Infinite Shades of Grey

I recently moved to the left coast of Canada. Some say I was a staunch conservative supporter for every year since my 18^th birthday and eligible to vote. It is not true. I was a staunch conservative since early childhood after hearing my father’s lecture on the evils of liberalism after my older 18 year old sister pounded an NDP campaign sign into our front lawn. This year I was somewhat chagrined, after moving to Vancouver, to determine that the most common response to any question including the word Tory was “a what?”. That’s correct… the left coast includes political choices of left or really left only. The Tories are unheard of. Hence, trying to fit in… my new left coast venture … the

Systems Consultant Resource Union

The Systems Consultant Resource Union (SCRU) will represent the interests of IT workers in every imaginable IT consulting occupation from coast to coast to coast. We will advocate on behalf of all working IT consultants in many different ways – from organizing campaigns and rallies to lobbying federal politicians in Parliament to speaking out in the media and to business on key issues to representing Canada’s IT consultant’s labour movement internationally to developing partnerships with the community and other supportive groups. Our goals are simple – what we wish for ourselves we desire for all. That includes decent wages, healthy and safe workplaces, fair labour laws, equality rights, dignity in retirement, a sustainable environment and respect for basic human rights – here in Canada and around the world. We believe that IT unions are a positive force for democratic social change – and that by working together we can improve Canada for everyone. SCRU is not only dedicated to fighting for IT consultant’s  rights at the bargaining table, it’s equally committed to taking on economic, political and social issues that affect its members and their families in the broader community.

Sixty-hour or eighty-hour work weeks with no overtime or comp time, an iPhone hitched to your belt 24/7, mandates from clients who have no clue what you actually do – all for a job that could be outsourced to Bangladesh tomorrow. It is finally time for technology consultants to form a union and demand better working conditions!

After all, if Hollywood writers can organize effectively, you’d think IT consultants would have a shot. As with Teamsters in the transportation industry, when IT consultants walk off the job, everything comes to a grinding halt. Just see if your ATM card still works 24 hours after we walk off the job!

Our demands are not unreasonable.

Our compensation needs to be sufficient to include:

• a lease payment for a decent model of Lexus
• a respectable condo in a downtown location not more than 15 minutes commute
• a nanny for the kids
• before school, private school and after school care
• a twice-a-year “quality time” vacation at an all-inclusive tropical resort with special “we watch the rug rats while you play” programs
• free iPad, iPhone and all-you-can-download  iTunes with 3G subscription
• all divorce, legal and palimony costs incurred

Whoa… stop! I am getting carried away with this left coast thing. Yes …. reality check ….ultimately it is your value that drives whether you get the Lexus, the waterfront condo and whether you can build a life that is truly excellent eschewing the ‘pretend your kids aren’t there vacations” and iToys. (WP7 is better by the way)

Sorry, there is no SCRU. Just you and the value you deliver every single day. I guess I’ll have to be the sole Tory in BC for now.

* above rhetoric courtesy of the Canadian Labour Congress and the CAW web sites slightly edited

For the most part I write this blog to assist consultants to achieve the highest standards and best results possible in their profession. However I also feel great empathy for clients who accidentally engage a predatory consulting firm and even some empathy for those who do it knowingly. First of all, the predator does this all the time, breakfast, lunch and dinner every day. The client may only occasionally engage consulting firms and has yet to hone the necessary survival instincts to not be a main course dinner. Many of these feasts have unhappy endings.

“inadequate planning, ineffective design, and poor communication with users had produced a high-cost, incomplete system that did not meet the needs …” (go ahead and search for the text on BING.com (if you wish)

“signed a $180 million contract …was followed by a $32 million contract… cost eventually rose to $284 million. Employees experienced problems with the system and considered it cumbersome. At one point, it was down for 16 days.”

“made their money and left … the taxpayers o­n the hook for their outdated system. …expensive, inflexible, out of date  and cannot be modified to support future operations”. Somebody sold the government a pig in the poke, and left laughing all the way to the bank. That somebody was ..”

The stories continue to appear unabated.

The number one reason for overruns is lack of clarity in requirements, either technical or functional. This followed in close second by breakdowns in communication which drive issues with politics, collaboration and adoption. Coming in third and perhaps the most surprising is consultant resource availability, productivity and skill, the very reasons the client hired the firm in the first place.

So how do you even the odds?

Requirements.

