Midwest IT Survival

I think it is safe to say that anytime any company wants to get something new accomplished they “kick off” this thing called a “project”.  Now if you have spent any time in IT you have probably had a role on one of these so called projects.  You know when you are on a good project:

• Everyone knows what the end goal is.
• Everyone knows each others roles.
• Everyone has a sense that all participants are accountable for their tasks.
• Things are getting done.
• Everyone feels a sense of progress.
• Everyone feels a sense of team.

You also know when you are on a bad project:

• Everyone is seemingly bumping into each other.
• No one can really articulate the goal of the project
• No one knows what the end state is supposed to look like.
• Time is going by with meetings and minutes and status reports but no real tangible work is getting done.

This series of articles will cover different aspects on how to survive as an engineer that has a role to play on an IT project.

In the previous article, the concept of a “pre-task” was introducing a gap in the project plan and introducing gaps into the plan causes panic.  Thus, how can you redirect this panic to work for you?  That is were the ability to introduce a gap or a “pre-task” from the example in the previous article that redirects the panic on to another individual or entity while at the same time, implying the gap should have been already accounted for because everyone knows it is a required tasks works.  Breaking down the previous example:

How does a pre-task help me?

“…I can’t finish until the Architect signs off on my design document” introduces a gap in the plan that doesn’t involve or imply more work on your part.  Rather, it brings in a task that is a barrier for you to complete your task.  Thus, and here is the selfish benefit, this technique allows you to work on your task without someone hovering asking every five minutes … “is it done yet?  How about now, is it done yet?” as project managers tend to do.

“All designs must have Architect sign-off” is the follow-up sentence implying that it is the project manager’s job to know this standard operating procedure or process.  Thus, it isn’t your job and thus you can take no blame for not having this step in the plan from the beginning.

In summary, whether you find yourself with too many chiefs or too many indians, using the tools above should help you succeed in your role on a project.  Now if you have read this far and are thinking to yourself, “geez, this sure sounds like a lot of work above and beyond doing real engineering work.” my response is yes, it is.  And yes, none of it is seemingly appealing to the engineer that just wants to do engineering work.  But, in my experience, I have seen, time and time again, the good natured engineer get himself, his boss and his team in hot water because all the chiefs were pointing the finger of blame squarely on the good natured engineer that became the almighty reason for the project delay.  The finger is pointed regardless of all the prior missteps that get conveniently forgotten in these scenarios or have already been covered up.  To better position yourself not to get caught up in these nontechnical exercises with chiefs, it pays dividends to invest some time understanding what the formal and informal processes are in relation to your project role and get into the practice of always having a pre-task in your back pocket to use when chiefs are starting to dig into the project tasks.

Key points from this series of articles:

• Know your role on the project and ensure your boss is in agreement.
• Always have your boss in 110% support of your performing tasks/functions outside of your traditional role
• Have a working knowledge of the official project and engineer processes leveraged by your company
• Always have a pre-task ready to articulate when ever possible to create that external dependency on any tasks you are performing

I think it is safe to say that anytime any company wants to get something new accomplished they “kick off” this thing called a “project”.  Now if you have spent any time in IT you have probably had a role on one of these so called projects.  You know when you are on a good project:

• Everyone knows what the end goal is.
• Everyone knows each others roles.
• Everyone has a sense that all participants are accountable for their tasks.
• Things are getting done.
• Everyone feels a sense of progress.
• Everyone feels a sense of team.

You also know when you are on a bad project:

• Everyone is seemingly bumping into each other.
• No one can really articulate the goal of the project
• No one knows what the end state is supposed to look like.
• Time is going by with meetings and minutes and status reports but no real tangible work is getting done.

This series of articles will cover different aspects on how to survive as an engineer that has a role to play on an IT project.

In the previous article two concepts were introduced to help you survive.  Now it is time for the most powerful concept, the “pre-task”.  As much as possible at all times, create the perception that you are waiting on something from someone else in the organization.  Make sure in every situation possible that the project manager or development lead or whoever is managing the checklist of project tasks believes someone else needs to complete their task before you can complete your task.

