The Failed Gorilla: Just because you failed doesn’t mean you didn’t succeed.

Photo Courtesy of: gorillagolfblog.com

It was like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. No matter how many times I moved the boxes around, the data still showed the damning truth. Failure. The project was a failure and there was no amount of lipstick I could slap on it to make it anything else. The executive review was going to be painful.

“FORE!” A golf ball whizzed past my head and shot out the open window. All but picking myself up off the floor I shot a look out my open door. Cheerfully striding down the hallway was Hogarth, wearing the most ridiculous golfing outfit I’d ever seen in my life. All right, the outfit wasn’t so bad, but on Hogarth it was awful.

“Hogarth!” I snapped.

Ignoring me, he cheerfully swept into my office and over to the open window. Casting a critical eye out the window he gave a dissatisfied grunt. “Dang, I was hoping for an eagle on that hole. Be lucky if I make par.”

“HOGARTH! What on earth are you doing?”

He turned and offered me his ivory smile. “Practicing for the launch party golf trip, of course. This is going to be so fun!”

I buried my head in my hands. “Hogarth,” I muttered from the depths of my palms. “There isn’t going to be a launch party.

The project is a failure.”

“The project the customer is using right now?”

I nodded, “Yes, that project.”

“Maybe I’m dense, I mean I’m just a gorilla, but isn’t shipping to the customer a definition of success.

I threw myself back in my chair and cast my arms in the air. “The Project was a failure! We shipped a full quarter late and went over budget by fifteen percent!”

“The customer is so happy they are doubling their order and you’ve failed?”

“Yes! We failed to ship on time and on budget. That’s two of the triple constraints. We failed!”

“Huh,” he grunted. He took a seat on the corner of my desk, eliciting a groan of protest from it. “I’m not sure I’m following you. The product shipped, the customer is happier than ever and they are planning to order more and that’s a failure?”

I nodded. 

“Hmm, okay. Let’s take a new approach. You remember Apollo 13. Was it a success or a failure?”

“It was a success; they all made it home alive. You can’t argue with breathing.”

“Yeah, but they were supposed to land on the moon…”

“Who, cares about landing on the moon! They lived.”

“Precisely.”

There are dozens of stories about the stunning percentage of projects that fail. And yet we still do projects. You’d think with ratios upwards of 80% project failure that whole departments would be getting shot on a daily basis and a lot more companies would be going under every week than actually do. So why doesn’t this failure have a greater impact.

Just because you failed, doesn’t mean you didn’t succeed. Just because a feature is broken, doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. So tied are we to the infamous Iron Triangle of Cost, Schedule, and Scope, that we often lose sight of two of the most important things.

Are we delivering value to the customer?

Are we delivering value to the business?

Whether you use Agile in your development process or not the value of communicating with your customers just can’t be overlooked. When you communicate and communicate often, you will find the needs of customer shifting. This can drive many folks mad, as they try and keep features locked down and fixed. But at the end of the day we are selling the product to the customer. If we build it exactly to the original specifications and that doesn’t meet the customer’s needs, then you’ve got a real failure.

What’s a bigger failure? Being three months late, but the customer is happy. Or being on time and the customer doesn’t want the product?

Make sure you are in touch with your customers, internal and external and don’t let the Iron Triangle sink you to the pits of despair.

Joel Bancroft-Connors

The Gorilla Project Manager

Want me to talk to your gorilla? Send me an email

You can follow me on twitter, @JBC_PMP

 

Who is Hogarth? Read Blog 001 to find out all about my personal gorilla. 

How is a Gorilla Project Manager like R2-D2?

Note: For new Gorilla Blogs, head over to The Gorilla Coach

"So what do you do?"

See, this is why I hate dinner parties. Now if I was a doctor, a pilot, heck even a mechanic, it would be easy. I'd just say it and we'd move on to the meaningless small talk portion of the evening. But no... I had to decide to become a project manager, even worse an agile project manager. With a deep internal sigh I sized up the person who had just asked me the question.

Neil was nice enough, but I could already tell it was going to be an uphill battle. He was the neighbor of the host who was a friend of my wife's. I already knew Neil was in Real Estate (he'd left a stack of his business cards in the bathroom), I didn't relish the next few moments. 