There are 7 solid tests of requirements. They are:

• Stability – degree to which the requirements are changing and the possible effect changing requirements and external interfaces will have on the quality, functionality, schedule, design, integration, and testing of the product being built.
• Completeness – Missing or incompletely specified requirements, requirements that are not specified adequately to develop acceptance criteria, or inadvertently omitted requirements.
• Clarity – ambiguously or imprecisely written requirements
• Validity – requirements that do not reflect client’s intentions for the product, misunderstandings of the written requirements, unwritten client expectations or requirements
• Feasibility – difficulty of implementing a single technical or operational requirement, or of simultaneously meeting conflicting requirements. Also included is the ability to determine an adequate qualification method for demonstration that the system satisfies the requirement.
• Precedent – any capabilities that have not been successfully implemented in any existing systems or are beyond the experience of program personnel
• Scale – technical and management challenges including scheduling and response requirements, complexity of system integration, component dependencies  and impact due to changes in requirements.

You even the odds by being realistic about the current state and treating stable, complete, clear, valid, feasible requirements under a statement of work that isolates as many of these components from ones that are not. In most projects more than 60% of the requirements will fit this category and then there are the… other ones.

Sorry folks but you can’t fix price contract variable requirements. That’s just a fact. You can however limit your exposure to a runaway, with strong change control procedures and perhaps most importantly productivity warranties.  The biggest and oldest game in town for predatory consultants is to deep dive into the never-ending requirements analysis pool.  Timebox activities, set aside budget for change control  and keep control of the process. Offer incentives for timely completion and incentives for NON-USE of the change control budget. As an example, the consulting firm and the client work on elaborating requirements for a specific area. It was timeboxed at 50 person-months effort. 25 person-months was set-aside for change control and a cash-bonus of 50% of the pool was set-aside for hours not used.

Assume $25,000 / month / person. Initial requirements cost is  $1.25 Million.  $625K has been set-aside for change control.

Let’s assume the consulting firm is running at 30% Gross Margin.  The profit on $625K  would be $187.5K if they maxed out the change control.  The bonus for not using the change control budget would be $312.5K. You will complete it faster for $312.5K less  by setting up the contract correctly on the areas with weaker requirements where you can even the odds.

Communications

Communicate it all, communicate it now and communicate it to everyone including every member of the consulting firm. It is the only way to even the odds. Good PM’s know to keep communications logs but that is not what I am talking about. It is not just the contractual to and fro that needs to be communicated and logged. It’s everything!  Every change gets a CR no matter how small, every change gets its day in court (Configuration Control Board) and every resource on the team gets a copy of the change log on a daily basis with a note that says…. it is your personal responsibility to reply-all if any of these changes effects your workstream and it is not noted on the CR with an appropriate budget modification.

Yes, the amount of time spent each day (it could be 10%) on communication will seem high, but the consequences on not doing it are far beyond the 10% investment to do it. If you hide something from the team, expect to pay dearly for it.

Resource Productivity

Not all productivity lapses are as obvious as setting up a hammock on the office front lawn. There are actually 6 common dimensions to this potential problem.

• doing a lot of work that isn’t useful
• doing the work slowly
• doing the work with insufficient skill to be proficient or to turn out a quality deliverable
• not doing the work at all
• managing other people that don’t work either

               or my personal favourite

• being conference room furniture (CRF)

I was working with a large systems integrator with a 3 letter moniker and we had scheduled a requirements review meeting for a functional area. 22 people from the integrator attended. (all billing)

• 4 domain analysts
• 8 business analysts
• 4 application analysts
• 2 functional analysts
• 2 project managers
• 1 architect (application)
• 1 Program manager

The only thing missing was the partridge in a pear tree. So I started the meeting like this. “Ok if everyone could introduce themselves and state your role on the project and your role in this meeting and your deliverables from it …”

Panic ensued…none of them knew why they were there. Personally I like the smallest team possible with the highest calibre people and pay them well. I know people don’t use the term “conference room furniture” on their CV, but some of them really should. Clients need to be able to recognize furniture when they see it and not pay for it.

How do you even the odds.

#1 – Build a detailed and granular*  plan   and base it on accepted standards like the 16hr/FP metric (see my blog Art of Estimating a New Project) * (granular means no higher than 8 hours per resource. If you plan an 800 hour task it is NOT controllable.)

#2 – Fire any PM immediately that suggests a duration based plan can manage a project.

#3 – Time gets entered daily against  the plan with a minimum of 2 numbers:

• todays effort against the task
• time remaining to complete the task (ETC)

#4 – No one gets paid a dime if it was not logged in the master plan

#5 – Hire a full time Project Coordinator that tracks individual productivity against plan and

#6 – have a “3 strikes and you’re out” clause written into your contract with the firm or at a minimum “3 strikes and we don’t pay again until the productivity comes into range”.

Be tough, be fair but above all be vigilant. The  #4 reason reason for runaway project costs is lack of adult supervision.

Even the Odds…

Maureen (Mo) Hutchinson-Parker and John Parker are the proprietors of the Northern Lights motel in Wawa Ontario. I met Mo and John in 2000 when I started a  snowmobile adventure tour company (as a hobby…it’s a long story) and selected the Northern Lights as a stop on our tour.

