereby the most skilled and knowledgeable people in the company can make those decisions themselves.

Project managers should strive to follow the principle of subsidiarity, and push responsibility to

the lowest hierarchical level possible

involving the greatest number of persons affected

over the longest period of time.

Greek democracy expected every citizen to vote in a town meeting on all matters of import to the community. By the time our forefathers wrote the U.S. Constitution, the size of the nation required that citizens elect representatives to consider issues and vote on their behalf. We have a representative democracy because a direct democracy is not practical, neither cost-efficient nor effective. We have neither the time nor information necessary for direct democracy.

In the 1920’s Ford Motor Company made decisions in a strictly hierarchical fashion. After the 1950s decision-making within Ford became more democratic. Although Ford has changed dramatically since the days of the first Henry Ford, it faces pressure today to change even more quickly. Poor decisions made by Ford executives concerning tire safety on the Ford Explorer cost the lives of Ford customers and cost the company dearly in good will and damages. To survive and thrive, corporate cultures are evolving more sophisticated ways to make good decisions.

Warning: difficult decisions ahead

Corporations, like other social and economic institutions, face many challenges in the twenty-first century. These challenges will require that companies adapt and change. Adaptation and change is the goal of every corporate project. Project groups are called on to design or select process components and to craft systems that will allow the corporation to grow and survive in a changing world. The future of every corporation will be determined through deliberative assemblies of project teams, steering committees, stakeholders, etc.

Corporate life is changing

According to Peter Drucker, the chief challenge that corporate project managers and corporate executives face is the coming decline in the number of younger workers. This particular challenge will require project leaders to employ more sophisticated political strategies than before, because the shortage of workers will mean that each worker will have more potential power. Workers in the 21st century already have and exercise their rights more as if they are corporate citizens than as employees. The very structure of the corporation is adapting to this new reality.

The x-generation, also known as the “baby-bust” generation, is entering its prime work years just as the “baby-boom” generation is starting to retire. The birth rate in Japan, Germany and most other developed countries is now around 1.3 per woman, well below the 2.2 population replacement rate. In the United States and Europe, the proportion of people reaching traditional retirement age will grow from about 20% to around 50% of the population by 2030.[39]

We are in the habit of thinking that the modern corporate structure is a constant. With the decline of agriculture as a central structure of society, the corporation has become the most familiar economic feature in advanced societies.. Even “family farms” are structured and managed as corporations. But the manufacturing corporation did not come into its modern form until late in the 19th century, and Peter Drucker tells us that it began its decline late in the 20th.[40]

Drucker tells us that the corporate model has depended on basic assumptions all of which have been changing since 1970. All of the following are in flux.

1. The corporation-employee relationship

2. The corporation-customer relationship

3. The value of brand names

4. The availability of technologies

To cope with these challenges, Drucker says that management will need a new strategy. The old rules and modus operandi of management will not work in the new world. More than command and control, corporate management now must rely on influence and cooperation to achieve objectives. That is, management must be more adept in the politics of governing.

the management Challenge

Henry Ford’s notion of rigid control and mass-production has given way to the need for flexibility and customization. His statement that you can “buy a car in any color so long as it’s black” has morphed into a world where the consumer can choose from twenty-nine flavors of Quaker Oatmeal and innumerable combinations of automotive features.

In 1995 Christopher Bartlett of Harvard business School and Sumantra Ghoshal of London Business School explored the changing nature of management in three issues of the Harvard Business Review. Their essential point was that the replacement of capital with knowledge as a company’s most valuable resource is forcing top managers to rethink their jobs because the trouble with knowledge is that it is so much more difficult to manage than capital.[41] Peter Drucker, who coined the term “Knowledge Worker” in 1960, [42] wrote in 2001 that although we talk a lot about knowledge management, no one knows how to do it. In fact, Drucker argues that the old job of the chief executive has become impossible.

“Knowledge is so difficult to manage because it resides in the heads of persons who not only have free will, but now increasingly have the power to go where they will and do what they want.”

Managers have assumed they have the ability to “control”. Managers assume they operate with more potential power than those who report to them. In the case of knowledge workers, corporations are rapidly losing the power to command and control. Corporation executives now must increasingly rely on their ability to influence.

Hence the job of an executive today requires a politician. To build an organization requires leadership that can inspire, cajole, craft compromises, apply pressure, shift strategy, delight, discourage, and maneuver people into achieving together the ends they share.

Some corporations today are responsible for more human and financial resources than are some nation-states. Some corporations are as deeply in debt as are some national governments. Whether national government or corporation, some are more effective at inspiring and retaining the allegiance of their human resources than are others. Regardless of what kind of political actor we study, whether multi-national corporation or nation, each faces many of the same issues and goals: accomplishing a mission while assuring the dignity, health and welfare of large numbers of persons.

Table 5‑1 Comparison of the resources influenced nation-states and corporations.

2000-2001	Employees or Population	Net Sales or GDP	$ Sales/emp or $ GDP/head
Wal-Mart	1,244,000	191,329 billion	153,801
GE	313,000	129,900 billion	415,016
Denmark	5,300,000	175,200 billion	33,040
Israel	6,000,000	96,500 billion	16,180
Estonia	1,400,000	4,900 billion	3,360
United States	274,000,000	7,903,000 billion	29,240
Kuwait	1,800,000	25,200 billion	13,915

Politics is how we make communal decisions.

Political Science has traditionally studied decision-making in the public sphere. To apply lessons learned in political science for decision-making in corporations, we emphasize the similarities between politics in government and politics in corporations. We have already touched on the similarity in goals.. Let’s now consider the similarity in the role of leaders.

Leadership involves building consensus among followers so that followers not only do not rebel, but share identity and a sense of fate. This motivates them to perform well. Many corporations today are more analogous to 18th century governments than to modern governments when it comes to building consensus. Too many CEOs today act like kings and corporate division heads behave like dukes and duchesses. Boards of directors generally exercise the weak powers of eighteenth century legislative bodies.

Some senior managers think of themselves as royalty and treat entry-level employees like serfs. When serfs worked land belonging to a duke, they were obliged to accept whatever treatment the landowning duke meted out to them. But once serfs discovered alternative ways of earning a living, free from the need for land, they rebelled. In the 18th century, royalty learned the hard way that the autocratic model would no longer govern. Every government had to have at least a minimum consent of the governed. Some English royalty adapted without losing their heads, but the French and Russian royal families were neither so perceptive nor fortunate. Corporate royalty, too, will retain their positions only when they play by the rules of common decency and honor.

The Bible says, “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall” [43]. Pride was decried in the middle ages as one of the seven deadly sins, along with sloth and avarice. Do you suppose it ever occurred to senior managers at Enron corporation that pride or avarice still might be deadly sins? Many observers spoke of how arrogantly Enron executives behaved before the company filed for the largest bankruptcy in history. Enron was living on borrowed financial assets, deception and self-delusion. Bethany Mclean wrote the following in a cover story titled “Why Enron Went Bust” which appeared in Fortune magazine December 24, 2001.

“Jim Alexander, former CFO of Enron Global Power & Pipelines, which was spun off in 1994, once worked for Drexel Burnham Lambert and sees similarities. “The common theme is hubris, an overweening pride, which led people to believe they can handle increasingly exotic risk without danger.[44]…

“Because Enron believed it was leading a revolution, it encouraged flouting the rules. There was constant gossip that this rule breaking extended to executives' personal lives-rumors of sexual high jinks in the executive ranks ran rampant. Enron also developed a reputation for ruthlessness both external and internal. Skilling is usually credited with creating a system of forced rankings for employees, in which those rated in the bottom 20% would leave the company. Thus, employees attempted to crush not just outsiders but each other. [According to ] an executive at a competing energy firm, Enron traders...were afraid to go to the bathroom because the guy sitting next to them might use information off their screen to trade against them. And because delivering bad news had career-wrecking potential, problems got papered over--especially, says one former employee, in the trading operation. "People perpetuated this myth that there were never any mistakes. It was astounding to me"[45]

The industrial revolution freed workers from dependence on the land. Once they were free to move about, the workers could change the serf system of allegiance. Guilds helped people obtain skills needed for jobs in the industrial economy. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the trade unions and industries grew in power as they attracted the allegiance of more and more workers. To the extent that they improved peoples’ lives, they flourished. Industry provided raw materials and technology for the workers to use. Workers provided skilled labor for industry to use. Trade unions representing workers negotiated with management representing industry to reach consensus on the rules of the game.

Now with the New Economy, few corporations can any longer monopolize the means of production. With universal education and global freedom of movement few professions can control who has to access entry-level job skills. Since raw materials and technology as well as knowledge and skill are all within reach of individuals, more and more workers are free to go where they will, learn what they want, and apply knowledge to whatever purpose is important to them. They can also write what they will and say what they dare, such as Enron employee, Sharon Watkins, who wrote about the abuses within the company long before it went bankrupt. Workers have great power as individuals.

The X-generation, first to begin work in this new economy, has embraced and defends this new freedom with a vengeance. The average 32-year-old has worked for nine different companies [46] in a ten-fifteen year career. As such workers become more independent, as they experience more mobility and more self-confidence, they will be will no longer submit to autocratic control by mangers. Successful leaders will organize and motivate workers more like volunteers. Corporations will need to look to lessons learned by large volunteer based organizations such as the Red Cross or the Roman Catholic Church.

If corporations do not sustain at least a minimum consensus on goals and procedures within their work force, they will see the sort of emigration that plagued failing states at the end of the 20th century. Neither a nation nor a corporation can remain healthy when its best and brightest leave for greater freedom and greener pastures elsewhere.

Workers, who no longer need worry about basic human needs such as food and shelter, become concerned about personal dignity and self-actualization. Workers increasingly want jobs to offer personal achievement and allow them to exercise judgment and accept personal responsibility. Workers now seek jobs that fit their tastes as well as skills, and allow them to make decisions in their area of expertise. [47]

Politics is the skill managers can learn that will help them to retain, organize and motivate large numbers of human resources. Because human resources increasingly determine the fate of a corporation, the politics of projects will become more and more critical to the success of corporate projects and of corporations in general.

The Role of law

Perhaps the single most apparent difference between how corporations and governments make decisions today is that, for governments, decision-making rules are codified into law by constitutions and legislative bodies. Corporations have not traditionally codified decision-making authority, except via the organizational hierarchy. But neither laws nor organization-charts are completely clear about who has responsibility for what decisions or even about how to decide who.

Even in law, the difference between the public and private sectors may be less substance than form. Most large corporations have amassed a slew of written policies, processes and procedures that function as corporate law. Not all “law” is enforced or obeyed, either in the private or the public sector. Some written law in both sectors is silly and generally ignored by all concerned. Similarly much unwritten “law” is essential and is rigidly enforced for the good of all.

To the extent that rules are fuzzy, politics of negotiation come into play. For example, in sand lot softball, where rules are unwritten and umpires non-existent, the most powerful players get to decide what’s fair and what’s foul. To the extent that corporate rules are less clear than government laws, politics may play a larger role in corporate projects than in government.

Decision form follows function

Each individual has preferences for making decisions, but like conflict resolution and other preference areas, the effective leader will choose the decision-making modality that is most appropriate to his ends. This section is about decisions which affect other persons, not those daily choices which we make when doing our individual work. First let’s discuss some common terms.

Directive

Sometimes called autocratic, a directive is a decision made by one individual. Although we may think that autocratic decisions are wrong because they do not involve other people, a team leader may appropriately decide on behave of the team. Directives work when the issue is unimportant or when a decision needs to be made and conveyed quickly—provided the urgency is not due to the leader’s procrastination. Of course, knowing when a team will easily accept a directive—decision by fiat—is a leadership talent.