"I'm a project manager." 

Neil cocked his head to the side. The look of confusion on his face was all too familiar. Taking a breath I tried to explain. I don't know why I did. It's not like I'd ever had any success before. And yes, I've tried the "I heard cats for a living." I really didn't want to be asked what circus I worked for again. 

"I'm responsible for managing the scoping, planning and execution of project deliverables with a cross functional team in order to get a product shipping." 

"Oh, so you're a manager?" Neil asked. Of course what he was really asking was if I was in charge of people. Why is it that a measure of your worth is how many people call you boss? 

I shake my head, "No, I don't have direct reports. My job is to facilitate the project and help the core team deliver." 

"Like a hostage negotiator?" 

I sighed. Smiling, I nodded my head. "Yeah, just like that." 

"Cool." 

I wasn’t even going to try and explain how agile project managers were more like coaches. Not being a sports fan myself I didn’t want the conversation to go down the rat hole of how I thought the local pro sports teams would do this season.

Just then I spotted a dark shape duck around the side of the house. Hiding a groan I excused myself from Neil and left the smell of BBQ cooking on the patio behind me. Coming around the corner of the building I found what I feared most. 

"Hogarth, let go of that branch." 

Hogarth turned towards me still holding onto a large branch sticking out from the tree in the side yard.. "This is an Arkansas Black apple tree, do you know how rare those are?" 

"Hogarth, you can't eat that tree, it's not yours." 

He gave a sigh and let go of the tree. "Fine..." He flopped to the ground and picked at the overgrown lawn. "You won't begrudge me a little grass, will you? I'll give you the secret of explaining your job." 

"Hogarth, I've been a project manager for years. There are even people in my company that don't have a clue what a PM is." 

Nibbling some of the green grass he looked up at me a smiled a toothy white grin. "That's ‘cause you never told anyone that you're R2-D2." 

"Wha...?"

R2-D2 - Robot side kick to the Skywalker's of Star Wars and Agile Project Manager: He's not the hero of the show and he's never been a leader, but it would be hard to imagine the Star Wars universe without this plucky little trashcan on wheels. But what does R2 have to do with being project manager?

Everything! R2 is the ultimate Agile Project Manager. Or perhaps we project managers are the ultimate R2 Astromech droids. 

R2-D2 knew all about responsibility without authority: Princess Leia, his project sponsor, assigned him the project but gave him no resources to do it with. He even had to track down the product owner for more information. He enlisted C3PO on the force of their relationship alone. As the project progressed he collected more resources on influence or by working with his project team. 

R2-D2 understood that project requirements change: When his sponsor first gave him the project it was very simple, get this message to Obi Wan Kenobi (his product owner) so that Kenobi could stop the Death Star. But he knew the requirements would change. He didn't demand a full list of requirements before he headed for the escape pod. He was confident that future backlog grooming would reveal more requirements. He also knew that iteration planning would break the epic scale user stories down into smaller stories and tasks. So he started the first sprint with just a couple of user stories. Engage existing resources. Get off the Ship. Don’t get shot.

R2-D2 knew how to motivate his teams: When R2 met Luke Skywalker, he knew who the boy was. He leveraged past project retrospectives for that (Okay, he was in the first three movies). So with that in mind do we really think he accidentally showed Luke the holo of the princess? Heck no! He remembered that Obi Wan told Senator Bail Organa he would watch over the boy. So by revealing the holo, not only would he possibly find a clue to where his product owner (Kenobi) was, but also could motivate the young man to help the project. 

R2-D2 knew his job was to guide the use of proper process, but also knew that sometimes you trust your team: Process said you used a targeting computer when firing a proton torpedo. But he chose to trust his team member, Luke, when he turned off the computer. Good thing he didn't stick to rigid process enforcement, right? 

R2-D2 knew all about removing impediments: Shut down the trash compactor. Fix the hyper-drive. Stop the elevator from falling. Shift power to the rear deflector shields. Open this door. Put C3PO's head back on. Put C3PO's head back on, again. When his project team encountered an impediment he jumped right in and owned clearing that impediment. 

