Guest Post: Dhaval Panchal on Satir Change Model

This is a guest post by Dhaval Panchal an experienced executive, Agile Coach, and Organization Design consultant. He is also the  founder of Evolve Agility, a Texas based coaching and training consultancy, read more about him here.

The Satir Change model applies to individuals as well as systems of individuals. It is one of the cornerstones of the family therapist Virginia Satir’s work on how change takes place.

Late Status Quo

A fairly stable system (individual or groups) with predictable familiarity and comfort. Actors in late status quo system may not be comfortable with “the way things are” but they have familiar solutions to common problems. Organizations in late status quo is a balancing system (systems thinking archetype), where different parts of the system pay different prices to maintain balance. The organization system has stayed the same for a long time. Actors in organizational system know ‘what to do’, ‘how to do, understand where they fit, and know what they can get away with. These ‘games’ or dysfunctions are part of the routine for actors these are indistinguishable from real work.

Examples:

Individuals working long hours compensate by not exercising or spending less time on family matters. “This is very important TPS report, I will take my evening walk tomorrow”.

Teams support low-performing members by everyone else doing a bit extra or tolerating dysfunctional behavior and nobody says anything about it.

Organizations ask for thorough cost-benefit analysis or business case to justify change initiative. Instead of assessing where we are at and where we need to be, organizations ask for proven case-studies and success stories before they consider changing.

Foreign Element

Systems favor self-preservation, this survival instinct is necessary condition for systems to continue to exist. Something happens that people in the system can no longer deny – this foreign element is generated internal or external or just plain old randomness. Ignoring, or ejecting, or neutralizing impact of alien elements are systems’ defense mechanisms. Actors in the system try to accommodate using delaying tactics, or try to encapsulate foreign element within the “normal” way of handling things, or may find somebody to blame.

Example:

After reading newspaper article on impact of stress, a workaholic blames their partner for not supporting their career goals.

After attending an agile conference, team-members acknowledge importance of cross-functional work and demand full management support before they are willing to try pair programming.

Organizational leadership takes note of stealth agile implementations and appreciates their success. As a result, mandates organizational agile transformation by a fixed future date.

Organizations in late status quo are closer to breaking point. Actors who are compensating and sustaining late status quo find their situation is no longer tenable. Systems in late status quo can learn to deny, ignore, or accommodate foreign elements developing unhealthy dysfunctional behaviors for a long time. Just waiting out organizational change initiative is a veteran tactic to diffuse energy and support in organization systems.

It is not possible to predict, but one of these many foreign elements knocks late status quo systems off balance. This could be increasing attrition rate of customers/employees or difficulty getting new ones, or perhaps a sudden change in technological landscape that threatens organizational survival.

Chaos

With critical mass around the foreign element, internal or external, late status quo system tips or gets knocked off balance. This is disorienting. The experience is similar to children’s game of being spun around while blind-folded. Usual ways of getting things done are challenged and there is confusion about ‘what to do’ and ‘how to do’. People react in a number of different ways: by engaging in random behavior, by seeking stability at any cost, or trying to revert to earlier patterns of behavior.

“Familiarity is always more powerful than comfort.” – Virgina Satir

It is common for people to seek for silver-bullet solutions, or seek for complete description of end state, to pursue order in midst of chaos. The uncertainty inherent in chaos zone is unsettling. Even when people realize that old status quo is not where we need to be, they seek the familiarity of old status quo. Loss aversion – losses loom larger than gains, tendencies kick-in.

Example:

Faced with intervention from their child, who is upset at not seeing parents at his favorite school play may tip a family into reevaluating their work life balance priorities or hire a very expensive nanny.

Teams attempting scrum, may discard it and switch to kanban or vice-versa. They may continue to chase the next big agile thing like devOps or server-less in endless pursuit of a quick silver bullet. They may end up blaming organizational culture and continue to operate worse than before.

