Midwest IT Survival

Drop everything and make project "X" the top priority!

As a manager of a team of IT engineers, one of the toughest challenges is getting a handle on not only what everyone is working on, but what are all the seemingly unpredictable requests for work coming at your team. Thus whether you find yourself managing a new team or have been managing a team for some time but you are constantly being surprised with new requests out of left field, you may want to consider constructing a logical approach similar to what is being outlined in this series of articles to stop the surprises.

In the first article in this series, we identified the work request attributes of your team and built a list of sources of those requests. In the previous article, I described how to keep your plan from going stale as well as the benefits to you as a manager for making resource plan a prominent source of data in all your delivery commitment discussions. This article will offer various “what if” opportunities your plan enables you to explore.

“What If” Opportunities – Drop Everything and Work on X

After all the work up till this point in building and maintaining your plan, here is where you can experience some real power of your team resource plan actually making your life easier. Consider this incredibly typical work scenario:

Senior Manager: The VP of Operations just told me the new FlimFlam upgrade project needs to start immediately and is now the most important project for everyone in the department to be working on.

Manager: No problem. Upgrading FlimFlam requires my team members Bob and Sally to be engaged to make system changes. I’ll let them know the new priority and I’ll communicate to the requesters/sponsors of what they are presently working on that their requests have been bumped in priority.

<Conversation continues>

During this conversation, by getting out your resource plan, you can easily identify what work Bob and Sally are presently engaged. You can share with your senior manager the impact of the priority change he or she is mandating. Before we go too far, there are some subtleties to this specifically structured response that I would like to call out:

1. You aren’t saying “No”.

Clearly, your manager is making a demand not asking a question. Thus, saying “No” isn’t an option just because it causes massive changes to your brilliantly crafted resource plan. There might be situations where telling your manager “No” is the right response, but I believe the majority of situations are best handled without a direct “No” as the immediate answer.

2. While agreeing, you are sharing the “cost” or impact of the shift in priority.

In a polite manner, you are agreeing to the request. But at the same time, you are sharing the “cost” or impact of what current work in flight will be paused and thus delayed as resources are shifted. In a non-threatening and non-confrontational way you are allowing your manager to get an appreciation for what work he or she is implicitly approving can be delayed. This subtle phrasing also allows your manager to consider if the “drop everything and work on X” is truly that important. You have allowed your manager to save face and possibly engage in a more detailed dialog around how to slot this new work in with existing work. In general, allowing your manager, the individual with the most direct impact on your paycheck, to save face and achieve their objectives as often as possible is always a good thing.

“What If” Opportunities – “Cost” of Working on Y

Another “what if” scenario that your resource plan can help you with is assessing the impact of asking resources to work on side or “special projects”. As an example, many times during the year pops up the potential need to know what features a new version of a system provides compared to the current. Another example would be a new technical capability that sounds on the surface to benefit your team but someone needs to dig into it to determine how much real benefit. Yet another involving software development teams is re-factoring existing code because what was put in production works, but really needs to be changed to meet standards/guidelines/ enterprise re-usability, etc. If your team is delivery focused, everyone is probably fully allocated to business work according to your plan thus asking anyone to put some time into a “special project” is going to add stress to that individual’s ability to meet their committed delivery dates.

Your resource plan gives you the ability to consider the impact of, say, adding some number of hours per week to a particular team member’s workload. There might exist enough slack time on a particular assignment within a project or work request to absorb those additional hours. If not, there might be the opportunity to contact the work requester and confirm that extending the delivery date by a few days is acceptable. Alternatively, you can schedule a few days/weeks of contiguous time after a delivery date for a particular resource to be dedicated to the “special project”. This way, you can work the “special project” assignment into that resource’s normal workload and delay uncommitted additional work items until the task is complete. This effectively treats the “special project” just like any other work request or project task forcing other tasks to be schedule around it. This gives you the ability to time box the “special project” with your team member so they can focus on this work without distraction as well as give them a clear end date when they need to have their work completed.

At this point, you have a few “what if” scenarios attributed to your team resource plan. In the next article, I’ll suggest more “what if” opportunities your resource plan possesses particularly around staff leveling.

How credible are you perceived?

As a manager of a team of IT engineers, one of the toughest challenges is getting a handle on not only what everyone is working on, but what are all the seemingly unpredictable requests for work coming at your team. Thus whether you find yourself managing a new team or have been managing a team for some time but you are constantly being surprised with new requests out of left field, you may want to consider constructing a logical approach similar to what is being outlined in this series of articles to stop the surprises.

In the first article in this series, we identified the work request attributes of your team and built a list of sources of those requests. In the previous article, we finalized our Gantt chart listing all the external and internal work requests. We also added “HR-ish” activities and other categories of work that can impact delivery. This article will offer considerations on how to keep the data from becoming stale and how the plan benefits you as a manager.

Avoid Going Stale

Like any resource plan, it is only as accurate as the last time it was updated. You have put plenty of work up till this point in building your resource plan; don’t let it get stale. Consider making reviewing and updating the report a fixed agenda item for all one on ones and possibly some full team meetings. By sharing together with your full team you help team members get a sense of what others are working on. You never know one when team member will notice what someone else is working on and be able to offer some advice or alternative points to consider. If you are managing towards fostering a more self-organizing, self-directed team, which I’ve written about prior, this technique of sharing the resource plan with the entire team helps to communicate the broader workload. By encouraging team members to offer opinions and share perspectives on what others are working on organically moves your team towards more self-direction.

When it comes to updating your plan, to reduce the burden of taking notes then going back and updating the chart, consider updating the chart in real time with each of your team members. The real time update not only saves the burden of taking good notes and having good memory recall, it allows for immediate feedback and verification during your one on ones. Placing a copy of the report in a shared location for your team to view and update is great, but the additional value of making and talking through updates in real time can be exceedingly more valuable. Again, this is another opportunity to increase team member engagement through actively discussing what they are working on and capturing it in the plan.

Depending on your management style, the frequent real time update of the chart during one on ones could replace the classic weekly status report.

