FRequently Asked Qustions

Questions you should be asking!

Does Agile boost performance?

I find that the Agile methodology gained huge attention because at its heart it addresses communication before products development.

Teams and organisations reap the benefits of implementing Agile much better with the mindset of improving communication, rather than resign to blindly following a technique - which kind of defies the intention of Agile! Otherwise it becomes like other organisational changes, monstrous and bureaucratic.

The Agile Manifesto, provides an elegant invitation to leaders and teams to collaborate, interact, and adopt the human interaction over fixed or impersonal processes, documentation, contracts, and plans.

Interestingly, the recent Pulse report 2018 from PMI shows that champion teams outperform underachieving ones by 21 times, that is 2,100% (!). This sets a very high bar for teams that want to improve their productivity and outcomes, and merely adopting methodologies blindly will not do the trick!

  • For a start read the classic work "Uncommon sense, Common Nonsense" by Goddard and Eccles.

  • A great book on the implementation of Agile Scrum is "Essential Scrum" by Kenneth S. Rubin.

Should I outsource, or hire talent?

In his latest book Good to Great, Jim Collins says “Put your best people on your best opportunities, not your biggest problems”.

I often work with managers and clients who have this dilemma, of matching the right resources with the right tasks; should they train and upskill their teams or hire specialised professionals, perhaps use a contractor, or maybe engage with an agency that builds a subsystem or the whole product for them, let alone the discussion of whether to develop something or buy it off the shelf.

My approach to making such decisions goes back to the company’s strategy; what is it they are trying to achieve to be a successful business, and what is the strategic advantage they already have or willing to obtain?

For example, think of Apple’s App Store; you might think of the iPhone as the strategic product that put the company on the path of success; but early on what made it all work was the App Store. Apple established and invested in the iPod brand, before the iPhone, to prove that they have a great and working mechanism for downloading content and managing the billing cycle. Only last year after a couple of decades of success, that Apple announced they will start manufacturing their own chips rather than rely on big suppliers, signaling a shift in their stratygic approach to winning their business.

Recently I worked with a company that developed a huge scanner for the mining industry, a 2 cubic meters device that can scan almost 2 meter wide rods of rock. This required a specialised image processing software that operates a moving camera and “stitches” the snapshots of images. However, this was not the core technology or the unique IP that the company was creating. Rather it was an AI algorithm that could analyse those images and automatically map out the materials that were excavated.

Strategically, the company had to protect their IP of analysing the rocks and mapping of the materials excavated. And this AI component was already being developed by a PhD graduate who has been publishing papers on the subject and early on became part of the company’s personnel and management. Therefore, in this particular case, deciding how to approach the imaging system, we started by trying out off the shelf products but those proved inadequate to the task at hand; and once the personnel question came up, with time to makret in mind, I recommended for the first prototype that the imaging system should be outsourced to a highly specialised agency that could develop the important system quickly – eventually, within 6 months the first operational device was shipped, installed and started working in a mining site and generating revenue.

  • Read the latest work from Jim Collins "Good to Great, why some companies make the leap… and others don’t"

How to keep my project on time on budget?

Many consider the “On Time, On Budget” as the holy grail of running successful projects, and often forget that it is only the means and not the end!

Time and budget on any project are arbitrary and get created out of mutual expectations. A good project or product manager will do their best to keep those expectations in check. The key is not merely to meet the expectations, but keep them up to date and negotiate them, all the time!

Let us consider a most simple project: we decide to meet the first Monday of next month at 2pm, for one hour to discuss annual planning objectives. The time is set, and our budget is 1 hour to meet.

Why this time and budget? It is arbitrary! But probably because it suits our needs when we set it.

Things might change by then, we may need to reschedule, or start late but finish on time, or any combination of changing time and budget – the key point here is that we will have to communicate and negotiate the change, so it suits us both again. The end goal remains to discuss annual planning objectives, and not fit into time and budget blindly!

When changes ‘happen’ and not managed, they become deviations, whether when set at the start arbitrarily and not challenged, or when reality challenges expectations but remain unmanaged. In either case it is such deviations that kill most projects and not managed changes.

  • I highly recommend the book "Thinking, Fast and Slow". It’s a great read about the choices we make, and includes great nuggets for running projects and working with people from the author of "The planning fallacy".

How to create collaboration between teams?

My approach is that the key to successful collaboration, and outcomes, not only requires agreement between different stakeholders, but getting to a point where parties corroborate and endorse each other's perspectives. This is achieved from gaining insights based on mutual understanding, where all stakeholders (for example, business, technical and marketing) have the same information and aim for the same goals, yet need to translate their knowledge into their domain of expertise and teams.

