It’s hard to remember when to use its and when to use it’s. One means it is or it has and the other make it possessive. But which one is which?

The Grammar Police force has its own typo-sniffing dogs. Image: sxc.hu

• It’s should be used to refer to it is or it has. It’s a contraction.
• Its should be used as a possessive form of it. Its lack of apostrophe is important.

How can you remember this? It can be tricky. Here’s how I do it:

It’s (it is or it has) uses an apostrophe. In contractions like don’t and can’t use the apostrophe to replace a letter. The same is true for it’s. If you’re writing the word to mean it is or it has, you’re replacing a letter with an apostrophe. When you’re making it possessive, you’re not replacing any letters.

You can see other Grammar Police posts by heading to this page.

I read the summer reading guide for IT pros on CIO Insight. It reminded me of the days I worked for AT&T Solutions, an “insightful” consulting firm within AT&T that picked “futurizing” as it’s mantra. We couldn’t get out of the starting blocks because of all the “ideating” that was going on. We read ALL the books but they were about as bad, in terms of practical action, as the organization I was a part of.

One book CIO Insight missed, which has completely changed my thinking about the highest impact actions a company can take, is Advanced Project Portfolio Management and the PMO by Gerald Kendall and Steven Rollins. My brief conversations with Mr. Kendall reveal him to be the real deal with excellent experiences and success. His use of Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints as it applies to governance models and PMOs is groundbreaking and should be considered by every company, large and small. Gaining control of selecting, eliminating, and prioritizing projects along with aligning them with company strategies, using the approaches in the book, WILL make an impact no matter what kind of organization you belong to; this is evidenced by the numerous case studies from organizations as diverse as manufacturers and counties.

Much of my writings stem from seeds planted by that book- check out my Choosing the Right PMO Vision series. There you will see how to establish an approach and criteria for selecting a PMO vision that can change your company. Keep in mind that a PMO can be very small depending on the need. So, you smaller companies can also benefit from how to connect your strategies to the projects you do!

This is a MUST READ for all IT AND C-level executives.

Have you got a book that has changed your business life? How about your personal life? I just about recommended Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy because of it’s excellent, practical applications to business.

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I have some great, reliable, commentors. One of them is Alan Wilensky. Commenting on my June 7th post ““Fewer, More Successful Projects”: The New HP” he gave one of his great personal examples of an IT organization run amuck. Here is his comment (edited by me) and my response:

Alan W: A while ago, I was a bidder on fair sized contract with a specialized mfr. They had a BIG IT plan, SAP, SCN, you name it. They were hostage to their IT man, he had them seduced and bought in to the tune of 30 projects (none fully implemented) and 400K in licenses (way more than a company this size needs in a Webbiz20 services era).

I did not get the [deal], because I spoke the truth - but somehow, I think that my honesty will get me back in. Here is what I said while trying to get this seven figure (career high for me) 18 month re-engineering project:

“Dear Colleagues, you have over 30 individual related and unrelated integration and installation projects….I ask you to total the months and items of completion…”

Silence. Then the excuses from the people running the project… well, Wilensky, what would you do about it?

“I am glad you asked. Cut at least 75% of the unfinished projects, make what you have work in 90 days or less, and move to hosted CRM and billing”.

Then, after I delivered the print out of my analysis, I met the CIO in private….“Your company can’t finish one project and the consultants and internal IT steering [you] towards these complex packages are making the excuses seem plausible”.

PM411: This is very typical in my experience. Hopefully, you opened some eyes above the CIO also. This points directly to the need to get a PMO operating OUTSIDE of the purview of the IT folks. There are just too many factors that support such a multi-project result when IT is guarding the henhouse.

Alan’s candor is exactly what many companies need right now. Many are attempting to do projects that have nothing to do with strategies. The organizational structure and culture for project selection and management doesn’t exist at a broad enough level.

Do you have some stories of excess projects that aren’t getting done? Share them!

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My post on comparing HR and IT as service parts of the organization once again brought out the best in my readers. Miki at Leadership Turn gave her usual, and appreciated, “words-that-we-would-like-to-say-but-don’t” in regard to a McKinsey Quarterly’s quote “only HR can translate a business strategy into a detailed talent strategy…”:

“That has to be the stupidest statement that ever came out of McKinsey! I spent 25 years as a recruiter and another decade teaching line managers better hiring skills and in most instances HR has neither the knowledge nor the business acumen to detail staffing needs for any project, tech or not. HR’s preference for controlling staffing budgets has more to do with amassing organizational power than with its ability to translate strategic initiatives into action. Staffing needs and talent acquisition, motivation and retention is the province of line management at every level.”