At the all hands meet (AMA), CEO’s declaration of Agile transformation initiative to be completed by end of fiscal year was received with muted murmurs and extended break room conversations that impacted overall effectiveness. Many managers reported to executive committee that Agile is not working and we should revert to the way things were before.

Transforming Idea

People change, people change all the time. People buy houses, get married, have children, relocate and can cope with the changes all the time. They resist being changed or coerced into it. Everyone cannot be skilled at coping with chaos in all realms of their life.

Organizations often attempt to direct change in behavior and expect that results will follow. This almost never works, because the experience of people trying new approaches is negative they do not alter their core belief systems. At its best, leaders get compliance or in worse cases rebellion. Leaders skilled at surfing chaos set clear guardrails and focus on developing compelling experiences that lead to transforming ideas.

Leaders recognize that transformation must first start from within. So they create an environment where good ideas can get recognized and implemented. They focus their energies of creating a context for learning and recognize that many good ideas will have to be discarded before a transformational idea is recognized and tried.

Example:

Parents decide to set clear boundaries at their work place so their colleagues are respectful of their family time. This helps them to find time for physical exercise, and taking care of their family.

Team members recognize that they have been too insular and decide to get help from ‘coaches’ (internal or external).

After six months into Agile initiative, executive committee convenes an off-site where under guidance from expert facilitator they are able to discuss real issues, build upon each other’s ideas and agree to run focused controlled change ‘experiments’ instead of asking people to fall into line with the ‘big-picture’ Agile scaling framework.

Integration and Practice

During integration stage, there is excitement, energy and things seem to be improving. The feeling is so good that people mistake that this is the change. But the journey has only now began. This is a phase where leadership has most influence and gets tested all the time. There is strong temptation to declare “mission accomplished”, collect laurels and march on to the next big thing. This rush of excitement energizes people to try out other new ideas, many of which do not work out. So the system, is thrown back into chaos. Many organizational systems are stuck oscillating between chaos and integration, never fully realizing full benefits. Desire for quick fixes and leaders aspiration to make their mark, forces regime changes that desensitize employees to management. It is fairly common for veteran’s to list all the management thinking changes from Lean and TQM movement, to Agile and DevOps that have come and gone while never delivering on promised benefits.

Example:

With new found family time, they impulsively adopt a puppy. Excitement around new member in the family is mixed with feeling of anxiety around lack of attention to work and growing needs of family dog.

Team members identify many new ideas in initial sprint retrospectives and after a few sprints find that most of the actions items from previous retrospectives are repeating themselves. They are struggling to find time to implement most of their action items in light of higher delivery expectations (now that they are agile). They think retrospectives are a waste of time.

While the energy and excitement within organization is palpable, the executive committee is not seeing improvement in its traditional productivity measures. So they decide to intervene by asking for company wide rollout of Agile life cycle management tool. This will help them to get accurate data, because clearly this much fun (and engagement) is not justifiable if we are not able to quantify.

During integration and practice, people are learning to use new practices and tools. Appropriate training, coaching, support, and most importantly space to integrate new practices into people’s way of working is needed. Do not rush to quantify benefits, metrics have their own tendencies to look good even when the actual performance may be nose-diving.

New Status Quo

Integration of new ways of working results from many tiny changes to the system at work. These cannot be rushed. With sufficient information, support, and structure the actors within a system arrive at new status quo. There is now familiarity with new way of working, people are at ease and relaxed. A new vocabulary, mental models and belief systems emerge. “How we do things around here” – the culture that emerges from the dip, through chaos and integration, stabilizes to become the new norm. The organization is no longer viewed as the obstacle. And the cycle continues.

Change is inevitable, it is happening whether we like it or not. Organizational anti-bodies that attack all foreign elements, need to be developed to pick out beneficial foreign elements from the harmful. A leaders role in learning organization is not ordained, it is earned. From their organizational position and from resources they posses a leader adapts themselves and influences the climate around them so that people become empowered to change themselves and the environment around them. The only business of being a leader is to create other leaders.

Like what you read? Read more similar content at Evolve Agility

The Challenges of International Projects

This is a guest post by Elizabeth Harrin.

