StevenVinson.com

Watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off tonight with the kids. More cuss words than I remembered. And I sincerely asked the kids not to try any of that crap. We’re too smart for that, right?

Anyway, life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you could miss it.

Which is why we watched a movie with the kids tonight.

And why I went and visited Mark a few years ago.

And why  I am going to visit Greg in SoCal in June.

And Paul in May.

I knew a guy once who told me he stopped asking for stuff for holidays. He started asking for experiences. Or nothing. Seems to me that he had a pretty good idea there.

I am going to change things up again. I’m allowed to do that, right? Here’s the plan…

Stevenvinson.com will continue to be my daily blog to tell you what you’re supposed to be thinking about stuff related to politics, religion, creation, comedy, writing, and whatever else. In the meantime, I am going to move my business-y stuff to a different format, to be announced soon. There’ll be an email list that you can sign up for and I’ll cross-post to LinkedIn.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been struggling to figure out how to make this blog personal enough to connect with you and business-y enough to build a following of strangers – in other words, new friends. Truth is, I don’t want to have to think about what I’m posting here in terms of whether it is professional enough while being interesting to my friends. So, I am going to separate the two. I hope you find something you like in one or the other.

I love you 🙂

In May 2014, Robert Reich, the liberal democrat who served as Bill Clinton’s secretary of labor, said (http://robertreich.org/post/84984296635):

Says a top Republican-leaning Wall Street lawyer, “it’s Rand Paul or Ted Cruz versus someone like Elizabeth Warren that would be everybody’s worst nightmare.”

Everybody on Wall Street and in corporate suites, that is. And the “nightmare” may not occur in 2016. But if current trends continue, some similar nightmare is likely within the decade. If the American establishment wants to remain the establishment it will need to respond to the anxiety that’s fueling the new populism rather than fight it.

This was in his blog post warning “the establishment” that the current nightmare was coming. Now he seems like a prophet. Dan Carlin summed up the mood around the same time in his podcast (Common Sense 275 – The Specter of Dissent).

Both Reich and Carlin were hinting at something similar. That a growing populism is not rooted in one party or the other. Each party has its populists and these populists share a lot of common ground. All of the common ground seems to center around the idea that too few in our country have too much power. While reasonable left wing people can disagree with reasonable right wing people on methods, the ends seem to be aligned – return the power to the people.

Of course there is an even more primal shared grievance. It is that there are insiders and outsiders and if you are not an insider, then you have no power over things that really matter to most people. We have been fooled before. Remember the promise of hope and change in 2008? How did we end up with Bush the Third?

It’s no accident that Trump and Sanders are both doing well at the same time.

Clinton seems likely to win, but we have all been wrong about Trump before haven’t we?

I would vote for almost anyone over Clinton, but consider this. At least she is not pretending to be an outsider. She is running on a platform of knowing how things work. And she can get things done. Guess who she will be getting things done for? You and me? Yeah, right. 1992 called and told us we’re suckers if we think a Clinton will bring positive change for anyone other than the wealthy elite.

Stages of Grief (or, stages of the compliance journey)

• DENIAL/ISOLATION: You received the warning letter and you tried some bandaids to get yourself out of trouble; you aren’t like THOSE guys, you just need a tweak here or there
• BARGAINING: FDA snickered and said, “Nice try, but, no.” So, you hired Big Consulting Firm LLP to try and buy your way out of trouble.
• ANGER: FDA did not laugh this time. They snarled. They said, “We don’t care that you dumped the gross national product of a small island nation. We don’t care that Big Consulting Firm LLP said you were okay. What we see is window dressing. Expensive, high-end window dressing.”
• DEPRESSION: Now What?
• ACCEPTANCE: You finally realize that the deficiencies in your quality systems are real. You have some systemic and cultural issues that need to be fixed. This is not something that someone from the outside can come in and fix. This is not a one-and-done project. It is at this point that you will find the right people to build a plan that will stop the bleeding, stabilize the patient, get you out of trouble, and set a course of healthy living so this doesn’t happen again.

Today was proof that you don’t always need to plan every detail to enjoy close connection and joy with family. Our youngest and mom went shopping. That left me with our oldest to do whatever. We truly were playing it by ear when I drove toward downtown. We grabbed food at the Marsh and had us a picnic at a downtown park. While we were chewing out food, Twitter told us that Hillary Clinton was just a few miles away. So we finished our picnic, my daughter put her new pet – the silk worm – into a little box, and we headed for adventure. Though we drove by Douglass Park Gym four or five times, we didn’t get a glimpse of any famous people. Lots of Hillary supporters, though.

Since we were in the neighborhood, we stopped by Goose the Market for gelato, an espresso, and some tasty meats.

This evening I grilled up some Korean BBQ shortribs. Little salt, little pepper, some onion and garlic. Oh man. Beefy goodness. And some grass fed beef hot dogs.

We wrapped it up with our first (of many) family meeting and some quality time downstairs hiding from the tornado that never came.

