Project Information - Where to put it and how to use it?

I've had cause to think about the issues of managing projects without a LAN. Indeed managing any kind of business activity without a LAN requires a particular mindset.

If you think about project information it falls into a number of clear categories:

• Control material - things like status reports, actions, issues etc. This stuff is both structured and requires formal control. In a LAN-free environment it lives in some kind of web-based project control tool. This kind of information is generally well understood and well catered for by projects and project managers;
• Formal documentation - material such as requirements documents, reports, project plans. This material belongs in a document management tools - web-based. The tool should allow check-in, check-out with version management and fine grained access control. Again, this material is well catered for and well understood by project managers;
• Semi-structured project information. This is the perhaps the most troublesome type of information. How often have you had a client or someone else saying "where do I find last week's status report?". You don't want them wandering around in the document management system and you don't want to have to continually email documents around. Similarly the endless questions about "what's happened about x this week?" can be more effectively answered by having that information in a central spot. It's this last set of information that is both the most troublesome for projects whilst being the least thought of in terms of management.

Clients, project owners, management and client team members are often very interested in progress, often in a qualitative fashion. It takes a lot of time to keep all the stakeholders up to date, particularly those with a voracious appetite for information.

Enter the wiki and blog. This is the right place to manage this sort of information. A really simple initial structure gets you off the ground. The master pager of the wiki has links to these pages:

• Who's who? Many projects have a large pool of people that they deal with. Induction for new project members can be incredibly slow and time consuming because of the large number of people that they need to be aware of. Creating a Who's Who page and then encouraging all team members to keep it up to date can be a big help here. This is particularly important with the layer of people who are outside the team but very important to the project;
• Status. This is the place for final copies of the weekly or monthly status reports. Once they are finalised a copy can be placed on this page to give interested parties access without needing to provide access to the DMS;
• Documents. Every project creates "landmark" documents, whether it's a stage report, a Func Spec or a set of FAQs. These could be placed in a "public" section of the DMS. The reality is it's probably easier to put them on the wiki page. This forestalls the endless questions from project members like "can you send me a copy of...?".
• Blog. Perhaps the least thought of capability is a blog. This is where project members can be encouraged to publish short snippets about small project achievements, activities for the day and planned future activities. It's a way of letting other project members and stakeholders know what you are up to.

Sitting alongside those pages you need some way of letting others know what has changed on the wiki or blog: either email or RSS feeds work well. Expecting interested parties to visit and check for updates is not very useful, you need to tell them what's happening.

Similarly the capacity to email items of interest into the wiki and to have attachments appear is also important. It creates an additional means of interacting with the system.

So here's what I'd like to know: Do you use wikis and blogs in projects? Do you find them useful? What specific tools do you use?

I've been using the Snow Leopard Server Wiki Server 2, I like it, it works well and it's very simple to use.

How big is too big?

I spent a long time in the car yesterday. It was pretty boring, but at least there's time to think. One of the things I ended up thinking about was the relationship between the "size" of a country or state and the effectiveness of its government. By "size" I mean the number of people and the complexity of services provided. I think there's an inverse relationship between size and ability to deliver.

In Australia, very few direct government services are provided by the Commonwealth. Kevin Rudd wants to change that with regard to the hospitals, because he has a view that he can do it better than the states. Two things concern me about that. Firstly I think that's the naive view of someone who's never had to do it - deliver direct health services; secondly the Rudd government has, disappointingly, shown itself to be completely unable to deliver anything except mindless blather. I don't expect that to change if they get their hands on the hospitals. And just whilst we are digressing: it seems (from what little we have been told) that one of the key planks of the "Rudd Hospital Plan" is to give more power to, inter alia, the doctors. Wrong move! Assuming that doctors know how to improve or run the health system is just plain wrong and confused thinking. It confuses the delivery of clinical services with the management of a highly complex and resource hungry system. I have great respect for the ability of doctors to deliver clinical services. That does not mean that they have the ability to manage a complex beast like the health system. Demonstrably they are part of the problem and their role in the solution needs to be carefully managed.

But back to the subject in hand. The most populous state in Australia is NSW (around 7 million +) followed by Victoria (5.5 million +). NSW seems to be chronically unable to deliver services and chronically unable to make the money stretch. Hospitals in NSW, in particular, are creaking and groaning at the seams. If you also think about places like the US and India it appears that they have similar problems.