Consultative

The consultative decision, sometimes called a collaborative decision, involves the decision-maker’s seeking the advice of selected individuals before making a decision. As with a directive, the leader decides, but in a collaborative decision, he or she, in effect, does not decide alone.

Participative

The participative decision is made by several people by some means that registers the will of the group.. The important thing for a leader to remember is never to ask others to participate in the decision and subsequently override their choice, unless he can show that circumstances changed between the decision time and his moment of action.

Consensus

Consensus is the situation where every member of a group agrees to support a participative decision for the good of the group. Not all members of the group may have preferred that option, but they accept the procedure for making that choice as having been legitimate. In a consensus, team members agree to support something even though they may prefer a different solution. After a consensus, members understand the decision and are able to explain it to others accurately and with equanimity.

Building consensus can be time-consuming and is not appropriate for all decisions. Consensus requires collaboration. During consensus, a scribe should write the key points on a flip chart or on another area where the group can view the words as they deliberate. When the preponderance of the group is satisfied with an option, other members should be asked individually whether they can support the growing consensus. A vital leadership skill is being able to give voice to a group’s will. If one or more of the group hold out for a different solution, the meeting may need to continue at a later time. If more time and more information cannot resolve the impasse, then consensus may not be possible, although the decision can be called collaborative or participative.

If consensus is achieved, after the meeting, the final statement should be formally distributed to serve as a reminder that the group has reached consensus on the documented points. The benefit of consensus is that, because of the collaboration of all parties involved, everyone has a stake in the success of the choice.

Discussion on Building Consensus

Nominate someone to act as facilitator and someone else to serve as scribe. Use the following process to reach consensus on what three items you would put into a time capsule to represent America in the year just past.

Process:

1. Open discussion to list several candidate items. Scribe writes each item on the list.

2. Going around the group, tic mark each item chosen as each person says what three items he or she would choose and why.

3. Continue if someone has a question or wishes to say something more.

4. Facilitator summarizes: “We seem to agree on _______, but we still have to work through _____, ______,…

5. Discussion continues.

6. Do another group check.

7. Summarize the consensus.

Chapter 4

Decision making Models

To explain models used to describe processes by which groups make project decisions and to explain the value and limitations of these models.

From Plato to the present, political theorists have described pictures in their heads about how to make decisions. Theorists use the term model to portray how they perceive a given group actually makes decisions. This use of the term, model, is called descriptive: it gives us terminology to use to describe how and why a particular decision came to be. Theorists may also use the term, model, to refer to a set of steps prescribing how decisions ought to be made. This use of the term, model, is called prescriptive: it may guide the decision-making process or provide criteria to judge whether the process was performed according to the model.

Studying descriptive and prescriptive models is one way to improve our leadership ability. Models give us a framework to use when we analyze decisions and how others decided as they did. By using models, we can study how to make a decision separately from the peculiarities of decisions itself. This assumes that we can, for the time being, set aside our attachment to our own personal habits of decisioning.

Here we present four models of decision making, all useful in the context of teams and projects, together with the special features that make them useful or limit them. We offer both descriptive and prescriptive uses for these models. Three of the models are from Graham Allison’s book, Essence of Decision[48]. The fourth is from Irving Janis’s book, Victims of Groupthink.[49] All four of these models are appropriate to apply when a decision will result in a rule or rules that a particular group is expected to follow. These models discuss ways to make major project decisions, decisions that will change the stakeholder environment, decisions that yield policy. A policy in this context refers to an action, plan, or program designed to achieve one or more objectives.

Each of us makes decisions. Project leaders, by definition, need to make decisions on matters where there is less precedent. Applying models can help us understand our own behavior and that of our mentors. Since these models have not been widely discussed in the area of project management, one result of your reading and thoughtful application may be more ways to use these models than suggested below.

Model I: The Rational Actor

The most widely used model in the study of decision making is the so-called “Rational Actor” model. It is also called the classical model because of its heritage and pervasiveness as an ideal. Project managers will be familiar with the steps of model I, because these same steps are prescribed by many different methodologies under many different names.

While some observers grant that decision makers deviate from the model, and claim to do so to be more “rational,” most formal methodologies seem to expect decision makers to follow the steps outlined below as an ideal, for the “best” way to make decisions that affect a group of persons, for the “best” way to make policy. The Rational Actor model assumes that policy is the output of purposive acts by a unified group. In this view, the group is treated as if it were a single person and can thereby be held accountable for the decision. Using this model we personify groups as “rational” and talk about their aims and choices.

“Rational” Decision making Steps

If a team collaborates to decide policy via the Rational Actor model, which they sometimes do, they proceed in the following manner to deal with each succeeding challenge or opportunity.

1. Documenting Group’s Interest

First the group will set up and agree upon top level criteria of evaluation, composing a statement of the general, long term, continuing purpose of the group. In the early project context this step will generate a vision statement. On a broader level, the national interest would be a purpose statement for a government group describing how what it does is for the good of the country. Such high level statements, vision statements, discuss concepts such as “self preservation, security, and well being.” Whether at a project or a national level, such interest statements are logically essential, but too vague to guide action directly. Nevertheless leaders often speak as if decisions can be made directly out of the vision. Applealing to this level of thinking can sometimes calm heated disputes at a lower level.

2. Analyzing the Situation

Decision makers next move to a less subjective level where they try to concretize such very general notions of good. The next stage involves delineating fixed and dynamic aspects of the environment, setting down the past and anticipated actions of other organizations, and doing a preliminary analysis of the capabilities of significant groups. Out of such an analysis comes a list of apparent issues, both threats and opportunities. The list derives from logical comparison of the environment against the statement of interest that came from stage one. In the language of the Project Management Institute, (PMI), the analysis step may be compared to the risk analysis, feasibility studies, etc. The result of the analysis is a statement of need or a “rationale” for the objectives to follow.

3. Stating Objectives

In the third step of the Rational Actor model, issues are then converted into objectives. Objectives, importantly, but this is often forgotten, are mutable, middle level criteria of what is good for the group, a purposive translation of a problem situation into something achievable. Creation of a comprehensive project charter would satisfy step three of the model. Achieving an objective stated in the charter is then purported to be “in the group’s interest.” Rationally, there should be no incompatibility between achieving a chosen objective and protecting or promoting the group interest. Rationally, no disconnect should occur between the vision, the risk analysis and the charter. Reality is not always so “rational,” however. Teams face serious trade-offs at this stage, because pursuing or achieving objective A can rule out B, even if the stakeholders want both A and B.

4. Arraying Alternatives

To move to the next stage of the model requires that a team elaborate all possible policy alternatives (moves, actions, behaviors) that might achieve a given objective. Along with the linear progressive quality of Model I, this stage of elaborating all conceivable policy choices, making the range of choice as broad as possible, is held in high esteem among theorists. Corporate team leaders may also value this stage, but they are may be more sanguine about the difficulty of doing it thoroughly. To each alternative one is expected to attach a carefully stated weighing of cost and risk against the benefit anticipated. At this stage a team faces serious trade-offs involving various components of power. These trade-offs clarify the downside of coercion.

5. Making the Decision

The next step is the decision itself. Here the decision maker chooses from among the alternatives elaborated in the previous stage based on 1) the costs and risks of inevitable unknowns or accidents and 2) his priority arrangement of the various objectives he holds. Because of the logical power and linearity of the Rational Actor model, some who describe this model omit stage five since, presumably, the previous stages have led the actor to the only true choice, the appropriate policy.

6. Implementing Policy Action

Conceptualized separately from the decision, a policy action can in form be

“inaction” (let the current situation continue or let someone else decide)

a single act,

a series of actions,

a posture of future response in similar fashion to a similar stimulus, or

a “program”—that is, an ongoing pattern of administrative and operational actions, a plan for doing a given thing until told no longer to do so.

The decision to act allocates resources: determines how much of a group’s effort to expend in what amounts, i.e., the project plan.

Players and theorists may forget that making a decision and implementing it are quite different; a decision, once made, does not implement itself. To carry out the chosen option, to implement the decision, entails further decision making. Subsequent “managerial” or “administrative” decisions and resources are required to effect the selected alternative. But each of these decisions will be less complex or consequential than the policy decision in the primary decision making. Decision making is iterative, and the model may be reapplied toward decisions of gradually reduced scope.

Cumulatively, the weight, that is, the costs and risks involved in implementing the decision, the strategy of implementation, would in the rational actor model have been considered during the examination of policy alternatives. The managerial or administrative costs and risks may not have been examined in the detail the implementers will now examine them. The rational actors dealing with initial project decisions may or may not have been able to anticipate these subsequent features.

7. Evaluating Outcomes

After the policy move or moves are made and stakeholder responses and feedback are in, then the team of decision makers will gather round the table again to assess their performance pragmatically. Was the action performed as planned? Did it entail the costs anticipated, or were they greater or less? That is, did action move the actor toward achievement of the objective(s) as planned? If so, now that the objective is achieved, does it still appear to have been in the group’s interest to achieve it? Did the actor keep costs to a minimum.

Use and Evaluation of the Rational Actor Model

Prescriptive use of the Rational Actor Model

By imposing linear order onto chaotic reality, the Rational Actor model helps separate events that occur by chance from those which result from purposive action. Following such a model helps a team stay focused on its initial goals. Such focus allows a team to complete a project and achieve a goal from which a less directed or less committed group might have deviated.

But the model also has failings. The model presumes the existence of more time and access to more information than is commonly available. The model can lead one team to brand another as “irrational” when, in actuality, other teams may be working from a different model or may have incompletely applied the rational model due to faulty intelligence or insufficient time.

By going consciously through all the motions leading to the decision, as prescribed by the model, a manager may mistakenly feel relieved of his responsibility for the consequences of the final choice. He may feel that whatever option the network recommends must be the rational, proper one because it was reached through a rational and proper process. If he is confident of the process, a leader may absolve himself from moral or ethical responsibility by thinking, “I have no other choice.” Indeed either he or the others in the network could assume that any other choice would be irrational and unwarranted injection of his subjective view at the last moment. Consider, for example, the logic that led Enron executives down a path to maximize share prices through increasingly risky accounting.

If a manager or a team steps through the decisioning process using false assumptions about the nature of the environment, they may end up creating the assumed reality. Depending on whether the assumption was of a threat or an opportunity, the creation of such a reality would be either negative or positive. Such is the nature of a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Using only the Rational Actor model can seriously handicap a decision maker who lacks the confidence to choose from an imperfect set of “facts.” Since the nature of reality is never wholly understood, attempted use of the model in the strictest sense can lead to constant frustration. Assuming the Rational Actor model as the only proper route to important decisions can condemn a leader to rigidly narrowing inquiry, thus losing information, flexibility, and clarity. Imposition of such a logic, regardless of its propriety for a particular situation, will eventually turn any bureaucracy into a simpering or volatile heap.

One can best describe Model I, for decision maker and observer alike, as conservative, and scientific in the popular use of that word. The model deals most formally with the cost effectiveness of action. Experimental testing and logical examination of the steps, sub-steps and assumptions of the Rational Actor model have resulted in increasingly complex versions of the problem solving process. Every new “methodology” and almost every new business book on the American market purports to offer a superior version of the age-old advice, e.g., rational decisioning. Because these multiple versions still fail to account for all observable successful decisioning behaviors, of the making of management books there is no end.

