The traditional mojito recipe is good, but lately I’m beginning to prefer an Americanized alternative.  Not only does it taste better (IMO), but it’s faster to make — because you don’t have to warm up any simple syrup.  Courtesy of my friend Scott:

• 2oz Bacardi Lemon Rum
• half-cup sprite
• one whole lime, quartered, juice squeezed into glass
• 2-3 sprigs of mint (rough them up a bit so the mint comes alive)
• Ice

Mix this all together violently and then strain it (preferably) to catch the loose mint.  Pour the liquid into glass, add the ice, lime carcasses, and (large) mint sprigs. Delish!

But not everyone is so lucky.  Insane sums are spent on rework for systems which were built with bad or missing information.  As someone who builds and implements these systems myself, I can’t say that there is a foolproof method for uncovering every constraint, assumption, requirement, and interface which might affect the solution I propose.

But I can say that there is a process of due diligence which must be systematically followed to try and fully understand the target business.  I decided to sketch a brief list of things which the project manager, business analyst, and technical lead should look at when building and implementing a solution:

•  Corporate objectives.  The suits might be leery of sharing the three or five year plan with a vendor team, but the more information you can get about the organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats — the better!  Is the organization growing, innovating, changing, and/or trying to cut costs?  If so, how are they accomplishing these things?
• Competitors.  Who competes with this organization?  What does market share look like and how have these competitors designed their systems?  How can they be outdone?
• The Industry.  Checkout the trade journals, attend a conference, and join any industry organizations.  You need to become a kind of insider who can help lead the customer to a solution which they never even considered.
• Org Charts 2.0.  You need to take the plain old org chart and dress it up with some key details for each department or entity: mission, function, and current initiatives.
• Infrastructure Charts.  How do the existing systems communicate with each other?
• Location Models.  Geographically, where does everything sit?  And what laws, cultures, and locale-specific variables change from one location to the next?
• Business Events.  What events drive the business? Do they come from customers, partners, suppliers, regulators?  Who springs into action when these things occur? Do they occur on a regular schedule?
• Process Models.  Workflows and interactions.

While so many customers (and providers) want to dive directly into the requirements gathering phase, there are huge benefits to first researching these domains.  It can mean the difference between a well conceived proposal and an expensive disaster. But more than that, it can lay the foundation for a customer-provider relationship which goes beyond this project.

Imagine if you (as a provider) noticed a trend in your customer’s industry which led you to design a solution for a problem which your customer didn’t even realize they had!

1) Too many organizations try to save money on projects (cost efficiency) when the benefits of completing the project earlier far outweigh the potential cost savings.

You might, for example, be able to complete project X with perfect resource management (all staff are perfectly busy!) in 100 days for $1 million. Alternatively, you could hire some extra people and have them sitting around occasionally at a total cost of $1.3 million, but the project would be completed in only 60 days.

What’s that 40 day difference worth? Well, if the project is strategic in nature, it could be worth everything. It could  mean being first to market with a new product or possessing a required capability for an upcoming bid which you don’t even know about yet. It could mean impressing the heck out of some skeptical new client or being prepared for a surprise audit. Sometimes the benefits outweigh the cost savings.

2) Project management exists only to better deliver benefits and capabilities. It doesn’t exist for its own sake, it’s not some kind of innately useful, primordial thing. If it isn’t helping deliver benefits and capabilities, then you can send the whole rattling project management caravan off the side of a tall cliff.

This is where so many organizations get themselves into trouble. They hire a bunch of project managers and demand they follow this or that methodology. But why? Is it because — well — this is what everybody else is doing? Or is it because this methodology will deliver 15% more projects with the same resources? Or this methodology will reduce project cycles by 20 days? Is anybody even measuring these things before/after implementing all these processes?

If you’re going to go down the project management road (and you should!), you need to understand why you’re doing it, and how you’re going to measure your success (hint: throughput!).

434 pp. Recommended.

As traffic and sprawl continue to sicken suburbia, more and more suburbanites are throwing in the towel and moving into neighborhoods which are highly walkable.  A highly walkable neighborhood is one where groceries, parks, schools, restaurants, and shopping are within a mile or two.  According to WalkScore, the benefits are tremendous:

Better health: A study in Washington State found that the average resident of a pedestrian-friendly neighborhood weighs 7 pounds less than someone who lives in a sprawling neighborhood.¹ Residents of walkable neighborhoods drive less and suffer fewer car accidents, a leading cause of death between the ages of 15–45.

Reduction in greenhouse gas: Cars are a leading cause of global warming. Your feet are zero-pollution transportation machines.

