Managermind

I just wanna tell a story from a life.  The story is about luck in the understanding of the importance of tools by self-confident managers.

Knowledge Management

Several month ago I was in a meeting, where some managers and some consultants where discussing about some IT topics. One of the question that is always present on such meeting (these meetings happens usually every week) is how we can distribute the knowledge of specialists over all team member and keep it up to date.

It is clear that such niche wisdom e.g. some technical guidance must be written down otherwise it is lost. So the next question that should appear is where to write it down. However I was very stunned how airy all team members answers that question inner or loud.

The typical and “simplest” solution is sending mail. “Just send me mail with that link and password” or “I’ll send you the path to my presentation on the network drive Z“. Such solution system can exist over several month till the information lost is grows so much till nobody definitely know where the particular and actual information is, who responsible for what and s. o. But that was good scenario. In the worst case such mail routing can be established forever!

I such mail brokerage scenario some people start to organize the information on their own, they build up diagrams directories structures and other documents on their local machines. That result in redundancy and inconsistency in between such privates archives.

But sometimes there are some better managers at work, at some points a smart manager begin to think about optimisation and improvement of knowledge management that is usually results in the “invention” of centralization of information. And that’s all. At this stage the solution for the problem is clear “we just need central storage and every body has to write his part of the knowledge down there“.

The centralization is in fact is high improvement a t this point. It eliminates inconsistency and redundancy, it clarifies the responsibilities for the parts of the content and everybody know where to search.

Unfortunately management has not think just a half step further. So some centralization tool was taken which one of them has known by name. My doubts wasn’t taken serious because I was new in team.  Responsible person rejects with: ” I don’t wanna have any tooling discussion“.

However the documentation is still incomplete. In the central storage we have many incomplete places and information that is there, is mostly relative sparse and just some kind of copy paste of some presentations or personal notices. Not really the wisdom of the team ;).  There is a luck of trust and acceptance for that tool, because it’s not modern and it’s presents the information as one big list.

So why just don’t take a simple Wiki which is designed to order some fuzzy information which is edited by many users. Just because You know nothing about it? Then liston to competent people in your team!

P.S. For some days I found I my calender the invitation to “Tooling discussion” meeting. What a surprise.

In previous post i was falling in philosophy about dynamic aware organisation. In this article a will cover one aspect of real life organisation in companies that prevents them to be dynamic aware and therefore not to have desired advantages in the competition.

I’ talking about Center of Might. I heard about Center of Might (germ. Machtzentrum) several Years ago from Professor Menzel and since that never again. But the conception of Might Center stays in my mind till now maybe because i have seen it in the practise in real life organisations.

Definition

Center of Might is aggregation of competency and bulkheading of some partitions of a company. Traditional or else functional structured organisations divide the whole organisations in such functional partitions of responsibilities but this leads to the establishment of “Might-centers”.

The establishment of such bulkheading between departments grounds on many factors. One of the fundamental things it the understanding of the fact that organisations are nothing else as social structure or network of living people. People tend to have own opinions and different personal interests. One of the well known goals of human is gaining and preserving might. Not considering that in organisation structure leads can lead to such problems.

Nevertheless Traditional Business Study, beginning with Adam Smith don’t covers that point, where people are considered as one of the resources of the company. And the vision of a company dominates the vision of the “well oiled machine“! This vision may work in industrialization age, but fails in modern times. But even today the believe of obedient “machine-worker” dominates the vision of corporate organisation developers.

The other aspect is the complexity, large companies with many departments, organisation units and large hierarchies are often affected by the problems of strong centres of might. This is naturally, cause the management of big companies takes a greater risk by breaking the established and “proved” way. I think that introduction gives provides the understanding of the concept of Center of Might.

Curse of Center of Might

Now we understand the Might-centers, but are they so bad? Yes, the greatest problem in concentration of might on several points inside the same organisation is the personal protectionism, that results from distrust mood between organisations subjects. Therefore one might owner is tended to protect himself. That leads to several problems in organisation:

• Information diffidence
• Even Information falsification
• Resistance for changes/improvements
• Pessimistic Forecasting
• De-motivation

These points are leading to inefficiency of the whole company. The discussion of the problems can be continued and sophisticated, but not intendet here, but can be proceed in as comments …

Organization (of a company) is a very complex subject and difficult and therefor often changing process in the real companies. May be you was wondering why the organisation of your company changes so often. It is because organisation is something dynamic, and this property grounds on two important things: There is no feasible optimum structure of an organization to determine. Second, the environment of organization changes every day.