Management Perception Benefits

Now that you have an accurate and professional looking report of what work your team is doing, start to carry a paper copy around with you every where you go. Try and print out a copy of your most recent update on a large, single sheet of paper. Print a new copy after every major revision and discard the old copy. If it doesn’t appear clearly on the report, write the date of the latest revision. Consider setting a date range for the report of:

• Go back about one calendar week from the present date or the date you are printing.

This helps you answer questions pertaining to what transpired last week that impacts future projections. This is handy to be able to quickly respond to queries with: “Last week Sally was sick for two days and that is why her deliverable carried over into this week.”

• Report out a few months. Consider three months maximum.

Depending on the level of priority changes and work request adds/changes, you will probably discover that reporting out into the distant future isn’t all that helpful. Consider starting with three months and see how often you are discussing work requests that far in the future. The smaller your organization, more than likely, the shorter the future can be predicted. In truth, the level of maturity in work prioritization and forecasting in your organization will impact the frequency of report changes and the ability to project far into the future. The more mature the more consistent data available to reduce the frequency of changes to your plan. The less mature and more prone to “IT Instant Gratification” the more frequently you will be forced to re-juggle your resource plan.

By carrying around your plan and frequently referencing it in meetings, discussions, etc. you should notice a significant up tick in your external perceived management capabilities. Really? How so?

• Increase in perception of knowing what is going on

Sure, you might be able to keep everything you and your team is involved in at any given moment in time in your head. What is more likely the reality is:

As more and more work is being dump on you and your team, your brain is bound to get overwhelmed and loose details.

Thus, having a detailed report at your fingertips helps jog your memory reducing the chance you might miss something important in a discussion. Plus, when pressured to commit to deliverable dates, and what project manager doesn’t want you to commit to a magic date on the spot, you now have a legitimate excuse to pause, look at your plan, and then offer a more thought out response. Sometimes just the ability to inject a break in the pressure of the commitment exchange permits avoiding that hastily, in the moment, less than optimal reply.

• Increase in the credibility of your resource communications

Without report: “Bob is working on X now and should be done by Friday.”

With Report: Reviewing report prior to responding “Bob is working on X now and should be done by Friday.”

You are sharing the same message and very well could be using the exact same words in both cases. But, when you visibly reference some data prior to making your statement, your words are augmented with an increased incredibility. I attribute that increase to the external perception of being on top of what is going on and having data to support your statements that your resource plan gives you. Others don’t have any competing data, thus you have the more authoritative position in the conversation. The folks at Thinkshift Communications have developed a Credibility Quotient as a formal criteria for determining the level of credibility in one’s communications. As a factor in their ranking system, they specifically call out “Providing support for claims is the most important single contributor to credibility”. Sure, the corporate bureaucrats and smooth talking management pundits are able to talk circles around why something should be or needs to be delivered by a certain date. You can challenge back with equally crafted responses alone or remove the emotion and let data in your plan drive the discussion.

• Benefit of your responses having higher “stickiness”

The increase in the perception of you knowing what is going on and the resulting credibility in your responses nets you the benefit of having high “stickiness” in your responses. You will notice, especially in people that challenge your resource assignment or contention concerns, that over time you will see a dramatic drop off in the frequency and aggressiveness of challenges to your message. I directly attribute this increase in people taking you at what you say (rather than immediately challenging you) to the resource plan’s increase in your credibility.

At this point, you should have an accurate team resource plan that you have incorporated into your management work delivery commitment interaction discussions. In the next article, I’ll describe the additional power your resource plan possesses through it’s “what if” capabilities.

Consider tracking team member vacations on your resource plan

As a manager of a team of IT engineers, one of the toughest challenges is getting a handle on not only what everyone is working on, but what are all the seemingly unpredictable requests for work coming at your team. Thus whether you find yourself managing a new team or have been managing a team for some time but you are constantly being surprised with new requests out of left field, you may want to consider constructing a logical approach similar to what is being outlined in this series of articles to stop the surprises.

In the first article in this series, we identified the work request attributes of your team and built a list of sources of those requests. In the previous article, we finalized our Gantt chart listing all the work requests and projects by work phase and indicated which team member is work on which phase with durations and dependencies from your team’s estimation sheets. Additionally, your team review of the chart increased its accuracy and improved your team’s level of engagement again. This article will offer considerations on what additional, non-external work to reflect on the chart for improved reporting.

HR-ish Stuff

The first non-external work data items to consider adding to the team resource plan are company holidays, mandatory “all hands” meetings and team member vacations. Basically, consider adding all the HR-ish stuff that requires your team’s time that results in the loss of the ability to work on other “real” activities. You may want to establish a threshold for the duration of HR-ish stuff to add. You may recall we calculated a real work day of five or six hours assuming 1:1’s, fire drills, performance reviews and other interruptions previously. Thus, you may want to consider a minimum threshold of a full business day. A single hour one on one still allows a team member to complete a task on that same day. Contrarily, a full day off-site “all hands” meeting does not permit any “real” work to get accomplished on the day the meeting is scheduled. Thus, creating a break in the work all team members are performing on that specific “all hands” meeting day reflects the real world impact of such events on your team’s estimates and work delivery. Once added, all work delivery end dates should be pushed out a full day. In my experience, when estimating work, technical people rarely think through the impact of such business event. They don’t always realize the need to incorporate these events into their work delivery communications and expectations setting.

Vacations

Adding team member vacations is extremely helpful from multiple perspectives. For one, it is a great single place for you to keep that information. Your company may already have an HR administrative system that automates the process of keeping track of this information thus this benefit might be marginalized. But if you aren’t fortunate to have such a system, it can become a real hassle maintaining and updating a spreadsheet to track this information yourself. By incorporating this administrivia into your Gantt chart, keeping track becomes just another step in the process of keeping the chart data updated through team one on one discussions, etc. For our planning effort, the lager benefit for tracking such information is in the improved accuracy of establishing work request delivery end dates. If another 40 hours is needed for a team member to complete a specific work request but that team member is going to be out on vacation for the next five days, clearly that work request isn’t going to get completed for at least two weeks. By adding that team member’s five day vacation as a break in their work on that request, the new work delivery date now is more realistic. With this vacation break clearly noted in your chart, external parties have a clearer picture on what is making the request take, in this case, at least two weeks minimum instead of expecting the request to be completed next Friday.

