Project Managers. Need some?

Two or three years ago I received a mail that was supposed to be for business managers only.

One of these managers, by mistake, spread an excel file containing the list of employees who did not have an active contract at that time. For those not familiar with consulting, you have a salary but not a job.
I looked into the long list, ignoring names and focusing on the “skills” column.

Most of them were Project Managers, Project planners, Project analysts, Team leaders, Senior project coordinators.
The rest were young testers with little or no experience, young, underpaid and maybe beacuse of that, easier to reintegrate somewhere, somehow.

That was a real trigger in my mind; I looked carefully my business card and for the first time reconsidered my position of Senior Project Manager.
I realized that around me there were Project Managers everywhere.
Funny to say, but in all the projects I was involved in, there were several managers reporting to an “Initiative manager”. It sounded like an army of Generals, but no soldiers. We could prepare a perfect strategy, but for a sudden death.

In the consulting world, it’s quite common to start as a developer, or hardware engineer, or someone who really knows how to do something, and “growing” up to a project management role.
The fact is, that unless you are not managing business (and business is money), you are managing nothing, or barely yourself.
Project management meant doing properly, orderly and methodically the common daily routine.

Yes, yes, I can hear you complaining. You may say I do not know what I am talking about. But believe me, I have also studied those boring PM body of knowledge, and spent long time over expensive PRINCE books in glossy cover paper. I can define project planning and use software tools with ease, assign stakeholder roles and responsibilities, deliver project reports and risk assessment analysis.

I have spent hours in endless conference calls, wrote tons of mails and minutes. I led project to an end.
I have eaten, drank and breathed the so called PROCESS.
I am not saying it’s unnecessary, that’s not the point of this post.

I am just inviting you wondering how this can help you once you fall into an excel cell, in the “waiting for a project” sheet.
Come on, if you are a project manager, and I know you are a good one, just manage to stay away from that risk.

And from time to time, remove your pompous sign and just tell me the practical things you can do better than anyone else.

Good luck

Yet another bubble?

“

One question I get asked alot both inside and outside our industry is - Are we in a bubble?  Or the less subtle – We are in a bubble aren’t we?  I lived through a few bubbles last decade.  The DotCom bubble, where I was the naysayer – “This trajectory isn’t sustainable”.  To the Asian Crisis, when I was selling industrial park space in China, and clearly saw the over building, over spending, and money transferring happening across many Asian countries, and then lost my job because of it.  And I now find myself quite happily in the middle of Mobile Madness where I see similarities and differences to the past.  On one hand it feels like we are moving very fast now with insatiable growth, demand for apps, extreme competition and everyone wanting to get into the game.  On the other hand after being in the industry since ’95 – I’m so glad the rest of the world is finally catching up!

I chuckled recently watching a US morning show where the two women were going gaga over these ‘new’ QR codes, and I recalled how exciting they were for me 5 or so years back helping me get a free pass to a hot CTIA party.

I worked on ‘convergence projects back in ’95, and we are now seeing ‘transmedia’ truly happening.

In another aspect, the hunt for good web developers during the Dotcom days, had young high school kids demanding 100k salaries for html skills; and we are seeing similarities now with the so called ‘dirth’ of mobile developers , where iphone developers with 2 years or less experience are demanding and getting a higher price than seasoned engineers.

I think we will witness this instability for while as we play with business models, watch technologies and ideas form new mashups, and new skills become old hat.

As ever the ones who stay agile, flexible and creative will do well, from the small development company to the big operators and OEMs.  Besides – who needs sleep!

“

Source:

News from WIP May 2011: Innovation trumps sleep.  Always.

