February Football Half-Time Fiasco

 Well another "Big Game" come and gone...and a bit of a disappointment, this one was, too (I don't want to use the term "Super B__L" term and risk getting the NFL's Legal Team after me!).

The game was "OK", but since I really didn't care about either team, there wasn't any real emotional connection.

There were a few good new advertisements, but there certainly weren't any ground-breakingly interesting ones.  Certainly there were none that we'll still be talking about next month, let alone next year at this time!

And then, of course, we had the half-time show. Putting it bluntly: It sucked!

While I do try to keep an open mind and I'll admit we don't have a stereo TV (nor a flat-screen digital, for that matter), but from a pure "quality of the production" stand-point, that was a horrible show.  I suspect the sponsor of that debacle is re-thinking their investment in next year's 15 minute stadium spectacle.

The instruments were drowned out by crowd noise and the over-pumped vocals to the point where, for most of the time, it was an a cappella performance...and a poor one at that. Case in point, when the camera cut to the line of horn players blowing up a storm, there were no "horn" sounds at all. The musicians instruments seemed to have had no amplification! The performance by Slash was another example...his guitar was no where near as loud as the singer's voice.

The artists' voices, on the other hand, came across flat, dull and (sometimes) off key. I suspect this was due in part to the fact they couldn't hear their accompaniment, and in part because they were singing louder than normal to try to get above the crowd noise.

As for the glowing people, while an interesting tableau, it didn't seem to have any real connection to the (non-existent) music nor the words of the various songs being sung.

I like (some) of the Black-eyed Peas', Usher's and Guns & Roses' music...but last night's half-time show was not one of their better performances. I suspect we won't see a thread here 5 or 6 years from now, wistfully reminiscing about how great this performance was (remember the recent discussion of U-2's Super Bowl performance).

I listen to a lot of different music, but I won't be listening to that performance again. :-)

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I'd love to hear what you think. Feel free to leave a comment here or e-mail me at: TomFawls@Council4SmallBiz.com.

Management Tasks: Organizing

Dictionary.com defines “organizing” in part as:

“to systematize...to give organic structure or character to...”

As managers, it's our responsibility to make sure the team, the materials and the work is given some (hopefully) logical, rational structure.

So exactly how do we do this? How do we decide what goes where, who does what and when it all happens?

help us organize the people, the work and the resources we have to do the job.

First, we've got to know what it is we're trying to do. This, of course is one of the things we hope our plan will do – give us a clear idea of what needs to be done, when it needs to be done and what tools we have to get it done.

Second, we've got to know the organization we've already got in place – what's working and what's not. For new programs / projects / companies, this is a pretty simple thing – we've got no organization. In this happy case, we can do whatever works best for us, our personality, our management style and our people. We're free to arrange things pretty much any way we want. we decide who works for who, where folks sit, where the copier is located and, sometimes even pick the color scheme for the facility. It's a great gig when we can get it.

However, most managers aren't that lucky. We often have little in who works for us, where our offices are located, or what the floor plan looks like. And we'll virtually never have a chance to pick a color scheme (“institutional green”, anyone?).

In most companies, critical things like facilities, equipment, tools and staff are assigned to projects based on priorities established well outside the project itself. And the lower priority our project, the less say we'll have over any of the things that are assigned to us.

When we find ourselves in this situation and we've done everything short of tendering our resignation to get what we want, don't complain. Just take a deep breath, paste a big smile on our faces and remember, “adversity builds character”.

Then we take a critical look at the people, tools, facilities and materials you've got to work with. Identify those pieces that already work well and leave them alone. If there are folks who've worked well together in the past, keep them working together on your projects whenever we can

Then find the stuff that isn't working so well and fix it. Reassign people, rearrange furniture, re-plan work, get new tools; whatever it takes to get your team working efficiently and effectively.

Third, we've got to decide where things go. “A place for everything and everything in its place”. Do we team our people by specialty (Engineering, Production, Accounting, etc.) or by what part of the project their work most affects (hydraulics, wing, fuselage, etc.)? Do we assign tasks by position or by the likelihood the work will get done? Do we use the company's central stock room for project specific parts or establish an project stock room for “our stuff”?