In summary, consider a threshold of a day for HR-ish work events and the following activities to be worthy of explicit Gantt chart reporting as material breaks to in-flight work:

• Vacations
• “All hands” meetings
• Off-site meetings (even if they are half days, consider the travel, etc.)
• Training sessions (full day and/or off-site)
• Sick days

Recording sick days can be really handy when a team member misses a few days of work and the ability for them to still complete their work request on the originally estimated completion date is infeasible. Additionally, as the weeks go by it becomes increasingly difficult to remember such loss of work days occurring in the past. This data can be critical to have captured and clearly reported on over time when the delivery date is fast approaching and requestors are starting to challenge the status of the work request progress or perceived lack of progress.

Special Assignments

Another body of work that deserves reporting recognition is the special assignment. From the typical situation:

Manager: Hey, can you look into what systems will be impacted when we start the FlimFlam upgrade project and let me know by next Friday before the quarterly project review meeting?

Team Member: Sure.

You asked that team member to do that work because it is important for your meeting. Now adding that request as a new single Gantt row of work accomplishes a number of goals:

• Records the request so both you and the team member know it was made and when it is due.
• Reflects that request along side the other work that team member is actively working on.
• Communicates to other team members what each other are working on beyond just formal request and project work.
• Communicates to outside parties all the work required by your team to perform the services they are charged with beyond just the formal request and project work.

In the act of recording the request you might (hypothetically) notice that the team member has a critical work deliverable due that same Friday. You have the opportunity to follow-up with that team member to remind them of their deliverable due dates, reset priorities or re-assign the request to another team member.

Again, you will need to develop your effective level of detail in reporting these non-external work requests. Your goal should be to strike a balance between overly detailed and thus time consuming to track compared to too little detail and thus requests get missed or lack external visibility.

On Going Assignments

You may want to consider adding on going assignments that don’t have a true end date to your report as well. An example might be investigating a new technology in order to consider its use in solving a formal work request in the future. I would suggest you put them at the very bottom of your report since they won’t change frequently. You may want to consider coming up with a unique color for these never ending requests. Since the time applied to these assignments varies, I wouldn’t try and update any work estimate durations around them unless you really want to enforce a team goal. A goal such as “spend 10% of your time investigating new technologies” should involve the reduction in about a half a day per week applied to all work estimates. This overall reduction formally allocates time for all to accomplish this goal from a work estimation perspective. Motivating your team members to meet their pressing external work deliverable dates plus invest time in learning new technologies at the same time is another matter.

At this point, you should have an even more accurate team resource plan reflected in your Gantt chart including all the major external and internal work items your team is engaged on. In the next article, I’ll suggest ways to keep the report from going stale and examples of the power of your resource plan possesses in improving how your are perceived as a manager in your organization.

Build out that Gantt chart

As a manager of a team of IT engineers, one of the toughest challenges is getting a handle on not only what everyone is working on, but what are all the seemingly unpredictable requests for work coming at your team. Thus whether you find yourself managing a new team or have been managing a team for some time but you are constantly being surprised with new requests out of left field, you may want to consider constructing a logical approach similar to what is being outlined in this series of articles to stop the surprises.

In the first article in this series, we identified the work request attributes of your team and built a list of sources of those requests. In the previous article, we put together an initial Gantt chart that lists all the work requests and projects by work phase and indicated which team member is work on which phase. Additionally, your team review of the chart increased its accuracy and improved your team’s level of engagement. This article will build on that initial chart and incorporate work estimation sheets as well as additional work considerations.

Merge Gantt with Work Estimations

Now that you have a list of all work requests and projects with resources assigned by phases plus a quick team review, now is a good time to take all those work estimation sheets and pull the data and plug the data into the Gantt chart. But first, we need to make a few decisions around how to account for time in the day.

If you are using a Gantt charting tool that has an option for defining the work hours in a day, you will need to determine the total number of hours that reflect a true workday for your work requests and projects. As I’ve covered before in part three, realistically, an engineer doesn’t have a full eight hours in a day to dedicate exclusively to project and work requests. With team meetings, HR activities like performance reviews, 1:1’s, training, holidays, time off, etc., your real working hours in a given day maybe more like five of six rather than eight.

If you re using my work estimation template I referred to in part seven of this series, then that template has the ability to incorporate a calculation to handle the real working hours in an average workday. More specifically, the total hour calculations are raw hours where as the “duration” or “contiguous work days” calculations are where the real working hours calculations come into effect. Make sure you are clear on how you are entering your hours for estimating phase durations to make sure you aren’t over or under calculating the length of the durations.

Linking or Sequencing Work Phases

After taking a brief pause and stretching from the cramping associated with all of the data entry you have just completed, now it is time to link or sequence the work phases. Depending on the Gantt chart tool you are using, there should be a way to link the work phases you entered to reflect the workflow over time. Using our example from the previous article, the sequence should reflect that work requests get completed in the following sequence:

Planning -> Design -> Development -> Testing -> Deployment -> Post-Deployment

Below is an example from Microsoft Project that shows this example from above:

Your Gantt chart tool should have some way to indicate that although both tasks can start after the “Design” phase is complete, (hypothetically for example purposes), the Biz development can’t start until a certain milestone is reached in the UI development. Similarly, “Testing” can’t start until both Biz and UI development is completed. In this more complex example, UI is estimated to take a few days more than Biz even though UI started before Biz:

Pause and Admire Your Work

Before you start analyzing the results, first, step back and look at your first draft team resource plan in Gantt chart form. I think you will agree that you now have a single, professional and authoritative report of what your team is currently engaged on work request and project-wise.

