Bob Lambert

Not everyone gets to be a leader, and most leaders are also followers in their own right.  The project manager follows instructions from the project sponsor, the CEO from the board, the politicians from the polls, and so on.

Followership is the yang to leadership’s yin, and according to many interesting sources following can be as fulfilling and important as leadership. For example, check out this site: http://www.exe-coach.com/followerPartnership.html.  Quoting: “When both the leader and follower are focused on the common purpose a new relationship between them arises. This new relationship is candid, respectful, supportive and challenging. It is a relationship that honors open communication, honesty and trust from both parties.“  The article argues that effective followership is the key to making today’s flat organizational models successful and mitigating risk of corporate malfeasance and scandal.

Think about it: more people are followers than leaders, so isn’t it more important to cultivate effective followership than effective leadership?

Recently I was asked for a high level requirements plan for a large IT conversion.  I googled around a little for something standard.  I found some good references (see links at the bottom of this post), but not exactly what I was looking for: a simple, method-agnostic layout of the high level steps and checkpoints in requirements for a big project, emphasizing interactions with business people.   I then rifled my files to find the example below.

This summary plan frames up interactions with business subject matter experts and their review of results.  The table lays out the steps, “granularity” (meaning how often each step is carried out), what comes out of each step, who does the work, and offers a few notes.

Before the table, here are two important definitions:

• Sponsor: Very early on in your project you should identify the one person who you need to make happy in order to succeed.   The bigger the project, the higher up the sponsor.  Keep in touch to make sure they know what’s going on, keep them happy, and if something happens that will make them not happy don’t keep it secret.  Maintain a vibrant risk/issue process so that you can give them early warning of bad possibilities and they can help early.
• Stakeholder: A stakeholder is anyone who will benefit from or be harmed by your project.  Requirements come from stakeholders.  Be sure to build support even with the latter group if at all possible, and at least make the adjustments that will keep them from working to prevent you from succeeding.

Careful, this is just an empty vessel.  Within this high level framework a team can apply whatever requirements techniques they want.  (In fact, I highly recommend structured analysis techniques like use cases or process models, but that’s for the requirements team and this framework is for the PM).  Of course a smaller effort suitable for agile techniques wouldn’t need something like this.  This is for big transitions like conversion to a new COTS package, for example, where it is easy to get lost in the detail.

Hopefully if you’re a PM on a big project you’ll find this framework as useful as I did.

 Here are some of the other references I found along the way, caveat emptor:

• http://www.outsource2india.com/software/RequirementAnalysis.asp
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Requirements_analysis
• http://www.jiludwig.com/HCI_Journal_article.html

To me, calling someone a “user” contributes to the gulf between IT and other business people.

Most of us don’t think about it and say “user” or “end-user”. Those who do think about it say something like client, customer, or business customer, or something similar.  Sometimes these terms work and sometimes they seem contrived, but there’s a better way.

Lior Arussy of the Strativity Group argues that what we call our customers is critical to effectively serving them (http://www.crmxchange.com/focus_customer/Oct06_2.asp). According to Arussy the problem is that many of us use terms for customers “based on their role in our process, encouraging a “one size fits all” approach that treats all customers the same. The diversity and complexity of customers is subsequently ignored and replaced with a customer that does not exist but who fits perfectly within the organization’s business model. The customer is thus subjected to the company’s processes and efficiency needs rather than the other way around.”

When we in IT call them “users” we do the same thing. Rather than thinking about a business person’s role in a business process, we think about them in terms of how they use “our” system. This encourages us to think narrowly about how, for example, a recruiter uses a personnel workflow system. The word “user” encourages us to disconnect from the business process rather than understanding how the system fits into the hiring process as a whole.

Maybe I’m exaggerating and this one small point doesn’t matter much. However, in most organizations there is a a communications gap between IT and business, and as the service provider it is IT’s responsibility to bridge the gap. Communications gaps are made up of lots of little habits of thinking and practice, and this is one of them.