More transportation options: Compact neighborhoods tend to have higher population density, which leads to more public transportation options and bicycle infrastructure. Not only is taking the bus cheaper than driving, but riding a bus is ten times safer than driving a car!²

Increased social capital: Walking increases social capital by promoting face-to-face interaction with your neighbors. Studies have shown that for every 10 minutes a person spends in a daily car commute, time spent in community activities falls by 10%.³

Stronger local businesses: Dense, walkable neighborhoods provide local businesses with the foot traffic they need to thrive. It’s easier for pedestrians to shop at many stores on one trip, since they don’t need to drive between destinations.

As the National Association of Realtors pointed out, “Buyers want it all within walking distance. The next hot market could be homes in walkable neighborhoods.”

Enter walkscore.com, this brilliant website allows you to enter an address, and the system will evaluate its walkability by measuring its proximity to grocers, libraries, etc.  It’s not perfect of course.  It can’t tell for example, that although that grocery is .3 miles away, you would have to cross a six lane highway with no sidewalks to get there.  It doesn’t measure church proximity either.  But nonetheless it is a fantastic tool for gauging the general walkability of an area. And NAR is spot on, this will be the next hot market.

Project managers are usually thought of as analytical types and as people who execute things.  In their analytical moments, they survey a field of options, risks, and opportunities, determining the optimum path through the landscape.  When they execute, they move mountains to get things done.

But there is a third archetype which ought to describe the project manager.  Project managers ought to be creative.  Not creative in the sense of managing their projects (e.g. finding a better way to crash a schedule), but rather creative in the sense of  strategic product and service innovation.  Let me explain.

In today’s cutthroat business world, organizations must constantly improve.  They are in  an endless cycle of cost cutting, value adding, and creating new products. No matter how well your business is doing now, it is just a matter of time until a competitor catches up and duplicates–or even improves on–your success.  Your profits shrink.  As Robert Reich has explained, at the end of the day there are essentially three strategies to stay in the game:

1) You can figure out how to cut your costs and offer your X for less than competitor’s Y.
2) You can figure out how to produce a much better X for the same cost.
3) You can use whatever expertise gained along the way to be first out with entirely new product Z.

What does this have to do with project managers?  Simply put: Everything.  Project managers are in the incredibly unique position of having one foot in their supplying organization, and one foot in the customer’s organization.  They can gather customer needs and match those up to the supplier’s offerings.  But more than that they can  identify unstated customer needs and find innovative solutions which haven’t even been built yet (but which the supplier has the capability to build).

The key of course is creative thinking and relentless focus on the three strategies.  When is the last time you asked yourself and your project team, “How can we cut costs?” “How can we add more value?”  “Is there an opportunity for a new product here?”

COMING SOON:  Part 2 — Tools for Creative Product Innovation

I’ve slowly been eating my way through Bon Appetit’s list of the best barbecue joints in the US.  Last stop was at Stamey’s in Greensboro, NC.  Stamey’s — like most good BBQ outfits — doesn’t look like much on the outside, but it doesn’t matter:  The food was incredible.  Everything was hickory smoked, easy on the sauce, and they had hush puppies!  The peach cobbler was to die for as well.  Stamey’s has jumped to the top of my Carolina’s list.  If you’re in the area — don’t miss it!

After Lencioni has you hook, line, and sinker on the story, he spends the last portion of the book breaking down what happened according to the five dysfunctions, and explaining how to avoid and/or fix these pitfalls.

Dysfunction 1:  Absence of Trust

Dysfuntion 2:  Fear of Conflict

Dysfunction 3:  Lack of Commitment

Dysfunction 4:  Avoidance of Accountability

Dysfunction 5:  Inattention to Results

This is a winner.  Yes it occasionally steps into pop-business-psychology territory, but most of the time it is on point as a basic team building primer.  There is nothing groundbreaking here, but there never is with Lencioni.  He has built a nice little niche gathering assorted insights on some business subject and embedding them into something which is actually readable.  He succeeds once again here and you’ll learn a few tricks in the process.

Recommended.

My wife and I recently went to Italy and spent a lot of time studying the life and work of Michaelangelo. For a legendary genius, his day-to-day life was surprisingly tumultuous. If you thought he quietly tolled away on the world’s greatest art without interruption, you would be in for a big surprise. In fact, the process of decorating the Sistine Chapel was so crazy, that it immediately reminded me of wild and unruly software projects. Which in turn, got me thinking about some of the good (and bad) moves which Michaelangelo–chief engineer–made.

• Estimate? One year. When Pope Julius asked Michaelangelo to decorate the Sistine Chapel, the great genius estimated that it would take him no more than a year to complete the project. When all was finally said and done, four and a half years had transpired. And this was without any beta releases. What happened?
  
  It seems a perfect storm of factors converged to slow the project: There were political fights, there was miswork which had to be re-done, there were structural and weather problems in the chapel, and all variety of other complications. But the factor that struck me most strongly? Michaelangelo made the estimate himself at the beginning of the project before building his team of painter-assistants. At that time, he had not done frescoing in nearly twenty years (his focus had been on sculpture). In other words, he made a wild top-down estimate in an area outside his expertise without consulting the people who would actually be executing the work packages (his team). Sound familiar?