Not having a “pre-task”:

Sally the Project Manager: “So Bob, according to my plan, you should be working on that widget … are you done yet?”

Bob: “Um, yah, I’m working on it but I told everyone it was going to take me five days and this is day two.”

Sally the Project Manager: “Not according to my plan … it says you build the widget and then we start testing.  You are holding up testing.  I’m going to have to escalate!”  And rushes out of your cube before you can formulate a response.

Having a “pre-task” at the ready:

Sally the Project Manager: “So Bob, according to my plan, you should be working on that widget … are you done yet?”

Bob: “Um, yah, I’m working on it but I can’t finish until the Architect signs off on my design document.  All designs must have Architect sign-off.”

Sally the Project Manager: “Um …” <has no clue what that means but now knows there is a delay building> “I better go find our Architect on this project and get him or her involved”.  And again, rushes out of your cube.

Now, in this example, there are multiple issues generating confusion.  One is task duration.  The likelihood that someone actually recorded your need for five days to actually do work is very low.  I am continually amazed that the less technical a person is the greater the likelihood they will assume a technical task takes an amazingly short amount of time.  Another is the propensity for project managers or people whose primary job it is to track other peoples work are quick to react less than rationally when their plan gets messed up.  They have their plan and they remain rational when, as time goes by, the plan remains unchanged and tasks are sequentially marked complete.  But when the plan itself appears to have a gap, panic and irrationality can ensue.

Ok, why does someone whose sole job is to track a checklist loses their marbles when there is a missing tasks or four additional tasks need to be inserted somewhere?  A quick glimpse into the project manager’s world reveals their greatest value to the organization is in their ability to predict the future with their plan.  Based on the future date their plan indicates, all kinds of business-ish things could be set to kick off.  Thus, something as simple as a plan that says when a system upgrade will be deployed could also be the starting point for a marketing team to formally kick off a set of media ads, plus a customer training/education packet could be already in the mail with dates for when each customer will be forced to use the new upgrade system, plus an accounting group could be poised to show a drop in license costs (i.e., save big money) due to the upgrade, plus, some executive is counting on the license money savings making his departments balance sheet come just under a magical finance number that triggers a quarterly bonus.  Hence, when the upgrade implementation date starts slipping from a failure of the future predictor (aka. project manager) being accurate, all kinds of heat from all kinds of folks downstream from any of the technical work associated with the project can come out of the woodwork and come down hard on the project manager for giving bad data.  Hence, fearing such heat, project managers react in a variety of ways and some of which are not particularly 100% rational.

In the next article, I’ll outline how to use this panic to work for you.

I think it is safe to say that anytime any company wants to get something new accomplished they “kick off” this thing called a “project”.  Now if you have spent any time in IT you have probably had a role on one of these so called projects.  You know when you are on a good project:

• Everyone knows what the end goal is.
• Everyone knows each others roles.
• Everyone has a sense that all participants are accountable for their tasks.
• Things are getting done.
• Everyone feels a sense of progress.
• Everyone feels a sense of team.

You also know when you are on a bad project:

• Everyone is seemingly bumping into each other.
• No one can really articulate the goal of the project
• No one knows what the end state is supposed to look like.
• Time is going by with meetings and minutes and status reports but no real tangible work is getting done.

This series of articles will cover different aspects on how to survive as an engineer that has a role to play on an IT project.  The previous article can be found here.

How to survive with too many chiefs or too many indians

First and foremost, make sure your role is clear on the project.  Make sure at all times you are executing the functions associated with your role.  If you are unsure if your role requires you to perform a certain function, ask around to confirm and if you aren’t getting concrete yes or no answers, confirm with your boss.  It might seem like you are annoying or bothering your boss but believe me, your boss would rather answer a 30 second role clarification question than sit in hours of meetings dancing around why someone on his team did or didn’t do a particular function on a project.