RATIONALITY IN RATIONAL ACTOR MODEL

Often one hears the word “rational” in a discussion of a political process. To say a decision was “irrational” often implies that an irrational process must have been used in producing it, although such may not be the case. “Rationality” also presumes that an actor always maximizes his values, which is not necessarily true.

The term, “rational” in the Rational Actor model simply refers to the internal logic of the decision making process as described or prescribed by the model. The Rational Actor model simply means, in a rudimentary way, that the actor will break up an issue into its component parts in an agreed upon way, then reassemble the issue differently but in accord with his values and accepted group rules to produce a choice among options and follow up with an evaluation.

Rationality and Uncertainty

Psychological research suggests strongly that the less clear the situation, the less likely a person will be able integrate new and old information and make the informed judgments that the rational actor model requires. The human mind, instead of integrating and deciding among contending and confusing images of the goal, behaves in a non-rational way. When facing mutually exclusive means to an end and with sufficient uncertainty, the mind simply tries to find beliefs strong enough to justify action. Such beliefs may well deviate from the rational actor model’s demand to comport with reality. One reaction simply is to deny that any tension exists; the leader masters his internal conflict by pursuing potentially conflicting ends in logic tight compartments, simultaneously believing that the two ends are complementary.

Categorical Assumptions

Instead of weighing the probability of each element contributing to uncertainty, which the rational actor model would require, decision makers use categorical, open/shut judgments. Judging categorically requires assumptions rather different from those in Model I. Decisioning based on categorical assumptions may be faulted on the following three principles.

First, the principle of “reinforcement” suggests that “intermittent success with specific decisions will tend to give strength to the general beliefs, quite apart from the validity of the connection in strict logical terms. This effect enables beliefs to become established and maintain themselves despite weak connections to reality or even contradictions of it. Such is the mechanism that can drive an intelligent caring individual to compulsive gambling.

Second, a decision maker’s imagination can fill in for logic to strengthen a belief, i.e., by “wishful thinking”. The decisioner can draw an analogy from a simpler view of an earlier situation to the present or can otherwise change the time frame within which he or she handles inconsistent information. For example, a decision maker may take threatening information out of the immediate present and treat it as part of a long-range problem, saying, in effect, I shall now deal only with the immediate threat. “A” by values “A,” and the longer range problem “B” by values “B.” Scarlet O’Hara, in Gone with the Wind, declares, "I can't think about that now, I'll think about it tomorrow."[50] Thus she justifies to herself that the situation will change; whether it changes for better or worse is less important than that the uncertainty in her mind is resolved at least temporarily. Similarly, other decision makers will deny aspects of reality that threaten cognitive discomfort. Thus do modern project managers proceed in the face of significant risk, often risk that they should address immediately, such as data backup.

Third, the more ambiguous the situation, the more co-workers will corroborate a leader’s preferred working view. Thus when a leader may most need dissenting opinion, she will be least likely to receive it.

Idiosyncratic behavior, Chance, and Rationality

No discussion of the Rational Actor model would be complete without a warning that it most definitely cannot be assumed to be the model used for all serious decision-making even when those decisions are of the highest priority. Historical evidence abounds concerning the outcome of idiosyncratic decisions by world leaders and corporate managers at all levels.

Napoleon suffered from hemorrhoids during the Waterloo campaign; Lee suffered angina pain from a heart condition when the Confederacy lost at Gettysburg. Kennedy was new in office and unsure of himself during the Bay of Pigs. Bismarck was out of town when the war of 1870 began. Stalin suffered a nervous breakdown on being told of the German attack in WW II and the Soviet military machine was paralyzed for a week while awaiting orders. MacArthur’s behavior on the eve of the Chinese intervention in Korea included both fits of elation and depression. The Japanese leadership fell after the loss of Saipan, and the new leadership stumbled about blindly for more than a year making half hearted efforts to get out of the war.

When such historic figures were known to make poor decisions under stress, we would all do well to attend to the needs of our own health and that of our teammates, if not only for personal reasons, then at least for reasons of corporate interest. We cannot assume our wish to be rational will make us so.

Model II Organizational Operation

The next two models assume that decisions are made within rather large organizations filled with the complex gears and levers of a highly differentiated decision making structure. They assume that the policy outcomes—large acts, such as the project vision and charter—result from innumerable and often conflicting smaller actions by individuals at various levels and units. Both models view the bureaucracy as impersonal, as serving a variety of only partially compatible conceptions of group goals. Neither focuses on a single identifiable or unitary rational actor.

The Organizational Operation model asks the following questions:

1. where within the organizational context did the policy originate? What context brought it forth?

2. what are the strengths and weaknesses of the mother unit, its standard operating procedures, and action repertoires?

Based on answers to the questions above, the model contains certain guides on what one may infer from such information. “If an organizational unit produced X output today, and that output resulted from existing organizational features—standard operating procedures and common behaviors; chance is ruled out.” The model simply assumes that the policy or action emerges as a result of organizational processes.

The Organizational Operation model emphasizes those factors that limit the rationality of individuals and small groups, i.e.,

1. the limited capacity to process information,

2. constraints on attempts to obtain the information necessary in framing and pursuing objectives.

The Organizational Operation model also allows for what Herbert Simon called “satisficing”[51] activity, the search by an organization not for the best option—the rational option—but for the first option that satisfies minimal needs of the group for consensus.

The Organizational Operation model suggests that the really important rules of a team’s operational decision making are not committed to writing, especially rules that govern how decisions are reached through interaction with other teams, or interpersonally within the team. These invisible rules contribute heavily to the policy output’s content, time, and targets. Under stable conditions unwritten rules can operate for long stretches of time, even decades. Under stable conditions, the main contours of decision-making become so much a part of the bureaucracy that although they are not articulated, neither are they are open to challenge—even when they no longer serve the goals they did originally. Such behavior may be predictable, but it certainly is less than rational.

Prescriptive Utility

In a very large organization or for decisions involving complex and multiple units of a corporation, the Organizational Operation Model provides considerable insight and guidance for the Project leader.

First, the model suggests that the very existence of “procedures” assures greater efficiency in decisioning, even if the procedures “filter out” certain ideas or squelch a certain amount or a certain kind of creativity. Since the organization does not need to deal with all ideas, the group saves time, while the procedures tend to assure that when action is required, a decision will be made. The Software Engineering Institute offers considerable evidence to support this assumption through its evaluations of the productivity of organizations following procedures that implement criteria within the Capability Maturity Model.

The Organizational Operation model gets around the eternal frustration inherent in trying to follow the Rational Actor model in a large organization--the larger the organization, the greater the frustration. But, on the other hand, by focusing on organizational operation in an ad hoc or immature organization, a leader may end up eternally butting into incompatibilities of objective and policy. The message of the Organizational Operation model is

1. to concentrate on making the procedures more comprehensible, more tuned to the abilities and expectations of the persons using them, and

2. to work on enlarging or restricting access to the decision making channels for the purpose of improving the efficiency or effectiveness of decisions.

Satisficing and Minimum Necessary Consensus

That decision makers “satisfice” in the Organizational Operation model does not prevent them from using the model prescriptively. They may still create an ideal of “satisficing” by which to gauge their actual behavior. Decision makers could strive for maximum flexibility and high morale. The desired consensus would be the minimum necessary consensus on project purposes, the level giving the decision maker the greatest range of flexibility at the time he wants it most.

The minimum necessary consensus would be a permissive support above a “floor of anarchy” but below a “ceiling of fixed commitment”: support the leader, not the policy; the interest, but not inflexibly the objective. Even “satisficers” need such support to assure compliance with their decisions.

Sometimes leaders ignore the need for even a minimum level of consensus, and may, for a time, successfully operate without one. But obviously they can then put only minimal demands on the team or the stakeholders. On the other hand, even unpopular leaders may, in a panic or emergency pull the stops to produce a rush of supportive “patriotic” consensus. The project manager may issue a “call to arms” whereupon everyone in the project will put shoulder to the wheel and turn out product sufficient to meet the emergency. This behavior is clearly inefficient and hence not rational; but it can be effective and thereby in the short term compensate. As a car salesman once said to us, closing the deal and commenting on his smallish commission, “ A little bit of something is worth more than a whole lot of nothing”.

Model III: Bureaucratic Politics

A third model, called Bureaucratic Politics, focuses on the internal politics—the “pulling and hauling,” in one bureaucrat’s words—of an organization’s governance. Policies are neither “choices” nor “system outputs, ” but they are a “resultant” or “consequence” of the varied bargaining games going on among the actors within an organization, especially within the governance or management sector.

Noting the intrusion of self interested pursuits into politics is certainly not new. Exploring the self-interest among current politicians supports innumerable publications, from The Washington Post to The Omaha World-Herald. Gabriel Almond, Charles Lindblom, David Braybrooke and others have drawn observers’ attention to the highly competitive interactions of politicians.[52] Such is no less true of corporate executives. Just because a corporate house organ does not typically regale readers with the political intrigues of management does not mean that such intrigues are inconsequential. One could speculate that the house organ would have a much higher readership if political shenanigans were reported—but any such article, if it could get printed, would probably produce a pink slip for the editor. Corporate managers are not known for supporting “Freedom of the Press.”

The dominant pattern of behavior of any bureaucracy is “incremental change,” hopefully “continuous process improvement.” A bureaucracy needs enough change to prevent rebellion by constrained interests while simultaneously meeting the needs of powerful interest groups. The bureaucracy manages the necessary compromises across interest groups to keep each group’s supporters—stakeholders—sufficiently satisfied that they do not sabotage or obstruct whatever change that results from the negotiations.

Descriptive Utility

An observer employing the Bureaucratic Politics model concerns himself with the perceptions, motivations, positions, and maneuvers of the players. Then he infers, “If an actor performed action ‘X,’ this action came from the bargaining among all the players having influence in this game.” The Bureaucratic model is considered to have “explained” a policy when it describes who did what to whom that yielded the policy.

Predictions are generated by identifying the game, the relevant players, and the players’ relative skills and positions. By asserting that any policy is merely an outcome of self interested, rational bargaining, this model erases distinctions between whether a policy originated from within a central corporate or a business unit group, for example, or whether the policy is sales or finance driven. Erasing such distinctions can usefully dispense with certain prejudicial baggage associated with a particular unit.

The Bureaucratic model explains the type of contention often referred to when persons speak casually about “politics! L”. But contending actors may each individually pursue options rationally calculated in the classical manner. The outcome of their interaction, however, must serve a group too diverse in its values to have stepped together through the Rational Actor model. This outcome preserves the system and may be more effective and efficient than would have been the wasting of time pursuing all views and all relevant information and options.

The inclination to integrate all issue pursuits offers important enlightenment on how the corporate political process works. The Bureaucratic Politics Model works consistently only on second order issues, where top leadership interests are not immediately involved. On anything other than middle level decision making the analyst would more profitable use the Organizational Operation model or a groupthink model operating at a small unit level. Nevertheless, much corporate project decisioning falls in the arena addressed by the Bureaucratic Model.

Within the Bureaucratic Politics model the corporate bureaucracy is seen as so loosely integrated that little of the decision making process can be predicted, except as a matter of internal bargaining among discrete units. More important than the process in general are patterns of communication channels and professional socialization—the culture.

To change policy in the Bureaucratic model, change the participants, and /or the channel of communication and /or the right of communication. Any discussion of informal communication must still distinguish between channels of communication with their rights to communicate vs. idiosyncratic or unpredictable communications.

In the Cali Case, Cali was attempting to challenge Betty’s “right to communicate” when she ran into difficulties.