As usual, she hit a home run that cleared the bases for Sensei at ActiveEngine to make an excellent point about how useful HR CAN be in the area of working with different cultures:

“Certainly HR has evolved away from the traditional approach of “helping employees fill out forms”. For companies going international HR is indispensable in regards to working with other cultures. Generally they become the focal point for training people how to communicate with new team members with not only different backgrounds but with different cultural frameworks.”

What is curious here is how an organization like McKinsey can move so far in one direction with it’s advice without considering the limitations inherent in the mission and capabilities of an area. Clearly the three of us have a pretty clear perception of HR’s role based directly on our experiences. Why is a major consulting firm so interested in pushing HR out of it’s box?

Does your HR department get involved in executing strateges? If so, which ones and what role do they play? Do you agree that HR should stay within the limits imposed in this post? I’d like to hear from some HR managers, directors and VPs!

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The “Making Talent a Strategic Priority” article in The McKinsey Quarterly referred to applying customer segmentation principles to designing different talent management approaches for segments of the workforce. This starts with recognizing that it’s more than just “top talent” that needs this kind of attention:

“The impact of top talent on corporate performance hasn’t diminished, but what’s much clearer today-not least, as a result of the expansion of knowledge work-is that organizations can’t afford to neglect the contributions of other employees….Experience suggests that an exclusive focus on top players can damage the morale of the rest of the organization and, as a result, overall performance.”

The idea is to develop employee value propositions applying segmentation principles to the process, i.e., customer segmentation applied to employees! The problem so far is that most organizations only develop one value proposition as if all employees were the same:

“Ten years ago we stressed the importance of defining and communicating a powerful employee value proposition, which is senior management’s explanation of why a smart, energetic, and ambitious person might want to work for one company as opposed to another. While many organizations now use such a proposition, most have only one.”

These value proposition projects will require great collaboration between HR and department managers as they fulfill the tactics required to support company talent management strategies. The key is to clearly communicate why talent management supports other strategies thereby making it an extremely valuable process to standardize in the organization.

How many different segments of employees do you think you have? Can they be categorized/organized to reduce the amount of value propositions required? How do managers feel about working with HR to do this? What should be HR’s role in the process?

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The McKinsey Quarterly article on “Making Talent a Strategic Priority” has spawned a lot of reaction on my part. One statement seemed to lay the talent management function firmly in the lap of HR:

“Only HR can translate a business strategy into a detailed talent strategy: for instance, how many people does the company need in order to execute its business strategy, where does it need them, and what skills should they have?”

This got me thinking about how IT interacts with the organization on it’s projects. I’m not a fan of expanding the role of a CIO to be CEO-like. The same thing holds true with HR. I’ve personally gone through the cycle of having an HR VP suddenly gain power and importance because of this logic- it was more disruptive than helpful because the HR VP wasn’t equipped to handle CEO level issues.

Rather, ALL executives need to become more HR/talent management savvy in order to translate business strategies to talent management strategies. To simply put the burden on HR to do this is similar to the move toward having the CIO attempt to prioritize projects across many departments without a PMO and executive governance board- very difficult, if not impossible, to do.

The question of where and what skills are required is deeply ingrained in the hiring manager- the task of HR should be to collaborate with the hiring manager to determine and fulfill the hiring manager’s needs, much as an excellent IT developer collaborates with users to fully understand what they need.

Do you see parallels between how IT and HR projects are handled in an organization? What is an HR “project”? Does a VP of HR and CIO have to have CEO-like capabilities related to determining and executing strategies? Can a PMO and governance board arrangement play the same role in HR talent management projects and IT projects? Frankly, I’m new to the HR discussion- those experienced with HR functions, help us out!

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The McKinsey Quarterly article on “Making Talent a Strategic Priority” conducted a survey of 98 business/HR leaders that yielded obstacles to effective talent management; it’s amazing how well these “obstacles” correlate with obstacles to any organization wide effort like project management and PMO processes- the top three were:

1. Senior managers don’t spend enough high-quality time on talent management

2. Organization is “siloed” and does not encourage constructive collaboration, sharing of resources

3. Line managers are not sufficiently committed to development of people’s capabilities and careers.

Often HR is given the “talent management” task. However, the “obstacles” point to talent management being a function performed by ALL management. The obstacle that really jumps out for me is item 2. followed closely by item 3. “Siloing” can be overcome by putting together collaborative “learning events” where executives present and discuss their organizations and challenges with each other. ALL strategic issues, including talent management, should be covered as to how the entire organization can work together to improve and execute strategies.