For example, as a programs manager in Medtronic I used to ensure that most client visits included myself and both the Marketing and Technical project managers. Learning from first-hand impressions and interactions is invaluable. First, each team could then come up with their impression and translate it to their domain, be it technical, operational usability, or deployment related. Moreover, in the life of a project as difficulties and conflicting priorities arise, the negotiations would gain a jump-start as in most cases each stakeholder knows what are the pains of other stakeholders. A project manager would be able to endorse and strengthen a change request from marketing, or negotiate impact rather than lose valuable time catching up (or worse, guessing), “what or why on earth” do they want to make such a request.

Contrary to the saying "means justify the outcome", I've observed so many projects where time after time how "means define the outcome".

Is there a recipe for unicorn startups?

As a manager in Given Imaging (now a Medtronic company) I witnessed its journey from a successful medical device startup to a unicorn valued $1b USD when sold to Covidien (and later Medtronic) in 2013-2014. In a nutshell, a journey spanning over 15 years, 1,000 employees including almost 100 engineers, and three owned production facilities around the world, with a consistent growth of multi-million dollars annual revenue to get there.

Over the years the company adopted various techniques, methodologies, and offered improved and first class solutions to push its growth; this accumulated journey to create a world-class product in a world-class company is what drove the success.

My point is, we tend in general to idolise outstanding outcomes, in sports, in business, in music, and all aspects of life. We know the big names like Apple (tech), Boby Fischer (chess), Michael Jordan (basketball), Beethoven (music) and many other names, and they have this mythical aura of achievement around them. Such myth is perceived by overlooking the journey of accumulated work and experience that those stars meticulously gained over the years, to become the stars they have become. Sometime there is an element of luck, talent, or circumstances that could provide a great push, but the recipe includes, first an approach of wanting to create something superb, finding ways to create that outcome, and following the journey day by day, year by year. Or as the professional golfer Arnold Palmer nicely put it “The more I practice the luckier I get”

So, if you have an idea and dare dreaming of the title unicorn, don’t sell it cheap asap and don’t pursue shortcuts; rather, plan your roadmap to get there, and go pursue it with the right people.

  • I suggest these refreshing articles on startups and unicorns state in the US

Startups, It’s Time to Think Like Camels — Not Unicorns (hbr.org)

Where Have All the Profitable Startups Gone? | Mind Matters

  • Another interesting read in this regard, is the fabulous book “Talent is Overrated, What Really separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else” by Geoff Colvin.

What are the common oversights of early stage entrepreneurs?

I find myself providing these recurring tips and advice to early stage entrepreneurs.

I hope they can put you or keep you on track; or as I like to say "Get it Right the First Time!"

  1. Avoid thinking in technical solution terms. Define what "tangible problem" you are solving to your customers, and describe how your (tangible) solution solves this problem to them.

  2. Don’t focus on comparing your solution to other solutions to understand your market and competition. Find which other solutions solve the same problems as you do.

  3. To plan your first MVP, find the minimal “technical” solution to your “tangible” solution. One of the MVPs I recently suggested to a couple of entrepreneurs, was as simple as a social media page created in a couple of days.

  4. Build your crowd; engage with your clients asap. This way you will refine your understanding to the market while you gain interest from potential customers. You will also have leverage when approach investors with a crowd of fans behind you!

  1. Be productive not busy! Start simple: make a list of everything you want to do, prioritise those and divide the work among your partners if you have them (use an app or a tool!)

  2. Go for it 😊

  • I highly recommend these references for any founder and innovation leader: "Running Lean, Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works", by Ash Maurya.

  • See my webinar on best practices to manage your startup journey. MVP - minimum Solution or Minimum Problem?

Risk management a snowball or butterfly effect?

The butterfly effect describes how small variations could accumulate in complex dynamic systems into gigantic impact. A snowball’s effect amplifies and gains more and more momentum the longer it prevails in a very persistent manner.

Most project start with the best of intentions from everyone involved, then shortly after a spiral downhill of problems and escalating issues add to the unfortunate statistics that 70% of projects suffer from delays and deviations, and over 15% turn so bad that they can threaten the very existence of their company.

I take it for granted that problems will occur and something unexpected will happen, projects and life are just too complicated to assume otherwise. Therefore, I think of unattended risks like snowballs, not as a butterfly effect outcome. They are way less random than most people would like to think.

The most crucial aspect to projects problems is lack of preparation! (over 80% of startups fail due to creating products that don't generate interest, or simply run out of resources).

Risk management could address things you know, so you start with what you assume to be true. Or they can be about things you don't know, so you make sure to investigate and know more, either using internal resources or calling for experts.

Some choose to dismiss risks and feel optimistic until overran by a snowball. The alternative is preparing to embrace challenges, one at a time, with well organised teams and processes based on rigorous risk management, so when a snowball forms it is tackled asap before it grows beyond recognizing, and becomes almost impossible to detect where it originated and how big it is to handle.

 

You are welcome to share your questions or insights