I feel stupid. Really stupid! How many times will it take before I learn the lesson that "90% of the population are honorary show-me Missourians?" as Tom Peters says in This I Believe TIB #20: He who makes the Quickest & Coolest Prototypes Reigns! I thought I learned that lesson...a long time ago. But my recent efforts to introduce design professionals (architects and engineers) to a different way of doing projects was met with great resistance.

Many people in the architecture and construction industry are exploring their discontent with the results of their projects. Greg Howell and I have been working quite successfully with project teams and companies introducing a different way to deliver projects. We decided that it was time to work intensively with a group of architects and engineers to explore two things as learning and innovation in action:

1. How much value can be created from adopting lean project practices in the A&E work settings?
2. What will it take to be successful in adopting a different approach in those settings?

We've come up with a series of six workshops and project-based actions for introducing new practices and exploring results. While we have confidence that our background in doing projects in a variety of settings will allow us to succeed with A&E teams, our audience didn't grant us their confidence. Rather, the overwhelming response was, "Show us (me) what this will do for us (me)."

The ironic aspect of the response is the set of workshops and project-setting changes are designed to produce exactly the evidence that people are looking for. And even more ironic was our opening the first of six workshops without addressing the 90% of those concerns in the room.

We're in a Catch-22. Until we produce examples and data we struggle getting people to try a different approach. Yet, we need people to try so we can produce the examples and data. The exception are those A&E project teams that are in trouble on their projects. These people listen to us, take direction from us, and begin to adopt new practices. However, the vast majority of A&E firms don't recognize that they have trouble doing their projects. From where they sit it's just fine.

We started out working with nine A&E firms (teams). I expect there are two or three teams that won't continue with the series, maybe more. But I thank each of them for helping me to learn the lesson (again). As Tom Peters says, "(It's time to) Get Concrete! Fast!" I'm setting out to do just that for workshop #2. I'll let you know how it goes.

By the way, I can thank Tom Peters again for rocking my world. It has been my great fortune stumbling upon his latest booklet Project04: Snapshots of Excellence in Unstable Times.

posted by Hal at 8:02 PM | link  |   |   | Google It!  | Email This  |

Can anyone upstage Tom Peters' Kaizen Is...Very Dangerous Stuff? How about David Drickhamer? David has a different view on kaizen, Continuous Improvement -- Crash, But Don't Burn, appearing in Industry Week.

People often cringe when I say, "Fail early and often." We work so hard to avoid failure, to encourage it seems counter to accepted wisdom. When I worked at The Neenan Company we called attention to our errors by banging on a Chinese gong in the main lobby of the building. Visitors thought we were crazy. Our subcontractors knew it to be true!

The road to process excellence and market success -- and wisdom -- is paved with failure.

So along comes David Drickhamer telling us to talk about our company and project failures. This is a guy who says if we don't speak about the failures we can't become great.

"What doesn't work -- the major and minor failures -- becomes the tacit knowledge and experience that builds up within individuals and organizations as they keep trying new things. Learning from past missteps, the next time they face a similar bottleneck, or a customer makes a similar request, these people and organizations are able to skip some of the trial and error to arrive at a solution faster."

I've learned that only the mature and wisest of managers and companies take advantage of failure. Politics, petty ambitions, and the fear of not looking good are the main enemies of an organization intent on learning, innovating, and staying competitive. David describes the usual situation:

"(W)hen the death knell begins to toll for really big projects, everybody who possibly can flees, separating themselves mentally and physically from the doomed venture."