Manager’s who aren’t interested in “development of people’s capabilities and careers” aren’t really managing at all; it’s possible that the organization has been promoting the wrong people into management positions simply because talent management is not a priority.

Do you see the same obstacles to talent management in your organization? Have you seen other obstacles? How have you overcome them?

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A McKinsey Quarterly article on “Making Talent a Strategic Priority” dealt with lack of talent management especially when more knowledge workers are required:

“Companies like to promote the idea that employees are their biggest source of competitive advantage. Yet the astonishing reality is that most of them are as unprepared for the challenge of finding, motivating, and retaining capable workers as they were a decade ago.”

While reading this it dawned on me that talent strategies lead to talent tactics and talent projects just like any strategy-tactic-project link in the organization. They went on to describe how talent management is perceived by organizations:

“Too many organizations still dismiss talent management as a short-term, tactical problem rather than an integral part of a long-term business strategy, requiring the attention of top-level management and substantial resources. One European COO lamented recently. “Talent management puts you under strain because it stops you from doing what you are rewarded for.”"

This idea of “reward” is important but should not be the focus; executives must see talent management as something that will give them value towards accomplishing their mission. I really think it is more of an educational, vs. reward, challenge: executives need to reevaluate and learn how important and valuable it is to attract, motivate and retain talent at all levels AND link these “projects” to their strategies.

How does your company perform the “talent management” process? Is it a process for a select few in the organization?

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Continuing from yesterday’s post , another great point made in David Brumby’s Computerworld article “Risks Pay Off in Brand Building ” relates to how we evaluate projects. Clearly, he makes the point that financial criteria can hurt innovation; a better approach is to evaluate how a project contributes to strategies:

“Some of the most innovative ideas I have seen would never get off the page if they were decided solely on financial criteria like payback period. For example, we initiated a centralized program services office to manage how we did projects across the company. We knew we would need to demonstrate to the business that the disciplines of project management would enable the business to achieve better commercial results . But if we had to use normal business case metrics to justify it, it might never have gotten off the ground.”

Finally, Brumby makes a point of the need for IT to “market” it’s potential projects. This aligns with my thinking that people doing projects and running PMOs must develop “selling” skills, especially when it comes to getting traction for ideas and innovations:

“One way to get your message across is to use every available resource on your team to help. I achieve this by creating very simple ‘elevator scripts’ that every IS staff member who may get an opportunity to market an idea can pass along. These are messages that people can readily identify with an idea. You need one or two paragraphs that you want not only the CEO to remember, but that even the desktop support engineer will internalize and be able to bring up when he interacts with a business partner. Consistency and simplicity in message will do the trick.”

I would rather see all of these suggestions (develop commercial instincts, challenge financial-only criteria, market internally) implemented in a PMO-like organization that deals with ALL (IT and non-IT) projects. But many times you have to improve based on what you have, and the IT organization can be a great place to start.

What are you doing to increase your ability to market and sell within your organization? Do you challenge financial criteria as the only way to evaluate projects?

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You may know by now that I am not a fan of increasing the CIOs role. Rather I see tremendous value in centralizing non-IT executive control of projects (IT and non-IT) supported by a PMO-like organization. Even so, I’m am NOT saying I’m against CIO role improvement; what I am saying is that other executives need to become more familiar with what IT is doing, and the projects they are working on, as they relate to company strategies FIRST.

Darin Brumby deals with the CIO role as a “brand” (i.e., “what do you think of first when you hear CIO”) in his Computerworld article “Risks Pay Off in Brand Building”. Interestingly, he focuses on developing a CIO’s commercial instincts:

“One of the ways we become top performers as business strategists, transformation experts, effective managers of people and masters of our IT domain is to hone our commercial instincts. We should be good at finding money-making opportunities.”

The reality is that many projects originate from the IT area, and they tend to be internal, infrastructure projects. “Commercial” projects, or those designed to focus on the external, customer-facing, demand development side of the business, are often not emphasized enough. The result can be continued development of internal capabilities with no demand creation to take advantage of them. My posts on how a PMO can impact marketing strategies, developing a compelling marketing offer, and an example of such an offer in a consulting firm, emphasis this.

More on Brumby’s article in my next post.

Do you have, or are you recognized as, a CIO that has “commercial” instincts? Why is this important? Should “commercial” projects reside in the IT area? Is it better to have a PMO take on these types of projects?

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