So what should you call the user of a business application? When I’m talking generally about business people who use IT applications, I use the term business people, which after all is what they are. When I’m talking about the users of a specific system I try to use the term that everyone else in the organization uses for what they do, like “financial analyst” or “recruiter” or “production line supervisor.”

I hope that being specific and correct about business people’s role encourages me to understand the system I’m building in business context, making it easier for me to build the application exactly as they need it.

Free form diagramming doesn’t only mean “no rules”, it also means “just right”.

This post, last in a three part series on free form diagramming, gives some simple guidelines for getting the technique right.  Part one talked about the tension between rigor and expression in diagramming for analysis and design, and how more precise diagrams can hinder rather than help communications with business people.  Part two reviewed free form diagramming in practice.

While it is impossible to specify format and structure of a free form diagram in advance, here are some useful guidelines to follow when building your free form diagram:

•    Rule number one: draw it as you see it. Typically, an analyst uses a free form diagram because he/she already pictures a business process.  Trust your mental picture and get it down on the page.  Then, go through the following checklist to make sure it says what you want it to say.

•    Model real world processes, things, and events. Free form diagrams have one great advantage over Use Case Diagrams, Data Flow Diagrams, and the rest: they are concrete rather than abstract.  For example, in a free form diagram you can symbolize a shopper with a clipart picture of someone choosing a soup can from a grocery store shelf.  The free form diagram should clearly represent things from the real world: organizations, locations, business processes, interfaces, etc.

•    Use symbols consistently. Look at each repeated rectangle, line, circle, icon, etc, and verify that everything with the same shape represents the same type of thing or event.

•    Speak the language of the audience. A free form diagram should depict things business people care about in recognizable terms.  For example, accountants might readily understand boxes labeled GL, AP and AR for general ledger, accounts payable, and accounts receivable.  A shipping clerk might quickly interpret a process illustration showing labeled icons shaped like trucks and warehouses.

•    Arrangement on the page conveys meaning. Frequently, free form diagrams group objects that belong together on the page.  In other cases, the diagram shows a definite process flow by the arrangement of objects.  For example, Business Intelligence Architecture diagrams typically show information flow from source systems on the left to business reporting on the right.  Could this kind of flow or grouping improve your diagram?

•    Limit the number and complexity of objects on the diagram. Most often, a meaningful diagram shows relatively few objects, organizes them in a sensible way, and does not cross lines.  If you need many objects to tell the story, reduce complexity by arranging them logically.

•    Work at one level of detail, or clearly indicate differences between levels of detail. If your diagram includes a box labeled “AP System” then it would not likely make sense for it also to contain another labeled “Journal Voucher Key”.  Diagrams that communicate well are all at the same level of detail or clearly indicate differences in level of detail.

The free form diagram can be an essential part of a successful IT application project by enabling all to understand the target system in the same way and helping business people understand critical functionality.

This is part two of a three part series on free form diagramming for IT projects.  This entry reviews free form diagramming in practice. Part one talked about the tension between rigor and expression in diagramming for analysis and design, and how more precise diagrams can hinder rather than help communications with business people.  Part three will provide a few simple guidelines for getting it right.

Some current development tools and methods do include the free form diagram in their toolbox.  For example, Scott Ambler’s Agile Modeling site includes a page on free form diagrams (http://www.agilemodeling.com/artifacts/freeForm.htm), and the IBM tool XDE has provided an integrated free form diagram (http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/rational/library/915.html).

A Free Form Diagram Showing the Broad Outlines of a System

Free form diagrams can be especially useful in illustrating the overall scope of an IT development effort.  For example, XDE product literature cites the free form diagram’s “capabilities to communicate broad ideas about the direction of [a] solution”.  IT software product marketers frequently bear out this advantage over structured modeling with attractive diagrams describing their products and services, as in the diagram above.  Such diagrams enable companies to “level set” the terms of a conversation, providing a reference point for providing more detailed information about the product.

