I read with some pain, but also a chuckle or two, CFO on-line’s sloppy spreadsheet practices article. I like to be organized, send files with naming conventions (source, date, and revision numbers), and like to assist the user of my excel files by using borders, bolded titles, and generally making them readable and printable. Amazingly, according to the article, most students and employees seem to simply send very poor looking documents that at first are unprintable. It’s simply work-creating laziness!

This creates an amazing amount of waste especially if you send your files to two or more people who have to fix your mess.

So here are four things everybody should do to help the world handle your spreadsheets:

1. Title your columns

2. Bold and italicize where necessary to make them easier to read

3. Wrap text (in comment fields in particular)

4. Make them printable

Apparently you will be one of the few who do these simple things and will probably be loved for it. Who knows, it could lead to a promotion.

Do you have any pet peaves related to spreadsheets? Share them! Are you a lazy spreadsheet user? REPENT!

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Very interesting issue popped up the other day as I was speaking with a food manufacturer. They are very high quality and taste is everything. They therefore cringe when talk of continual improvement comes along because they do NOT want to mess with the process of food preparation even though they are a manufacturer and not a restaurant. Efficiency, as it relates to continual improvement, can lead to what they call recipe “drift”. In other words, many companies have started small with taste and quality of their food as the key differentiator, only to inexplicably lose that taste edge as they became “efficient” in their manufacturing. This is a great example because everyone understands what happens when your mom’s great recipe is passed onto the next generation the first time.

This got me thinking about other manufacturing processes, of very high quality, that might be subject to inexplicable “drift”. Over-engineering is generally a problem of not listening to the customer. The other thought is to concentrate on waste and NOT efficiency. Waste seems to be a more palatable target for the firm that is hesitant to embrace the efficiency side of continual improvement. The other approach might be to simply separate what you apply continual improvement approaches to. In the case of a food manufacturer maybe packaging, distribution and planning processes could be targets for waste reduction. Always remembering what your customer must have to continue to do business with you reigns supreme.

Do you have a high quality manufacturing process that could be subject to “drift”? Does focusing on waste and not on efficiency help combat “drift”? Is it possible to introduce continual improvement into an organization in one area and not another?

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Becky at www.myorgnanizedbiz.com recently wrote about the value of calendaring your “biz” and your life. One thing that stuck out was her proposal to try a two week experiment that could change your life:

Becky: Try this for the next two weeks: each day, figure out the five most important things that you need to accomplish that day. Then schedule time for them on your calendar. Schedule it around meetings and e-mail and errands. Actually block out time where you concentrate on that task.

And when that time comes, work on the task. If you only have a 1/2 hour, then see how much you can get done in a 1/2 hour. Don’t answer e-mail. Don’t pick up the phone. Just stick to your calendar.

Didn’t get your task done in the allotted time? That’s okay. Did you make progress? That’s the important part.

My response to her post was to link this thinking to project management best practices, preparation, and actually doing more by doing less:

PM411: Becky- really like the “capacity planning” emphasis. Many are great at calendaring but end up going from one activity to the next being unprepared. I find that lack of preparation means a lot of what I call “stops, starts and redos” which waste a lot of time. We almost need to do less in a better way to cut down the bad multi-tasking- this is what I love to write about at http://www.projectmanagement411.com, i.e., the ways good project management practices enable efficient prioritization of projects and alignment with strategies- whether it be on a personal or business level.

How about you? Do you have examples of doing more by doing less? The Theory of Constraints (Goldratt) deals with issues like suboptimization, slowing down certain activities to actually get more done because of the alignment with rates of other processes- do you see an application for this in your office? Your Plant? Your personal life?

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Marketing message experts, driven by global warming fever, are more often linking green with lean. The Association for Operations Management’s annual conference brochure (no link but check out www.apics.org) indicates that “green is the new lean”. It can be if you use lean approaches, concepts and culture change.

Value stream mapping, a lean analysis approach, is used to link wasteful production practices to reduced energy use. Consulting firms and companies have put together excellent lean programs focused on reducing waste which includes energy. But to say that all of “green” is the new lean is to attempt to piggyback an ill-defined concept onto a tried and true approach. It’s probably more accurate to say that lean concepts can be tenuously linked to some green efforts.

How do you view lean? Is green the new lean? In what way?