Prescriptive Utility

A decision maker trying to follow the dictates of this model would narrow his focus to the interests of his project. This would assume a faith in corporate upper management either to support the project as necessary or at least not overtly intervene to block project objectives.

In fact the bureaucratic model would say that to behave other than in a manner that is in the best interest of your project will foul up other actors’ planning. Pursue only incremental change and be moderate in pressuring other groups to support your change otherwise the system will come apart; it will fail you. To change policy, change the participants in the decision making.

Prescriptively, however, this model begs the question of larger organizational, or societal interest. Who is to watch out for the overall corporate interest? A user of this model, with such a fervent focus on the bureaucratized or group players, might overlook the importance at some junctures of key individuals.

Project Decision making: Model III

Many features of project policy decisioning fit Model III. Intense negotiation and ill-concealed conflict go on between numerous internal self interested groups before any multi-million dollar project is ever approved and especially during the requirements phase. Each group with a stake in the project stresses and strives to achieve its own goals; the likelihood of a cohesive, homogenous aggregated collective team decisioning process during project initiation is remote. This contention is normal. It can bring out views and policy consensus and norms other models might deny. Skilled negotiators can integrate competing wishes and notions of “the corporate good,” can visualize and voice the shared values and complementary character of such priorities and can rearrange how such priorities are ranked.

Early policy emerges almost mysteriously by a process similar to Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market economy. The policy emerges in a way that almost makes the outcome of the decision incidental to the bargaining process. Each actor articulates only his own interest, or the interest of the team or teams represented. No one is yet in a position to raise the corporate interest authoritatively. A “commons” type of dynamic exists with each manager striving to maximize his own gains. Instead of trying to find the best possible corporate decision, actors appear inclined to satisfice. They become fixated on the bargaining process itself. They may joust and haggle for the fun of it, leaving aside subtle thoughts about ultimate shareholder impact.

Under such circumstances, a change in policy output can be effected by altering the participants in the process. Different decisions will be made following changes in the actors involved. These changes trace ultimately to the position, capability, and vitality of each actor and team.

Model IV: Group Dynamics

A fourth way to describing decision making is the Group Dynamics model Irving Janis calls “groupthink”. Janis leans heavily on earlier works of Leon Festinger, Alexander George, Joseph DeRivera, and Karl Deutsch.[53] The actor here is a small group of decision makers, a team. This model considers neither the individual leader nor the bureaucracy in its entirety. An opening assumption is that any error that can be committed by an individual can be compounded by group processes that produce shared miscalculations.

A productive, high performance team employs caution when it makes decisions this way. While the team can provide the advantage of flexibility and full discussion of ideas,

“The members of policy making groups, no matter how mindful they may be of their exalted national status and of their heavy responsibilities, are subjected to the pressures widely observed in groups of ordinary citizens..

..Members tend to evolve informal objectives to preserve friendly intragroup relations and this becomes part of the hidden agenda at their meetings….”

Groupthink refers to a deterioration of mental efficiency, reality testing, and moral judgment that results in group pressures….”

...Groupthink..fosters over-optimism, lack of vigilance, and sloganistic thinking about the weakness and immorality of out groups.” [page 13:]

Janis’ law: “The more amiability and esprit de corps among the members of a policy making in group, the greater is the danger that independent critical thinking will be replaced by groupthink, which is likely to result in irrational and dehumanizing actions directed against out groups.”

Users of the group dynamics model frequently assume that the philosophical predispositions, habits of thinking, and policy preferences prevailing in the ruling elite reflect and concentrate those of the entire bureaucracy.

Sometimes researchers assume that knowledge of a single key leader can help predict or explain the behavior of the leadership group or the network as a whole.

For relatively small groups the interpersonal familiarity speeds exchange of views yet leaves time for making and following up decisions. Small groups can adjust quickly if they sense the need. They can change plans, avoid advance commitment, and rather easily maintain options open until the decision point.

Substantive work outside the routine can only be accomplished in small groups. Such groups do not guarantee productive work, but the potential is not likely to be stifled. Importantly, the group should take steps to build in systematic openings to opinions of those outside the team and for challenges to sloganistic thinking. One technique is to hire or appoint—and respect—an ombudsman, someone to speak for contrary views. A hazard of using the Group Dynamics model alone to effect decisions is that it may lead, like a shortsighted use of the rational actor model, to a lack bureaucratic follow-through.

Section 6 The Cali Case

To lead teams successfully is to apply power and politics appropriately. To apply power and politics appropriately one must understand the players and their motivation. One needs to know something of the culture. One needs to consider each player’s history and temperament. Because so much that is necessary to Leading Successful Project Teams depends on understanding relationships and predispositions and environmental challenges, we’re going to tell a story that you may to use to discuss the various concepts presented above.

Enjoy this story as you would any short story. You may read it either before or after the formal content in Part I. You may want to read it both before and after. We offer The Cali Case so you can consider what you think the leaders did right and what you think they did wrong; you can consider what approaches you prefer and which you disapprove. Project management remains more an art than a science. This case illustrates the creativity open to project teams and project leaders. The art created by Cali’s team might fit in your corporate setting, or it might not.

The Cali Case, like the Dilbert cartoon introduces players, some of whom you may recognize, by another name. Parts of the story arose from experience in actual projects, but the tale itself is fiction and any resemblance to persons living or dead remains our secret.

Considering Change, Creativity and History

Maybe it’s because I’m married to a professor of Political Science or maybe it’s because I earned my degree in history, but I view organizational change, especially in a large corporation, very much like a mass movement on a world stage. Revolutions and reformations are simply organizational change projects writ large.

Antony Jay, author of several books on politics and the corporation has a theory that throughout history major changes are most often brought about by a creative leader working with a creative team. Jay says that “changing things is central to leadership, and changing them before anyone else is creativeness.”[54] In this story, Cali has been challenged to produce mega change in a multi-national organization. She tries to implement this change by building creative teams after Jay’s model.

Jay lists several attributes of a creative team; these attributes include strong leadership, open dialog and debate, pressure for considerable output, as much autonomy as possible and constant stimulus from bigger and bigger challenges. According to Jay, these are the same team management principles that guided Luther, St. Dominic, and Machiavelli. Some believe they can guide corporate change today. Cali is about to find out.

Setting the Stage

Mac’s staff meeting was slow that day. In an off hand way, he asked, “Anybody interested in bringing in the CMM?” Two hands went up, Jack’s and Cali’s. Jack had Air Force experience with the Capability Maturity Model, the CMM. Cali’s interest came mostly because she was bored.

Mac, Jack and Cali all work for ACBC-DC, a software company in one division of a corporate empire, the ACB Corporation, that employs thousands worldwide. Mac, the Chief Technology Officer of ACBC-DC, is under pressure to improve software quality. Customer expectations seem insatiable.

ACBC-DC is just starting a new quality organization called Six Sigma dedicated to reaching a quality level of fewer than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. No one in the world is at that level of quality in software. The CEO of ACBC-DC has just appointed Paula, from User Services, to head Six Sigma. But Mac wants to be in charge of quality improvement within his software community. He is not predisposed to turn that job over to Paula or to anyone else who does not understand software.

CMM stands for Capability Maturity Model, a framework developed by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) of Carnegie Mellon University. Mac had used the CMM at his former employer to improve the software development process and he’s thinking that it could be useful here too. The CMM lists “best practices” for each of 5 levels. An organization is expected to first reach level 2, before it can implement the practices associated with level 3. Only after reaching level 3 can it go to level 4, and from level 4 finally to level 5.

Six Sigma is a model largely based on quantitative measurement, behavior the CMM would say is achieved at level 4, hence not possible before an organization reaches at least CMM level 3.

Whether they use CMM or Six Sigma, Mac knows he has to do something to improve quality. Despite the heroic efforts of his bright and willing workforce, software errors quite often cause customer applications to crash. The software errors database lists so many identified issues that over 50% of his 1600 person staff is deployed just fixing problems, and still they are unable to keep up with demand. The size and age of the ACBC-DC applications makes the software complex and convoluted. Failure reports are on a hockey stick curve.

With the tech wreck in 2001, ACBC stock took a nosedive. They say pain is a necessary precursor to change. ACBC-DC is definitely feeling the pain. Something fundamental has to change. Mac knows it. Jack and Cali know it, too, but none of them know just what they are getting themselves into.

Exploring the Problem

After Mac’s staff meeting, Cali and Jack call consulting companies to find help. Several companies respond, but Cali & Jack are most impressed with SQP, Software Quality Partners. When Cali called to ask if SQP could help them, the SQP consultant responded in a decidedly atypical fashion. He interviewed her! He boldly asked just why she thought ACBC-DC ought to get involved with CMM. When she replied that process improvement via CMM could improve the quality of life for her sometimes sleep-deprived colleagues, he seemed satisfied.

Soon after they scheduled SQP for a marketing visit. When Mike, the SQP consultant, came away satisfied that Mac would provide the strong executive support essential for success, the partnership began. SQP started with an Mini Software Process Review (MSPR). In the MSPR, Mike from SQP and Cali interviewed over fifty engineers and studied four projects, all in Jack’s area. For each project the MSPR compared project practices to the CMM. The resulting evaluation, although far less rigorous and costly than a formal appraisal, documented that ACBC-DC was what Mike laughingly called a “bottom feeding, mud sucking, level one organization.”

In April Mike presented the results of the MSPR to Mac, Jack, Cali and other executives, including Paula from Six Sigma. At meeting, Mac was convinced to proceed.( I guess it didn’t hurt that Mac and Mike, the consultant, both were car buffs and both drove Porsches. ) At the end of the meeting Mac asked Cali to step out of her current job, report directly to him and spend full-time implementing the CMM. He also asks Paula to provide a Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) employee to help Cali.

Cali was delighted. Cali is one of those persons, who particularly love the beginning game. She is an energetic, friendly, relentless organizer, always wanting to introduce change. The changes she had introduced to her previous team had been successful. The team no longer needed her enthusiasm and drive, so she had asked Mac to find her something with more challenge.

Capturing the Vision

The New Year brought Cali back to the office brimming with ideas. She had been to the SEI web site and to dozens of connecting sites. She had read articles about organizational change, had rethought previous experiences from her long and checkered career. Cali had learned much about how to do a corporate change project from Gerald M. Weinberg. She had attended several of his workshops and read his books. Cali is one of those folks who may never know where the rubber meets that road, because she’s always focused where the rubber meets the sky. Her creative side kept imagining how best to roll out CMM across Mac’s empire. She wrestled with the concept of change. Over and over she asked herself, “Why don’t we build software the way we know we should? Why did I have to experience failure before I got the idea? Isn’t there some way to get others to learn without their having to fail? The CMM is not rocket science. It is straightforward, best practices, good management.” Ever the optimist, Cali keeps telling herself, “This shouldn’t be too tough.” But in her heart she knows it will be.

After spending weeks reading and thinking Cali wants someone to talk with; someone to challenge her ideas; someone to ground her plans with a no-nonsense interpretation of what will and what will not fly in this cow town.

Sue is ideal for the job. Sue manages all the technical administrative assistants and has her fingers in almost every support activity. She has come up from the ranks, speaks in a blunt, no nonsense fashion. Sue has contacts in every corner of the company and knows just how to get their attention. A practical foil to Cali’s creative side, Sue and Cali talk for hours. Gradually they enlarge their circle to include Tim, a bright young Info Tech auditor. Together they conceive the structure and operation of a Software Engineering Process Group (SEPG). Sue agrees that this new SEPG should take over functions from the existing PAC, an ad hoc Process Approval Committee which Sue has been managing.