A similar diagram can provide a reference for IT project participants.  One, produced jointly early on in custom development of a financial system by the primary business contact and project architect, helped build consensus with designers, database administrators, programmers, and business people.  Some on the project considered this shared vision of the planned system one key to the project’s success.

Both of these examples illustrate the most common use of the free form diagram: to depict “the fundamental organization of a system [or business function], embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and the environment, and the principles governing its design and evolution” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_architecture).

Because the free form diagram can seem more concrete than other, more abstract, models, a well-constructed free form diagram is a great way to communicate complexity to an audience of both technical and non-technical participants.

The free form diagram is also useful in other situations.  Sometimes a requirements team works with business users who have a diagram describing their current process.  In that case the team might use the same format to describe the new process.  In other cases it might be useful to improve readability by drawing a process flow on a map of the shop floor, or using icons representing real objects and events rather than class symbols on a class model.  The point is to create a medium that precisely matches the audience with the message.

Part 3 of the Free Form Diagrams series provides a few simple guidelines for success with this technique.

One effective way of communicating complexity, especially in the overall architecture of a system, is the free form diagram.  A free form diagram can directly address unique characteristics of a system in a way that business people can understand.

Out on a walk some years ago I met an acquaintance who happened to be a professor of Computer Science.  We talked shop (I worked in the IT department of the local electric utility) and he asked me what methods we used for mathematically proving program correctness.  I confess I laughed.  My team was struggling to figure out just what the business really wanted – forget mathematical proofs!

Our conversation highlights the tension between rigor and expression in diagramming to support IT projects.  Developers need precise diagrams rigorous enough to accurately reflect complex processes.  However, that precision and detail can make the diagrams at best boring and at worst intimidating to business people.  Often they don’t have the time or patience required to sit through the explanations needed to understand such diagrams. Requirements meetings frequently end early with business participants walking off grumbling about IT non-alignment.

UML is today’s de facto analysis and design diagramming standard. To the OO professional UML provides a rich, expressive, and consistent set of conceptual tools that continue to evolve.  Work is underway to improve the accuracy and precision of UML with respect to the target code. (http://www.omg.org/docs/ad/00-01-07.pdf).
The problem is that more precision will make the UML diagrams more complex and less understandable to non-coders, making the diagrams even less useful in communication with business people.

For project success business people need to be able to communicate their needs freely and completely.  Requirements analysts need to capture, record, and replay business needs for confirmation, and let the business expert return to other work as quickly as possible.  These communications often work best with pictures rather than words, and of course when everyone understands the picture the same way.  Asking a busy floor supervisor to review a formal class model is literally having him or her review specifications in a foreign language.

One solution is for developers to communicate with business people using free form diagrams, expressive yet rigorous diagrams with drawing conventions tailored to the audience.

More to come in parts two and three of this series.  Part 2 talks about using free form diagrams in practices, and Part 3 provides some simple guidelines for successfully using free form diagrams.

Everyone involved in managing or improving a business process should understand data modeling.  For real. And almost everyone is in a position to improve a business process by understanding the current one and making suggestions to improve it.  Understanding a business process means understanding business objects, events, the relations among them, and the business rules that govern the process, and that’s what data modeling is all about.

Sure, data modeling is the first step to designing a database, but that’s just a coincidence.  A well designed database is well designed both because it’s efficient and because it matches business needs.

The first step in data modeling is understanding entities.  An entity is like a business object: examples may include customer, order, product, patient, blogger, post, or whatever.  The next step is to understand relationships among the entities, like  a customer may place many orders or  a post is written by a blogger.   Then the data modeler thinks about the attributes of the entities, like the name of the blogger, the price of the product, and so on.  The attributes and relationships are where the business rules come from.  Examples of rules may be “a post is written by exactly one blogger” or “every order must have a shipping address.” It’s not really a sequential step by step thing, more like a series of really interesting brainstorm sessions, but you get the idea.

Data modeling can get really complex, especially when it includes enough detail to generate an actual database, but that’s beside the point.  We’re talking about clear thinking about business things, events, relationships, and rules.  The point is that this kind of thinking can enable a business person to understand better the things, events, and rules of a business, and then to define more rational processes based on that understanding.