There is no Optimum

Of cause there could be no optimum, because you never have the complete information about the environment. Even if we would have all information about the environment, this will get soon to old and not valid. Furthermore the complexity of real world environments can’t be modeled even in 100 or 1000 years. So the model has to be relative abstract to be handle and calculable.

Dynamic

I already wrote about dynamic of economy which is the exterior environment of an organization. This dynamic of cause affects the organisation in it self. Then the organization should deal with changing environments, therefore it has to be updated often. Otherwise the organisation can be designed as dynamic and flexible, to minimise the reorganization processes by making them natural.

Dynamic Awareness

How to make an organisation aware of changing environments and markets, this is the question that matters more than ever. But this is also very difficult questions, and it goes through many aspects of a company. When i think about dynamic aware organisation, the following aspect appear as very important to me: organisation as a structure, staff and IT.

1. Hierarchies should be flat and maybe not really tied bound.
2. Companies should understand, that modern staff is not a resource in Adam Smith sense. Modern employee is hard to motivate, but hey should be aware of changes.
3. The IT of companies has also be aware of changes and reorganization. By changes i mean not only some stuff or department changes, but even the whole business process or parts of it.

This three Aspect stood at beginning of considerations of dynamic aware organization.I’ll will cover that aspects more deeply in the future posts. Feel free to comment.

There is a ton of theoretical articles about employee motivation. So if someone talks to you about motivation possibly you first think of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and this is OK. I just want to present one interesting and very personal point of motivation - your chef.

Surprised? Let me explain why your boss is a very important part of your personal motivation and how one good supervisor should look like to my eyes.

At first, I think every direct supervisor is some kind of person you subliminal see as someone who is professionally better than you. At least at the beginning every supervisor is. If this fealing of professional advantage and respect to boss holds on you stay motivated employee.

How bosses looses respect and demotivate

Many supervisors shows sometimes that they did not understand what their team do. Some of them goes further they show even that they are not good in doing their own things. In worst case, such boss is so underdeveloped in his methodologies, that with his doing or not doing he slows down or relatives the work of his team. Such boss looses respect in hours and is frustrating for all.
If such situation occurs, no further achievement can be awaited from the stuff. All office parties, and Christmas presents are senseless. They can’t motivate. Even such things like further education can not motivate for more achievements, employee would see it as a chance to live that office or department.

Top 6 properties of motivating boss

So the message is, everyone needs professional boss. I just notice some of them in following:

• Good supervisor should never forget what he has assured to his employee, because employee does not forget it too
• Good supervisor has also not to forget important work relevant things, like planed holidays of his employees, or meetings with them - never.
• Good supervisor has to organise things in his department well. He should organise his own tasks first and task of his team, that employee has not to worry about things that are not in his direct or even indirect duties. Being engaged in things which are were not intended at the moment of application for employment is very frustrating. Doing things for other is frustrating even for own boss
  • Every boss is interested that new employees begin with their work as soon as possible . The are companies, in that processes of employment and introduction to work environment are not clearly defined. This is an example field, where the boss can gain much respect at least in the eyes of new employees.
  • Good boss defines processes in his department by himself and not just follows some randomly originated workflows.
• Good motivating chef has to be better than you. I mean he has to be better by doing something job related. In good situation your boss is good in organisation, motivation, and knows at least something what you do at work :). Your lucky when your can ask your boss even professional or technical question. That must be a dream boss in that case.
• Motivating chef has always more information from above and from bottom, he is open-minded and communicative person. He can organize his information input and what is much important, he is internally interested to be involved in things that are happened around him.
• Finely only motivated person, can motivate others.

As committed software engineer one sooner or later asks him or herself where to work. Which is the best employer, where can one develop the best, has the most interesting challenges and so on.

Steve Jones answers in the referenced posting to a blog entry from Joel Spolsky also known as Joel on Software. I found this comparison very interesting and also slighly amusing… enjoy!

http://service-architecture.blogspot.com/2007/12/why-corporate-it-means-something.html 

An interesting techtalk on “Competing On The Basis Of Speed” by Mary Poppendieck about the importance of speed for every business.

I like it, even if it nothing very exciting or new and follows basic principals of modern programming paradigms. The concept of test-first, refactoring as well as short-iterations are well supported in various continous integration tools.