The miracle of the 9 moms

Everyone knows (or so I believe) that it’s not because you have 9 women, you can now have a baby in 1 month. This sentence is commonly used in management books, and it aims to explain that sometimes, it’s not just more people we need, or that all problems are solved by adding more people. But, truth to be told, when the budget allows it to, this tends to be the solution applied. And then all the team is TBB because the results don’t get there as expected. No shit, Sherlock!

Sourced from https://leaderandmanager.blogspot.com/2015/07/what-if-workplace-is-out-of-controlout.html

A practical example, we were late in a project, the complexity was big, so as the scope and there were not many of us. We’ve stated that this was an issue, but there was no budget so we had to live with it. Also, because there was not a lot of pressure at the time, the existing resources were not “killing themselves” and the status was: yes, we are late, but we’re waiting on it. The new year came, and it seems all changed. Suddenly we were in a rush, new resources came in, and a week later they were “shouting” (don’t forget we live in a political correct world, so unless it’s panic room, there was no real shouting, except that we had a shit list and we were red. Ahh the shame of having our team red! No one wants to be red, neither-less in the shit list for the late topics (with a clear TBB).

“If you now have more resources, why are you late?” The problem was not only a matter of numbers. Hard to believe, yap, it was more than that. At the time there were many things, such as we require time to bring the new resources up to speed, as they were not and our ass was being beaten, we ended up doing it ourselves (which added a bit more delay). Secondly, after a bit analysis we found out that we had a bottleneck, which was the approval process. The last 5% to achieve took almost as time as the rest of the 95%, because there was just 1 person doing so. We managed to delegate to other people in his team, but since they were the SME (subject matter expertise) we couldn’t just bring more people in (but what about bring more people to this role?…. ahhh, if it was all about the numbers, it would be dead easy, won’t it?) Also, we were not updating the trackers, because we were focusing on doing the work. But again, because we measure up everything in numbers and many times, numbers alone, the status report was not accurate.

So yes, if things are not going according to plan try to analyse why not before just deciding to bring more people in or more money. Maybe the solution required can be from a combination of different solutions, or even very easy and cheap to solve. Try not to get blinded by the numbers, and by what it seems to be the obvious.

Funnily enough, there was a point were we had so many resources, that we ended up with more grey areas, the “no one’s land” topics because it’s also easier to lose control of a bigger topic. Moreover, more people means, more trackers to get the numbers, and more trackers also means we need more admin, which then think about more trackers…. you get the picture, I hope.

FYI, you’re the new TBB

FYI, You’re the new TBB

…. obviously in the political correctness world we live in, this is not how you describe it. There’s other nice acronyms such as SPOC (single point of contact), SPA (Single point of accountability)… among others, but what it really means is that you’ll end up being the one blamed if anything goes wrong with the topic you’re responsible for. Or, if things go really wrong, the one to be beaten.

Every manager wants to have some sort of control, and what better to control than to delegate some topics to the people in your team. It’s also a good way to motivate the employees and empower them. Break a big topic in small chunks and then nominate who’ll be responsible for which topic, with a clear (is it always so clear?) deadline and a responsible. It seems a good practice and indeed it is, but… ah there’s always a but. What ends up being missing is clear expectation management. If you delegate something to a person, need to clarify proper expectations: what is the topic about? what is the scope? by when it needs to be done and how it will be reported. There’s always a tracker, a nice little excel tool to include the numbers and make everything look green, but what about being a bit more specific and give more information?

Normally ends up being: “FYI, you’re now the SPOC for this topic, thank you” a week later…. “is it done? why is it not done? Have you updated your status?” Seriously, why does common sense fails so much? In a parallel universe, the boss would have said something like: “you’re now the SPOC for this topic, which means I expect you’ll report the progress of this topic to me on a weekly basis. You are responsible for contacting the relevant people that you need in order to deliver it. This piece of work is expected to be completed in 2 months time, for the next 1 week I expect to have the draft design ready for review.” Is this so hard?

Seriously, the time I spend chasing (oh yeah, I’ve got to say I love this word by now), for information is unbelievable. “You’re asking me to report about this topic, but what exactly do you need and how does this fit in the big puzzle of things”? Then after a couple of calls / emails I get a bit more information out. I can’t say I’m late, because I didn’t got the information I needed in first place, or that I spend too much time trying to get it. I can’t say that, because that, even though if true, is not the political correct thing to say. If I’m late, never-mind, I’m the one to be blamed…