Back to Work, Sanity Checking the Chart

Enough basking in your resource management reporting superiority; now it is time to sanity check your chart. Beyond merely double checking that all your “Testing” phases currently appear after any and all “Development” phases, look for these specific abnormalities and take some action on them to improve the quality and accuracy of your chart:

1. Do any of the same resources appear to be working on phases at the same time as phases in another work request or project?

If the answer is “yes” then don’t panic; this might not be wrong. It may reflect a resource winding down on one request and getting started on the next. But, if you have allocated a full “day” on request A and another full “day” on request B with one starting/stopping, you need to be sure that that indeed is the message you want to externally communicate. Please recall that the real goal of this Gantt chart is to “report” to external parties what you want them to see and understand about your team’s work. Thus, if you have been requested to work on two requests concurrently and the skill set needed to complete these two requests is contained within only one team member, then the overlap your report is showing is accurate. It maybe accurate but it might not be realistically achievable. There will be more on how to use this report to assist with rectifying this situation later.

1. Do any resources appear to have large gaps of unassigned work requests?

If the answer is “yes” make sure you have entered all the estimation data correctly and verified your start and end dates. This may not be an error. Rather, this may indicate that a particular resource doesn’t have any formal project of request work to handle during that gap.

Sanity Checking the Chart with your Team

Similar to the previous article, this is another great opportunity to get feedback from your team. As I mentioned prior, in addition to increasing the quality of your chart, you will enjoy the side benefits of over all increased team engagement. If your team is highly technical, asking for feedback might not immediately resonate with them on how this helps them. If you simply ask:

Manager: Does this look right?

Highly Technically Focused Team Member: Yah, sure.

You may need to pull information out of them through more probing questions or consider challenging them on specific data in the report that looks a bit suspicious. Consider:

Manager: Does this look right?

Same Team Member: Yah, sure.

Manager: Ok, it looks like you are working on request 7648 and 7653 at the same time and from your estimates, it looks like both will be done next Friday.

Same Team Member: I can’t do them both at the same time.

Manager: Ok, which one makes sense to work on before the other?

Same Team Member: Oh, I have to do 7653 first since I’ll tweak the solution from 7653 to complete 7648.

Manager: So you need to work on 7653 first, exclusively, and then you can begin work on 7648?

Same Team Member: Yes.

Manager: Great, I‘ll adjust the chart to show that.

Based on the above exchange, adjusting the chart to show request 7653 starting and then ending before 7648 will now more accurately communicate what this team member is working on when and at what date specific work items are estimated to be completed. Additionally, you can note the technical dependency the one request has on the other in order to communicate that externally to interested parties. Lastly, the team member now leaves that conversation with a sense that the boss cares to an increased degree what he or she is working on. Hence another additional up tick in engagement from that team member.

At this point, you should have a rather accurate, through team review, Gantt chart reflecting all the major external work items your team is engaged on. In the next article, I’ll suggest ways to include internal work items like vacations and special assignments that involve your team’s time with considerations on how to reflect that work in amongst the external work in flight to give a even more complete view of your team’s work.

Drag your team into resource planning

As a manager of a team of IT engineers, one of the toughest challenges is getting a handle on not only what everyone is working on, but what are all the seemingly unpredictable requests for work coming at your team. Thus whether you find yourself managing a new team or have been managing a team for some time but you are constantly being surprised with new requests out of left field, you may want to consider constructing a logical approach similar to what is being outlined in this series of articles to stop the surprises.

In the first article in this series, we identified the work request attributes of your team and built a list of sources of those requests. In the previous article, we put together a way to capture work estimation data in a standard format from your team including the benefits to such an approach from a team management perspective. This article will describe how to use the work estimation template for more effective resource planning. I will describe a sequential approach to use the work estimation template data and build a comprehensive team resource plan.

Single Team Resource Plan – Building a Plan

In order to build a resource plan we will steal a data presentation format from Project Management called the Gantt chart. A Gantt chart provides a structured way to represent work break down structures in order to show task start and end dates plus the sequence of tasks with their associated dependencies and assigned resources among other things.

You’ve probably run across project managers on projects creating Gantt charts to a varying degree of detail and not immediately thought this charting could be useful to represent a single view of the work your team is doing. There are various tools, both commercial and open source, that can be used for creating such charts. With a the plethora of choices available to you I would strongly encourage you to leverage whatever your company standard project management tool is for Gantt chart creation. The value of using the same tool as everyone else is to produce a Gantt chart that style-wise is similar to others in your company for easy consumption by your audience. Alternatively, you could ask project managers you work with what they use. Also, feel free to search the Internet for “Gantt chart software” and explore the myriad of choices.

Determine Common Work Request and/or Project Phases

To begin, first determine the best mix of the your company’s standard project management methodology terminology for project phases (“Visio and Scope”, “Pre-Planning”, “Design”, “Development”, “Testing”, etc.) and assign each one a unique color. Below is a sample list phases I will use as an example:

Pink Planning

Purple Design

Red Development

Green Testing

Blue Deployment

Yellow Post-Deployment Support

Remember, the goal of your Gantt chart style resource plan is to easily communicate externally what your team is working on. The more similar the terminology to what everyone else uses the easier for your management and work requesters to quickly grasp what you are trying to communicate. The consistent use of colors for the various project or work request phases helps to easily and visually determine what phase a project or request is in at any given time.

Determine Unique Work Engagements

Add in any unique team work engagement model terms you see benefit in calling out. An example would be if during the formal project “Development” phase your team has a pool of people that can do user interface development as well as another pool that work on business logic component or service development. Try to use as close a naming convention as possible to what the standard project methodology uses. As an example:

Light Red Development – UI

Dark Red Development – Biz

In the case that you have people that can actually work in both groups, using my example above involving UI and Biz development, this resource reporting approach will clearly show who is working on what when. Additionally and possibly more important is the ability to conduct “what if” analysis when a higher priority request arrives. There will be more on the “what if” possibilities later in the series.