Four months have passed since that first meeting where Mac proposed the CMM, but the time seems to have been standing still for Cali. But once she has the project clear in her mind, it doesn’t take Cali long to write the vision. Mac likes it. He shares it with his staff and others. His imprimatur is all that is necessary to move ahead. Together they have taken the first step toward a successful change project. They have captured the vision.

Selling the Vision

Mac is a natural born leader. He’s tall and handsome with a charisma that some cannot resist and others simply detest. Mac is a man of principle, but also a bit of a ham. He has sixteen direct reports and is in his glory when they all join him around the big table in staff meeting. Staff meetings have no agenda. Mac’s language isn’t exactly what you’d call PC, politically correct, either. But his jokes are so funny that his staff forgive him for their crudity.

Mac intuitively understands that leaders of change need a legitimate base of operations. They need to be touched with the “magic stick.” The entire empire needs to know that they have been appointed to lead and that they have the unequivocal backing of the powers that be. Cynics abound in big business and none are more cynical than software engineers. If Mac is afraid, no one would know it. Mac knows that tackling a change project is not for the timid and that no one should sense a leader’s fear. If you haven’t the confidence to proceed, how can others dare come after you? Your first flurry of activity must be big and bold. It must leave your audience with the feeling that this movement is inevitable. They can either join, follow, or get out of the way. Resisters are welcome because their ideas will improve the outcome, but resisters need to know that change will happen. Mac knows all this, in his gut.

At the next staff meeting, Mac says simply, “We’re doing the CMM. If you don’t want to participate, you can find someplace else to work”. His statement was not viewed as a challenge, simply accepted as fact. Mac demonstrated the “strong executive support,. that the books say is required of a change program. He expressed time and again, loud and clear, that CMM is not the “flavor of the month.”

Recruiting Officers, Ladies and Gentlemen

Jack, like Cali, one of Mac’s direct reports, was named co-champion of CMM effort. Jack retained his position as Vice President. Cali was a director. She asked Mac for a promotion, but he put her off. Mac was uncertain about Cali. She seemed smart enough, but she had relatively little management experience. He decided to wait and see how she did.

Jack and Cali selected about twenty individuals to be trained as Change Agents, almost all came from Jack’s department. Cali and these agents attended a three day SEI certified course called “Introduction to the CMM.” They then went to a two day course called “Rapid Change” to teach people how to implement a large cultural change project. Agents also participated in a SQP-led three day Planning Session.

During the Rapid Change course, the Agents learned that to implement change depends on understanding corporate culture and fitting the change strategy into that culture. Culture was a major topic both in the classes and in the workshop. They described the culture as very fast paced, very ad hoc and highly dependent on personal relationships. They analyzed challenges presented by this culture. Cali kept repeating to herself their message, “You must communicate, communicate and communicate. When you think you’ve communicated enough, then communicate some more.” To Cali, communication means writing. She just hates the telephone.

After the classes are over and after the excitement dies down, Cali went back to her office alone. Every one involved with CMM, every agent and Jack and Sue have another full time job. Mac, Jack, Paula and all the agents are busy with their regular work. Cali had two priorities: One was to maintain Mac’s involvement and interest. Second was to get some full-time help so she naturally turned to Mac and Paula.

Because the CMM was Mac’s personal project, he arranged to fund it from his administrative account and not to do a formal business case. Mac allocated funds for three FTE, in addition to the one Paula had promised from Six Sigma. Although Cali stayed in touch regularly and even attended Paula’s staff meetings, she was never able to get the allocated FTE from Paula. But that didn’t stop her from finding the people she needed for the project. One day Mac handed her a resume he had received from a member of the Board of Directors.

The resume was from Ed, a personable young man in his mid-thirties. Ed was clearly not shy about going straight to the top to get what he wanted. He was experienced in CMM and had been a process auditor for another software company. The day Ed arrived for his employment interview, Cali quickly decided she wanted him on her team. After the personal interview was over, after normal work hours, she escorted him up to Mac’s office and was able to catch several minutes to get Mac’s reaction. Ed is asking for more money than Mac had allocated to each of the three positions however. Reasoning that the biggest challenge to the CMM project would be credibility and that credibility required expertise, Cali obtained Mac’s authorization to spend her full allocation to hire just two, not three, software engineers, giving each 50% more pay than Mac had put in each line. When Ed agreed to join the team, Cali cleaned out an unused accounting software library near her office. She found furniture in the warehouse and converted the room into a private office, thus getting around the “furniture police” who only gave offices to Directors and above. Once in the office, “possession was 9/10th of the law.”

A week or two later when Cali is sitting at the dinner table, her husband tells her about his Navy buddy, a long-time friend of her family, who is exceedingly frustrated in his current civilian position. John’s previous experience as a CEO qualified him for a far more responsible position and more pay than Cali could ever offer. Nevertheless, she enthusiastically presented John with the challenges of the project and the good that they could achieve together. Finding an office for John was a bit more of a challenge, but she asked her assistant to help. Going through the administrative assistant channels to the marketing department, Cali asked for, and was granted, use of a vacant office on eighth floor for John.

Cali assign roles to Ed and John as liaison consultants to Mac’s direct reports. Both were immediately busy because Cali’s means of keeping Mac involved was to jump onto Mac’s ideas and set about implementing them. The approach was sound, but Cali was rapidly biting off more than she could chew.

Spreading the word through Key Player Meetings

Before either Ed or John actually reported to work, Mac had had this idea about communicating with four key groups within his staff. The groups, called Key Players, were the Analysts, the first-line Software Managers, the Directors, who managed the Managers, and the Project Managers. Mac didn’t really say what he wanted to communicate about, but Cali saw that Mac’s idea offered a built in opportunity to communicate about the CMM. She offered to make it happen.

About that time Mac inherited several more departments in a DC reorganization. Immediately wanting to integrate the new VP’s into his group, he planned a retreat with all sixteen to set Annual Objectives and he assigned every one of the sixteen to one of the four Key Player subcommittees. Mac then tapped Cali—or she volunteered—to facilitate meetings of the Key Player subcommittees to work out the planned events. After one particularly difficult meeting Cali went home recalling how awkward and difficult life was the last time she had tried to manage a group of VPs. Mac had given minimal instructions and was not present for any of the subcommittee meetings. But he did want the Key Player meetings to take place ASAP. Mac wanted everything ASAP.

The next week, Cali joined Mac’s staff for an off-site meeting to set annual objectives. In the middle of the meeting several of Mac’s staff left for the CEO’s Annual Objectives meeting. How weird was that?

Mac asked Cali—or did she volunteer--to record and communicate Mac’s Annual Objectives. Paula, from Six Sigma, was made responsible for recording and communicating the CEO’s objectives. The CMM appeared very high on both lists of objectives as did the objective to improve the Requirements Process. Cali knew that improving the Requirements process was embedded as step one toward the CMM. She wondered if others knew that.

Cali did a great PowerPoint Mac’s objectives, but the wear and tear is starting to show. Her meetings with the VPs are more and more difficult to schedule and even when scheduled, one VP or another would inevitably miss the meeting then get confused about what he or she should do. After all, they had “real work” to get done and “real problems” to manage. The VPs had lots of ideas, but expected Cali to carry out all the work. Cali is now beginning to pay for not having gotten Mac and others make their objectives for the Key Player meetings more clear. Cali herself is comfortable with ambiguity, because she can bend it to suit her purposes, but the VP’s are not about to let her just tell them what to do.

Cali is trying to bring Ed and John on board, but they haven’t arrived yet and she is starting to get really frazzled. The entire story might have ended here without the exceptional support of Jan. Jan was administrative assistant for Cali’s former team. Since neither Jan nor Cali had moved physically, Cali kept Jan was so busy that Jan was unable to do more than the most routine tasks for anyone else. Fortunately, the situation was not a problem. By the time Cali got her own budget number, a year later, she arranged to pay half Jan’s salary and formally have Jan report to her. Cali’s prior team agreed to pick up the other half so that the position would remain in their budget.

Jan was top notch at setting up large group meetings. Her first challenge was to figure out how many people would attend. She soon discovered that no one had a list containing the names of the persons in each Key Player group. There was no list of Analysts, no list of first-line Software Managers, no list of Directors, and no list of Project Managers. Eventually, by working with other Admin assistants, Jan was able to come up with email names for these four groups. As it turned out, Jan counted almost 200 Analysts, over 200 Software Managers, another 200 Project Managers and about 85 Directors.

Then, just as Jan was ready to set up the meetings, the corporate office of ACB, sent out clear instructions that to save money no “off-site” facilities were to be rented without approval of the ACB Corporate CEO. Darn! Now what was Jan to do? No one wanted to ask for permission from Corporate to rent the local ballroom, but no place internal was big enough to hold a meeting of 200 people.

Jan said “The biggest place we have is the cafeteria in the new building. It will seat about 140, but has never been used for a meeting before. Besides, many of the participants live and work out of town. The new “save money” guidelines are death on that much travel.”

“Okay,” said Cali, “This is how we’ll do it. First, see when and how long we can get the cafeteria during the day. Then schedule two meetings for each of the three big groups. Suggest that those with names ending A-M come the first day and those N-Z the second day. Encourage those who cannot come on their designated day to trade off and come a different day. Don’t forget to take attendance. As for the out of town folks, go talk to Roger. He knows all about video conferencing.”

Jan spent the better part of the next few weeks making all the necessary arrangements, and when time came for the meetings, they went off without a hitch.

Each meeting took three hours, from 2-5 pm. The format was somewhat different for each group as set forward by the VPs Mac had appointed to each team. In each case the groups were split into smaller discussion groups led by a VP. Participants were asked to define how they saw their role, some of their challenges, etc.

Cali wanted to be sure that each meeting started with a presentation by Mac and she turned to Morris for help in that area. For several years Morris had been producing charts showing trends in software quality. Morris was bright, but his charts were too complicated. He and his charts were generally ignored. Cali helped Morris simplify some of the charts and asked him to prepare them for Mac to use as slides. Morris was pleased to be asked to help and created a series of graphs for Mac to demonstrate why the CMM initiative was important and why it was needed. Then Cali herself borrowed slides from various government web sites and created a presentation to explain what the CMM was. John came on staff just in time for the last meeting. His assignment was to collect, correlate and distribute feedback from the meetings.

Since Cali and Mac were going to have to repeat their presentations seven different times, Cali asked Mac if they could capture it on video for training purposes. Mac said okay, if you can do what you need for less than $2000. The original estimate had been $7000, but by using internal resources to do all but the actual filming, the project came in at $1850. Using two separate video “takes,” Bob from the Training department edited one good show and integrated it with text on a training CD. Mac was very pleased to see what the Training Department could do and the audio-video CD came in handy over the next several years.

In the Key Player meetings and elsewhere, Mac made it clear that he was the leader of the CMM initiative. Altogether, the Key Player meetings reached over five hundred people. The CD with Mac and Cali speaking about the CMM was then distributed for viewing by additional groups throughout the company. They also distributed a CD to each person in the growing cadre of change agents and enlisted the public relations staff to produce a flyer that was distributed individually to over four thousand employees.

Within weeks word had spread across the empire that a Software Engineering Process Group (SEPG) had been formed and was active. They had shared the vision.

Recruiting soldiers and sailors and candlestick makers

Cali went to visit Tom, the head of the training and documentation division. Tom was already an ally because of the good press his department got out of the CD. Cali considered how training and doc departments are always the step children in a software house; the real heroes being software engineers. The doc folks just “Don’t get no respect.” Tom was a really nice guy and Cali expressed clearly how important documentation would be for the success of the CMM project. She also said that she figured she could use the full-time support of at least two people in documentation. Cali didn’t have much to trade, but she knew that Tom wanted to continue to be an important part of a high profile project with Mac’s personal attention.