Today a lot of the problems that data modeling helps reveal relate to overcomplicated org charts and artificial complexities of legacy information systems.  Often the business evolves around the system, and it takes clear thinking to untangle the process spaghetti that results.

I worked with one company that organized itself by four different product line channels, served by matrixed support functions like accounts receivable and claims.  Worked pretty well, except when you wanted to know all of your contacts with a given customer, for example.  The same customer could have had a different record for each channel, then more information was socked away in the matrixed support functions.   Furthermore, the customer records were all laid out differently, and had different addresses, contact information, billing instructions, and so on.

Maybe I’m oversimplifying, but shouldn’t one customer have one file with the same information that everyone uses?  It seems to me that if applied in the real world this data-oriented perspective could really make things simpler and more cost effective.

I’ve heard that “A good project manager can manage any project, as long as they’ve got good people on the project”. In the perfect world, maybe. In the real world, no way.

Those promoting project management focus on characteristics of PMs that are common across all disciplines: interpersonal skills, organizational skills, communication skills, and problem-solving skills.  These are necessary but not sufficient qualities.  Good project managers also have interest and depth in the subject matter of the project.

It seems that the world has forgotten about history’s great project managers. They were overwhelmingly individuals with abiding interests in their fields.  Werner von Braun led the massively successful development of the Saturn moon rocket. General Bernard Schriever, the man cited as “The Father of Project Management” (here), who led the Air Force’s space and missile programs in the 1950s, was a long time pilot with an engineering degree.  Frederick Brooks, with a PhD in Mathematics from Harvard, led development of IBM’s OS/360 operating system, fundamental to IBM’s dominance 0f commercial computing during the 70s and 80s. “As of 2008^[update] he is still engaged in active research there, primarily in virtual worlds and molecular graphics.” (Wikipedia)

I recently witnessed two IT projects, both multimillion dollar efforts and both business-critical.  Project A, a migration to a commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) human resources system, tracked to budget and schedule and met business objectives with almost no customization.  Project B, another COTS effort for core business operations, suffered huge budget and schedule overruns associated with frequent changes in direction and scope expansions.

Project A was outsourced to an outside consulting firm, who brought in a PM with deep technical experience configuring and customizing the COTS package.  Project B was run by an internal Project Management Office, staffed by project managers who did not have technical or business analysis backgrounds.

Project A’s leadership had the background to understand the road ahead, and spent six months of a two year project in definition, completing detailed business requirements, business process design, and system architecture deliverables.  On Project B, a senior IT manager decreed that the team skip requirements definition, since future business processes would be dictated by the COTS application: a critical early mistake.  Project B’s management did not have the IT background needed to recognize the mistake, which would have been obvious to the Project A team.

For a PM to be effective he or she needs sufficient knowledge to envision the end product in a scope and objectives document, create a work breakdown structure that makes sense to business and technical team members, and know which risks are pivotal and which don’t matter.

In spite of stereotypes about IT folks, many are experienced, articulate, well organized, have great interpersonal and problem-solving skills, technically curious, and would welcome an opportunity to lead an ambitious project.  Make one of them your project manager, provide strong organizational support, and you’ll be more likely to achieve objectives on budget and on schedule.

An architectural template is a generalized architecture that illustrates features common to all examples of a given type of system. A template may be thought of as a “fill in the blanks” form for a project lead, identifying typical components, good analysis and design techniques, general project planning guidelines, staffing skill needs, and more. The data warehouse model is a good example (check out the Wikipedia article on data warehousing). It identifies distinct components and interfaces that make up a data warehouse, and defines the quality and performance characteristics that make them work well.
Most importantly, the template gives rules for deciding whether or not a system is an example of the given architectural type. With a good template, it is possible for a systems architect to compare the template with the general functions and objectives of a planned system. If the problem matches the template, then the architect has a head start on planning and definition.