In the Wonderland of Management Culture

At the outset, I would like to wish all my readers a very Happy and Prosperous year 2011. Let the year bring a culture of Performance and Prosperity.

Very often we hear about Management Culture. You might have come across many types of companies. They could be family owned organization, publically owned and professionally managed by a specific National or a Multinational organization. There is a common thread of success across all of them. I have heard many debates in my life. I feel lucky to work with all of them. I’m sharing with you what I have heard in different companies.

Let us take a family managed Organization first. The spirit of Entrepreneurship was buzzing all over the organization. Innovative ideas, new thoughts, execution at lightning speed, urge to implement all techniques, were some of the talk of the town. The Management always tried bench marking itself with the best possible in the world. They thought of best practices and how to exceed the expectation of shareholders. In the process, at times, the human feeling did not get the due weight age. But the organization prospered. A good example could be creation of a mammoth umpire by Mr. L.N. Mittal. I don’t remember having heard even a single time the world “Culture.”

Let us take a professionally managed organization. The organization run on best practices, it had time tested systems, decisions were taken based on well debated process. It had a sound management system. People were heard and Manager decided. Again rarely I heard the world “Culture.” One of the best example in this category could be Tata Steel.

The third category of company is a so called Multinational. The Multinational could be an Indian Multinational or a western managed Multinational. I have heard story of a very mediocre performing company in this category. This was one of the cases where I heard about the world “Culture” every now and then. Possibly the company had poverty of Management and performance and got satisfaction by using the world “Culture” all the time. A group of sycophant Managers aligned and echoed the “Culture” word synchronously. For them creating a niche for themselves at cost of anything was the sole goal. The result “ Non-Performance”. In MNC category we all have read and heard about GE and Jack Welcsh. I have not come across the world “ Culture” many time in Jack Welch book. The Performance under Jack Welch is a known fact now and being referred by management practitioner all over.

Based on the above examples, I think culture of the all organizations can be grouped in two categories namely a Performance Culture & a Non-Performance Culture. There is no classification on the basis of origin and management of the organization or any other factor. It is an amazing experience to be a part of performing organization. If you think you are a part of non-performance, sit down, introspect, and get into a performance focussed oganization. You will learn, enjoy and prosper. Performance brings prosperity and not the so called world “Culture”.

Application Portfolio Analysis framework can help improve return on IT Assets

Globalization and the dilution of trade boundaries have forced industries to evaluate various options for cost-effective operations. Industries now face the challenge of channeling resources to meet organizational objectives in continuously changing environments. Information Technology plays a major role in such a dynamic business environment. However, with the advent of new technological tools and continuous advancement, the IT environment has become very complex.

Chief Information Officers (CIOs) regularly add new assets to their IT portfolio, making the portfolio more and more complex. In addition, they face the task of aligning business needs and IT assets. Cost consideration is becoming increasingly important. The challenge is to do more for less.

In such a dynamic situation, the Management of the IT Portfolio has become an increasingly important and crucial task. Increasing number of CIOs are now pursuing IT Portfolio Management as a tool to prioritize investment decisions, decide the location of various activities, evaluate the various assets with the value it delivers, and much more.

Each asset in the portfolio is evaluated against parameters like cost of procurement, cost of managing, and indeed the cost of replacing the same. “Total cost of ownership” is seen in conjunction with the value delivered by the asset. Optimal Management of the assets leads to minimal TCO.

A study by Gartner states that, “Approximately 30 percent of the total cost of ownership during the life of an application is for its maintenance and management.” One can achieve a significant degree of cost reduction by maneuvering the costs associated with maintenance and management.

Portfolio Management is the process of managing assets and investments in order to achieve desired organizational goals. The portfolio is a combination of assets that are expected to provide certain returns. It has risks associated with it. Portfolio Management includes selecting a set of assets congruent with the set goal, managing the economic lifecycle of those assets, dynamically divesting and investing in different assets to optimize gains. In the IT context, the portfolio includes application software, hardware, infrastructure, resources, processes, and so on. While financial Portfolio Management has been in practice for many years, IT Portfolio Management is relatively new and gaining ground. An integrated framework that helps in investment, divestment, modifications, and movement of application assets has become a necessity to align business and IT goals of an enterprise.

There are applications to help manage IT portfolio for a CIO. I think it may be prudent to get into the habit of understanding IT Portfolio as a concept before investing in expensive Software. A heuristic method for managing IT Application Portfolio is very helpful and cost effective. It is easy to implement. The framework has been implemented at several places and has given enormous benefits to the clients. The detailed methodology is available at http://www.codeproject.com/info/search.aspx?artkw=bishram.

Joint Requirement Discovery

Requirement management is the essence of Project’s Success. In simple words, it means that most of the problems that the projects encounter could have been avoided from the very begining by making it very simple and to understand the Customer’s expectations from the respective projects. Very often we hear the story of changing requirements. I was going through a project review; I came to know that the requirements were changing very often. May be that is a truth. But when we hear the customer’s side of the story you often get a different perspective. Customer often thinks that development teams lack the domain understanding and the ability to interpret requirements. There is always a fine line between understanding of requirement and seeking clarifications from customers. When you come across a story of frequent change in requirements and many requests for pending clarifications, it is time to look at your requirement elicitation process.

There are different stake holders in the Project. They view the requirements differently. They all may be right in their respective perceptions but collectively going by their understanding of requirements one cannot deliver a project to meet all their understanding.It reminds me of a very famous story of “Six Blind Men and the Elephant”.

Once upon a time, there lived six blind men in a village. One day an elephant came to the village. They had no idea what an elephant is. They decided, “Even though we would not be able to see the elephant, let us go and feel the elephant by touching it”. Each of the blind men touched the elephant. Perceptions emerged about the elephant. Hey, the elephant is a pillar," said the first man who touched his leg. "Oh, no! It is like a rope," said the second man who touched the tail. "Oh, no! It is like a thick branch of a tree," said the third man who touched the trunk of the elephant. "It is like a big hand fan" said the fourth man who touched the ear of the elephant. "It is like a huge wall," said the fifth man who touched the belly of the elephant. "It is like a solid pipe," Said the sixth man who touched the tusk of the elephant.

I think requirement process is very similar to the process of six blind men feeling the elephant. The designer, the developer, the tester and the user perceive the requirement differently. They are touching the requirements at a different point of time. They carry different perceptions and often get into a conflict about the requirement. Think of the situation where the six blind men had reconciled their respective observations. Obviously, a holistic picture about the elephant could have emerged.

Therefore it helps if different stakeholders sit together after their initial feel, reconcile their understanding and then come up with a unified view of the requirement. A simple three step process may be very useful in rationalizing requirements:
1. Every Stakeholder studies the requirement separately. They are Designer, Developer, Analyst, Tester etc
2. They come with their findings and questions and sit and discuss their understanding. Reconcile them and finally put a unified understanding to the customer.
3. Customer validates and rationalize the requirements.

These simple steps can avoid a confusion which crops in at a later state. Although these steps are simple and do not require great processes, we rarely implement them. These steps can be implemented in different flavor across different development methodologies.

These are Simple fundamentals but it works.