Hey, Tom Peters. Kaizen is not dangerous. Danger is an organization that doesn't systematically and continuously learn from its mistakes.

posted by Hal at 3:33 PM | link  |   |   | Google It!  | Email This  |

I have the pleasure of attending many project meetings. Some are well-run; others seem to just go through the motions. I was in a meeting this morning with an architectural team. The team was going through the promises they made to remove constraints for the construction members of their team. The project architect took the team from one open commitment to the next checking on how team members were doing fulfilling their promsies. The team got bogged down just once. It only took Peter Drucker's question to get them focussed again. Here it is:

The Project Reformer's e-Tip of the Week

037: Ask a Great Question

The editors at Business 2.0 interviewed Peter Drucker for the year-end issue "How to Succeed in 2005." They asked, "What is it that executives never seem to learn?" Mr. Drucker answered that managers ask the same questions everyone else asks. He says you need the attitude to not start with the question, "What do I want to do?" but with the question, "What needs to be done?" Mr. Drucker's second question places focus on the interests of the company or project and on execution. Don't just try asking the question. Make it a habit. Write the question "What needs to be done?" across the top of your notebook. Post it under the clock on the wall where you have your project meetings. Add it to your email signature. Make a sport out of it; see how many times in the course of your project meetings you can ask and answer, "What needs to be done?" Finish each conversation with someone making a reliable promise to do what needs to be done. The Project Leaders' Studio™

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

What needs to be done at this minute? Get to it!

posted by Hal at 11:42 AM | link  |   |   | Google It!  | Email This  |

Excellence has become transient...the Pursuit of Perfection gets in the way of ferreting out the Next Big Thing.

Tom Peters is doing what Tom Peters does best -- promoting big ideas and himself along the way. Don't get me wrong; I'm a very big Tom Peters fan. His in your face, not-to-be-ignored style grabs me each time I encounter his writing. In August Tom published a manifesto on the site Change This! Tom's manifesto is titled This I Believe (TIB). I'll just say that Tom's TIBs are provocative. This one caught my attention:

#12. Kaizen (Continuous Improvement) Is...Very Dangerous Stuff
Caught with our pants down by vigorous Japanese competitors, we Americans quickly copied their essential competitive ideas, such as Total Quality Management and Kaizen. Fair enough! Brilliant, in fact! Yet these important notions are in part cornerstones of an earlier, industrial age...when winning products stayed on the shelves in showroom floors for years, even decades. Now excellence has become transient (few teams win back-to-back championships in sports, the competition and rate of improvement have become so intense); and the fact is that the Pursuit of Perfection (at today's "sport") gets in the way of ferreting out the Next Big Thing. My de facto mentors in all this are media guru Marshall McLuhan ("If it works, it's obsolete") and IT guru Nicholas Negroponte ("Incrementalism is innovation's worst enemy").

Can this be? Can Tom be calling our baby ugly? You bet he is. And I see why. Kaizen is one part of a whole system that Toyota and others use to stay competitive. But it is just one part. When Toyota decided it needed a more hip car than a Corolla it didn't just improve the Corolla in one place and another. Toyota created an all new car -- Matrix -- and did so in record time, reportedly about one year from conception to market. That is one heck of a project. Competitors take three times as long to launch a new car (even when based on an existing car). But Toyota didn't stop there. They added three performance levels to the car and offered the same performance levels on the Corolla. Their market share and profitability show for it. Toyota has moved in front of Ford to be the number 2 auto manufacturer worldwide and they intend to knock on GM's door.

You can get Tom Peters' TIBs in his manifesto. You can also get the same TIBs in book form along with his thoughts on leadership, excellence, and my favorite -- Pity the Poor Brown: Tom Peters Challenges Jim Collins, for Better of for Worse, currently only available in the book. The book is titled Project04: Snapshots of Excellence in Unstable Times. You will also find another Tom Peters' manifesto at Change This!. It's titled Off-Shoring. It's as provocative as TIB.

By the way, Change This! is a project started by Seth Godin of Purple Cow and Free Prize Inside fame. If you act fast you can get Seth's very popular The Bootstrapper's Bible for free. It's available at Change This! 'til December 1, 2004.

posted by Hal at 10:51 AM | link  |   |   | Google It!  | Email This  |

John Musser, Columbia University, recently told me about his project management website. The site is titled Software Project Management, but it's so much more.

The site is all the course work, class notes, recommended texts, etc. for John's class on Software Project Management. He also includes references to other useful materials. After you bookmark this site, take some time to explore what John has catalogued. And if you think he's missed something, then drop him a note with your suggestion.

posted by Hal at 10:44 PM | link  |   |   | Google It!  | Email This  |

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