R2-D2 was the ultimate servant leader: R2 knew exactly what needed to happen. After all, he'd been working on related projects since the Phantom Menace. By the time it came time to destroy the Death Star, good old R2 knew all the players. He could have told Luke that Vader was his dad on the first day they met. But he didn’t. He knew he had to let his team member discover some things himself. Instead he carefully guided his team member on the path.

He was never the hero, but he always saved the day. He worked quietly and tirelessly in the background to ensure all went well. Emperor Palpatine may not have known who he was, but his team did and they appreciated him for his efforts.

So you see, the next time someone asks you what you do for a living. Stand up proud and declare.

“I’m R2-D2.”

Joel Bancroft-Connors

The Gorilla Project Manager

Want me to talk to your gorilla? Send me an email

You can follow me on twitter, @JBC_PMP

 

Who is Hogarth? Read Blog 001 to find out all about my personal gorilla. 

Gorillas can be Agile with any project

Some days I was so thankful for the fact I worked in a three story building. It made the urge to toss myself off it, to end the misery, so much less. Unless If I  was really lucky I'd just end up hurting myself and that would just add to the miserable condition I was in.

Hogarth was right... Oh how I hated to think those three words. It was becoming such a common occurrence that I was considering adding to the law's of nature. The sun comes up in the east, politicians are lying when their lips are moving and Hogarth is always right. This time it had to do with my implementation of Agile. Agile may be the silver bullet of development but I hadn't had the first idea how to properly implement it.

So I'd swallowed the pill and went out and figured out just what Agile was. Leaning back in my chair I took in the remains of that discovery. Highsmith was leaning on Adkins and the two were threatening to push Cockburn off the desk. Larsen and Cohn were glaring at me from under the coffee cup perched on them. The books stared back at me mutely, mocking my pain and despair. Tilting my head back to stare at the ceiling I moaned. "Kill me now..."

"What and miss all the fun?"

I kept my eyes closed and used every ounce of my will to imagine away the voice that had spoken.

"Not gonna work," Hogarth replied. "Your subconscious really likes me, so you're stuck with me."

Pulling my gaze from the acoustical tile I fixed Hogarth with a baleful gaze. "Remind me to schedule myself for a lobotomy."

Hogarth was perched on the large window ledge. His black fur shimmering in the afternoon sunlight and his face was split with a contended grin. "Now why on earth would you want to give up all this?" His huge paw swept in an all encompassing arc that took in my cube and then the rest of the office beyond.

"Because there is no way on earth I'm going to get the company to adopt Scrum for real!" I poked at the stack of books. "It’s a far cry between some structural artifacts and the real meaning of Agile and the company is about as unagile as you can get."

Hogarth nodded, "Well yeah, I think we covered the whole artifacts part already" He snaked an arm out the open window and broke off a branch from the tree outside. Snacking on the branch he said, "You've recognized the real problem so what's the issue?"

"There is no way on earth I'll ever get this company to go agile."

"Agile or Scrum?" Hogarth asked.

"What's the difference?" I shot back.

"A single sapling a forest does not make..."

Scrum is an Agile Framework - Scrum is not the only way to practice Agile.

When these kind of comments are thrown out, the typical response is something like "Well of course, there's Kanban, Lean, or XP."  And those folks are right, these are other frameworks or methodologies  of Agile. And at the same time I think we end up missing the bigger picture. To understand this, we need to look into the roots of Agile.

Agile has two foundational roots. The most obvious is the gathering of software luminaries that created the Agile Manifesto. Agile wasn't some earth shaking new concept. What it was, was the joint thinking of seventeen software developers who had been practicing various lightweight development methods and how what was the common, foundational values of these methods.  At its heart Agile was a new language to explain long standing best practices, values and principles. If you think about it, in a light weight Agile way, it is the Agile PMBoK. (Remember that the PMBoK is also not a methodology, but a set of standard terminology and guidelines for project management.)