Note: One final word of caution, try to avoid creating an incredibly granular work engagement list. A very log list will make keeping the chart up to date a full time job plus it will detract from the simplicity you are striving for in reporting to external parties. Let’s face it; external parties are in a hurry. They don’t particularly need nor care to know your resource A is doing a solution approach review of resource B prior to a full team design review prior to a design committee meeting. They need to know:

• What is in flight at an extremely high level of detail.
• Impacts of a new request hitting your team.

List all Work Requests and Projects

Next, adopt a work request or project naming convention as similar as possible to the one your company uses. If requests have numbers, capture those numbers. If a project has had several name changes, use the most recent but consider indicating the previous names. Enter all the requests or projects you know your team is working on at present as well as all the possible requests or projects that you are aware of that might involve your team. This will be an on going and frequent exercise thus initial list perfection isn’t required. Over time, the list will become more and more accurate and comprehensive.

Enter all your Team Members including Yourself

Most Gantt chart creation tools have a place for entering in “resources” to be assigned to work. Make sure to enter yourself in the likely event that you will be participating materially in listed work at some point.

Enter Work Phases for all the Work Requests and Projects

Yes, now it starts to get a bit tedious. For each work request or project you entered, add the standard work phases you plan to track. You maybe tempted to enter only phases you consider important to reduce the data entry. As you become more experienced at how your resource plan is used in day-to-day resource work handling you may take shortcuts. But, if you are starting out with a new team plan, I strongly suggest to don’t cut corners just yet.

Link Your Resources to the Work they are doing

Now, for each phase entered for each work request or project, enter the resources that will be performing tasks on each of the phases for all the work requests and projects you entered. Don’t worry about start/end dates of phases nor the percentage of time spent on “concurrent” activities for the same team member just yet. I’ll offer some ideas for you to consider on the level of detail and effort you may want to expend in that area.

Review with Team

Now is a great time to have your team members check your work! Consider adding a review of this list at your next 1:1 with each of your team members. You might be a bit surprised to hear what other things your team is being pulled into beyond what you have captured. As a side benefit, you should experience an up tick in engagement from your team now that they know that you care more about what they are actually doing. Plus, they’ll see that the work estimation template exercises are actually going to be used for something beyond just mindless administrivia. By the way, if a team member reports they are working on something but they haven’t previously provided a work estimation sheet for it, now is a great time to ask them to provide one for the work they think is remaining on this unlisted work request.

Now you should have the start of a Gantt chart that captures all the request and project work your team members are working on by work phase of the request or project. You’ve also vetted your chart with your team and increased your team’s level of engagement. Look for the next article in the Single View of the Work series to complete the draft of your Gantt chart by including more data from the work estimation sheets your team is completing.

“You can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

As a manager of a team of IT engineers, one of the toughest challenges is getting a handle on not only what everyone is working on, but what are all the seemingly unpredictable requests for work coming at your team. Thus whether you find yourself managing a new team or have been managing a team for some time but you are constantly being surprised with new requests out of left field, you may want to consider constructing a logical approach similar to what is being outlined in this series of articles to stop the surprises.

In the first article in this series, we identified the work request attributes of your team and built a list of sources of those requests. In the previous article, we developed some techniques to get out in front of the requests coming to your team. Now it is time to put together a way to capture that data in a meaningful way that will better reflect what work your team is doing and the impact of new work on in-flight work. This article will describe the benefits of using a work estimation template for collecting this information for more effective resource planning.

Let me start by commenting that I wrote and published the first six articles in this series around the third and fourth quarters of 2009. Since that time, I have been struggling with part seven in that I wasn’t able to succinctly capture a non-company, non-industry specific model that I felt I could share publicly with confidence. Thus, this series stalled at part six. Since that time, I’ve managed additional sets of teams in different industries and now feel I have a solution that is backed by personal experience and ready for public consumption and criticism.

The theme from this series of IT management articles is clearly that there needs to be data collected, documented and modeled to support ones management positions creditably and the ability to successfully commit to executing and delivering quality work. Through personal experience, the size of the company nor the size of the IT department significantly impacts the data model and approach I am proposing:

1. Provide structured and consistent work estimation criteria to your team members.
2. Collect that formal work estimation data into a single team resource plan.

Formal Work Estimate

Avoid the new manager trap of believing you and only you can make accurate work estimates for your team’s services. Force yourself to delegate that work to your team members. This provides a host of benefits, including but not limited to:

1. More accurate estimate based on the skill set of the individual about to do the actual work and not your skill set.
2. Gives team members a sense of empowerment and the ability to have an element of control over their destiny.
3. Builds a capability in your team that allows you to focus on things only you can focus on.
4. Enables more bandwidth for you to be objective in reviewing estimates and providing constructive coaching feedback to team members.

As Peter Drucker (or Robert Kaplan?) is famously quoted: “You can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

Many technical people are great at executing technical work but they may not be so great and providing estimates for that work. Thus, one way to accomplish coaching team members is to sit down with them to talk through their original work breakdown estimates compared to the actual time it took them to complete each task. Helping a team member see where they can improve their estimation skills through data points can be extremely helpful since the likelihood future work will be based on current work is relatively high. Having that reference back to past similar work estimates contextually helps in future estimation exercises.

How does one go about creating a formal work estimation template for your team? I’ve recently written about this very topic of formal work estimation and provided a sample spreadsheet as a template for having your various team members provide data back to you in a consistent format for easy review. I encourage you to consider this article as a guide for the first part of this Single View of the Work data model and approach.

Now that your team is using a structured method for estimating work, what is the best way to compile all that data into something meaningful? Look for the next article in the Single View of the Work series to dive into how to construct a single team resource plan that builds on the formal work estimation you have your team providing to you.

"I just signed the sales contract yesterday. This needs to be up and running by the end of this week!"

In talking to others recently, we’ve discovered an unfortunate pattern across multiple companies where the partnership between the business units and IT isn’t particularly strong. When I say “partnership” I mean the level of collaboration on business activities that involve IT in some manner. Prior to contracts being signed, has IT been directly involved in the new business opportunity? Does IT have a voice in the major initiative delivery date setting process? Is IT’s resource capacity considered at the same time the business’s resource capacity is being evaluated in moving forward with a major effort? Does IT have access to the business’s multi-year plan? Are IT initiatives peppered throughout that multi-year plan?