The world of business is continually shrinking: we work in an environment with real-time audio visual communication with colleagues on the other side of the world and online translation tools. Even small companies can operate internationally with outsourcing agreements and partners overseas, which means that project managers in organisations of any size face the challenges of managing international projects.

And that means far more than just calculating that when it’s 9am in ‘my’ London it’s 4am in London, Ohio. International projects come with two main challenges: the people you are working with won’t necessarily work in the same way as you, and the people you are working for won’t necessarily want the same things.

Having an open mind about these challenges is the first step in being able to address them on an international project team. You need a pragmatic approach, especially as national culture plays a big part in how we act, and we can’t change who we are – we can just learn how to make those differences work for everyone concerned.

This can be difficult for project managers to get their heads around. Once you are in the position of managing an international project, you may well be one of the more senior project managers in your team. You have gained that position through hard work and successful project delivery. You expect your project team members to behave in certain ways and people from different cultures won’t always behave the way you expect. As you can imagine, that causes problems and conflict on projects.

Making international working easier

Project managers taking on international projects face a variety of practical challenges. For example, time zones are important. How will you conduct real-time team meetings? Who is going to be the person who gets up in the middle of the night for a call with the Brazilian development team to go through the testing results? In the absence of incentives for the project team, the project manager will find it difficult to recruit volunteers.

Protecting the interests of the UK-based team also falls to the project manager. A project sponsor who doesn’t appreciate that you have just spent half the night on a web conference with the manufacturing supplier in New Zealand won’t look favourably on your request to send everyone home at 3pm. Project managers with international components to their teams not only have to educate team members in how to work well together, but also have to manage upwards and ensure that senior stakeholders understand the constraints of this type of project. In reality, international projects take longer and involve higher travel costs than projects where the entire team is co-located – and that isn’t always a welcome message to the executives.

Practical suggestions aside, the easiest way I have found to work with international teams is to build cultural understanding. As I found when living and working in France, you can be linguistically literate without being culturally literate. At a pub quiz I couldn’t answer the questions about children’s TV programmes or what was found under the streets of Paris (I think, if I remember rightly, that it was the river). But the pub quiz was in an Irish bar, and there weren’t many of them around so that was a change of environment for many of my Parisian colleagues.

Cultural understanding relies on the emotional intelligence of the project manager, his or her leadership skills, adaptability and ability to inform and train the teams.

Using software to help international communication

Aside from cultural understanding, your next challenge is communication. Successful communication relies on the soft skills that a project manager brings to the table. These are the ability to listen, hear the unspoken concerns and messages, and respond clearly in a way that the other person can understand.

Being able to put those soft communication skills into practice is something that can be helped by technology. People need to be able to hear and speak to each other in some format before the project manger’s emotional intelligence can be put to good use. Technology can help with the challenges of international projects, even if we have to accept its limitations with regards to the interpretation of messages communicated using it.

There are lots of technologies available to project managers with virtual teams, whether they are based all over the world or in multiple offices in the same time zone. Instant messaging gives project teams the ability to connect informally when their status is shown as online. This can promote collaborative working as team members can quickly and easily ask questions of their colleagues instead of waiting for a scheduled formal meeting. In general, the more communication the greater the bonds and understanding between team members, so provided this facility is not abused, it can help improve working relationships. In practice, it works best when all users are in similar time zones where the difference is only a few hours.

The next step up from one-to-one messaging is web conferencing, where multiple users join the same online conference. Applications such as WebEx allow you to hold a virtual meeting with the team. Web conferencing means you can make changes to documents in real time or show product demonstrations to the rest of the team without having everyone in the same room – lower travel costs and a reduction in time spent out of the office even if you don’t have the international element to contend with.

Instant messaging and web conferencing allow synchronous communication, but asynchronous communication is also useful for project managers with international teams. You could opt for something as simple as a shared calendar, where team meetings and project milestones are recorded for everyone to see. When you connect from a PC configured to a different time zone, Outlook will automatically show the meeting at the correct time where you are. However, I have been caught out by the same feature in Google’s calendar, which didn’t seem to adjust for daylight savings time for some reason – and I missed my conference call.

