I think I'll write a book. I've been looking over the best-sellers. The big hits have one thing in common. Their titles all start with a number. The author follows that number with a few words to convey that he or she has the secret. For just $19.95 you can have the secret too! I've picked 10 of the most popular number-titles to illustrate the extent of the wisdom packed inside.

Life is never so simple that success can be described by a single-digit list

• 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, by Steven Covey
3. Put first things first
7. Sharpening the saw


• 10 Things that Keep CEOs Awake, by Elizabeth Coffey
2. Developing bifocal vision
10. Balancing your act


• 11 Keys to Leadership, by Dayle M. Smith
3. Develop a dynamic belief system
10. Nurture effective channels of information


• 12 Simple Secrets of Happiness, by Glenn Van Ekeren
7. Forgiveness: Keeping bridges in good repair
12. Gratitude: Show it!


• 17 Essential Qualities of a Team Player, by John C. Maxwell
8. Enlarging: adding value to teammates in invaluable
15. Selfless: there is no "I" in team


• 17 Indisputable Laws of Teamwork, by John C. Maxwell
2. Big Picture: The goal is more important than the role
14. Communication: Interaction fuels action


• 21 Indispensable Qualities of a Leader, by John C. Maxwell
1. Character: Be a piece of the rock
19. Servanthood


• 21 Most Powerful Minutes in a Leader's Day, by John C. Maxwell
4. Navigation: Anyone can steer the ship, but it takes a leader to chart the course.
18. Sacrifice: A leader must give up to go up


• 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, by Al and Laura Ries
11. Fellowship: A brand should welcome other brands
21. Mortality: No brand will live forever. Euthanasia is often the best solution.


• 50 Things that Really Matter (no author)
6. Bubble baths
42. A good cup of coffee

I want to start my book with a number others haven't taken. I'm thinking 37. There are many reasons to love 37: It's prime. It's a two-digit number; life is never so simple that success can be described by a single-digit list. The digits add to ten. Next, I'll need to pick a grabbing qualifier.

The "I"s have it in the above titles. I've selected INARGUABLE. It might help to keep the hecklers away. Now for the rest of the title. While I know something about leadership, there's just way too many leadership books available today -- 93,851 titles on Amazon earlier this month. The subject I know the most about is projects. But I'm looking for a new audience. I've narrowed it down to vacations -- 67,695 Amazon results, or to player pianos -- just 1,523 Amazon results. I like to take vacations so I'm probably as qualified to write on that subject as any of the above authors. I don't own a player piano, but I'd like to one day. And the market for books is not crowded. I've made up my mind. My book will be titled The 37 Inarguable Uses for Player Pianos. It's got best-seller written all over it.

In case you're wondering, I don't own all the above books. I subscribe to Business Books Summaries. Each week I get a new book summary in PDF format by email. Each summary is 7 - 12 pages long -- just the right length for all that numerical wisdom.

posted by Hal at 12:28 PM | link  |   |   | Google It!  | Email This  |

  Plumber dies in 3 foot deep trench.

      Landscaper dies when tailgate collapses.

          Painter dies when moving ladder.

These are the headlines of the last few weeks. These people were not doing something reckless -- just the opposite. However, each one was taking safety for granted.

Construction work is inherently dangerous. We can never take our safety for granted. Three people die everyday on construction worksites. Sure, there are the freak accidents. There are also those situations where the jobsite has tipped to dangerous. Heed this warning:

Beware of small hazards.

Read Safety Everyday's construction safety in the news sideblog.

posted by Hal at 10:47 PM | link  |   |   | Google It!  | Email This  |

There are plenty of ways breakdowns occur on projects. We don't need to add to them. One common problem is taking a short-cut to obligate others to take action rather than to secure reliable promises and freely given commitment.

The Project Reformer's e-Tip of the Week

032: Don't Mistake Obligation for Commitment

In this time of hyper-connectivity and simultaneous physical seperateness we see some extremely bad habits that create breakdowns, frustrations, and waste on our projects. One significant culprit is the emailed meeting request. We all know how it works, someone sends out a meeting request often at the last minute expecting that everyone that receives the request will show up at the meeting. With online calendars the meeting organizer can see that times are "free" and presumes that there will be no reason for saying no. Depending on the stature or rank of the meeting organizer people might understand that the only response is to accept the request or to just show up. There are two mistakes in this scenario. First, one person can not make a promise for another person. The most you can do is to promise to get a promise-yes or a promise-no. The other mistake is in assuming that an "opening" on a calendar grants you authority to commit that time. This is not a matter of the technology. Technology only allows us to do what we will do anyway. Projects are too often commitment-free zones. Take responsibility for activating a network of commitment rather than taking the seeming short-cut to obligate people. Nothing beats a group of people who are committed to complete tasks to the satisfaction of others on their team. The Project Leaders' Studio™