There are a seemingly endless list of articles available on the Internet that talk of the need for a strong partnership between IT and the business units IT supports thus I won’t extol those benefits here. Rather, what can an IT manager do in a company that is taking strides towards but is still working on forming a strong business and IT partnership? Or …

What to do when the Business wants “Instant IT Gratification”?

By “Instant IT Gratification” I mean the corporate culture where IT is expected to delivery what the business is asking for, how they are asking for it and when they want it done all without collaborative dialog. Contracts are signed without IT. Due dates are determined in advance and IT is expected to meet these deadlines without being consulted. The results of such interactions between IT and business requesters varies, but the thematic results are the most frustrating:

• Sub-optimal technology implemented: Instead of matching the need with the optimal technology, the quickest/fastest must be chosen to hit the date.
• Many post-deployment follow-up activities needed: Instead of having a healthy collaborative discussion about all the “requirements”, only what the business shares is implemented requiring many “oops, we forgot we also need X”
• Inability to upgrade/enhance existing technical capabilities: always focusing on the urgent needs of the business without allocating a percentage of time to invest in more current technology assets.
• Work never done: Constantly jumping to the next hot request leaving only phase one of Y implemented from the previous hot, now cooling request.

What can an IT manager do in this kind of culture?

Anyone who skimmed the above bullets and identified with even one point knows these are cultural problems that a single IT manager won’t be able to solve over night. So how does one not pull their proverbial hair out of their head trying to get anything proactive accomplished in such a re-active business model? Consider some of the options below; just know that none is a silver bullet of success.

• Leverage the formal charge back model.

If your organization has a formal IT work charge back model, become intimately familiar with how the process formally and informally works. Employ the charge back model in every possible situation to ensure there is fully accountability and record-ability for all business requested IT work.

• No formal charge back model, then use time as the “IT currency”.

If no formal charge back model exists to leverage, then the only real charge back model or IT “currency” is time. Make sure you have full data based reporting on all the work your team is performing. When a new “hot” request comes in, update your single view of the work and present the new “hot” request alongside all the previous “hot” requests and ask the business to prioritize.

• Like it or not, get some formal work estimation model in place

If all the business requests “just get handled” then the business has no governor for making requests. Without a charge back model to where the business has to make the conscious decision to spend on one thing compared to something else, there is no barrier for the business to make every conceivable request to IT. One approach is to “just handle it” and try to service every request as quickly as possible so to not have to engage in any prioritization or work break down discussions. But as I have written prior, having some formal work estimation process allows for an intelligent, data and date based discussion with the business. When presented with duration and possible delivery dates, business users can more easily take low priority work off the request list. Low priority work can easily be removed once it is known by all what is consuming time and delaying the delivery of what the business truly needs in a hurry.

• Don’t blindly start working on requests, ask probing questions

From a previous article on my learning in attending a formal Agile training class, asking why multiple times (per the instructor, ask “why?” five times to get to the bottom of the need for a request) in order to dig into the real reason for making a request for work to IT. You will be amazed how many times the request hasn’t been fully vetted by the business. Asking why to get to the real business case to support a request will help to reveal what is truly a priority that IT is in the best position to deliver on compared to a frivolous request that if not executed, actually reduces technical debt without harm to the requester. Invest 40 IT hours in order to avoid a situation that happens maybe once a year and consumes 4 hours of the business’s time? Assuming all costs being equal between the business and IT (usually IT costs more per hour) , a ten year return on investment? It would seem those 40 IT hours should be invested elsewhere.

As I said, these clearly aren’t silver bullets that eliminate the challenges of a less than strong partnership between IT and the business units. Yet, by consistently improving ones capability to work with business requesters through careful implementation of the bullet points above, one can establish a level of credibility for your team’s services back to the business to better align the limited IT resources with the highest priority work for the company as a whole.

Organization Silos Impeding your Enterprise Architecture?

There are countless sources extolling the benefits of a strong enterprise architecture strategy. The experts all agree on an effective enterprise architecture and even more so the larger the organization’s consumption of IT services. But recently, I’ve been reminded that the IT organizational structure, especially the structure aligned to providing new projects and new technical solutions has a dramatic impact on the ability for an organization to realize the benefits of established enterprise architecture.

In short, the more the IT new project and solution delivery organization is directly aligned with the individual business unit or group it supports, the more likely a spaghetti architecture will be the result. To help outline this point, below is a quick graphic of a sample organization chart that shows the two extremes:

Extreme A = Business group/unit functionally aligned:

Extreme B = Common function/service aligned:

The “extreme A” example is functioning with each vertical group acting as silo. Each silo is held accountable for delivering solutions to their business unit. In turn, each business unit will drive their IT silo to meet their needs exclusively. There is no inherent need to collaborate with their peers supporting other business units even if there are “enterprise architecture goals”. In my observation, collaboration might actually be viewed as a distraction to getting work done. There is essentially no organizational driver to force standard solutions and re-use of technology assets.

Sure, an architect in one group might have a strong personal relationship with an architect in another group, but unless they are trying to share ideas that happen to be at relatively the same level of “maturity” for each silo’s needs, they will unlikely be able to produce a common, re-useable technology used across both silos. Architect A attempts to work out a common solution with Architect B but suddenly Architect B’s project gets accelerated. Suddenly Architect B has to quick assemble a slimmed down solution that can’t be dependent on Architect A’s requirements or time-line. And sure, everyone might meet and agree to “retrofit” Architect B’s project with a more standardized solution with Architect A’s project in a later phase/iteration, but it would take an amazing level of cross-silo organizational governance to make sure that happens. If that standardization would in any way delay Architect A’s silo from delivering from the business, the standardization most likely gets pushed far and far out until no one remembers or even exists that remembers why the architecture alignment was needed in the first place.

