We would like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.  As usual, we are not sending cards as we feel uncomfortable with the environmental impact but have made a donation to the RNLI instead.

We hope that next year is productive for you.  We usually wish everyone “prosperity” however this sounded a little hollow, given the economic climate!

Robert Peston the BBC’s business editor has picked on on some of the themes (e.g. mutualisation) I have.  In his blog entry today, one of the telling passages is this

They (bankers) didn’t want to see themselves as the infrastructure of the economy, that couldn’t and shouldn’t attempt to push up their profits at an accelerating rate. Somehow it was a bit too humiliating to be no more than the pipework for the real generators of wealth, companies with genuinely new services, real products and real technology.

So bankers created and exploited new “financial technology” that enriched themselves (for a while, at least) and was supposedly benefiting all of us by providing unlimited quantities of credit at astonishingly cheap rates.

At last it is being recognised that “real wealth creation” is about commercialising new intellectual property and not financial engineering.  In my view, this is what capitalism should be about and where the real rewards should be found.  Most large mature businesses that don’t generate genuinely new ideas (rather than just process improvement) are really utilities and need to recognise that they have to satisfy the needs a broader stakeholder community.

The winners from this recession are likely to be mutuals like John Lewis, Co-op Financial Services and, in the recycling services sector, Valpak.  Shareholder owned businesses that want to compete will have to behave much more like mutuals and balance the needs of customers, shareholders, staff, management and broader society.

Stakeholder analysis and management is the now the critical skill for senior managers!

I have been tempted to comment on the grisly road crash that is the financial markets for a number of weeks, but each time, just as I have got my thoughts together something else has happened.  In many ways this just highlights that it is too early to draw firm conclusions.

I would just like to highlight a prescient post of mine on this website, two years ago to the day!!

In “Stakeholder Capitalism and the Mutualisation of PLCs” I commented on a number of trends which taken together meant that raw capitalism, where the only measure that mattered was profit, was in the process of evolving into stakeholder capitalism, where other stakeholder demands (e.g. no child labour, reduced emissions, fairtrade) are almost as important.

In the post I only mentioned the financial services industry in the context of de-mutualisation, however recent events, particularly the re-capitalisation of the banks, re-enforces my view.  When push came to shove it was decided (correctly in my view) that allowing any large bank to fail was not an option as our economic system would collapse with potentially apocalyptic results.

My key point, both two years ago and now is that capitalism in its “raw” form is probably finished.  It is not profit, per see, that is important, it is more how and why that profit is generated that is critical.

The broader sustainability agenda plays in here as well.  From my discussions with contacts, it is clear to some global companies that they can no longer rely on being able to grab hold of the resources to be able to continue to grow.  This poses some fundamental challenges both for companies and for the global economy, specifically that the issue hat we can see that the global economy cannot expand infinitely and we can start to see the limits!

John Maynard Keynes is seen as the key economist in these times because of his work analysing and dealing with the 1929 crash and subsequent depression.  However John Nash in the Times highlights another aspect of Keynes work. This is an essay where he imagined a world where we had moved beyond crass materialism…

“I see us free to return to some of the most sure and certain principles of religion and traditional virtue – that avarice is a vice, that the exaction of usury is a misdemeanour and the love of money is detestable…We shall once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well.”

I have a couple of Keynes’ books on the shelf already.  Might be time to find a copy of this essay as well!

I’m at the Agile Business Conference today and tomorrow, presenting the NPWD Case Study. I will be blogging on interesting stuff from other presentations.

Interestingly I spent most of today chatting rather than watching presentations. However I did catch Rob Thomsett’s highly entertaining and informative presentation on implementing agile. One of the interesting little snippets he gave are the “sliders” below.

They can be used as key indicators to calibrate how people feel about a project and how it should / is being run.

One of the other re-current themes is the thorny issue of “collaborative procurement” which I have blogged on before.  One of the key challenges in implementing agile methods is the fact that all of them require effective collaboration to be successful.  This is relatively easy to achieve inside an organisation (yes, really if there is a will to) the problem comes in when the organisation brings in external third parties e.g. software developers.  At this point company rules about procurement cut in and these rules are nearly always confrontational and assume a lack of trust; not a good start to any collaboration.

We’ve re-branded as you can probably see. How do you like it?

After blogging on the topic of virtual teams (below), I noticed this post on the topic on Gantthead.com.  I’ve also PDFed it so you can download it here (Part time teams; full time projects)

I’m not sure I agree with everything he says, but it is a useful contribution to the topic.

All of Kubernetes’ work involves virtual teams and these are virtual both in the organisational sense i.e. drawn from across the clients’ operation and in the physical sense i.e. in many locations. This means that, by default, we have gained a lot of experience in managing projects “remotely”.

A couple of recent experiences have shown us how much we have learnt without actually realising it!  Without going into details this includes:-

1. Communicate continuously and clearly. Do not assume that everyone that needs to know has heard you or read the email / text / website. Even if they have heard you, they may not have the same understanding!  Our rule of thumb is that if you think (as a project manager) you are communicating too much you are probably only just doing enough!!
2. Use technology appropriately. Email, discussion forums, text, voice and video conferencing can all make communication easier and quicker. They can also get in the way of effective communication e.g. an email discussion of a key requirement can take a long time and cause friction when diplomacy is needed. In general we use:-
   • Voice conferencing for status updates and general project management discussions (i.e. who is doing what by when). It can also be used for closed discussions.  It can’t be used for brainstorming and open discussions
   • Web based project libraries for having a single depositary for all project documentation with version control. This is essential to make sure that all excuses are removed for not being up to date!  At the moment we are trialling Project Spaces which seems to be very good, if a little North American biased as these things tend to be.
   • Email for confirmation of telephone conversations, meeting arrangements etc i.e. anything that is transient with a short half life of relevance.
   • Face to Face communication for anything where an “open” conversation is needed e.g. requirements brainstorming and prioritisation. I often have complaints that getting all the right people in a room is expensive and time consuming, however in my experience NOT getting the right people in a room (and facilitating them properly) is a recipe for delay and waste.
3. Both the day job and project work have to be done. This means respecting the fact that individuals are rarely measured or rewarded on their project work, but on their “day job”.  However it also means removing “business as usual” as an excuse for people failing to deliver their project tasks.  Speak it quietly; it is rare that a “day job”, if properly prioritised, actually takes up all a person’s working time.
4. Be as transparent as possible. With a remote team in either sense of the word there is always the temptation / possibility for cliques and pools of information that get dammed up. This is nearly always corrosive.  As far as possible, let everyone on the project team know everything, not only does it enable systemic issues to be spotted earlier it also makes people feel included and respected, a vital foundation for building a high performing team.

This is not an exhaustive list but we have found that applying these principles helps projects delivered by virtual teams perform better.

One of the next things we will be trying is video conferencing to see whether this bridges the open discussion gap where they only be done by face to face currently