Despite the economic trials of Northern Ontario since then, the NL Motel has prospered.  “Since we purchased this place, 14 Motels have closed from Wawa to Sault Ste Marie, and 5 towns north of us have all lost their only Hotels.  But, our guests seem happy that we aren’t smart enough to Bail like the rest of them. Haha We won an Amazing Hotel Award!” appears on their website 11 years after they purchased the motel. They are doing something very, very right.

This summer on a cross-canada trek to move from Ontario to BC, we had the pleasure of staying yet again at the NL. The rooms would put Conrad Hilton’s properties to shame for their cleanliness, but what makes the NL a must-stay is the personal and humourous touches in the rooms and the true graciousness of the hosts.

In the rooms you will find jokes on the bathroom walls, hair elastics on the mirror, photos of foxes sharing the wonders of snow removal and sarcastic stuffed bear heads (yay for the nature lovers) among the trophies in the breakfast room. In short, it’s a delight.  No it’s not a Fairmont, no it’s only view is of Highway 17 but year after year the patrons return because it is simply delightful to stay with Mo and John.

As consultants, we can learn from Mo and John.

If the motel was just brilliantly maintained, I wonder if it would still be around. It’s not the maintenance that does it, that just makes it equivalent to a Fairmont, Westin or Hilton. It’s the little things, the funny things that make it enjoyable and  that make it worth the extra 2 hour drive instead of stopping in Sault Ste. Marie.

Now I am not saying that you have to be a comedy-writer to keep your client engaged, but there is no harm in a little levity once in a while.( Only a leader as long as people follow shows my bunnier side)

Lighten-up, be engaging and every once in a while crack a joke. Your client will appreciate it.

One of the main reasons that client’s engage us is our knowledge and expertise in a subject matter area. We may perform brilliantly and complete the assigned work and yet the client may feel the work is not truly complete until “knowledge transfer” (KT) has occurred.

KT is a funny thing. It’s always desired, chronically underfunded and expectations are difficult to set early and impossible to set late.

“Before you leave, please transfer the sum total of all your knowledge to every member of my staff during your last four hours on Friday. I want each member of my team to be able to do everything that you do, as well as you do so that we will not have to engage another consultant in this area ever again.”

If you were writing a Use Case for Knowledge Transfer you would start with defining the Pre-Conditions. It would read something like this.

– The team members desire knowledge transfer

– The team members will commit sufficient time and effort (active participation) to knowledge transfer

– The team members are at a technical level of proficiency where knowledge transfer can be done as an increment to the foundational knowledge they already have

– There is sufficient time and budget to complete the knowledge transfer activity including the preparation of materials to complete it

– There is a mechanism in place (test?) to ensure that foundational knowledge is at the right level prior to knowledge transfer.

– There is a mechanism in place (test?) to ensure that knowledge transfer was successful after the activity

– The team members will “get it”.

This is why KT is such a tricky area and why it is critical to set realistic expectations with your client right up front. In 25+ years of consulting, I have never seen the above pre-conditions all met before a KT exercise is undertaken.

At the end of an engagement you are effectively transferring ownership for the area in question to the client’s resources. You are also doing it with less-than-perfect knowledge transfer and subsequently should not be surprised when the client team rejects the concept of being held accountable for future results.

So what’s the best way to deal with the resistance to adopt the new ownership responsibilities?

First of all you need to influence (please see my blog on  Mastering the Art of Influence )  your client that ownership and accountability is a process not an event that occurs 60 seconds after you walk out the door. It should progress from none to limited to moderate to full accountability over time and you should pre-define with your client what the checkpoints are at each stage to move on to the next. Eventually, the client’s team will be fully accountable and the process to get there should be communicated and discussed by the client and you with the client’s team to make sure they understand they are not on the hook day one.

The best way to gain accountability and ownership in the client’s team is to set expectations in advance that knowledge transfer will be incomplete,  that time is required in role and doing new activities before true ownership can take place and to discuss what (if any) role you may have on a “phone-a-friend” basis to support the team members while they take on progressively more responsibility over time. No one wants to be responsible without the self-confidence to do the job and it takes some time to gain that confidence.

“When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.” – David Brin

It’s your job to temper that view a bit….

The longest project I participated in was 4.5 years long. I started on the project a number of months after it was initiated and led the project team for the next 3.5 years.  In 3.5 years a lot of things happened:

• people got married
• people messed around
• people got divorced
• babies were made
• people got chronically ill
• people died
• people got promoted
• people got fired
• people got arrested, convicted and jailed and
• (oh yeah, we built a big system).

Lives, relationships and people changed through the passage of time and events that happened.   Long term projects are not the slightest bit immune to forces that come to bear on our society  and in fact may amplify them.   The cartoon above I borrowed from the Globe and Mail newspaper on Nov. 2nd.  The caption reads “The contract is very clear, you’re free to go once the project’s completed”. Fortunately slavery was abolished some time ago and we can now choose whether we continue in role or find alternate engagement. The cartoon does however reflect a common misconception that locking someone in for the duration is the preferred solution. I am not so certain.