The other foundational root goes back to the precursors of Lean manufacturing, to the Toyota Way. Like the Agile Manifesto, it was not until 2001 that Toyota published the "Way." But in Toyota's case it was not for lack of use. Toyota revolutionized automotive manufacturing with their unique style and for decades US companies tried to match it. It's not as if Toyota was a walled garden. They cheerfully gave tours of their plants to any and all comers. Why? Because they knew the artifacts of their process were not the key. The key was their six underlying principles, such as "Respect for People," and "Add value to your organization by developing your people and partners."

So what's your point?

Ah yes, this is not a history lesson and I am trying  to make a point.

Today I read a great blog that sums up my point nicely. Ben Horowitz wrote about Lead Bullets, on TechCrunch. The kernel of this is to not go looking for the silver bullet solution, instead use the bullets you have and shoot better.

I've heard stunning success stories in the use of Agile Methodologies (Scrum, XP, Lean, etc.) In nearly all of these instances, the support and engagement was across the board high. It was the right time, the right people, the right need and so on. The Perfect Project Storm. In these cases the silver bullet was the only bullet and it was a dead shot.

And I've seen people try and use the Agile silver bullet and have the organization smother them alive. I like to remind people that silver bullets only work against werewolves. If you are facing a ghost, you're kind of out of luck. When faced with an organization that is highly resistant, highly process driven, highly dysfunctional, etc. trying to dive into the deep end of the Agile pool tends to only end up in the Agile project and team being drowned.

I'm even more depressed now, wasn't there a point?

Yes! The point is Agile isn't just an umbrella over methodologies,  like Scrum and Lean. Agile is a set of guiding principles that can be used ANYWHERE. Where is it wrong to have good teamwork? When is it wrong to make sure the customer is getting what they want? If the process plan says to roll the parts cart around the outside of the building twice, before entering, is it wrong to ask "Why?"

Enter the Agile Manager. You don't have to be using Scrum to be Agile. You can use the principles of Agile anywhere . You can make any team better, if you try.

In short, don't let bad methodology get in the way of good management.

Focus on the team and the project will improve. That's Agile.

Joel Bancroft-Connors

The Gorilla Project Manager

Want me to talk to your gorilla? Send me an email

You can follow me on twitter, @JBC_PMP

Who is Hogarth? Read Blog 001 to find out all about my personal gorilla.  

Indiana Gorilla and the Artifacts of Agile

"Okay and Eric, you were working on the shopping cart ordering story, right?"

Eric nodded, but remained silent.

"And tomorrow you should be done and moving on to the Wish List story, right?"

He nodded again, still silent. He was a good engineer, never spoke unless he really had something to say.

"Any impediments?"

Eric looked around the table at the other seated engineers. None of them met his gaze, intent on their own computers. Then he shrugged and turned back to me. "No."

"Ah, excellent!" I gave a thumbs up sign to the assembled team. "Great stand up, guys, I'll see you all again tomorrow."

I happily began entering data into my uber status report spreadsheet and didn't notice the engineers talking quietly amongst themselves as they filed out.

I was cheerfully humming away five minutes later, when Hogarth wandered in. I looked up and pointed at my uber sheet projecting on the wall screen. "Man, this Scrum stuff is great! I love the daily standups. Just great to have everyone giving daily reports on their status. Can you imagine? A year ago I had to hound them for their slide decks every week and I almost never got a full report."

Hogarth cast a glance at the screen, before he flopped down near the window. Reaching out the window he pulled a branch from the tree outside. After a careful examination of the branch, he used it to point at the screen. "Pretty picture, but you know its completely wrong, right?"

"What!?" I turned to stare at him. "What on earth are you talking about? The project is going great! Look at that burndown! I just cross referenced it with my detailed MS Project file and we are at least a week ahead of schedule. We're doing AWESOME!"

Hogarth shook his head. "Nope, all an illusion. Take Eric for example, he's got a massive database integration issue that's going to end up making all of his stories crash and burn. He's stumped on how to solve the problem and it is going to cascade into a total failure of the storefront in about two sprints."

I blinked. "What on earth are you talking about? Eric just walked out of here and he didn't say word one about any issues."

Hogarth nodded, pealing a long strip of bark from the tree branch. "Course he didn't, no point saying anything if you're not going to listen to him."