Low stress. High quality. Now this is living.

Yesterday the St. Richard’s Dads Club! and a contingent from Trunity Episcopal Church put on a festival of Peace, Love, and Bacon. And beer. And a big floppy air dancer guy. It was a ton of fun and hard work. By the end of the day, even my wet tired feet, my sore back, and my sleepy mind couldn’t keep me from joining the boys (and a couple of wives) for a night cap. As tired as I was, there were at least half a dozen guys who worked longer and harder than I did. The aim of Rendezbrew is to raise money and build community. I’m not sure how much money we raised but the community we are building gets stronger every year.

Oh, and happy birthday to our dear leader, the benevolent dictator with a heart of gold and a healthy disdain for micromanaging, Clayton Kelly.

I tried to put this new word on Urban Dictionary but it didn’t work for some reason. Probably user error. So anyway, feel free to do it yourself and take credit.

NO SNOPES FOR YOU!

The Snopes Nazi is that person who always has to check Snopes and Snopesshame you if you post something not true. He is the distant cousin of the Grammar Nazi.

For example:

Benjamin’s Facebook post: <link> “The Music World Mourns yet again as Kanye West Found Alive in Hotel Room”

Otto’s comment: FALSE!! I checked Snopes: <inserts link to Snopes>

Rayray’s reply to Otto’s comment: Come on, Otto! It was a joke. Don’t be such a Snopes Nazi!

You’re welcome. And Happy Friday!

I forgot to write yesterday!! Completely forgot. So, I’ll do two today. Yes it violates my rule of “yesterday is done and you can’t make up for what you didn’t do yesterday” but I am going to cheat. I have been working on a book on my free time. I sat down today to write the outline (using the Foolscap Method). So I’ll write it here…

ACT I

Company is notified that the FDA is taking regulatory action against them.

• Board room with suits
• Grim looks
• Confused looks
• Warning Letter on the table

“NOW WHAT??”

ACT III

Company is out of trouble. FDA has lifted the Warning Letter

• Board room with suits
• Content looks
• Determined looks (with new sense of purpose)
• Out of trouble but not done
• Management Control Quality Plan on the table
• Plan for continuous improvement on the table

ACT II

Try to fix it themselves – FAIL

Go through phases of grief

Hire a big consulting firm – FAIL

Go through phases of grief

Talk to other companies who have done this before; collaborate with FDA and other experts to write a comprehensive plan to get out of trouble

Try to implement plan themselves – FAIL

Go through phases of grief

Hire hotshot project leadership and organizational change experts to implement plan – SUCCEED!!

The acts are out of order on purpose. Act I is the reason people will pick up the book in the first place. Act III is the reason they will remember it. Act II is the filler. Act II is simultaneous the least important and most important part of the book. Least important because it won’t sell a single copy and most important because the few who follow the approach will get to write their own happy ending.

NOTE: This one is totally baked. This is part 2. If you haven’t read Creating “from scratch” yet, consider doing that first.

Back to Jim Collins for a second. His point was that if you get the right people in the right positions, you will want to avoid bureaucracy. Bureaucracy tends to demotivate your best people, who end up leaving. Then you need more bureaucracy to compensate for the resulting increase in mediocrity. And the vicious cycle continues. Bureaucracy has gotten a bad reputation. It has become synonymous with worker-drones filling out forms in triplicate without ever getting anything done. Maybe it deserves this reputation so I am going to borrow from Jim Collins again and use a different description of one element that is needed to be a great organization. Discipline is bureaucracy’s role model. Like a great ancestor who is revered, looked up to, and often emulated. Bureaucracy is a pale imitation of discipline. Or the way Jim Collins puts it in Good to Great (paraphrasing again), great organizations have a culture of discipline combined with an ethic of entrepreneurship.

With this in mind, we rejoin our heroic (but weird) project manager (HWPM). Different client, same problem. A to-do list with hundreds of “projects”. Probably incomplete. Most assuredly not making the progress the client wishes it were making. What’s missing? How do we solve this problem for this new client?

Culture of discipline combined with an ethic of entrepreneurship. Luckily for our HWPM, said client already has a strong ethic of entrepreneurship. Unluckily for our HWPM, sometimes our greatest strength is also our greatest weakness. Entrepreneurship is great in startup organizations, which every organization once was. There comes a time, though, when the organization must go from startup to adult. This is when discipline is needed to focus and direct the entrepreneurial spirit. Not bureaucracy. Bureaucracy will strangle entrepreneurship to death. Also not enforced discipline, bureaucracy’s older brother.

The seemingly competing priorities are as follows:

• Develop/Instill/Reinforce a Culture of Discipline
• Maintain the already strong Entrepreneurial spirit
• Obtain enough truth about the ongoing projects (scope, schedule, resource needs, business drivers) to be able to categorize and prioritize them
• Determine which projects MUST be done (sometimes we call this mission critical) and which ones are “somebody’s priority but not mission critical or life & death” (what is the one word for that? Let’s use the word, OTHER)
• Make sure every mission critical project has the right resource in sufficient quantity to complete ON TIME

Make sure resources are assigned to the other projects ONLY if they are not needed for the mission critical projects

If I had never read Jim Collins’ Good to Great, I might just try to drop in the portfolio management process I designed for the other client. Two huge differences, though. Different company with a different culture. And, the system I designed looks too bureaucratic to my decade-older eyes.