Caroline Lewko, CEO, WIP - www.wipconnector.com

The soloist

I have had a gift: I am a great soloist.
That’s not the gift; the gift is that when playing with others, I am good too and sometimes I am able to create great “improvisations” that, when followed by others, lead to great performances.
That has been a really good trait when I joined consulting; in fact I started with a small company and I was the first of few others in a brand new client environment.
Sort of a start up opportunity. Great times guys.
The consulting firm rapidly grew and a few years later joined a big consulting corporate; I became part of a big international orchestra.
Between me and the Director, several lines of chairs had been added.
I have been given a score (a “partitura”), that should be absolutely and mandatory followed. They called it Company Processes.
Of course, playing for a big International and well established orchestra is much much safer.
Are you sick or not at your best one day? Never mind. And you can be invited to play in theatres you’d never venture to imagine before.
But.
What about your nature of soloist player? That could become a potential issue for you now.
Think for a moment about that: when your mind spawns a quite lovely and powerful business idea, you have two choices: go with it, or ask your boss before.
Several people I met in my life always cried about that: “Damn, if only I hadn’t to ask my boss”.
I often discovered that they were using the “ask the boss” as an “excuse” because they got stuck in the responsibility crossroad. Should I go or should I ask?
Big firms don’t like players who don’t ask. They create processes so that you must ask for almost everything. And when you have to ask, options spread and things got stuck.
Consider this example. I wrote my boss to open a purchase order procedure so that one of my perimeter consultants could have his jurassic notebook replaced.
Well, instead of writing “please go buying a new notebook” he unfortunately added an option: “..or check if a RAM upgrade is sufficient”. Giving an option to the IT department led the procedure to stuck.
The IT guy have been forced to take responsibility for a decision.
Sometimes you are lucky and the IT guy is a soloist able to autonomously decide, but as part of a big orchstra with processes, he probaly chose the “ask the boss” path, and the procedure got paralized.
Now let’s go back to corporates and soloists: can these players resist in structured environment? And how should they behave?
Well, I believe there are two options. If you decide for the “ask the boss” safe approach, then you should stuck with it. Do always ask. Always. Never forget to do it.
But if you choose to be a free rider, then never alternate the approach, go always straight on your path, without hesitation.
If you fail, you’ll be kindly invited to leave the company. That’s the risk.
But believe me, showing you are able to decide and make choices is the only way to move forward, closer to where the Director is.
Make your choice then. Good luck.

Business data, analyze you should!

Look at this marketing strategy:

People buy netbooks, so give them some.
People buy iPhones,so give them some.
People like Apps,so give them some.
People didn’t buy our brand new OS equipped smartphone, so drop the project.
People didn’t buy our Apps, so drop the project.
People heard someone is working on something like a 4G radio technology? Go for it.
Wait, are they still talking about it? No? Thanks God, stop immediately the money leakage on it.

Did you see something familiar?

Don’t think Master Yoda is behind this logic, if you can call it so. It’s much more a “they move, you follow” approach. They stop? You freeze. It’s not that difficult to apply this logic, and the reason is that this is not a logic at all.
There is no intelligence behind this. The decision alghoritm is well defined: If… then…stop.

I know, I know, I should not judge as I don’t know the precise and complicated logic that stand behind Telco Operators marketing reasons.
Maybe I see just the final output. I just made a reverse decisions engineering. I don’t understand this is the common behavior in “hard times” for economics. Maybe.
I often  hear about the fact that operators are dump pipes because they cannot invest on innovation.Well, before investing in innovation, you definetely need to invest on something else first: business intelligence.

The opposite of “dump pipe operators” is “Business Intelligent Operators“.

You must decide your strategy for innovating, and make sure you correctly understood where market is going.
Once you can “feel” the wind direction, then you can decide how incredibly nice, modern and full of interesting stuff you can build your boat, and carry your customers to the right places, before anyone else.

I see huge amount of network data flowing, and being lost. They are just checked to prevent platforms failure, that’s it.
But right behind these numbers, and KPIs, there is what I call the “customer base genome”.
Their “BIO steps” is well written there. Yes, BIO, like “life” in greek, “Bios”. Like B.I.O., Business Intelligent Operators.

Can find any? I still do not see mathematicians, nor stats analysts, nor researchers around here.

But even more serious, I can’t find them in firms consulting operators, too.

Engineers, always just Engineers.

Marketeers following geek advices sounds a bit dumb to me. Better follow others choices. Better standing one step behind technology evolution.

And when someone smarter finally make a 5 years leap, they look at him, astonished, as if she was Master Yoda.

Please don’t make my mistake

of turning from Senior Consultant into Senior CGROHS Consultant.

..

…

….

CGROHS = Can’t-Get-rid-Of-His-Sarcasm

(Special thanks to my friend and colleague Paul, I would define him the “Gentleman”, the “Lord of Smart consulting”).

Self – esteem

It’s a fundamental trait for a consultant.  It’s essential. You can’t face challenges your client assigns you without that.

But it’s essential you believe that. You believe each of us is particular, and can be beautyful.

You bring your qualities with you, always.  No matter what others say.  No matter if they try to weaken you. You can play the game, standing till the end.

You decide.

Leadership

We all can change the status quo.

Unfortunately we prefer adapting.

We all could improve further a working system.

Unfortunately we don’t really care.