A consultant with a resume that shows daisy-chained 30 day contracts on big projects is immediately suspected by a prospective employer as either a fraud (it took 30 days for them to figure out the consultant didn’t know anything) or a jumper (work wasn’t to the consultant’s liking so they bailed). The other extreme is the consultant that signs up for the long haul multi-year projects. Its impact on your resume is also not without danger. If that’s you, you will do most of your work in targeted areas, but big projects have ebbs and flows and you may get some tasks that are in other areas. We can call these “off-strategy” or your choice of a four letter colloquial term that is more colorful (_ _ _ _ jobs).  The challenge with long term projects for the consultant is delivering high value to your client every single day. You are not an employee, your only value is the value you bring to your client on a daily basis. So to answer the question that is the title of this blog, one answer is certain:

When is it time to leave?

It is time to leave when the value you are contributing to the client falls below their definition of excellent value for the money invested in you.

If you are delivering on tasks that are below your capability, that you know the client can find alternate (and cheaper) resources to do the tasks, it’s time to move on. Your client may want you to stay, but ultimately it will end badly. Sooner or later the client will look at the value and be disappointed in their investment. Consuming available budget is not the goal  ( I make no apologies to time-sheet stuffing consulting firms), delivering value is. (See my blog on just because you are necessary does that make you valuable?)

This almost never happens on short projects, as the mandates are precise, deliverables clear and expectations are set appropriately. On the mega-project, things change.(see above) The dynamics will always cause peaks and valleys as dependent tasks exert control on schedules and assignments. Constant vigilance on your delivered value will ensure that your clients are always satisfied and that your track record proclaims only high value work. Bottom line is if you’re a premium consultant you simply can’t be caught up doing the commodity jobs. Sure, chip in to be a team player once in a while but on an on-going basis, you will make yourself a commodity player and it will be fatal to your client relationship and impair your track record.

Put yourself in a customer position for the moment. Imagine you have hired a master carpenter to build a new mantle for your living room fireplace. He charges $150 an hour for his time.  One day you have a new carpet installed in the living room and you come home to find the master carpenter vacuuming the bedrooms of your house.  His reply “The installer’s were in the way, so I couldn’t work, so I thought Hey since you’re paying me… I’ll do the carpets”

Now there are two ways you can react to that.

• Hey what a cool guy!    or
• Hey I just paid him $600 to vacuum my carpets! What’s with that?

What’s your reaction? If you respond like me it would be:

• I am not paying you for that
• If you couldn’t do the work I expected, you should have told me
• I‘ve got other tasks around here I could have used your skills on that are better suited
• Please just go back to the shop and work on something else until they are done

So if on a long term project you find yourself about to proverbially “vacuum the carpets”,  you need to have a discussion with your client about it. It’s time to leave.

Have you ever spent time with a new puppy? Throw it a ball and it will chase it instinctively. Throw a different ball now and  it will lose interest in the first and chase the second. You can amuse yourself for minutes watching the pup zoom all over the place in search of the next speeding ball. When you create a project or architecture vision, it’s like that first ball. You lob it into the air… and then more balls will start flying in from other directions.  Some of the people who were quiet during the development of the vision will suddenly find their voice and alternate ideas once the cement trucks arrive to lay down the foundation for the new system. While the foundation may support the new suggested changes, should you allow it or should you protect the original vision and guard against disruptive change?

I believe the answer is Yes. Yes you should allow it and Yes you should protect the vision against disruptive change.

Every general contractor in the world who does private residential builds would reply the same way to the following question. “What’s your biggest challenge?” The “Homeowner” would be the ubiquitous reply I am sure. The architect has drawn the plans, the foundation is in, the frame up and the homeowner decides the kitchen is just too small and it needs to grow by 100%. Good GC’s know this happens on every build to some extent and plan for it with a specified budget, included in the costs and the schedule. We can and should emulate that approach.

Yes we have a project or architecture vision but we should also anticipate and budget for unexpected change.

Now a little later in the cycle the homeowner decides that the master bedroom really needs a walkout deck and a giant patio door on the exterior wall. “I’m sorry, but that’s a load bearing wall and we can’t do that” is an acceptable response to the client. They understand what can’t change if there is a good reason.

Yes we have an architecture or project vision and yes we need to protect the structure that makes the entire solution deliverable within the constraints established by our client. (Normally time, money and risk are near the top of the list)

Now the last part of the situation is where the balls that are being thrown don’t ever seem to stop. That’s not ideas or change, that’s just a mischievous dog owner who takes pleasure in watching the pup exhaust itself. If so, it’s time for it/you to take a break or learn how to bark.