Whatever software you choose to use to manage your project, you will quickly realise its limitations. A good project manager knows when to use the tools, and when to set the tools aside and lead with understanding and instinct.

Spending some time with your team members overseas is the best way to understand how they work, but desk research before you go (or if budget constraints mean you can’t go) will be beneficial. You will find out a great deal about how team members will most likely react in the project environment if you see them react, but that of course relies on you having the time to do that period of ‘getting to know you’.

Even if you don’t have lots of time, be curious in the time you do have. Many people love talking about how their countries work and a short discussion early on in your project can make a big difference. This knowledge provides you with a framework to manage the differences that will occur and also the confidence that you can develop an appropriate way of working together. In a shrinking world, projects are expanding, and the keys to success in international projects are shrewd use of the available technologies and excellent cultural awareness.

 This article has been adapted from material published on A Girl’s Guide To Project Management and is reprinted with permission.

(Pic Courtesy: Google images)

Challenge Accepted!

This is a guest post from Josh Nankivel from PM Student. If you are trying to begin your path in project management or are into it, Josh's blog is a treat. He also reached his half a million visitors this year! Congratulations.

This road sign is pretty much what the path forward looked like to me when I started my venture into formal project management.

Sheesh!

Perhaps you can relate. Since then, I’ve combined what I’ve learned in my own journey with the things I wish I would have known to start with and try to help other people who are starting out.

These are the steps you can start taking today to de-mystify your project management career.

Step 1 - You Are Here

If you don’t know where you are starting from, it’s pretty tough to move forward.

There is no ‘one size fits all’ advice for starting or advancing your project management career. Imagine a GPS system in your car that has no knowledge of your current location. It doesn’t work, does it?

You can leverage your background, skills, and interests in different ways to get started. If you have a technical background, there are tons of strategies to use that to your advantage. The same is true if you come from a general or operational management background. Even if you are just starting out and don’t feel you have much experience or background to leverage, it’s very important to acknowledge that and use your interests and natural talents effectively.

Write it down. In the course I teach worksheets are provided to help you clearly define your ‘current location’ as a foundation from which to move forward. You can even start with a blank page and just do a SWOT analysis of your current position. Going through this process will help generate ideas about what you might be interested in pursuing and how you can parlay what makes you unique into opportunities going forward.

Step 2 - Define Your Destination And Plot The Course

Imagine that same GPS unit knows where you are currently at, but has no idea or only a vague notion of where you want to go.  Again, pretty hard to get there...

I recommend researching organizations to eventually target 3-5 companies that you would really love to work for, who have clear indicators they value project management as a discipline, are in an industry you love, and with whom you can leverage your starting point to quickly achieve your initial goals.

Aside from targeting the right organizations, this is the step where you start to examine how you should augment your tool kit with certifications, education, and above all gaining experience with projects in ways that will make you more competent and appealing to those target organizations.

Step 3 - Build Professional Relationships

Almost anything worth doing requires more than just one person.

When you get lost you want to have a circle of friends who know, like, and trust you that will help put you back on course. Networking is a scary word for most people, but I’m talking about building relationships here. And now that you have a clear set of routes planned for, you know exactly what kind of people you should focus on building strong professional relationships with.

The most important factor here is giving, giving, giving. If you want to get people to know, like, and trust you it’s all about being indispensable to them. Most people go about networking all wrong. They come across as a nuisance, expecting someone who barely knows them to spend time, effort, and social capital to fulfil a request.

You shouldn’t be requesting anything until you’ve delivered so much value to someone they feel obligated to repay all the favors you’ve done for them. Every person is going to be receptive and value different things, so you really have to know the people in your network if you want to provide them with real value. This isn’t something you can do halfway; do your homework and be specific. Set up whatever you are willing to do for them to make it so easy for them to say yes.

In fact, all they should have to do is say yes.