We are all unsatisfied for something and prefer it would be different.

Unfortunately we look at the guy sitting next to us.

If he remains silent, we keep silent as well.

…

But if someone impose us a change,

we tend to prejudgely resist.

If someone provides us the minimum requested,

we immediately think he should have done the optimum.

If the guy sitting next to us talks, and succeeds,

we think he does not deserve it and we would have performed much better,

if only THEY had asked us.

Any vision of the future for consulting in Telco?

In Italy, right after 9/11/2001, the consultancy in Telecommunication was just at the very beginning.

Big Consulting firms were focusing on hardware design, integration, product concepts or process management mostly in other industrial branches.

Operators used to sign one year contracts with service integrators, or partners, and consultants were just time&material software developers assigned to specific (low level) tasks.

Vendors and Equipment suppliers used to hire contractors for the most repetitive, boring and low level tasks.

Actually, as they first suffered from market crisis, they immediately dropped  these contracts, relocating their skilled resources to other tasks , still having too much internals to deal with. (Thus, for some of them, this meant a change from complex design Windows MineField game).

In this scenario, even the smaller company in the consulting business of Telco could really choose and pick up well trained, skilled resources

with very specific and deep knolwedge, willing to do something new rather than getting bored in front of a browser (no facebook at that time).

MANAGER or usually referred to as “manager”?

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/career/?p=1179

The above link will take you to an interesting article. In a nutshell, it warns people claiming (or pretending) to be “labeled” as MANAGER, that this is not just an “etiquette” matter, and a long list of “hard” things to do for being a real manager is presented.

Most of the points named are actually true, and definetely you are expected to be able to take decisions. The right ones, as you will not decide about the colour of the lunch towel but mostly about people and company future.

 I agree there is a common “I pretend to be a manager” syndrome. This occurs especially to guys in their late 30s, (most likely close to 40s).

Most of them have just grown older dealing the business as usual tasks some manager assigned them. Maybe they even spent some time on training. One course per year uh? Well, it is quite banal to state that is not enough and bla bla bla…

But no one names the list of things can really give you a chance to slowly turn into a leader, which is (imho) the requirement for becoming a manager.

I will list some. This is my personal list I scroll everyday. I also (sometimes) worry about the fact the time is running, but I think that the age limit (and in general ANY kind of limit) is only for getting the “label“, not getting the “core“.

1) Manage daily life stuff. Organize, coordinate and complete things you start (everything, at any level)

2) Do you have a manager? Then get inspiration. Do you think he/she is wrong? Ask him/her why he/she decided that way (of course only if you think it was not reasonable)

3) What differs you from managers? Just a matter of a couple of certificates? Get those certificates.

4) Staying at office same as long as your manager may not be a good idea. Is there any reason why you should spend more time at office then your peers (providing you don’t have more tasks of course, but be honest with yourself).

5) I KNOW that managers like being photographed with 3/4 cut and nice black dress, ties and crossing arms to that a very expensive watch is visible. Please don’t do that (even when you become a manager). And please, there are no good reasons why you should look so serious. Smile!

6) Managers don’t reply “mmh I don’t really know”. They say “I will carefully think about, let’s take some time to figure out what is the best way to solve this”.

7) Managers rarely forget. Almost never. I would say never. Yes, I am talking about commitments.

8 ) Everybody knows …little or nothing about a manager private life.

9) Managers move people and minds towards an idea. And everything seems so clear when they are  explaining.

10) Managers can manage. Always

Today’s lecturer: Giorgio Faletti

Giorgio Faletti has a jurisprudence university degree.

Giorgio Faletti made me laugh out loud for several years as a smart funny cabaret artist.

Giorgio Faletti sold millions novel copies. He sang at Sanremo’s Festival with success and produced albums, even composing and writing songs for several famous italian singers.

He performed acting in some movies. He ran famous car races, he played windsurf.

He keeps doing things, and he does them pretty good.

Is there something interesting we can learn from him? Something a bit deeper than “clever, lucky, politically entrusted etc…”

IMHO:

he started from the right talent to show in that particular period (if he had started trying to sell a novel he probably would be still knocking publishers doors

he entered the entire artists world, exploring it and creating a  strong relationship network

he used the network to propose himself on a different perspective

he never turned back to things he did good in the past

he expressed himself only by interesting “products / results” (and not by taking part to stupid reality show or other bullshits)

This is a good “how to…”  build a career example, no matter if his books are really masterpieces or if you cannot even name one of his songs…

Would you add something?