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My fascination with how global warming and green messages are being used and abused by companies continues with a brochure advertising The Association for Operations Management’s annual conference (go to www.apics.org for more info). In it they promote a “learning path” called “sustainability/green” (my emphasis provided):

“Green is the new lean. Attend this Learning Path to discover how you can apply green concepts to your daily work. Examine the financial implications of sustainable purchasing. Evaluate models and methodologies for greenhouse gas emissions and “greening” your supply chain. Discuss how to develop a successful and sustainable plan for your company.”

The first time I read this my scam alert went off. Upon closer analysis, I found many more questions being raised than answered and possible misuse of terms. This is typical for green messaging which, for me, is comedic. As I’ve exposed in my post on how Prius’ are worse energy offenders than Hummers, feverish global warming marketing is often behind “green” concepts. Notice how that phrase (global warming) is being used less and less in favor of the nicer “green”.

I reserve my comments for the most interesting claim, “green is the new lean” for the next post.

What do you think? Are you having trouble figuring out what is “green”? Do you have a “green” plan? Is green the new lean?

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My post on Overcoming Language Barriers facilitated some very nice sharing of resources. Executives and managers! You need to familiarize yourself with this information; you will benefit through improved understanding of what your IT projects should be doing for you:

1. Excellent discussion on Domain Driven development from Sensei at ActiveEngine’s Cool Stuff post. This is more than a software development discussion- it deals with how to attack problems from a value perspective as you develop “language” between technologists and users. I suggest reading the transcript and paying close attention to Eric Evans’ thoughts- great reading.

2. Great, and thankfully brief, agile software development glossary from Alex Howard via Margaret Rouse at IT Knowledge Exchange. Agile projects have proven their value- get a leg up on this value-driven approach to software development.

As a teaser, here’s some of what Sensei and I had to say about the Domain Driven development discussion:

Sensei: you may be aware of a movement within agile called Domain Driven development. The basic idea is that you allow the “problem domain” to drive the efforts of your technology development and implementation…in Domain Driven development the starting point is the business processes and logic; the database and screens become secondary considerations.

However - and this is a big however - the domain must be defined in very clear terms….developers must be able to write, in English, what the problems are using the business units language. It is also critical that it is written clearly so that the intent can never be misunderstood. Some may argue that UML does this, but most customers’ eyes will glaze over when presented with Use Case diagrams. When the problem domain can be described succinctly in common terms, your problem solving sessions will be more effective.

My theme lately with the development teams I work with is to build a working vocabulary; that is, pick one term to describe a process and stick with that term. In these sessions I have had to literally ask “And the word we use to describe this process is …?” ….if you are jumping from problem to problem, or worse, from project to project, you need strong definitions to keep things straight.

Bob: I scanned the Eric Evans interview; easy and good reading for non-technical people to understand that software developers should want to work on VALUABLE system changes; i.e., very interesting in that he justifies domain expertise as enabling focus on valuable-to-the-business processes which can be much more complex than the other areas because they tend to be revenue producing and customer facing. I enjoyed the discussion about new system complexity requiring an “anti-corruption” layer to interface to the legacy system that could take as much resource as the new system. Also asking “why are you buying this” to get at where to focus modeling efforts. The multi-language (technical model, user model, reconciled language) issue sounds just like what happens when two people speaking different languages begin to understand each other- my last experience like this was in Korea. Excellent insight into the minds of software developers!

Do you have these types of discussions with your IT people? Is a software development process driven by the business processes that are of high value to the organization a good strategy? Why or why not?

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Intelligent Enterprise article “The Seven Pillars of BI Success” closed with a success story where agile software development processes came into play. 1-800 Contacts, winner of 2006 TDWI Best Practice Award, first aligned their BI project with a call-center-incentive project. The agile software development approach fostered high value innovative ideas to allow monitoring and improvement of agent performance mainly by giving the agents a way to monitor themselves. A large part of the success was attributed to the agile approach to collaboration with users:

Before picture: “Business would shout, and IT would do a fire drill and throw something out there.”

After picture: “Better communication with users and business leaders empowered to adjust priorities [through new governance model].”

As I said in my last post, BI and PMOs have similar requirements when it comes to the problem they are solving- decentralized, non-integrated projects and information that need to be prioritized and aligned with strategies. Interesting that agile processes facilitate the increased communication required for success in BI and PMOs.

The idea of empowering collaboration with agile approaches showed that IT can deliver something that gives business users value- mainly because they are getting more of what they want.