Here’s an example.  In September a local recruiter who is part of my network of friends reached out to me because I’ve always been willing to point him to qualified candidates, and he knows he is going to get a quality referral from me.  I have built up that trust over time by demonstrating my willingness and ability to deliver value to this recruiter.

It was a position for a Junior Project Manager position, and as it happens I knew someone else in my network who I thought would be a good fit. I made the connection between the two.  Here’s what happened:

•The recruiter gained a high-quality candidate referral.

•The candidate got a nice recommendation and referral for a position he’d love to have a chance at.

•I reinforced my status with both of them as someone who loves helping other people get what they want, without any expectations or hassle.

Voila! The virtuous circle is complete. All 3 parties here gained value. This is my style of networking and it’s a continuous process, not an event. Will I ever ‘get back’ the value I gave to these two individuals? Perhaps not. It doesn’t matter. If you do this often enough over time, you get to be known, liked, and trusted. Pay it forward, and you’ll be amazed what opportunities open up for you at some unexpected time in the future.

Step 4 - Drive With Confidence

In the last part of my course I get to the logistics of the job hunt; resumes/CVs, coverletters, portfolios, interviews, and dealing with offers and rejections. If you’ve done steps 1 and 2, and are constantly doing step 3, this is the icing on the cake.

Unfortunately, most people think this is the cake. It’s not!

(When did Josh switch from car to cake analogies? Just go with it people, I’m eccentric like that :-)

The goal of the previous steps is to never go into this phase of the process cold. You will be better prepared than the majority of candidates for whatever position you are applying. The vast majority of people do not know what I teach or actually take action to implement this stuff. They do what everyone else does instead; apply and pray.

If you’ve done your homework and put sincere effort into the process described earlier, the hiring managers will already know who you are and will be excited to interview you.  Imagine that!  

In the best cases the clear ‘vibe’ I’ve gotten when I did this well is that the whole application and interview process was just a formality; they already knew they wanted to hire me. In fact, you’ll notice I didn’t mention anything about searching the job boards online. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but if you are doing the rest of what I’ve outline well you should never have to. The goal is to hear about new positions from someone in your network who knows, likes, and trusts you... and wants you to come work with them.

5 steps to project scheduling

This is a guest post from Sam Palani. Find out more about him at his site or connect with him on twitter.


5 Steps to get your Project Schedule Correct

When I was asked to come up with a guest post for Stepping Into Project Management (SIPM),
I wanted to come up with something that was close with the central theme of the blog, which
is helping Project managers on starting their journey on the project management space. As a
newbie project manager (or for that matter even as someone who has been managing projects
for sometime) getting your project schedule correct early on is critical as this will be one of the
important baselines against which you would track your project execution.

I also want to call out one common myth / misconception here - A Project Plan is different from
a Project Schedule - no matter what they tell you. I will not go into details on this post, but to
summarize - A plan will include your strategy on how you will get there i.e. the end goal (scope)
whereas a project schedule is as the name suggests a schedule of tasks along with their
respective

So it is critical that you get this correct as you take your first steps into project management.

Here are five simple but important steps that will help get your schedule correct:

Start with the WBS - First things first. Start with decomposing your scope into a work break
break down structure. While there are multiple rules around this, the general thumb rule is break
down your scope to work packages where each package can contain around 5-10 individual
tasks. Again this is a just a rule of thumb, the level of the WBS would largely depend on your
individual program or project. The idea here is to be able to tie back the individuals tasks that
will make up your schedule to the capabilities listed in the project scope.

Hint - Do not over do this to a level where you end up adding more complexity and management
overhead.

Get your estimates on track - The next logical step is to estimate the individual tasks that
make up your work packages. How many resources you will need and how much time it will
take take for these resources to get the task completed. Avoid doing any fast tracking or
crashing at this stage. This is based on the assumption that you will be doing a bottom up
estimation, that is starting from the individual tasks and rolling up at the work-package level.

Hint - Make sure your estimation process & model is communicated and transparent to the
project stakeholders.