The first idea: I am considering a portfolio management approach that would apply a continuum of discipline to the portfolio. All projects would need to meet the minimum information requirements, for example, to allow for categorization into several buckets. Then, the buckets would receive their own level of discipline, depending on how much entrepreneurship is needed at that level. For example, mission critical projects, like regulatory compliance issues, would receive a high level of discipline, while OTHER projects, like a new parking garage or a tweak to an existing product line, might receive lower levels of discipline.

A variation of this idea could be that there are only two levels of discipline: follow the Portfolio Management Process or don’t. We could give leaders the freedom and flexibility to do any project they want, so long as they are providing sufficient resources to get the mission critical projects done. I think I am liking this approach best. Straightforward and simple. “We have two kinds of projects here. Projects that must meet their date and resource targets and those that we would like to have meet their date and resource targets.” Undisciplined execution on the former could mean existential threats to the organization while failing on the later could mean slower growth or less than desired business performance.

My hope is that the success of the mission critical portfolio at achieving the objectives of those projects would cause people to ask the question, “why wouldn’t we want that level of success on all of our projects?” After all, if a project is worth doing, why not do it well using a disciplined approach? But I am gambling on something with this client – baby steps first will lead to giant leaps and hopefully the culture change that is needed for this organization to maintain greatness.

How would you handle this challenge?

CAUTION: This is half-baked. It is a post I began as more of a book chapter than a blog post. But, what the hey… What is missing to make it totally-baked?

Almost a decade ago, I my client had a long list of projects that were not making the progress that my client thought they should. I had just finished managing a large program for them so I had some credibility and I knew my way around the building. I had a charter to turn things around for their pile of projects. What I did not have was a ton of experience or knowledge on how to help them make sense of a to-do list as long as my arm (single spaced Arial 8 pt.).

This was a unique client and would require a unique approach. They were not versed in the tools and nuances of formal project management. You might guess that your friendly weird project manager would have invented an approach from scratch for them. You might be wrong, depending on your definition of “from scratch.”¹

My first move was to get my hands on copies of the Project Management Institutes best practice guides for portfolio management and for program management. I taught myself using these practice guides and the consulting firm of Google and Google. I researched approaches and I toyed with some concepts. And, oh did I play with Excel Spreadsheets. Man oh man do I enjoy playing with spreadsheets.

The approach I ended up designing and implementing for this client did not follow the letter of the law when it comes to best practice. It did had quite a bit of governance and *gasp* bureaucracy to the process. To paraphrase Jim Collins, bureaucracy is added to compensate for mediocre performance. Which makes bureaucracy, added wisely and frugally, not necessarily a bad thing. Mr. Collins’ remedy for this is to put the right people in the right seats and they won’t need bureaucracy to ensure above average performance. Right. And I could win the World Series if I could have the first 15 picks of all active players in the MLB.

My goal was to add as little overhead as possible while adding enough to get results. The governance was aimed at collecting information at first, then at ensuring centralized review of projects and opportunities. The goal of the centralized review was to ensure priority projects moved to the top of the list and new projects were inserted at the right spot in the list so that the organization’s limited resources were focused on the right things. The key elements were:

• A form that each ongoing project must complete. Minimum information was (can you guess?) scope, schedule, and budget. In other words, a project description, when it was targeted to finish, and who needed to work on it for how many hours.
• Project drivers: We chose four categories as the highest level driver. Value Adding Projects (Return on Investment projects – usually a cost savings); Compliance Projects (regulatory requirements); New Product Development Projects; Strategic Projects (these are the ones either passed down from Corporate or an executive’s “pet project”)
• Project Benefits: depending on which category (bucket) the project was in, it would require additional details to allow prioritization within each bucket. For example:
  • Value Adding bucket: calculated ROI or NPV; Payback time
  • Compliance bucket: consequences/cost of NOT doing the project; regulatory actions being remediated
  • New Product Development: fit within company’s strategy; ROI; NPV; Market potential
  • Strategic bucket: Best executive arm-wrestler

Thus ends this half-baked post. Where should it go from here?

¹ I brew beer using dried malt extract and pelleted, premeasured hops. Some of my friends say this isn’t “from scratch” because they mash their malt from grain and grow their own hops. Well, I ask, did you harvest the yeast from a cave in Germany? Did you plant the barley yourself? Did you find wild hop seeds someplace or did you buy rhizomes from the local homebrew shop? You brew beer like the Amish and I will pick a point at which I can balance the extra work with my desire to bond with the beer. Either way, we can safely say it’s from scratch if I make my own wort, right?)