Cali offered Tom her unfunded third FTE. Hiring at ACBC-DC required two things, a hiring line, essentially a numbered piece of paper approving the staff addition, AND money in the budget to fund the position. Cali had used all her funds for two FTE, which meant that she had only the numbered paper left for the 3rd FTE. By giving that paper to Tom, he could combine it with funds in his budget to hire staff, who would be “dedicated” to the CMM project full-time.

Cali always took opportunities to thank Tom for his assistance and Tom became one of Cali’s strongest allies. As time went on, the CMM project was able to use almost four full-time documentation and training people. Because Tom had to staff up to meet quarterly release requirements, he often had excess staff during non-peak periods. By keeping his excess staff obviously busy during off peak times, Cali provided Tom another valued service. Thus by scheduling project documentation to avoid peak periods, Cali never had a shortage of documentation assistance.

Cali was feeling good about her “win” with Tom, but relationships with others were not going so well. She was working with Six Sigma and a group dedicated to improving Requirements, but she did not have much time to devote. She started attending Six Sigma staff meetings, but gradually dropped out. Occasionally she would hear whispers of dissatisfaction from VPs about not having feedback yet available from the Key Player meetings, but Cali was more interested in starting something new than in finishing something old. She didn’t like visiting the VP’s who all had a different idea about what she should be doing. Cali focused on getting a web site up and running and trying to orient her new team. And now that she had access to documentation people, Cali set out to take over the task of maintaining the standard Software Process Methodology, the SPM.

The SPM was part of Morris’s responsibility. Morris was a Director reporting to Philip, one of Mac’s direct reports. Morris had two people assigned to the SPM, but Cali explained to Mac that maintaining the SPM would have to be an integral part of the job of any SEPG and Morris’s two people should report to her. “That’s just how the CMM is done,” she said. Mac never quite understood why, but he acquiesced. Morris’s group was currently somewhat out of favor because they were having a difficult time trying to implement new application software. Now Cali had four direct reports, all of whom could all do new work, since she planned to allocate most of the maintenance of the SPM effort to the documentation group.

Bill and Paul from Morris’s group moved into the vacant cubes near Cali and Ed’s offices. Now that the team was pretty much assembled, they took time to create a charter for the SEPG and outline a three-year plan to reach their goal of becoming certified as a Level 2 software organization. Level 2 required improvements in five areas, including Requirements, Project Management and Quality Verification.

Paul was retired military, a professional quality engineer. Paul was assigned to work on Requirements and Verification, which was exactly the areas in which he was strong. Ed was assigned to work toward process improvement across all the areas by training software engineers reporting to each of the various VP’s. That suited Ed just fine. Ed was independent and just set off on his own initiative.

Cali admired John so she assigned him the toughest jobs. If John thought she wasn’t fair, he was too diplomatic to say. Cali asked John to manage process improvement in the areas of Systems Analysis and Project Management, after documenting the results of the Key Player meetings.

Bill was not enthusiastic about doing anything different than he had been doing before. Bill was basically retired, and still drawing his paycheck. He was leading the Analyst Advisory Group, made up of disgruntled, underemployed intellectuals who spent meeting after meeting discussing possible improvements in the life of an Analyst at ACBC-DC. Katie, one of these intellectuals, put together a PowerPoint presentation about a Computer Aided Analysis System, which she proposed building on the Mainframe. After positive feedback on the proposal, Katie set her team to designing the system.

Meanwhile Mac was starting another high priority project: To save money he promoted the replacement of domestic software engineers with contractors from India. Phillip, Morris’s boss, was assigned to lead Project India. Phillip, a retired military officer, loved to travel and was convinced this would give him the opportunity for several visits to the Indian subcontinent. The Indian contracting company had received a level 5, the highest possible CMM rating, so Cali offered to help Phil by using an Indian contractor on the CMM project.

Since both projects were high on Mac’s priority list, Cali and Phil were able to come up with the funds for a contractor for six months. Since the Indian firm was proud of their CMM rating and anxious to demonstrate their expertise to ACBC-DC, they sent a very knowledgeable and capable consultant, who shared many documents and templates that had been painstakingly constructed during improvement efforts in India. With the addition of Dari, Cali’s staff was now five formal and four informal. Immediately, Cali assigned Dari to the new Website task. Dari worked closely with the Documentation Department, and used many of the templates from her home firm. The results were spectacular.

Formerly reporting to Phil was a woman who had maintained some records on the cost of software errors. She resigned and Phil needed someone to pick up her job. Phil was so focused on the India Project, he didn’t care who did the work, so Cali found Phil willing to transfer the cost report and the FTE staff line to her department. Using the open FTE position, Cali then was able to transfer Wilma to the SEPG. Wilma was coming off another job as a project administrator. Wilma was a first generation American of German parentage, nearing retirement age. She was the stereotypical stubborn, perfectionist German. Later, Cali found that since no one was using the cost reports that had justified Wilma’s position she simply stopped the reports and reassigned Wilma.

Cali was by this time directing the efforts of 9-10 FTE, six in the SEPG, and 4 in documentation/education. Cali was pleased with herself…she’d accomplished a rather successful effort at “Empire Building.” But Mac was receiving more and more indications that other people were less than pleased with Cali. While Cali was busy growing her team, she had neglected to manage up and across. Mac wanted to talk with her, wanted to guide her and warn her to work more closely with his direct reports. But Cali did not make the effort to drop in and chat with Mac. Mac had no time to schedule regular meetings to chat with her. The rumors of discontent never reached Cali. She was on a mission and probably wouldn’t have listened to the rumors even if she had heard them.

Baselines

In their long range plan, the new SEPG team allocated the first year or so to taking a Baseline. The idea was to document where you are so you can plan the route to where you want to be. Their task was analogous to drawing the details of a construction site during the process of construction. Everyone knew that ACBC-DC had no shortage of software process rules. Cali and her staff base-lined all the ACBC-DC software process documentation, including the SPM, and came up with 1888 pages. Nevertheless, ACBC-DC had a long history of the “Nike” approach to building systems: “Just Do It!” Neatly understated by one of the internal audit officers, “Compliance with the SPM is a problem.”

ACBC-DC was a showcase of the free flowing, cowboy spirit of the old west. The independence and self-reliance and the native stubbornness of pioneer stock had built legendary software. But DC’s independent, self-reliant, stubborn people were notably uncomfortable with the idea of following bureaucratic processes. While the CMM demands discipline in following processes, the culture demands that a process make sense before people follow it. Clearly Cali and her crew must build sensible processes and sell the CMM as bottom-line basic to business.

Organizing for Action

The SEPG evolves over several months to include the following groups: SEPG agents, SEPG staff, SEPG core support, Local SEPGs, TWGs, and the SEPG Change Council. Cali created each of these groups to serve separate a vital function in the CMM initiative. She seeded each group with interested persons representing different roles and different talents. She gave each group responsibilities commensurate with their role. These groups accomplished two goals. First they were able to do real work to advance the vision. Second they were able to become creatively involved to spread support for change. A large group needs ten to twenty percent positive support to reach critical mass. Once that level of support is reached, others will go along and the culture change will mature.

Cali had worked for many years with volunteer agencies before becoming a software engineer. At one time she sat on the Board of Directors for the American Red Cross. Several times she was involved with recruiting volunteers for blood drives. The Red Cross experience taught her that you have to personally invite people to join a group where their skills are important and needed. You need to be mindful of the time they donate, taking care not to expect too much and thankful for what they achieve. You need to have the volunteers see themselves and be seen by others as a part of an important movement that is of great benefit to the world.

Cali had started with a group of about twenty people, called Change Agents. By following her volunteerism approach, SEPG soon grew to over a hundred agents. Ed was out working with Mac’s direct reports and seeking that each VP nominate one agent for every two dozen engineers. Thus each nominee was invited by his or her vice president to be a part of this important movement, and each nominee was personally sold on the idea by Ed or John. Ed and John and others set up a two day training class for each agent and each Key Player, to teach them not only about the CMM, but about their role as a member of the SEPG.

The acronym SEPG (Software Engineering Process Group) was part of the psychology of helping each person become part of a world movement. The Software Engineering Institute and the CMM itself endorsed use of the name. Cali’s staff were SEPG consultants. Representatives of the work groups were called SEPG agents. Anyone who wanted to be on the SEPG was accepted and added to the mailing list. Some were able to attend the national SEPG conference and brought back stories of how the SEPG was working in other companies and other countries. Success stores of level 5 companies circulated. The agents came to believe that if other companies could succeed with the CMM, ACBC-DC could as well.

While using national and internationally recognized terms wherever appropriate, Cali coined a new term that enjoyed broad acceptance. Early in the project, Cali kept hearing from the Vice Presidents, reporting to Mac, that “You should do this:…” or “You should do that…” She sensed that she was powerless to “do” much of anything to change how software was made. The VPs themselves were managers of the engineers building software. One day Cali told Ed, “I kept wanting to say to Fred, ‘why don’t you just clean up your own back yard’.”. Well the term “stuck.” Each VP’s employee group, numbering from 80-200 people, was thereafter called a “Backyard.” Each Backyard was organized to have a “local” SEPG, ranging from 3-9 persons. Each local Backyard would then be able to proceed a different rate of speed to do first the assessment then the improvement effort. Cali assigned half the backyards to Ed and half to John. Ed and John could report on the progress of each Backyard separately, thus pointing responsibility for change back to the line managers who were truly responsible, because everyone in a Backyard reported up through the same VP.

Although the new terms, SEPG, Agent and Backyard, were immediately well received, another new term was not. Currently operating throughout Mac’s domain were over half a dozen “advisory groups” that had sprung up over time and had taken over various software process related functions. Each of these groups would issue rulings, make rule changes or undertake projects with little or no management supervision. The groups were self-perpetuating power bases for various self appointed individuals.

Rather than turn over change goals to an advisory group who could not be held accountable, Cali determined that such groups should “go away” and be replaced with specifically chartered Technical Working Groups, TWGs, pronounced “twigs.” Management would charter each TWG to accomplish a specific task and then disband the TWG when it completed its task. SEPG would administer and monitor the TWGs via management representatives sitting on a Change Council.

The first advisory group to be disbanded was PAC, the Process Approval Committee that Sue administered. Cali went to the PAC meeting and told the participants how important their work was. She said that it was so important that management would now formally support their efforts through the SEPG. Each member of PAC was invited to become an SEPG change agent. Each agent was invited to attend the regular SEPG monthly meeting. Members of PAC accepted the change and the transition, though not immediate, was relatively un-eventful. The old PAC together with the newly appointed SEPG agents became THE SEPG, which met every Thursday morning.

So far everything had gone quite well. Nearly six months had passed. Then Cali encountered her first real open resistance. The SEPG takeover of the PAC had gone well in part because of Cali’s relationship with Sue . She and Sue had worked out a rationale for the transition over many months. But the ease of that transition was deceiving. Cali was increasingly busy and trying to do everything at once. All the tiny additions to SEPG functions were growing daily. John was still struggling over how to satisfy the various VP’s approach to feedback from the Key Player meetings while reining in unrealistic expectations of the Analysts. Ed was trying to get each of the VP’s to appoint their agents and build a local SEPG. Bill and Paul were just trying to figure out what their new jobs would be. Dari was busy designing the web site.