Analyze your dependencies - Most certainly your individual task will not be executed in silos.
They will have dependencies. These dependencies and constraints can be in different forms.
Example a task may have a dependency on a particular task getting started or completed as
well as there may be tasks that are constrained to start or end on a particular date.

Hint - Don't attempt to do this alone, get your SMEs involved in this exercise.

Calculate your critical path - Once your have your tasks,estimates and the dependencies in
place. You are now ready to to get the critical path. You either do this manually or through an
EPM software that you are using. It does not really matter. It is also likely that you may end up
with more than one critical path. You will need to pay attention to all the critical paths identified.
It is also important to note that during the course of the project your critical path might change
so your schedule is more of a living document and not static.

Hint - Often there may be tasks outside your critical path that will influence your project
outcome.

Communicate - Now that you have done all the good work and have the project schedule
in place, publish it. Your project stakeholders including your team need to be aware of the
project schedule. The schedule would help little just sitting out there on your hard drive. again
a reminder that your schedule is a live document and gets revisited during the course of your
execution for instance every time you do risk assessment or change management

Hint - Include a link to your schedule in your project status communications.

So that’s it, you now have a schedule baseline against which you can monitor and control your
project.

PMChat

PMChat has been gaining popularity and is a great way to stay updated, interact and learn more. Today's post is all about PMChat- details, where to join and what to expect.


This is a guest post by Robert Kelly;  Founder and Managing Partner of Kelly Project Solutions.  He has over a dozen years of experience leading complex, enterprise projects at companies including Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, Lenovo and currently at Red Hat.  Robert’s blog, Kelly’s Contemplation, was shortlisted for Computer Weekly’s Top 10 Project Management Blogs for 2010, named a Top 10 Up and Coming Project Manager on Twitter, and contributor to ‘A Peek Into The Life of Project Managers’.

Regardless of their experience level, Project Managers are always on the hunt for new ways to grow, learn, and stay on top of their profession.  It may be learning a new technology to join a new project.  Some are looking to break into the field of project management and want to learn the basics, while others are PMPs and need PDU’s to remain that way.  Wherever you may be in your professional career as a Project Manager, I would like to introduce a new medium to your development portfolio...#PMChat


Project Management Chat (#PMChat) is a weekly discussion hosted by Robert Kelly and Rob Prinzo each Friday from 12-1pm (EST).  The topics focus on Project Management & Leaderships techniques, best practices, and so on.  In addition to both Rob’s being named to the Top 10 Up & Coming Project Managers on Twitter, their partnership offers nearly 30 years of diverse experience to the #PMChat participants.  To further add value to this platform, they will invite thought leaders from a range of project management and leadership arenas to co-host the forum.  Additionally, KPS hosts a #PMChat Pre-Game show, via KPS Chatter on BlogTalk Radio, every week from 11:30-11:45 am (EST).  During this quick, 15-minute radio show, you will hear both Roberts and their guest for the week discuss the topic that will be discussed during the Twitter chat.


Here is what folks are saying...
·“Thanks for inviting me to the #pmchat. Great stuff, SMART people! Have a good weekend!”
·“It was fun! This was my first-ever Tweet Chat. Went very well and learned. Excellent use of time! Thanks for hosting it.”
·“Thanks @rkelly976 & @robprinzo for an interesting #pmchat today. Great topic! Wish I’d had more time to participate. Next time!”


The #PMChat is truly a great opportunity to talk with some tremendous Project/Program Management professionals about leading challenges in this space.  While other hashtags have become 1-way communication and retweets, #PMChat is truly a collaborative environment where people are sharign ideas, networking, and developing relationships. 


Join us and see what all the talk is about! 

Guest Posts and Podcast

Hope you are having a great week, while I juggle my timer schedule and try to squeeze in more – here’s some guest posts and interview I did over the last few months:

Podcast 1 

Podcast 2 

Guest post at PM 4 Girls

Guest post at PM Bistro

Enjoy!

(Pic Courtesy: Google Images)