Fire Fighting

Years ago a colleague told me that if you clean up the problems in your organization and generally set things on the right path, then you run the risk of disappearing and not being recognized or ‘worried about’ much until something breaks or there is a crisis.   There is a really great post on this subject with the title of Why is Fighting Fires More Valuable Than Avoiding Fires which I want to recommend.  The article talks a bit about the current Toyota problems, but it applies all over the place.

In IT and in all parts of the Enterprise, we need to develop ‘eyes’ to look for the people who are holding it together quarter after quarter.  People and teams who:

1. keep us out of trouble,
2. who are consistently delivering results in a quiet fashion,
3. who are researching new ideas and making ongoing, continuous improvements and
4. those who are just making good things happen month after month.

It is way too easy to run from one fire to another and over look these good people who don’t let the fires happen in the first place.

Something to think about.

 

Visualizing Connections

There is an interesting tool for Twitter that visualizes connections between twitter users.    It is called Mention Map and builds a visual view of where an account is mentioned in the twitter universe.    There is another tool that grades how influential you are in the twitter universe and it is called coincidentally Twitter Grader.  On Twitter Grader I got a grade of 94 and who knows what that means.   In both cases the tools help you visualize your connections and influence to those around you.

While Twitter and these tools are  just a proxy for influence and connections, it is important for us in enterprises to try to better understand influence and connections.  This might include those people in the organization who are the ‘goto’ people on project after project and those people who seem to keep teams focused and calm in the midst of the storm.   How about that person at work who is a good counselor and is well respected by many?   Relationships between companies/organizations are also important as those people who can connect with your customers and suppliers in a closer fashion are very valuable to the company.

The Connectors in Gladwell’s book Tipping Point:  How Little Things Can Make A Big Difference talk about this a lot and make some great points.  There are also great points in much of the Collaboration dialog on the internet and in books.   It is also talked about in the books like Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age and Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means both of which a read several years ago.   I especially liked the Linked book.

I think we are moving in the direction of much better understanding of this in the workplace in the coming years and there is likely to be some interesting things developed by forward thinking companies.

 

Checklists

One of my new favorite authors is Atul Gawande.  He is a surgeon who has written several very interesting books.   Last summer I read one of his earlier books called Better:  A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance and I wrote about it on my other blog.   This past week I discovered he had a new book out called The Checklist Manifesto:  How to Get Things Right and I’ve already downloaded it to Kindle and read it.  I actually stopped reading the giant new Stephen King novel 20% of the way in to read this one and now I’m back to the long Stephen King journey.

This new book is also excellent and highly recommended.   It is about the value of having checklists to cover important things in our operations.   It is about applying this kind of discipline to many of the things we do in the critical systems and operations around us.

There is a significant amount of time discussing the role of checklists in the cockpit of airplanes and how the airline industry has a culture of checklists to cover all kinds of boring and rare but critical events.   There are pre-flight checklists to cover the mundane that the crew needs to make sure to cover every single time and there are checklists when warning lights go off, engines fail and planes lose pressure.   When bad events happen with airplanes the industry quickly studies what happened, learns from the event, and then issues new directives and in many cases new checklists as appropriate.  The books talks about a door failure event on one flight that cost many lives that was studied, checklists were modified, and when the same event happened on a similar flight, the crew handled the problem differently and landed safely.

Other parts of the book talk about developing simplified checklists to use in the operating room before the procedure begins, before the first incision and after surgery completes.   One of the most interesting learnings was for everyone to introduce themselves to one another to make sure that the team that assembles in the operating room at least knows each others names and takes a simple step towards being a team.   One of the other steps is just asking if anyone has any concerns about what they are getting ready to do.   The author talks about many times where these kinds of discussions uncovered a piece of information that one person in the room knew but others didn’t.

Examples from the financial worlds are also discussed in one of the chapters.

This same thinking should apply in our data centers, our network security operations, and in our software production and quality control processes.  When we start a conference call, we should make sure everyone knows who is on the phone.  When we have complicated processes that we are managing and changing, we should develop checklists and use them.  When we have failures, we need to learn from them and modify instructions for the next time.  We need to have this kind of culture that is learning and adapting.

I very much recommend the book and will be looking for any future writings by the author.

I should add that this is highly related to the fast collaboration ideas and communication ideas that are being discussed all over the place.

 

Fire Yourself

I sure like this post on HBR about taking a fresh look at things at the start of a new year.   I think we often go down paths a long way and set many things in motion that if we paused and thought about, we might do differently or not do at all.   I keep asking my team to tell me things we need to do differently or things that are not working.   I want to have a culture around me where people are speaking up if they see things differently.  I hope I’m successful at that creating that culture.

In IT we’ve all bought systems and software that have proven to be a headache for us over months and years of time.   I heard the phrase years ago and I keep reusing it that IT pours concrete around the business processes of an enterprise. This is so true and those of us in IT need to be looking for concrete that is slowing down the business and we need to find alternatives.

Best wishes to all for the new year.

 

Cleaning House

One of the blogs I read said CIOs need to be trying things and always learning.   Well, this past week I had to deal with the flip side of that when I cleaned out a lot of old books, technology and software from my office.   New toys arrive or are bought, they are played with for a while and then they end up in a cabinet or a drawer.

I have a virtual museum of portable electronics.   My old favorite HP200LX which I’ve held on to because I loved it.  I also have an HP Omnigo 100 as well as every possible flavor of Palm across several years including the original Palmpilot which was amazing for its time.   One of the real joys of these toys was that each time you got a new one, you got to spend hours cleaning and loading your personal data like address book, calendar, notes, etc. into the new device.     I have several HP 12C calculators, one HP15C, of course an HP41-c and later an HP 48GX.

Just the past few weeks, I’ve been working with my son and several of his friends on a pre-calculus / trig class and we’ve been doing countless problems to prepare for finals.   I pulled out the old 48GX, put new batteries in it and off we went.  They had their TI calculators that the schools require and I had the old HP hardware.  I didn’t think I’d ever need trig identities again?

Lots of old manuals for PC software including multiple old versions of various PC programs.  Multiple generations of MS Office, Visio, and countless utilities.   How about an old copy of TK!Solver?    Manuals from classes and even old books that are no longer relevant to anything.

With the books, I tend to set those outside my office and give them away and they disappear very quickly.   I’m glad they find a home.  It is too sad to throw away old books.

And of course all the trinkets went in the trash.   Would all the conference organizers out there please take note and quit giving out fake leather writing folios or writing pads that have a logo embossed on them!   Nobody wants them and everybody throws them away.  Stop it.  Also, I don’t need miniature golf clubs, a slingshot, or lots of pens with logos on them.   Thanks anyway but I’ll bring my own pen.

OK, I kept all the HP devices.  Can’t throw them away.