Cali met with her staff weekly and talked over everything with them. The team met at the round table in a corner of the sizeable office she had inherited during a prior project. In staff meetings, everyone shared their visions and their challenges, they agreed on the policy positions they would take, so that they could “speak with one voice.” Jan, Cali’s assistant, was as much a part of the group as the others. The only outsider seemed to be Bill, who never spoke . Gradually, even Paul was brought into the group. Cali, focused ever on the future , listened and advised her staff, but basically left each of them to do their job. Her door was always open and different staff came in more or less often for her guidance. She set up regular weekly meetings with each of them, but then she would cancel or postpone the one-on-ones if something else would intervene. Ed seldom asked anything of Cali, but John made a point of dropping in every couple days. John was maximizing his relationships with everyone. Ed concentrated on maximizing relationships with the VP’s. Jan focused on taking care of Cali. Paul concentrated on doing his tasks. Wilma worked to clarify everyone’s responsibility, including her own, and in so doing sparked some occasional storming. Dari enhanced the web site and seeded it with the growing documents from other efforts. They were becoming a team.

Cali was primarily concerned about legitimizing the changes that were coming. She wrote a paper describing how the current ad hoc advisory groups within ACBC-DC should be transformed into TWGs. Each TWG was to be a cross-functional group organized around a particular challenge. Each would be a temporary group operating under a charter formally approved by management. TWGs would then define and propose new processes and process changes. A day or two after writing the plan, Cali sent it by email to the VPs on Mac’s staff. The plan came up then at staff meeting. But Cali had not visited individually with each VP about the TWG plan or its implications. So now Cali is here at Mac’s staff meeting with this plan to disband much of the informal process infrastructure that has grown up over the last several years. Her presentation at the staff meeting was informal, no slides and not much on the rationale behind the plan. She presents the idea almost as a status report. By the way, everyone, this is what I’m doing.

On the conference phone is Martha, one of Mac’s newly acquired VPs. Martha, with exasperation apparent in her voice, asks Cali, “Could you explain what you want to do, again?” Cali, who never handles confrontation very well any how, is flustered by this disembodied challenge. After some ineffective explanation from Cali, Martha counters that “her” Infoman Advisory Group, (within her power base) is not “going away,” and “is not going to become a TWG”. Furthermore, she doesn’t understand why Cali is even talking about TWGs; aren’t you working on the CMM? What do TWG’s have to do with the CMM? The rest of the staff stays quiet., except for someone who asks about the still unfinished business of the Key Player feedback.

Cali knew she was in trouble, but ever the optimist, she underestimated how much trouble. Cali had never personally gotten close to most of the VPs. They didn’t really trust her. She had delegated the work involving the VPs to Ed and John. Ed and John represented the face of the SEPG to everyone outside the SEPG actives. Cali should have known better than to abandon her key stakeholders and the power potential they represented.

Ed and John reacted to Cali’s abandonment in different ways. John, who was near the end of a successful career, partnered with Cali and did his best to shield her from the slings and arrows of political fortune. Ed who was eager to further his own career, concentrated on seeking a promotion. Ed wanted either to take over Cali’s job or another job at the Director or VP level. The more persons Ed talked with about wanting a promotion, the more his listeners doubted Cali’s management potential.

You may remember that Cali had inherited Bill, the retired-on-the-job employee from Morris. Bill spent his time rewriting the SPM (Software Process Methodology) and discussing his rewrites with the Analyst Advisory Board. He had been doing this for nearly a year with no visible progress. When Cali proposed that all changes to the SPM should be approved by a management staffed Change Council and that the Analyst Advisory Board should be disbanded, Bill’s little world was shattered. He was neither flexible enough to cope with the change nor strong enough to fight it. Bill resigned. Cali turned to Bill’s colleague, Paul, to set up a TWG to salvage what could be saved of the work Bill had done.

In the meantime, Cali kept working with what was now termed the Requirements TWG. This group of cross-functional programmers and customer service folks were following the Six Sigma path to process improvement. Cali had helped pen the charter, but she left most of the organizational work to Betty, the Six Sigma coach. Several months had passed and the group seemed to be making little progress. Cali invited Bette and Fred, the TWG leader to her office. The meeting was at 7:00 am, which was not a particularly good time for Cali, but she felt it was her responsibility to move this TWG along. Soon after greeting the visitors, they began talking about a meeting they had held with one of Mac’s direct reports.

Warning bells rang in Cali’s head, bells as annoying as her recent alarm clock. “Please, don’t meet with him again without me present,” she said. Bette said, “I’ll meet with whomever I like, whenever.” Cali said, “What did you say?” Bette said, “I’m going to call him right now and tell him what you said.” Cali said, “What’s your problem?” Fred walked out. Cali said, “I didn’t do anything to you.” Bette said, “It was the way you looked at me.” Bette called the VP in question from Cali’s office. Cali was mortified. Eventually Bette went upstairs and talked to her boss, Paula, the head of Six Sigma. Soon thereafter Paula calls Cali into her office. While protesting that she never said anything impolite, Cali apologized to Bette and went with Bette where both apologized to Mac’s direct report. After the storm subsided, Cali and Bette agreed to a statement Paula wrote on cooperation between SEPG and Six Sigma. Cali assigned Paul to work with the Requirements TWG henceforth and avoided Bette whenever possible.

After Bill left the company, Cali had an opportunity to participate in another of Mac’s initiatives. The company was going to have to lay people off. But before the layoffs were final, Mac invited his direct reports to confidentially share potential lay-off names so that internal transfers could be arranged wherever possible. Cali attended the meeting and offered to take Debra to fill Bill’s vacancy. This move accomplished several objectives. First, Bill’s spot was filled quickly with a minimum of time expended. Second, Mac was pleased. Third, Debra was delighted to be “rescued.” She remarked, “It was a God thing.”

Cali’s response to Martha’s challenge in staff meeting and Bette’s challenge in her office led Cali to formalize as “SEPG Central” a group that had originally started when Cali and Sue and Tim were outlining SEPG. Martha managed an internal support organization associated with Software Release Management. The Release team worked under her supervision as did some telecommunications personnel. Cali invited Donald, Director of Release Management, one of Martha’s direct reports, to join. She also invited Carol, Documentation Director and Jacob, Director of Training, both of whom worked for her friend Tom as well as Morris, who managed the Software Tools group.

The SEPG Central group would meet twice a month and review change requests. Cali carefully distinguished between the role of the SEPG Central Group and the Change Council. As she put it, the Central SEPG answers the question, “Can SEPG support the requested process change?” If yes, the change request would move on to the Change Council.

The function of the Change Council was to actually approve the proposed process change. By creating the Change Council, Cali could manage the change approval process in a more formal manner than would have been possible during Mac’s staff meetings. One of the rules of membership was that Change Council consist of persons with the rank of VP or above. The point of the membership was to assure the legitimacy of the Change Council. If Mac’s staff were ever to over-rule the Council, Council power would be decimated. By making sure that the Council included over 20% of Mac’s staff, she was assured of their support.

The Change Council also was used to broaden SEPG impact beyond Mac’s domain. Six functional areas were represented, three within Mac’s area and three in areas outside Mac’s control. Since the Council was strictly to supervise software process changes, no one from Six Sigma was invited. This, however, turned out to be a major oversight.

Jack was one of the first senior managers to volunteer to represent Mac on the Council and to attend regularly. Jack’s support helped greatly to make the Council viable. Tom, too, from Documentation and Training was a strong early supporter. Unexpected support came also from George, who managed software development in a city many miles away. The old ad hoc infrastructure had regularly ignored George’s needs. Cali had gotten to know George when she and Jan arranged two-way participation by off-site managers using video-conferencing for the Key Player meetings. George always made it a point to attend Council meetings by phone. Change Council was convened twice a month to answer the question, “Should this process change be implemented?” If yes, the change would be rolled out across the company. Change Council also was set up to approve TWG charters.

Arranging for the Executive Change Council also got the SEPG staff out of another tough situation. The old PAC assumed that they would operate under the SEPG banner in much the same way they had operated before. They planned to meet and vote on whether to approve a process change. But the lack of management support and management participation in the PAC had meant that management rarely did anything to enforce a process change. Mostly management ignored the process change group. Under the old way of doing things, if a VP wanted some process to change, he would just write an email and get Mac to send it out. The change would come with Mac’s authority, but the effect of the change would be dissipated by implementation issues, spotty enforcement, and varying interpretation. The change might or might not get incorporated into the SPM and it might or might not be sent through the old process change group.

Now Cali could explain at the monthly SEPG agent meeting that the agent role would be only slightly different. She worked with Wilma to define the new agent role. Agents would continue to review and evaluate each change, but now, if a change was unacceptable, they should do the following:

write to the SEPG mailbox detailing their objection

contact their representative on the Change Council explaining their position

contact the sponsor of the change in an attempt to correct the problem before the change was sent to Council.

Debra, newest on the SEPG staff was designated to shepherd changes through the SEPG core group and through the Change Council She and Wilma had to manage the SEPG mailbox, send out regular communications to every agent as well as to members of special groups like Core and Council. The first changes were those that Paul had salvaged from the SPM version that Bill had been working on when he left. Paul worked closely with the old process people and with Debra. Putting through the changes that the analyst advisory group had discussed for so many months made the SEPG several new friends. Not only were “their” changes approved, but the changes were now approved by a management group that pledged to implement and enforce the changes.

Taking territory

Now comes the tough part. They had made a splash. Everyone was looking their way. So what’s next? This is the part I call “staying alive.” They were strangers in a strange land. The locals needed to accept their message and to accept them or the movement would be doomed. They did survive, but only just barely.

Ed emphasized that they must be modeling CMM Level 2 behavior. They had to be “Walking the Talk.” But that required documenting SEPG policies and procedures. SEPG staff had to build and maintain their project plan. They needed staff meetings and monthly reports. They had to do inter-group coordination with the Quality Division, with Methodology and Tools, with Tech Doc and with Training. They had to direct the TWGs. They had to organize the local SEPGs. They had to lead groups who were defining roles and responsibilities. They had a ton of everyday email to answer and administrative details to attend.

Most importantly they had to respond to numerous skirmishes as the old informal power structure within the empire was reshaped. The former Policies and Planning Review Committee was disbanded. Several advisory groups were relieved of their duties and new TWGs were chartered. They managed the SEPG Change Council and began coordinating all software process improvements company-wide.

Reinforcing command and control

Meanwhile the small staff was stretched to the breaking point. They missed phone calls. They took weeks to do what they should have done in days. They were juggling a dozen plates in the air. Something was bound to come crashing down—and it did.

The old process structure did not die quietly. Mac’s direct reports were confused and uncertain what was happening. Like Jack, Macs directs, the VPs, were senior executives managing multi-million dollar departments. They could see the small-bedraggled staff managed by Cali being tossed on a sea of change. They sent word back to Mac that the CMM initiative was out of control.

Mac called Cali into his office. He said the CMM needed help he didn’t have time to give. He said that Martha, one of his direct reports, would be Cali’s new manager. Martha was the same person who had confronted Cali over the issue of “her” advisory group being converted into a TWG.

Cali was not pleased. She begged Mac not to move SEPG under Martha. But after consideration, Mac went ahead with his plan. SEPG did need help. Furthermore, Martha was Cali’s harshest critic. Without having her on board, the movement was doomed. And with budget season upon us, someone had to fight for resources and funding. Martha was a fighter.

As summer dawned, Martha set about getting more resources for CMM. She seized on Mac’s idea to have some people step out of their regular jobs for six months to do process improvement. Martha herself stepped out to spend full time on CMM. She selected six other volunteers and appointed each of them to lead a TWG to work on process improvements related to one of the Level 2 Key Process Areas.