Now I know that this is painting with a very broad brush, but give me some license here! This is an embryonic thought. Let's just assume that my hunch is right - that at some point government becomes too big and hard and we start to fail to deliver. I came to thinking that this might be because of a pair of linked issues:

• Is our system of government designed to cope with the scale issues that emerge as the scale grows? Systems theory shows us that systems develop emergent issues as they grow and change - issues that were not previously apparent but which emerge due to some change in system scale or structure;
• Are the humans who manage the system reaching the limit of their capacity to manage the complexity and the issues that arise? It's an interesting point to ponder. Management is a process of simplification and distillation. We make the complex understandable and manageable. I wonder if there is a limit to our capacity as humans to do that and whether we see that arising in government performance.

If this is an emergent issue of government systems, at what size do these issues emerge? Is it between the size of Victoria and the size of NSW?

PhD students and other researchers can take this idea and run with it - with attribution - just tell me what you find out -;) I'm interested!

Reclaiming the Enterprise - 2 - The Micro Manager

These women and men are an illness that has infected our organisations. They are responsible for much of the bullying and distress that happens in our organisations and they have a negative impact on performance. So that we are on the same page, let's paint a picture of the micro manager:

Jane is a GM responsible for the delivery of complex technical services to customers. She has about 8 direct reports and they, between them have about 400 staff in total. Jane insists that NO decision of any importance is made unless she is present (in person or by phone/video) in the meeting where the decision is made. Jane attends around 40 meetings a week. Her day and that of her direct reports starts at 7:30am and often goes late into the night. Jane never seems to have enough time for all the meetings that she has to attend and often decisions are delayed for weeks whilst people try and find a slot in her diary.

Often her DRs make decisions without her - albeit small decisions. It almost inevitably ends in tears. Jane will hear about it and will overturn the decision. Unless she has personally discussed something she will block it in discussions with other GMs and with the CEO.

Jane is very prone to ranting and raving at people - subordinates cop it most but she will also dish it up to other GMs. There is no stopping her and she is vindictive and erratic. Jane's behaviour becomes worse if she senses any risk in a decision. At that point she becomes paranoid and obstructive. The situation has got so bad that Jane will deny that she has heard of a proposal or been part of a decision, even though 6 or 7 senior people may have been with her in the room when she made the decision. The truth is that she works such long hours and attends so many meetings that she simply can't remember what she has discussed and what has been decided. Such situations however make Jane even more aggressive.

Jane's anxiety runs out of control - all of the time. She never feels able to stay on top of "her job"; she never feels able to run fast enough. Jane's DRs are almost all recruited by her, and a sorry bunch they are. Jane only recruits people who will do what she tells them and who she feels won't challenge or threaten her.

Everyone in the company acknowledges that she is a control freak. The CEO loves her because she is just like him: obsessed with detail and never able to exert enough control. He knows that things are safe with Jane, she's just so obsessive that nothing could get past her.

Unfortunately there is not a shred of exaggeration in what I've written about "Jane". My experience is that "Jane" is less obsessive, less controlling, less micro-managing than a very large proportion of what passes for "managers" in Australia.

Let's be clear about a few things:

• People like Jane are NOT managers;
• People like Jane are bad for businesses, bad for themselves, and bad for employees;
• Jane is driven by only one thing: her inability to manage her own anxiety;

Good managers do many things differently to Jane.

• They employ top quality people - they see the quality of their team as a sign of achievement;
• They empower those people to make decisions and to take action;
• They support and mentor their team, they provide them with challenges and support them if they stumble;
• They deal with performance issues in private and in a way that leads to growth and change rather than belittlement and negativity;
• The buck always stops with them for the performance of their team;
• Good manager have their anxiety utterly under control. They know what anxiety is and they have well developed strategies for managing it;
• Good managers are at peace with themselves and their egos. Yes they have egos but they are settled and quietly confident of their abilities. They don't need to show off to anyone;
• Good managers are entirely capable of leading from the front but they also know how to effectively lead by influencing and supporting others to perform. They don't need the limelight.

If you are a manager where do you fit? If you fit in the first group then you only have two ethical choices: either begin immediately to do serious work to ensure that you move from being like Jane to being like the Good Managers; or find another job that doesn't involve managing people and do that NOW.

Most likely however you are uncertain where you lie. The reason for that is that most micro managers also lack a key quality that good managers have: they have no capacity for self reflection and therefore they have no capacity to understand that they are in fact a dud and no capacity to do anything about it.

The saddest part is that when a managerial hierarchy in a company are all like Jane, then they all admire each other and none of them have any capacity to reflect on the inappropriateness of their behaviour.

Welcome to much of corporate Australia.