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ManagementSpeak: I do not want to run this project, but I do want to be involved in all discussions and decisions so I stay updated.

Translation: I want to run this project … except for all the parts that require actual work.

This week’s contributor has run his share of projects and knows the difference between running them and armchair quarterbacking them.

A concept repeatedly flogged in this space for more than 15 years is the difference between business processes and business practices.

Optimizing big, formal, core business processes is a form of engineering — it’s often called “re-engineering,” and ain’t it a shame process re-engineering so seldom involves actual engineers?

Optimizing business practices isn’t engineering. To optimize a business practice you have to improve the practitioners.

Most business processes require Big Software to manage them. But business practices don’t. Business practices are akin to crafts, and crafts depend on toolkits. The standard business practices toolkit consists of an office suite, remote collaboration tools, and maybe something specialized like a project management system. These toolkits are non-trivial, but orders-of-magnitude smaller in scope than what business processes require.

But unlike traditional crafts like cabinetry, baking, or jewelry-making, with business practices mastery of the tools of the trade is strangely optional. The impact of that optionality is, to be kind, significant.

Take the common situation of a team collaborating to write documentation. Typically, different team members write different sections, which someone — perhaps a technical writer — assembles into the final document.

That’s where the fun begins, assuming, that is, your version of fun consists of making lots of round pegs look like they belong in all of those square holes.

We’ll leave alone the challenge of multiple writing styles. While insisting everyone take a class in business writing would be helpful … I’ve spent more of my life than I’d care to admit re-writing colleagues’ passive voice into a form where it’s clear who’s going to do what … in the end there’s no substitute for an old-fashioned re-write to make sure the final document has stylistic consistency.

The importance of tools-mastery comes from something far more prosaic: Making the physically assembly faster and less error-prone.

To understand how it should work, let’s take a look at how it usually does work in a “modern” (which is to say, backward) workplace:

  • Jack’s a Unix jockey. He learned to format text writing in Vi and perfected his skills in Eudora. He uses the default font for just about everything, adds spaces to line up columns of numbers, hits <enter> twice to separate paragraphs, and uses a Perl script to convert his personal <number this> tag into actual numbered lists just before handing his section over to the team’s technical writer.
  • Jill likes formatting — she likes to say formatting is the written equivalent of body language. She handcrafts every title, subtitle, and heading. She particularly likes Comic Sans for headings and handwriting fonts to give words particular emphasis. Her bullets are adorable … hearts, hands, stars, each in a color that fits the mood of what she’s writing about, or perhaps her mood when writing it.
  • Jerome is a visual sort of guy. He’s a brilliant Visio jockey. And he’s even smart enough to paste his Visio diagrams into Word as bitmaps instead of OLE objects, knowing this will help him keep control of the diagrams. He’s mastered the art of adding a caption to his diagrams, and stylistically he reliably makes statements in his text along the lines of, “As Figure 3 illustrates …”
  • Jane thinks in terms of bullets. She’s terse and to the point, clicking the Bullets button in Word’s ribbon so often that if it was a physical button she’d have long ago rubbed away the ink of the image that labels it.

What’s wrong with all this is that these habits can add literally days to the job of document assembly. Double-enter paragraph spacing ends up with no space in front of some paragraphs and extra spaces after others after the editor has moved a few paragraphs around. Manually numbered lists end up as mis-numbered lists after the first edit.

“As Figure 3 illustrates” points to the wrong figure when the assembled figure captions in different sections automatically renumber. Or, worse, it points to several figures, because other authors manually number their captions, so the assembled document has several Figure 3s.

Add to all this the nightmare of having to manually construct and periodically revise a table of contents when few headings in the document make use of Heading styles.

And on, and on, and on.

Documents have an architecture just as surely as databases do, and teams of practitioners who violate these rules wreak every bit as much havoc as those who violate Codd and Date’s 13 principles of relational design.

The moral of this tale of woe? To optimize your business practices, insist your practitioners learn the tools of their trade.

Because while learning them isn’t the same thing as mastering the craft, failing to learn them is the same as failing to master it.

It was a busy week and busier weekend, so it’s re-run time again. This is one of my all-time favorites: The Desk o’ Death and why it’s a manager’s dream assignment. It first appeared, in InfoWorld, 12/11/2000.

– Bob

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As every programmer knows, God was able to make the world in only six days because he didn’t have an installed base. Programmers rarely have that luxury.

New managers have a different kind of installed base to worry about. While the difficulties they face are not as technically daunting as creating a backward-compatible operating system upgrade, the social engineering issues faced by a manager taking over an existing organization present their own set of significant challenges.

When you take over a department, whether it’s through a promotion or a job change, you don’t get the luxury of designing your operation from scratch. You’re inheriting an installed base — an existing team, well-worn processes and ways of doing things, and an entrenched culture. But where programmers usually have a test environment in which they can safely find and fix mistakes, managers have to do their testing in the production environment of an ongoing operation. Missteps are very public, and hard to unmake.

The social engineering starts before you take the job. If at all possible, find out whether you’re walking into a problem area or not. If it isn’t a problem area, try to get a mandate for change from the reporting manager to create a problem where none existed before. Failing that, let some other victim take this no-win job.

Coming into a smoothly running organization is much harder than taking over a disaster area. How are you to succeed? Your chances of further improving the situation and having the team look to you for leadership are low. If your charter is to maintain the status quo, your predecessor will get the credit if you succeed; you’ll get the blame for any deterioration.

Compare this to the desk o’ death. The department is in shambles. The team is demoralized, productivity is low, waste is high, service levels aren’t. Whenever possible, choose the desk of death, especially if you’re the third or fourth manager to get the job — expectations will be so low that your success is virtually guaranteed.

So long as you follow a few simple rules.

The first is to keep your yap shut. Beyond the usual pleasantries of how delighted you are to have the opportunity, say as little as you can. Listen to everyone, in group settings and one-on-one. Neither agree nor disagree with anything beyond broad philosophical concepts, and above all, don’t choose sides or make any commitments. Offer no ideas of your own. Listen and make note of who says what.

In a desk o’ death, everyone has a private agenda and is trying to recruit you. Assume everything you’re told is biased. You have to piece together an accurate assessment jigsaw puzzle fashion out of bits and pieces. The moment you accept any individual as a preferred or unquestioned source of information, you lose your ability to lead — your preferred source will have established his perspective as your own.

So the first rule is to take time to size up the situation. Then you can decide what needs to be changed — processes, technology, reporting relationships, team members (chances are, if it’s the desk o’ death not everyone is a great employee), attitudes, or what have you. And, you can choose your priorities.

That’s the first rule. The second will have to wait until next week.

Until then, trust nobody.

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Since this is a re-run it’s only fair to provide the link to the follow-up column. Here it is.