Second, if you have opportunity or are asked to perform a function outside the bounds of your role, consider all the angles before just up and completing the function.  It might seem cool to build the widget that connects the two systems together to allow the transactions to flow, but if that is not your explicit role, you might be putting your boss and your team in jeopardy.  How so?  Well, if you team is a support rather than a development group in the organization, you have just forced your boss to have more ownership in the system than he has been charged to have.  Your boss will be in political hot water when you are pulled back into the project make changes to the widget while other systems your boss is responsible for need coverage and you can’t be in both places at once.  The last thing you want to be doing is creating a headache for your boss when your boss has the most direct influence on your job duties and compensation.

Not all functions outside of your role are filled with danger.  Some are filled with opportunity for praise for helping the project move forward.  In the example above, there may not be a role that is supposed to build this widget.  Maybe the project is plugging all the technology together in order to test the final solution and someone didn’t realize these two systems needed a widget.  You could be the engineer that saves the proverbial day.  When everyone is patting each others backs when the project is successfully implemented and everyone is overly positive, someone could exclaim: “Wow, glad Bob pulled the widget out of his ear at the last moment, we thought we had a big delay on our hands!”  Yes, these moments are few and far between, but they do exist, they are fleeting, so enjoy them for the brief moment they do exist.  The key to pulling this off successfully, starting even before building a working widget, is to make 110% sure your boss is completely onboard with what you are proposing to do outside your role and the risks associated.  Be prepared for your boss to agree that you are completely capable of building the miracle widget, but because of company politics that if you tried to put them together in your mind would make you pass out, he asks you not to build the widget.  Don’t get discouraged if this happens.  There will be many projects and many opportunities to stretch your role and position yourself for exceeding expectations.  Learn from these rejections on how to better sell your boss on your ideas for the future.

In the next part of the series I’ll continue cover how to survive with too many chiefs or too many indians with one of the most powerful tools the “pre-task”.

I think it is safe to say that anytime any company wants to get something new accomplished they “kick off” this thing called a “project”.  Now if you have spent any time in IT you have probably had a role on one of these so called projects.  You know when you are on a good project:

• Everyone knows what the end goal is.
• Everyone knows each others roles.
• Everyone has a sense that all participants are accountable for their tasks.
• Things are getting done.
• Everyone feels a sense of progress.
• Everyone feels a sense of team.

You also know when you are on a bad project:

• Everyone is seemingly bumping into each other.
• No one can really articulate the goal of the project
• No one knows what the end state is supposed to look like.
• Time is going by with meetings and minutes and status reports but no real tangible work is getting done.

This series of articles will cover different aspects on how to survive as an engineer that has a role to play on an IT project.  The first article in the series can be found here.

Projects where everyone knows their role on and the goals of the project are rare.  More than likely, the project you are about to join is top heavy in one of two ways.  The first is too many chiefs and not enough indians.  Like the proverbial saying implies, plenty of people taking about the work, defining the work, breaking the work into chunks or phases or milestones or whatever is great, but if there is no one around to actually do the work, you as an engineer or as a do-er is likely to get dumped on.  The second is too many indians and not enough chiefs.  Equally dangerous because the lure of a bunch of engineers doing cool engineering stuff without chiefs provide direction, priority and governance, time and costs are ripe of getting out of control.  The next section will cover each in more detail with tips on how to avoid the prospective pitfalls.

Too Many Chiefs

A project full of managers, project managers, business analysts, requirements documenters, technical writers, testers, QA folks, support people, program office people, release coordinators, business liaisons, time keepers, relationship managers … well, you get the picture: people with functions to perform on the project but no one to actually do the engineering work itself.  As an engineer getting assigned to the project, you run the risk of getting all the “real work” dumped on you.  If you can handle all the work, great, if you can’t, there will be fifteen people with charts and graphs and emails and ten other ways to make it obvious that you dropped the ball.  In subsequent sections, I’ll over tips on how to navigate in this type of project.