This strategic selection of the first “BI” project in an area of great interest to the company led to going down the road of leveraging information in other areas like marketing data mining and customer segmentation. IT is enthused by their successes and the users are enthused with IT.

What examples of IT/user collaboration have you experienced? Was it on a Business Intelligence project? Did agile software development collaboration processes come into play?

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Harvard Business on-line’s post by Tom Davenport seems to deal with culture when describing two extremes to strategy development and execution:

1. Strategic Engineering- strategy is an engineering exercise with employees being the cogs in the machine.

2. Strategic Anarchy- executives get out of the way of employee’s entrepreneurial and innovative energies.

He suggests that a reconciliation of the two must take place.

While I see it as a culture issue I also see it like one of the commentors as not so much a reconciliation problem but one of creating a flexible environment controlled by standardized business processes. Letting elements of anarchy prevail can lead to the dreaded “idea man” who never gets anything done while disrupting and delaying all intiatives; i.e., you need them but they must be controlled. Certainly, the “cogs in machine” view leaves employee innovation out of the picture.

The “flexibility” required means having standardized processes that enhance both innovation and strategy execution (e.g., strategy creation, linking strategies to tactics and projects to tactics, project acceleration/prioritization/alignment, others). High-value PMOs, or PMO-like organizations, are a crucial element, along with a governance board (or set of executives) that the PMO supports, for strategy execution.

How does your organization support innovation and strategy execution? How is this done without a PMO-like organization that supports strategic alignment, acceleration, and prioritization of projects?

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My post on the PMO relieving pain prompted a response by ActiveEngine about pain being crucial to gain people’s attention. Pain and uncovering it can be a multi-layered process seemingly without end- i.e., dealing with one problem inevitably leads to having to deal with others which can get discouraging. This is probably because the “swamp is being drained”. Read my response below:

Pain is an interesting phenomenon. One of the analogies used for improvement is “draining the swamp”. When you drain the swamp you start seeing a bunch of ugly rocks. In project management this means getting rid of the projects you don’t need by doing a project inventory and then getting rid of some more by eliminating those that don’t align with strategies. What this does is focuses resources on the remaining projects and the problems they have which now beg to be solved. Same thing when you do a lean manufacturing program and eliminate wasteful processes- the real problems (pain) start to emerge; you are now on the road to solving real problems and root causes, not just symptoms. Back to software development- do you find that excessive documentation can hide problems in the process? I’ve heard that documentation is the “excess inventory” of software development.

Do you have situations where dealing with one problem led to several others? Did you give up on a project because of this? Do you think it was because you were involved in the “draining the swamp” process and simply uncovering more, but better, rocks (problems)? I KNOW you’ve been there! Tell us about it. What you say could make the difference in someone completing or stopping their project.

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Margaret Rouse at IT Knowledge Exchange continues our conversation on PMOs. We started by talking about how a PMO relieves pain, then the PMO’s role in dealing with the dreaded mythical queue of projects, and now language barriers in agile software development projects .

My post on how previous experience with lean manufacturing might overcome some of the barriers in language and acceptance of non-intuitive concepts related to agile also comes to mind.

Here’s Margaret’s language issue followed by my response. Sensei at ActiveEngine! I expect you to get involved with this:

Margaret: I’m going to think more about how language remains a barrier to effective communication when the business owner is trying to articulate what they need to developers and the developers speak Agile.

Bob: Now you’ve got me thinking. I’ve been on the sales/project scoping side and the delivery side of projects. In selling and scoping my initial goal is to understand the client’s challenges in their terms and language . I try to resist the temptation to begin defining solutions until we have a solid agreement on what the problem is. Thereafter, as much as makes sense, the solution, and more importantly the value, should be in their language.

There is obviously a point where new terminology/concepts/approaches need to be introduced- the more we understand the business, industry, and the problems the better we will be at developing a conversation with common language to introduce these new concepts. This up front work and emphasis smooths out a lot of bumps in the road. Easier said than done because of all the temptations and distractions along the way.

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What we are really talking about is developing the “salesman” in all of us; these concepts and approaches are covered more in a book about value selling which relate my experiences selling and scoping large business solution projects (see below).

What challenges do you have in developing communication with your customer (internal or external)? How much does the customer/client have to know about your processes (e.g., agile software development) in order to benefit from them?

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