Other potentially non-technology specific negative byproducts can evolve from this structure:

• Strong versus weak silos

One silo maybe more effective at deploying more current technology by the very nature of the business unit’s needs. As an example, consider a customer product or engineer unit compared to say, finance or one that uses in-house developed technology versus another with outsourced/SaaS technology. This creates a problem of talented architects and developers/others actively seek out roles within the perceived “strong silo” creating an even stronger silo compared to the other silos.

• Overall increased IT cost of ownership

As each silo is standing up technology to meet the business unit’s needs, they are all solving basically a significant number of the same problems with different solutions. Those solutions come with reoccurring maintenance, product end of life and all the traditional support and vendor management overheard. (I’ve written extensively about vendor management in past articles.) Then, to drive up costs even further, as some business need to see a “single view of the customer” or some other cross silo business challenge pops up, the cost to map all the data across the disparate systems is exceedingly high. In addition, not only does the mapping need to occur, but the technical (and probably some business) workflow needs to be altered to continue to keep all the data in sync. Someone suggests we need “Master Data Management” and now you have the cost and complexity of implementing a system to manage the data across all your systems.

The “extreme B” example brings the solution needs from each separate business unit/group into a common functionally aligned project delivery discipline. The goal is to leverage best practices/success stories from working with one business unit/group across to the other business units/groups via the common management structure by discipline. More specifically, the goals and objectives of each IT service discipline or function can be aligned to efficiencies and re-use within the specific discipline. Project Managers ensure they have common mechanisms to track and report on the project process. Business Analysts make sure they have a common framework for capturing requirements. Architects, develop unique frameworks for common requirements across all projects. Developers follow a consistent coding standard and reuse objects for data access, error reporting, and instrumentation, etc. The same goes for the other disciplines. Each discipline can focus on efficiencies aligned within their area of responsibility. And since each discipline has a somewhat singular work input and output for all business units, there is complete enterprise visibility to what is needed per each discipline. Thus, ultimately, the architecture team is looking across the entire enterprise at all the requirements and multi-year plans and can be charged with common frameworks for essential IT needs:

• Authentication
• Authorization
• Entitlement Management
• Business Rules/Workflow Management
• Business Event Management
• Reporting
• Data Structure, Storage, Management, Retention, Archiving
• Auditing and Compliance
• Capacity Planning
• Disaster Recovery

… and probably a bunch more that don’t immediately come to mind!

In conclusion, a strong enterprise architecture strategy gets a significant boost from a discipline aligned organizational structure rather than a business unit/group aligned structure.

Anyone have any thoughts to support and/or contradict my thoughts here?

Get sales to speed your support case to resolution

Whether you are working in a complete custom software development shop with little vendor interaction or a technology integration shop with vendor solutions integrated with other vendor solutions on top of yet other vendor solutions, you will have to manage vendor relationships to some degree as an IT manager in a MidWestern company.  This series looks at the complex arena of IT vendor management and offers some tips to make the arduous process a bit less arduous and possibly discover some additional benefits along the way.

Vendor Management Category

• How to Leverage Tech Support

In the previous article, we looked at the importance of opening a vendor support case for technical issues and following the process to the letter to avoid process fumbling to reflect poorly on you and your team.  In this article, we look to engage the Vendor Sales Cheese when the vendor technical support case isn’t getting resolved effectively and how to turn this around to drive beneficial pricing.

Drag the Vendor Sales Cheese into the technical support problem

One thing a good Vendor Sales Cheese is effective at is getting folks within his or her organization to move quickly to close a sales deal.  Why not leverage that ability to your advantage to put more pressure on solving your technical support issue so you and your team can move on to more important work?

If you haven’t had your technical support case solve the problem, your technical support case probably looks something like this:

Day 1 = Your Team: problem reported, steps to re-create the problem shared, log files capturing the error shared.

Day 2 = Vendor: “Try changing setting <blah>.<blah>.<blah> from TRUE to FALSE and provide the log files if it doesn’t fix the problem.”

Day 2 = Your Team: Setting changed, problem still exists, support case updated, log files capturing the error shared.

Day 3 = Your Team: request status on case

Day 4 = Your Team: request status on case

Day 4 = Vendor: “Please download patch 3498345, apply and provide the log files if it doesn’t fix the problem.”

Day 4 = Your Team: Patch applied, service now crashes immediately upon starting, support case updated, log files capturing the error shared.

Day 6 = Your Team: request status on case

Day 7 = Your Team: request status on case

Day 8 = Vendor: “Please uninstall patch 3498345 and download patch 3498350, apply and provide the log files if it doesn’t fix the problem.”

Day 8 = Your Team: First patch removed, second patch installed, problem still exists, support case updated, log files capturing the error shared.

Day 9 = Your Team: request status on case

Day 10 = Your Team: request status on case

Day 11 = Vendor: “Please download patch 3498351, apply and provide the log files if it doesn’t fix the problem.”

Day 11 = Your Team: update the case with “we are not even running that version of your software on our technology platform as already indicated in the case and thus we cannot install that patch.  Now what?”

Day 12 = Your Team: request status on case

Clearly, you and your team are burning hours on this issue and not making much progress and worse, not getting quality service from the vendor without any real resolution in sight.  Time to get the Vendor Sales Cheese involved:

Boss: “Hey, Vendor Sales Cheese, it is Boss from ABC Company.  Can you take a look at support case number 596784 we just opened?  I think we are getting the run around after the case has been opened for 12 days.  Heck, the last entry from your support asks us to install a patch that doesn’t even match our technology platform which is clearly needed to open the case in the first place.”

Vendor Sales Cheese: “This doesn’t sound right.  Let me look into this right away and get back to you.”

Boss: “By the way, we need this issue fixed otherwise it is going to be brought up in our license renewal discussions next week/month.  I can’t believe it is time to talk about new licenses already.”

Vendor Sales Cheese: <with even more urgency> “Don’t worry; I’ll get to the bottom of this straight away.”