Too many Indians

A project full of engineers, developers, architects and coders sounds like utopia with a whole bunch of people all doing actual work.  A bunch of people that think it is great when some new, hot off the Internet coding technique can be used to make some function perform some task at wire speed with four lines of code.  All those people cost money and consume time. People, managers, which are responsible for tracking and managing money and time don’t have an infinite amount.  At some point in time, someone, somewhere in the company is going to ask the dreaded question: “Hey, it has been four months, how close are we to implementing that new FlimFlam product?”  This is the holy crap moment for the managers that are responsible for the resources on the project.  If someone is asking that question, it means the project is in a heap of trouble.  Since that someone doesn’t already know how far along the project is, how much it is costing, how on track the project is to cost as much as originally estimated and exactly when it is going to finish, the project has failed and nothing has even been released yet.  Managers will be swooping in to ask the dreaded questions:

“What have we built?”

“How long have we been building?”

“When are we going to be done building?”

“When can this be implemented?”

If you have a bunch of engineers sitting around trying to answer those questions, the answers are not going to be what managers are expecting to hear.  More than likely, all kinds of cool stuff has been half built with no plan to pull it all together and meet the original goal of the project.  Managers are thus put in the tight spot and will react with decisions on what to do next which you are definitely not going to like.

In the next part of the series I’ll cover how to survive with too many chiefs or too many indians.

I think it is safe to say that anytime any company wants to get something new accomplished they “kick off” this thing called a “project”.  Now if you have spent any time in IT you have probably had a role on one of these so called projects.  You know when you are on a good project:

• Everyone knows what the end goal is.
• Everyone knows each others roles.
• Everyone has a sense that all participants are accountable for their tasks.
• Things are getting done.
• Everyone feels a sense of progress.
• Everyone feels a sense of team.

You also know when you are on a bad project:

• Everyone is seemingly bumping into each other.
• No one can really articulate the goal of the project
• No one knows what the end state is supposed to look like.
• Time is going by with meetings and minutes and status reports but no real tangible work is getting done.

This series of articles will cover different aspects on how to survive as an engineer that has a role to play on an IT project.

Boss: “Bob, looks like the FlimFlam Upgrade project needs a resource from our team and based on our team’s workload, I am going to give them your name.”

Bob:  <forcing a look of enthusiam> “Thanks boss, I’ll get right on it.”

If you already have some knowledge of this project from watercooler discussions or some other means and you see this as a positive assignment, you should take this opportunity to offer some sincere appreciation for the assignment.

Bob: “Boss, I apprecaite the opportunity to work on this project”

Something brief, to the point and low on the proverbial sap works just fine.  Now, if you view this as a negative assignment, I would still strongly encourage you to still offer sincere appreciation for you can’t be working on the cool projects all the time.  Making the best of the assignment will put you in a positive light in your bosses mind and can only increase your chances of being assigned something more postive next time.

If you are 100% clear on your role on this project, you are all set.  If you are unclear, don’t let your boss leave without getting that clarity:

Bob: “Boss, I just want to confirm, I am only fulfilling the project implementation into the test environment role on this project, correct?”

Believe me, your boss probably has ten things on his or her mind at the moment and probably doesn’t realize that you can’t read his or her mind as to what being a resource on the FlimFlam Upgrade project means.  You will cause more problems for your boss and then yourself if you go off and assume you are the test environment implementation person when in fact, you are only supposed to review the design of the system before it is moved into then testing phase.

Making sure you know exactly what role you fill on this particular project is critical.  Everyone on the project will most likely either assume your role is X or want your role to be Y and if you job aboard without knowing exactly what you boss expects, you will most likely fail to meet his or her expectations.

Projects where everyone knows their role and goals of the project are rare.  More than likely, the project you are about to join is top heavy in one of two ways.  The first is too many chiefs and not enough indians.  Like the proverbial saying implies, plenty of people taking about the work, defining the work, breaking the work into chunks or phases or milestones or whatever is great, but if there is no one around to actually do the work, you as an engineer or as a do-er is likely to get dumped on.  The second is too many indians and not enough chiefs.  Equally dangerous because the lure of a bunch of engineers doing cool engineering stuff without chiefs provide direction, priority and governance, time and costs are ripe of getting out of control.  The next part of the series will cover each in more detail with tips on how to avoid the pitfalls.