©2004 Hal Macomber | weblog.halmacomber.com | e-Tip Archive | PDF | Submit Tip

This week's e-Tip comes to us at the suggestion of reader Linda Raymond of Lockheed Martin. By now Linda is enjoying The Blind Men and the Elephant, Mastering Project Work, by David Schmaltz as a gift for proposing an e-Tip that I published. There are more books as gifts where that one came from. I'm giving UNSTUCK, by Yamashita and Spataro as gifts for the next three e-Tips that I publish. Get yours!

posted by Hal at 10:02 PM | link  |   |   | Google It!  | Email This  |

I've been living in the dissonance of the worlds of project management and enlightened company management. You only need to read a story here and there in Fast Company or Business 2.0 to see that we are setting out to manage our companies in a different way than we attempt to manage our AEC projects. That dissonance led Greg Howell and me in collaboration with Lauri Koskela and John Draper to write the paper Leadership and Project Management: Time for a Change from Fayol to Flores. Greg presented the paper last week to the 12th Annual Conference of the International Group for Lean Construction, in Copenhagen, Denmark. I got to stay home to tend to client work. I'll let Greg comment to this posting to share how the paper was received.

We succeed on projects by enabling project performers to adjust to the uncertainties of the world with benefit of full context of the planning on the project.

Our paper began with a discussion list thread gone bad in March 2003. In exasperation, I wrote an email and I posted it to the weblog, Lean Project Delivery Rejects Cartesian Thinking. Greg and I had just finished our paper on linguistic action for IGLC-11. I opened by saying bad management and leadership are to blame for the poor performance of our projects. I finished with a hunch on where we need to look for a new model.

"Our deterministic reductionist approach to projects is the limiting condition. New theory must embrace both the uncertainty that is the project milieu and the unpredictable, serendipitous, richness of the human condition when interacting one with the other."

Now fast-forward 16 months. Our basic premise in the Fayol to Flores paper is what we know as good principle and practice of management has been made obsolete by the very nature of project work. Project performers' tasks are dependent on the completion of other tasks. The unreliability of completion leads to all sorts of waste and consequent coping behaviors. The usual practices of establishing firm plans and controlling project performers' actions to those plans exacerbates the situation. Holding firm in a world that is always changing just takes you further off course. Instead, we succeed on projects by enabling project performers to adjust to the uncertainties of the world with benefit of the full context of the planning on the project. The only thing missing is theory to support a move from one set of behaviors to another.

We credit Henri Fayol, a French mining engineer, with codifying a theory of management that was consistent with the emerging mass production and scientific management of the turn of last century.

Fayol's Five Management Functions

1. To forecast and plan the future and to prepare plans of action
2. To organize the structure, people, and material
3. To command activity
4. To coordinate, unify, and harmonize effort
5. To control to assure policies and plans were followed

Fayol's 14 Management Principles

1. Specialization - division of labor
2. Authority with responsibility
3. Discipline
4. Unity of command
5. Unity of direction
6. Subordination of individual interests
7. Remuneration
8. Centralization
9. Chain / Line of authority
10. Order
11. Equity
12. Lifetime jobs (for good workers)
13. Initiative
14. Esprit de corps

I've been having some fun speaking about project management and leadership theory. I ask an audience what they think is good theory and practice. After they rattle off a few points I show them Fayol's five management functions and 14 principles. People usually agree that Fayol got it right. Then I share Fernando Flores' view of the world. People agree with that too!

Flores sees the world differently. And the world has changed in the more than 70 years that elapsed. In Fayol's time labor was the largest part of the product. The usual laborer was uneducated. The reverse is true today, especially in large AEC projects. Flores put it succinctly,

"Management is that process of openness, listening, and eliciting commitments, which includes concern for the articulation and activation of the network of commitments, primarily produced through promises and requests, allowing for the autonomy of the productive unit." [Flores, 1982]

Can we have it both ways? We think not. We think that one significant contributor to the malaise of project performance is the management and more especially the leadership that is manifest. Our evidence is anecdotal. Nevertheless, we now have an explanation for why some companies and teams succeed taking a lean approach and why others don't.

Greg and I are optimists. We think we will come to understand our situation with continued inquiry, dialogue, and collaboration. Please contribute to our education and the reform of project management by reading and commenting on the paper.

posted by Hal at 4:59 PM | link  |   |   | Google It!  | Email This  |

The August 8, 2004, Sunday Edition of the New York Times ran a story Building a Bad Reputation: Sloppy American Construction, Julie V. Iovine. The story appeared in the Arts and Design section. [You'll need to move fast to read the article. The NYT only makes their stories available for about 1 week. If you haven't registered with the site, then you'll have to do that before viewing.]

This story will make its way around the AEC and real estate industries. Ms. Iovine is saying publicly what many architects have been saying about contractors and the subcontractor workforce for years.

"Got a gaping one-inch space between frame and window? Just fill it in with silicone and call it a day. Not perfectly flush or plumb? Who cares!"