"What?" I said incredulously. "We just had our stand up! I was sitting right here! I didn't set up all these Agile meetings just to have things be the same as before!"

"Just because you have the magical artifact, doesn't mean you have a clue how to use it."

"What?" I hated it when Hogarth spoke in riddles.

Hogarth rolled his eyes. "You remember in the original Indiana Jones, the Germans had the Ark of the Covenant?"

I stared at Hogarth, "I don't have time for movie quizzes, Hogarth." He gave me a "humor me" look and I sighed in surrender. "Yes, I remember. It ended pretty badly for them."

Hogarth nodded. "Ayup, they had the artifact. But they didn't know how to use it. If you put a MacDonald's fry cook in the Iron Chef kitchen, he's not magically going to become a great chef. The tools don't make the chef, the chef does."

I stared at him for a long minute.

"Ah, crap…"

Agile Artifacts vs. Agile Values: Holding Daily Standups, planning work in two week iterations, and tracking progress on a burn down chart are all excellent tools for the Agile team. They are not  Agile. Agile is a set of values and principles. It's more about the how of team and not the what of the product.

You can't take a handful of engineers, start having them meet once a day, and declare yourself Agile. Like Hogarth's examples from above, having a tool (A Daily Standup is a Tool/Artifact) and knowing how to use it are two entirely different things. And the more advanced that tool, the more knowledge you need to use it.

Back in college I got a part time job at a little coffee shop/deli (Back before Starbucks took over the world). The owner was a quiet Turkish man who wouldn't let me touch the espresso machine until after I'd learned not only the history of coffee but the why's of exactly how the machine worked (this was an old manual style machine, no automatic buttons or anything). I must have frothed gallons of milk before he let me pour a single ounce into a customer's cup. He told me, "To make good coffee, one must first understand coffee."

Success in Agile requires a look beyond the tangible of meetings, code drops, requirements documents and into the heart of how the organization runs. The values and principles are as much, if not more about the team and not the product trying to be made. Make a better team and you make a better product.

Throw around a bunch of Agile Artifacts, like a five year old using a Ginsu Steak knife set, and you just replace one bad process with another.

Joel Bancroft-Connors

The Gorilla Project Manager

Want me to talk to your gorilla? Send me an email

You can follow me on twitter, @JBC_PMP

Who is Hogarth? Read Blog 001 to find out all about my personal gorilla.  

Death by PowerGorilla

C… O… C… L… S… I… O… N…

The typewriter sound as each letter flew onto the screen gave me a satisfied grin. Nothing like great sound effects to go with some killer slide animation. It had taken me the better part of a week, but I was done with the quarterly report. It was my first report and I was determined to make it memorable.

I hit save and sat back to wait for status bar to creep towards complete.

"You misspelled 'conclusion."

"What?" I spun around so fast I nearly spilled my coffee.

Hogarth was perched in on the window sill soaking in the late afternoon sunlight. He pointed a half-eaten fichus branch at my computer, "you misspelled 'conclusion.' Easy to do when you put spaces between each letter."

I turned back to my computer and groaned in realization. He was right. To make a better visual impact I'd put each letter in their own text box and had them spaced across the screen. I was missing the U. "Okay," I said, "thanks for the catch. Soon as this is done saving I'll fix it."

"Done saving?" Hogarth's voice showed a level of genuine confusion I wasn't used to in his voice.

I nodded. "Yeah, should be another twenty seconds."

"How big is your file?" He asked. By now it was starting to dawn on me that he was really confused and I tried not to smile at that. For once I was in the position of knowledge over him. This was great.

"About seventy slides, but the file itself is around twenty-five megabytes."

A fine spray of chewed fichus leaves showered across my back, with no small amount of spray coming over my shoulder to coat my screen. "HEY!" I yelped. Turning about in my chair I looked at Hogarth. He had somehow managed to fall off his perch and was on his hands and knees wiping plant matter from his lips. "What the heck was that for?"

Picking himself up, he recovered the, mostly-eaten branch and looked at me. "I'm sorry did you just say twenty-five megabytes?"