SEPG now had a TWG for Requirements Management, Project Planning, Project Tracking and Oversight, Software Quality Assurance and Configuration Management. They also had a half dozen non-CMM TWGs in progress. Cali assigned one of the SEPG staff to work with each TWG to assure coordination. SEPG also started a new Leadership group, where the TWG leaders could meet weekly with chairpersons of the local SEPGs.

Martha also picked up the banner of the CMM in public forums. She and Mac spoke about CMM before the annual meeting of all Technology Services, nearly two thousand people. Imagine Cali’s surprise to walk into that meeting and to see all of Mac’s directs wearing shirts with CMM emblazoned beneath the corporate logo. Clearly the initiative was going to live. It had grown beyond Cali’s dreams and beyond her control. Cali’s eyes welled with tears. This change, this maturing of the capability to produce quality software on time within budget seemed inevitable.

While some of the VP’s still try to push the task of process improvement off onto the SEPG staff or the central SEPG, many of the Backyards are forging ahead and implementing many process improvements. In each backyard across the empire, the historic pattern is followed. Small creative teams are inventing ways to work better, smarter and with less risk. Small creative teams are making big changes in culture and practice.

Manage Software Process Change Requests

ID: P200009
Authorized By: David Bailis	Version Approved By:

Purpose and Description

This process describes how SEPG handles changes and additions to the Organization’s Standard Software Process (OSSP) and rolls them out across First Data Resources. SEPG thinks of process improvement as a continuous cycle involving the process users. A process change can be triggered by different factors: inputs from senior management, inputs from process users and business needs. Upon receiving a change request, SEPG analyzes the request and depending on the cost and the benefits, prioritizes work to be done. To make this process efficient, the requestor is required to consolidate his/her thoughts and document them via a Change Definition Document (CDD). The SEPG will facilitate the process change from its concept until it is implemented and rolled out across all the affected groups.

Entry Criteria

Process Change Definition Document (CDD) has been received by the SEPG mailbox.

Activity 1	Process SEPG mail
Input		Supplier
Email Messages		Requestor
Description		Responsible	Participate	Inform
A member of the SEPG staff reads mail daily that is received in the SEPG mailbox and takes appropriate actions based on the content. Message types and actions are as follows: 1. New Request or Charter: Proceed to Activity 2 2. Comments on a pending SPI request: Forward to the SPI requester for response. Cut & paste into a note on the SEPG database. Notes are printed on the Core Report and Council Report. Archive by SPI number. 3. Update to a pending SPI package: Note receipt on the SEPG database. Forward to TWG liaison, SEPG Core support group, Change Council and/or to all SEPG agents depending on the nature of the update and the phase of the review. Archive by SPI number. Save to SPI directory in WIP area of LAN. Print for Green file folder. 4. Inquiry: Forward to appropriate member of SEPG staff for response with copy to requester. 5. OSSP Problem: Reply that problems are handled via the LAN help desk 71600. Forward to LAN support. 6. TWG Information: Forward to assigned TWG consultant. Archive. 7. Calendar Information: Forward to the SEPG director’s secretary. 8. Membership Information: Forward to the SEPG director’s secretary. 9. Security Request: Forward to LAN Support or web support as appropriate.		Doc Liaison	TWG Liaison
Output		Customer
Email Archives, LAN folders		SEPG

Activity 2	Respond to new SPI request
Input		Supplier
CDD		Requestor
Description		Responsible	Participate	Inform
The requestor of a change completes the Change Definition Document (CDD) with as much information as possible and sends it to the SEPG mailbox to explain the change specifications and impact. The Doc Liaison enters the new request into the SEPG database and receives a tracking number. The tracking number is formatted as SPInnnnn, where ‘SPI’ refers to the Software Process Improvement and ‘n’ is a sequential number. Initial status is recorded as “Received.” The Doc Liaison creates a LAN folder on the WIP directory with the SPI number and places the CDD with associated documents into the folder. The Doc Liaison replies to the requester providing the SPI number, a date for the first review of the request, and the web location of the status report as well as the address of the WIP folder. A copy of this message is sent to the SEPG Core Support Group and to the TWG Liaison. IF the request is the result of a TWG, a copy of the message is also sent to the SEPG Consultant or Coach assigned to the TWG. Database status may be updated as “To SEPG Staff”. The Director’s secretary runs the database status report and posts it to the Resource Web weekly.		Doc Liaison	TWG Liaison	???

Output		Customer
SEPG Database Record; SPI number SEPG Database Status Log SPI folder in WIP directory Initial response email message		SEPG Requester and Interested Parties Core Support group Assigned SEPG staff

Activity 3	Develop SPI package.
Input		Supplier
SPI folder on LAN SEPG database record		Doc Liaison
Description		Responsible	Participate	Inform
The TWG Liaison or assigned SEPG staff consultant and members of the Core Support Group review the CDD and associated materials in the SPI folder of the WIP directory. If the CDD is incomplete, SEPG staff interview and guide the requester until missing information is made available. Updated information is sent to the SEPG mailbox. If Documentation, Training, Tools or other support appears to be needed, SEPG staff coordinates initial contacts as appropriate and records work requests as notes in the database. Database status is updated as “To Doc/Trng/Tools”. Completed or updated material is sent to the SEPG mailbox. If the request seems to be in the purview of an existing Technical Working Group (TWG), the liaison coordinates transfer of the request to the responsible organization and records disposition on the database as “To TWG”. When a TWG accepts the request, the TWG leader should notify the SEPG mailbox of planned disposition. The SPI record may be closed or may be left open with TWG sponsorship. If the request is a TWG charter, the TWG liaison coordinates assignment of an EPR number. The requester, not the SEPG, actually opens the EPR record. Charters follow the same path as OSSP change requests through approval by the Change Council.		TWG Liaison	Core Support Group	Requestor
Output		Customer
Database Notes Work requsts Core Support Organizations Updated components of SPI package		SEPG
Activity 4	Conduct Core Support Group Meeting
Input		Supplier
SPI Packages Database Requests in status “Received”, “To SEPG staff”, “To Doc/Trng/Tools”		Doc Liaison
Description		Responsible	Participate	Inform
The Doc Liaison sends a meeting notice and copy of the Core Report to members of the Group. The Core Report functions as a meeting agenda. Meetings usually occur every two weeks. The Core Support Group consists of representatives from Technical Documentation, Technical Education, Management Information Systems, The Technical Review Committee, Change Management, Implementation Management and SEPG staff. For each pending request, each representative is asked “Do you believe that the SPI package is complete and if approved by Change Council, can your organization support this change?” When representatives concur that the change is ready for Council, they set a recommended rollout date. The Core group may disapprove of the request, but once ready, the final disposition on any change is left to Change Council. Following the Core meeting, notes are placed on the database to update status and to record assignments. The notes are made available as minutes of the meeting. When Core is in consensus that a SPI package is complete, the Doc Liaison marks the request status “to Council” and invites the requester to represent the SPI at Change Council. The request drops off the Core report and appears on the Council report.		Doc Liaison	Process Core Group	Requestor
Output		Customer
Database Core Notes Report Database Council Report		Core Support Group

Activity 9	Conduct Full SEPG Review
Input		Supplier
Candidate SPI Package		Core Support Group
Description		Responsible	Participate	Inform
At least one week prior to Council Meeting, the Doc Liaison sends a Council Report with the location of SPI packages to the Process Change Council and to all SEPG agents with a notice of the upcoming Council meeting. SEPG agents are asked to review the SPI packages and distribute the information to engineers in their area. They are expected to relay area comments, concerns, or issues to the SEPG mailbox and to their Council Representative prior to the scheduled Council meeting. Comments and issues are forwarded to the SPI requester for response and the responses are shared with Council members. The day before Council the Doc Liaison updates Council members with new information on pending requests.		Doc Liaison	Process Change Council All SEPG Members Requestor	Stakeholder Representatives Requestor
Output		Customer
Message to All SEPG		All SEPG Agents Change Council

Activity 10	Conduct Process Change Council Meeting
Input		Supplier
Candidate SPI Package Feedback From SEPG Review		SEPG Agents
Description		Responsible	Participate	Inform
The Process Change Council consists of senior management representatives appointed to represent each major area of FDR within Technology Services, the Data Center and Client Services. The Doc Liaison sends out the meeting notice with a Council report as the meeting agenda. The Council report includes correspondence relevant to the request from the SEPG mailbox. The group normally meets every two weeks. Process Change Council approval involves a commitment by executive management to enforce and comply with processes approved by their named representative. Approval is registered with a voice vote of representatives who are asked to determine if FDR should adopt this SPI as part of the O.S.S.P. Council may respond with preliminary approval which sets aside the rollout date pending specified changes to the SPI package. Following the meeting, notes are placed on the database to update status and to close requests. Notes are also made available as a record of the meeting. The TWG liaison will notify requesters of the disposition of their request.		Doc Liaison TWG Liaison	Process Change Council	Stakeholder Representatives Requestor
Output		Customer
Change Council Decisions		Technology Services Senior Management

Activity 11	Roll Out Process Improvement
Input		Supplier
Approved SPI Package		Change Council Doc Liaison
Description		Responsible	Participate	Inform
For each request approved by Change Council, the Doc Liaison prepares a section of the rollout communication memo including the address of the referenced SPI package. In the case of preliminary approval, the SEPG staff oversees execution of the recommended changes before authorizing rollout. Rollout communications are distributed to all affected parties at least a week before the effective date of any process change. The training plan is coordinated with the rollout for affected parties. If necessary the rollout is staged so that training can be made available as necessary. . Just prior to the effective date of the change, Techl Doc updates the O.S.S.P. online and MIS implements tool, screen and report changes.		Doc Liaison	Practitioners TWG Members SEPG Consultants	Impacted FDR Organizations
Output		Customer
Priority Communications Web Page Updates Approved SPI Packages		All Technology Services Related Organizations

MS Word

MS Powerpoint

1. Number of change requests received.

2. Number of change requests approved.

3. Number of change requests implemented.

4. Turn around time for a change request.

Doc No.	Version	Approved By	Approval Date	Author	Summary
P200009	1.00a		MM/DD/YYYY	Michael S Brown	Re-Format Document
P20009	1.00b			Kay A. Wise	Pre-publication Edit

Section 1 Exploring the Project’s Environment

Ad hoc Culture: KittyKitty

Process culture: Indemnity Insurance

Unwritten rules can be even more important than the written ones

Learn the Unwritten Rules

David Easton

Quincy Wright

David V.J. Bell

Quick Fast Messenger Company

“But, I hate politics.”

Discussion ON Project Initiation

Power as Capability

Discussion Example:

Project Power affects Cash Flow

Project Power affects Information Flow

Discussing Power

Team Building – the four stages

Factors that affect Team Building

Section 2 Forming a Team

The People-parts puzzle

What talents, skills and personalities?

Analyze requirements

Negotiate the Staffing Management Plan

training to upgrade technical skills

Training to improve human relations skills

Training to speed up the team building process

Section 3 Navigate the Storming Stage

What do we mean by Storming?

The Satir Communication Model

The Satir Communication Model

The first step: Intake

The Second Step: meaning

The third step: Significance

The fourth step: acceptance

The fifth step: response

Discussion on The Satir Communication Model

The Satir Concept of Congruence

Placating

Blaming

Section 4 Reinforce Good Norming Behavior

The Norming Process

Section 5 Steer a High Performing Team