Finally, we've got to keep tabs on the work...and be ready to re-organize when the structure we put in place doesn't work. I don't advocate re-organizing out of hand or on a whim (rotating bald tires), but there are times when how we've organized things gets in the way of getting the work done. When that happens, we need to be able to recognize it quickly and change fix the problems.

Remember, though, that reorganizations cause problems of their own. They almost always add stress, interrupt work flow and reduce morale. Even moving one person from one desk to another will have it's issues, so we need to plan carefully and make sure the benefits of the reorg far outweigh the problems it will cause.

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If you need help getting organized, feel free to contact me at: TomFawls@Council4SmallBiz.com.

Management Tasks - Planning

Planning is a tough subject to teach. Written descriptions of the planning process tend to be dry and boring. Case studies and examples, while more interesting than a plain process description, tend to be too general and off topic. There don't seem to be any really good movies made or novels written about teams completing their critical “Annual Planning”...and all the planning pantomimes I've seen have been....well...let's just say they were “disturbing” and leave it at that.

So the rest of this posting will attempt to describe planning words......for you to read. Try not to fall asleep.

As I said, planning is one of the most critical management tasks. For many people, it's planning that they think of when they hear the word “management”. “The Plan” is often the most obvious (dare I say “only”?) evidence that a manager has actually done any work at all.

A typical development project has three planning stages / phases that must be completed before work can start:

• Concept development
• Specification development
• Work & resource scheduling

Others will have their own ways of describing these steps, and some experts might add or delete a few from my list, but this is how I have come to think of it.

Concept Development is all about possibilities. This is the time to let imaginations run wild, to look at “crazy” ideas and to have fun thinking. The beginning of this phase is also the time to ignore all the operations, financial and other constraints that will become so critical later in the planning process. During the early stages concept development, getting the team's imaginations going is critical.

As managers, it's our job during this phase is to make sure that all viable possibilities are explored, and to make sure options aren't dropped from consideration prematurely. It amazes me how often an idea that is initially ignored or ridiculed by the team turns out to be the optimal solution. Customer desires / needs should be used to guide work done during this phase of the planning.

At the end of the concept development stage you should have a clearly defined conceptual framework within which the final remainder of the project will be developed. This framework should be as flexibly defined as possible, but it needs to have sufficient detail and structure to allow designers, planners and operational personnel to figure out what they will need to do to turn the concept into a reality.

Specification Development is the next step in the process. In this stage, the concept starts to become more than a good idea. This is the stage where the final deliverable items are defined, where quality standards are developed, and where risks and restrictions are used to modify and refine the concept.

It is here that those real-world operational, customer, financial, technology and other constraints that we happily ignored during most of the concept development phase start to wield their power. Here is where the final product, process, deliverable or system starts to take shape.

During this stage the first design decisions made, budgets are developed and approved and specific personnel requirements are defined. In detail. For everything that needs to be done.

At the end of this stage you should have a completed, detailed technical specification and/or Statement (or Scope) of Work (SOW) that has been reviewed and approved by all stakeholders. It is typical (and highly desirable) to have an approved budget at the end of this stage.

Work and Resource Scheduling - the final phase in planning, this is where the final “Who, what where and when” details of the project are worked out. This is what most people think of when they think of planning.

Here we decide the specific tasks (down to the one week or one day detail) that need to be done in order to successfully complete the project. We decide how many people we will need with what skill sets and experience levels. We figure out what resources, materials, equipment and facilities we will need. And, of course, we figure out when we will need all these people, places and things...and how we can get them and not break the budget.

The output of this phase should be a completed schedule showing every task to be completed, who's going to complete it, what they need in order to complete it and when / how long it will take. Preferably this schedule will be input into some sort of information system and “automated”.

Programs like Primavera, Microsoft Project and others have become very good tools for developing and tracking project tasks, resources and personnel.

One final thought.

Before we go, though, there is one thing you need to keep in mind about planning:

the act of planning is often of greater value than the plan itself!

Remember, most plans are obsolete before they're even published. Competitor's actions, customer tastes, technological advances and simple personnel turnover can all force the plan to change.

But if we've done a thorough job of planning, if we've gotten to know our environment, if we've identified the risks and gotten a solid understanding of our options, these changes will have fewer and less severe impacts on our business. And that, after all, is the whole point of planning, isn't it?

 

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I'd love to hear what you think. Feel free to leave a comment here or e-mail me at: TomFawls@Council4SmallBiz.com.