I nodded, "yeah, animations take up a lot of memory."

"Any seventy slides? Don't you only have twenty minutes to present?"

I nodded again, not seeing where he was going.

Hogarth did some math on his fingers. "Let's see, that's an average of 3.5 slides per minute or one slide approximately every 17 seconds."

I shrugged, "Yeah, that does seem like a lot, but the project is miserable shape and we have a lot to cover."

"And you think if you bludgeon the execs over the head with a twenty-five meg file they'll be too senseless to ask question?"

"Huh?" I replied.

Hogarth sighed. "Slides are there to make a point, not to bludgeon your audience into a stupor."

"Huh?"

Hogarth looked heavenward with a "why me" look. Returning to look at me he said, "You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to your grandmother."

"What?" I stared at Hogarth as if he'd grown and second head. "What kind of poppycock water cooler wisdom advice is that? That's got to be from some arm chair TV shrink, right?"

"Albert Einstein" 

"Oh…"

Sometimes it can be so very easy to make your point. And sometimes it can be so very, very hard. Unfortunately it seems that, all to often, the way we try and explain something is to throw more words at it. I'm certainly guilty of this one. Why try to explain something in ten words when one hundred will do?

Because by the time I get to thirty words, my listener is asleep, tuned out, moved on or made up their answer.

Man spent centuries practicing the art of communication. Great orators could empower a speech with nothing but their words and body language. When you think of famous speeches names like Kennedy, Caesar,  Churchill. These great speakers used their words and their gestures to communicate everything they needed to say.

Visual aids of course factored into even famous speeches and the advertising industry grew up around iconic images that conveyed an incredible amount of words, in single images. The crying Indian, the Marlboro Man, the hungry child, the oh so appetizing looking TV Dinner. But these were individual images. They were there to support the words being spoken, to anchor our minds to those words. They were not there to be the message.

Then suddenly it was as if man had forgotten the power of speech. The universe handed us  PowerPoint and we said, "this is good." We started putting everything into these mighty slide decks. Why show one table, when we could show twenty? Why memorize anything when we could put all the text on the slide. Heck, why even bother to present, just send the slides to your audience and ask for questions by email. And so came to pass the terms "eye chart" and "death by PowerPoint."

Did you know that Sweden has a political party right now who's sole platform is the desire to outlaw the use of PowerPoint in government?

PowerPoint is a visual aid. An aid, as in "to help or give assistance." Assistance, not to be the subject, but to assist the subject.

Manager Tools has a great podcast on slides for business presentations. They recommend no more than one slide for every five minutes of presentation time. Like many experts they recommend no more than five bullet points.  Don't use animation. They also stress that the slides are to support the conclusion not to present information. You don't show a graph of population data to let the viewer decipher. You show the specific result that supports your point.

These are great tips for a business slide deck and good starting guidance for a speaker deck. Speaker decks are more focused on backing up the physical speech and the rules are not as strict, you can even get away with some animations. Within reason. I recall Manager Tools describing a truly awful sales presentation. The woman had every single letter flying in, one at a time. And to make it worse, she had her computer piped into the auditorium speakers and every letter made a typewriter sound.

When I think of greater speaker decks, I really like one I saw recently by Bernie Maloney on building Rabid Rapport. It's  48 slides, which breaks the MT rules on one every 5 minutes, but the entire deck is focused on backing up the words Bernie spoke. Honestly I think the best speaker decks are the ones that make nearly no sense if you just look at the slide decks. Bernie's does a great job of that.

I'm currently working on an hour long speech for the PMI Silicon Valley annual Symposium. For a 9000 word speech, I have a slide deck with less than 550 words. Many of these are repeat words and only two pages exceed twenty-five words and only one exceeds 50 words. The animation consists entirely of replacing one image with another or with adding another, large image to an existing slide.

You can make your point with out bludgeoning your audience to death with your slides.

Joel Bancroft-Connors

The Gorilla Project Manager

Want me to talk to your gorilla? Send me an email

You can follow me on twitter, @JBC_PMP

Who is Hogarth? Read Blog 001 to find out all about my personal gorilla.