The key to this whole exchange is to link the need for this technical support case to be closed to the next sales opportunity.  Besides being in the Vendor Sales Cheese’s positive relationship interest, now, more importantly, it is a barrier to a sales interest.  You now have a highly motivated sales person to put pressure on the technical support arm of the vendor’s organization to clear through the process morass and get the problem resolved as quickly as possible.

Finally, how can consistent tracking of vendor technical support cases drive beneficial pricing?

By keeping an accurate track of each poorly handled support case and creating a plausible story that suggests a consistent struggle with the existing support arrangement can pay dividends.  Those dividends may not be in explicit price reductions, but thee could be.  Rather, you may find you have leverage to get an improved support arrangement for the same price.  The Vendor Sales Cheese may be able to add in something similar to:

• Ability to use a “priority code” to have your tickets skip the first level of support and go directly to a stronger second tier
• Ability to use an inside “customer advocate” that you can drag into cases the minute they start trending negative or as soon as you open the case and want to impress upon the vendor the urgency or severity of the issue and need for fast resolution
• Improved SLAs which actually improve your ability to get cases routed to experts rather than just artificial improvements such as “response time for a new case from 24 hours to 12 hours” which look good on paper but only provide case acknowledgement slightly sooner and no change to resolution expectations

Thus, not usually direct dollars off the top, the ability to negotiate an improved support arrangement without impacting the price ultimately benefits you, your team and your company with lower overhead involved in getting product technical issues resolved more quickly.

In addition to these perspectives on achieving beneficial pricing, can anyone share additional techniques to link poor technical support case experiences to squeeze out the best pricing scenarios for your company?  Look for the next article to pick up where this article left off with more MidWestern IT perspectives on the topic of the “Product Versioning and the Upgrade Cycle” in the spectrum of vendor management.

How to get to the light at the end of the support case tunnel!

Whether you are working in a complete custom software development shop with little vendor interaction or a technology integration shop with vendor solutions integrated with other vendor solutions on top of yet other vendor solutions, you will have to manage vendor relationships to some degree as an IT manager in a MidWestern company.  This series looks at the complex arena of IT vendor management and offers some tips to make the arduous process a bit less arduous and possibly discover some additional benefits along the way.

Vendor Management Category

• How to Leverage Tech Support

In the previous article, we looked at techniques such as “Good Cop”, “Bad Cop” to drive more beneficial pricing for your company.  In this article, we take yet another angle at the Vendor Management topic with a look at how to leverage the vendor’s technical support for results and pricing pressure.

Bob the Engineer: “Hey, we are getting the FlimFlam backend service throwing error 57’s again in production?  Anyone want to bet me the phones are going to start lighting up with everyone concerned about system stability?”

Joe the Engineer: “Can’t we just restart the service quickly?  No one would know.  We know the error will go away for awhile.  It is probably a memory leak of some kind.”

<ring, ring>

Sally the Engineer: “Too late, the panic is already starting.”

Boss: “Can I have a volunteer to capture those log files and open a case with FlimFlam tech support?”

Sure, the temptation is there to immediately restart the service and hope the problem goes away.  Sure, once you start down the path of resolving this annoying yet not life threatening problem you have to see it all the way to resolution otherwise you are even worse off.  Worse off in that you have lost the “surprised and confused” defense option (see previous article on this defensive topic).  You can’t be surprised by a system error that you already opened a ticket with the vendor’s technical support.  Thus, how can you leverage this support problem into a positive of service quality and vendor beneficial pricing?

First step, you have to open a support issue or ticket with the vendor through the vendor’s product technical support process.  Make sure you follow the process of entering a support issue into the vendor’s product technical support system to the letter.  The last thing you need when participating in a “root cause analysis” meeting is to have the vendor brought in to the fray only to cause grief with a procedural miss step such as:

Vendor Support Representative: “Why did it take us more than 24 hours to respond to your trouble ticket?  Let me see … ah, your company has an Yttrium Support Contract.  But, in order to get that fast response, you need to flag your ticket with your Yttrium Support Resource’s name ‘Bob’.  According to the ticket history, it never got assigned by your engineer to ‘Bob’ …”

As you probably can imagine, the vendor support engineers probably have all kinds of internal as well as external SLAs (service level agreements) and metrics to meet.  Thus, the vendor support representative that gets assigned your ticket is looking for the fastest way to change the status of the ticket to stop the clock on their metric and move the ticket to a status of “waiting on the customer”.  Thus, be prepared for typical responses such as “please provide current version and patch level by running the <blah> command” or “please provide a system log file and a screen shot of the error”.  You might as well coach your team to provide as much of this information up front when creating the ticket to reduce the back and forth delay between your team and the vendor in order to get the vendor working on the problem as quickly as possible.

Now, as painful as it might seem or as much of a waste of time as it might seem, if the vendor support rep wants additional log information or they want your team to try a patch or updated product or component version, you need to follow through.  Sure, your lead engineer knows that the problem doesn’t magically go away with the mythical vendor software patch, but you have to still go through the process, otherwise:

Vendor Support Representative: “You are still getting error 57?  Let me check your case … ah, I see we asked you to try applying patch number 39483 to your system because that fixes the problem.  Did you try that patch?”

Thus, in the root cause analysis process you will be at a disadvantage for not following through the technical support ticket process and battling back with “we know that patch won’t fix the problem because we know …” is a challenging argument to win against peers that have no first hand confidence in your lead engineer’s expert analysis.

By completing the vendor’s technical support process, you should be left with steps to take to eliminate “error 57” from ever interrupting your team’s work again and reducing your face time in the root cause analysis process.  But what if you are making no progress in resolving the issue?  Here is where the Vendor Sales Cheese can be exceedingly handy.

Drag the Vendor Sales Cheese into the technical support problem

In addition to these perspectives on the importance of leveraging the vendor’s technical support process, what other experiences have people had to suggest this arduous process is needed to deliver quality services back to your company?  Look for the next article to pick up where this article left off with the role the Vendor Sales Cheese can play in driving efficiency and how to turn this whole situation around to drive beneficial pricing.