But she doesn't stop there. She's also saying what contractors have been saying about architects.

"(T)he architect's reputation for meticulous standards was so daunting that some 50 contractors had refused to bid on the job."

Is our industry broken? Do we have a bad reputation among foreign designers? While it may be an exception, some people in the industry are up for the challenge.

"At first there was this big fear that the kind of quality possible in Japan was impossible here. Some of us took that as a challenge to achieve the equivalent level of craftsmanship."

There is something foreign designers value about the American way.

"The team spirit in the U.S. is exceptional. Once they are in front of a challenge, they rise to it. It was a pure American effort."

I suspect poor quality persists due to the way we manage.

Here's what I make of the situation. In the U.S.A. we do not have a value for and practice of learning and innovating on the jobsite. Too often we buy out the job by awarding pieces to subcontractors on a lowest price basis. Those subcontractors hire other specialist subcontractors each offering their lowest price. We do this in an attempt to optimize the cost of the job. Instead, we get sub-optimization of systems and the project as a whole. Further, we bring strangers together and make no effort to build relationships. Why bother? Labor is labor? We can replace one person with another without negative consequences to the job. And that's where we are wrong.

We can make concrete that has "the airless density of a flourless chocolate cake." We can form that concrete so the finish can be polished. And we even can design, fabricate, and install curtain wall systems to tight tolerances. But we can't do any of that reliably without fundamentally changing what we value from our construction activities. And that goes for the architects too. They must bring construction folk into the earliest stages of design if they want a design that is constructable to their intentions.

I see the lean approach transforming the AEC industry.

I suspect poor quality persists due to the way we manage. The story of Toyota's entry to the U.S.A. is instructive. Toyota took GM's worst plant in Freemont, CA, where there were reported to be more worker grievances than in the rest of GM combined. That plant is also where they had low quality and high recalls. Giving up, GM closed the plant. Toyota came in and hired back a large group of the workforce but not the management. Instead, Toyota infused the workforce with the Toyota DNA. Then together management and workers designed the plant operations. The Corollas that come off that line are equally good as those from Japan.

Ms. Iovine interviewed Dana Buntrock, author of "Japanese Architecture as a Collaborative Process". Ms. Buntrock, just up the road from Toyota, said quality is tied to wealth. But she's changing her mind.

"Now I am beginning to wonder if well-built architecture occurs only at a very fragile economic moment. You need not only affluence, but a group of people who are well paid enough to remain in the crafts and building trades even though they are intelligent, and you need the overall size of an architectural project to remain relatively small."

I'm more optimistic than Ms. Buntrock. Just as the lean approach has made Toyota a powerhouse and competitors their imitators, I see the lean approach transforming the AEC industry. And it is well on its way in northern California, just a few miles from Toyota's Freemont facility. Read the August 7, 2004 story appearing in the Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal Sutter Health Tells It's Builders, "Make It Lean".

posted by Hal at 4:40 PM | link  |   |   | Google It!  | Email This  |

The AEC world can learn from those people doing information technology projects. I hear people in IT say, "Construction is straight forward; everything is visible and predictable." That shows how little they know about construction! But hidden in that statement is the recognition that IT projects must deal with high levels of uncertainty. While the IT world inherited the practices of project management from the AEC world, they have adapted those practices to accommodate some of the same challenges prevalent in AEC projects.

Planning is practice for the main event. Let's practice with the people who will perform.

All but the trivial construction projects are uncertain. The nature of engineer-to-order one-off products nearly guarantees that a group of strangers will have one heck of a challenge designing and building. Bill Heldman, Director of Operations for the City and County of Denver Office of Information Technology, writes in Microsoft Certified Professional Magazine That First Step Is Tricky. The article is worth a read, particularly if you are not an IT professional. You'll see something about how another large group of project folk see the world. Bill describes approaches for dealing with poorly articulated project requests, something that is oh-so familiar in the AEC world.

Bill's basic message is to set your project up for success by taking the time to define outcomes, time tables, budgets, team members, and project roles. While he misses at least one important element -- practices for planning -- Bill's emphasis on getting the project started well is on the mark. Projects that start well are more likely to finish well.

I have one beef with Bill. He recommends that a project manager

"...whip up a project plan for almost any IT undertaking of any size".

It's exactly that way of working that gets us into trouble in the AEC world. Project planning is effective when we include the team of performers. When we engage the performers in an on-going planning process we not only expand the knowledge, talents, and judgement available, but more importantly we prepare the performers to operate in the uncertain future. Planning is practice for the main event. Let's practice with the people who will perform. Planning is a recurring conversation that produces a coherence of the promises of the performers with the overall promise of the project. While the first step of starting well might be tricky, don't miss the second step of collaboratively planning.

posted by Hal at 10:45 AM | link  |   |   | Google It!  | Email This  |

Reference Papers

Project Resources

Books

Bookmark These Weblogs

Yahoo! Groups

RecipRoll