• Minimize your footprint. Renaissance artists had customers just like the rest of us, only they were called patrons. Patrons (be they the Pope or simply a rich businessman) would specify exactly what they wanted in the art which they were paying for… the number of figures… the scene, etc. Nonetheless, the artist would constantly make little, unplanned decisions about how the scene unfolds. Will that person in the crowd be a man or a woman? Young or old? Will they be smiling or frowning? What will they wear? Unfortunately many Renaissance artists (not Michaelangelo) were an egotistic bunch. They would do things like paint themselves side-by-side with the wise men in the nativity scene, or amidst the apostles in the resurrection scene. They look ridiculous, and one can only imagine what their patrons thought.
  
  When building software, you are constantly making the same kind of little, unplanned decisions about how the application will function. Should I display the customer name with their last name first? Should the input box be freetype or should I force selection from a drop-down list? These seemingly inconsequential decisions add up over time into a huge body of collective decisions that are often made with little customer consultation. This is the developer footprint. The bigger it is, the more likely something about it will irritate the customer. Where many renaissance artists had the audacity to paint themselves into scenes side-by-side with the apostles (a big footprint), Michaelangelo rarely painted himself and when he did it was in the most humble of places. In the Last Judgement, Michalangelo painted his face on the dead skin of a skinned martyr (Bartholomew). It was so subtle, that art historians didn’t even notice the portrait for hundreds of years!

• Start in the back. As mentioned earlier, Michaelangelo had not done frescoes for twenty years when he was commissioned to paint the Sistine chapel. With this in mind, he made a key decision: He started painting from the back of the sistine chapel first so that he could improve his technique by the time he got to the front. Indeed, there are obvious differences between the frescoes up front and those in the back. When one enters the chapel from the rear door–the eyes naturally see his best work in the front first.
  
  This reminds me of an agile development trap. With agile, the tendency is to build important, core functionality in the early iterations so that you’ve gotten something worthwhile accomplished if time or money unexpectedly runs out later. This is a wise tendency, however you usually don’t want to do the most important work in the first phase. Critical work should be done when the team is hitting stride, not when they are forming/storming. Michaelangelo nailed this.

Our favorite experience on our recent trip to Italy was undoubtedly staying at a little bed & breakfast called Locanda Rosati in the Umbrian countryside. LR is situated a few minutes outside Orvieto, which is located about 1.5 hours north of Rome. LR is a kind of hybrid: Part B&B, part agriturismo (farm house), and part restaurant.

The B&B portion consists of about ten rooms with private bathrooms in a gorgeously restored 19th century villa. The place was passed down from father to son for several generations and remains in the family. It’s been updated with modern amenities, but they somehow managed to maintain that delicate balance where the new complements (rather than conflicts or overwhelms) the old. The rooms are simple, but elegant. There is a common room with library and a chilly natural wine cellar below the house. Of course you won’t be spending much time in the house, because the grounds are amazing.

The publicly accessible area around the villa is a cornecopia of lushy green plants, fruits, lemon trees, flowers, etc. Pretty much everything you can imagine an Italian garden might look like. And there is a fabulous pool set below a small hill which has been carved out with caves. Lots of chairs and places to relax. Paths to walk and things to look at.

Innkeeper Gianpiero told me (in his remarkably good english) that they raise chickens and other small animals as well as various fruits, olives, and nuts. They use these ingredients and other locally bought organic goods to put together a five course meal most every evening. The meal is served family style at a big long table where all of the guests sit together. The food is incredible: Gorgonzola bruschetta, fondue zucchini, homemade penne, rabbit meat, strawberry rhubarb pie. Something different every night. The place is part of the slow food movement. Eating dinner here with the cheery camp of constantly changing international guests was the highlight of our trip. After dinner, we would drink local wine and limoncello and spend hours chatting into the night with the company.

Between the food, the people, and the place, this was Italy at its best. If you stay one place on your next trip, stay at Locanda Rosati.

Apple’s solution is to buy an iPhone with its “visual voicemail” fanciness. It’s an elegant one, but I’m not paying $500 for better voicemail. Enter <a href=”http://www.phonetag.com/”>PhoneTag</a>. PhoneTag is a subscription based service where you redirect your voicemail over to their voicemail system. Most cell phones and many office phones can handle this “redirection” by dialing a short code (which PhoneTag provides). Once redirected, any callers who reach your voicemail go into the PhoneTag system where they leave a message and–here’s the kicker–it gets transcribed into an email or txt msg and sent to the recipient(s) of your choice.

I’ve been trying it for a week and I’m completely hooked, and at only $0.35cents/message its not too expensive either. They push a little window mobile application that goes along with it, but as long as you have a phone with email or text messages you don’t even need the application. Recommended!