Hi all

Welcome to the 7th post on this series delving into the murky depths of SharePoint project failure. I’m sure that even if you haven’t used SharePoint, or been involved in a SharePoint project, most will have experiences of being sore and sorry from a project gone bad and the content presented in this series thus far has been somewhat familiar.

Speaking of sore and sorry, I am writing this post days after buying the kids a Nintendo Wii. I’m not a geek-toy kind of guy, so I’m usually a little behind when it comes to consumer gadgets, but what a brilliant product it is. I am completely addicted to Wii Sports (especially the tennis and baseball), but after two days, I am feeling muscle ache like I have never felt before. I can barely move!

So I’d better stop playing that damn game and get back to business. In the unlikely event that you are hitting article seven for the first time, I suggest you go back and read this series from the start. You will learn all about tequila slammers, why Microsoft is like Britney Spears, Bill Gates selling SharePoint to Sergei Brin and the wonderful land of chocolate where projects never fail.

More recently, we targeted the infrastructure and development geeks in posts five and six. Now it’s time to cast our lens over the guys who control the budgets and get paid way more than you and I. So of course it is the project sponsor and senior management in general

This post will definitely come across as the most idealistically naive of the series and will drift away from SharePoint again and back to people and personalities. To write from a position of authority about the management contribution to project failure, one has to have been in the management role. Given that I have never been the CEO of an organisation larger than two people, I thought I’d better call in an old friend to help me on this one – but I’ll get to that later:-)  

Ideally, this should be the last post in this series, because looking at project failure from a senior management and organisational strategy point of view is where the buck stops really. But alas, based on some of the fantastic feedback from readers around the world, I think there will be at least one more before I am finally spent

Senior Managers: Can’t live with them, can’t live with them…

Let’s get all the cheap-shots in early – I am a product of the senior managers who I have worked with, so I am interested in how close my observations are to yours.

Managers eh? Are coffee, redbull and tequila shots enough? Hell no! How about stress balls and voodoo dolls? I don’t think so. In fact the only effective cure I personally have ever known for bad managers is panadeine forte and if that fails, changing jobs. I say this because I can attribute pretty much every stress-related headache I’ve ever had, partly to someone with the word "…manager" in their job title.

In general the higher up you go in an organisation, the lower the computer literacy gets. But paradoxically the size and cost of their barely used laptop goes up proportionately also. Once you are at CEO and board level, you have lost so much tech savvy that even the photocopier is a bit of a challenge. Sending a fax? Forget it – that’s what personal assistants are for, right?

But the laptop/toy thing… Senior Managers are like peacocks in the golden wing lounge of an airline. The unspoken battle of who has the smallest laptop and fanciest corporate toys goes on in earnest, despite most of them not being able to explain anything more than how much they weigh…

At this point I feel its only fair to give readers the CEO view. So I hand the reins of this article to a former CEO of mine who I have a great deal of respect for. I was in at the very beginning of one of his businesses (first employee), and I feel much wiser for the experience. On top of 10 years in Silicon Valley, he has successfully started and sold three businesses, been a senior manager at a Fortune 500 company in the USA, has an MBA and is a graduate of the Harvard Business School Executive Education Program.

Taking a 30,000 foot view from a CEO or Senior Management level into IT or SharePoint project failures probably highlights some of the criticisms of management losing their technical knowledge or technical literacy as they progress further up the management hierarchy.

Running a business, division, group or function within an organization requires a completely different perspective than implementing a technology or making a technical decision.

As a senior manager your job is about building consensus around the business strategy and implementing strategy within your group or division. Whether the strategy is created by you or more likely driven by a board, shareholders, competitors or management more senior to you, a manager needs to consider the business requirements and strategic goals first not the technology choices available. Even for a CIO or CTO.

I mean if the business doesn’t hit its cost, revenue or profit targets, eventually we are all in the same line at social security.

I personally focus very little time on what technology is implemented. That’s what I hire smart managers for and what they hire smart techs to determine.

If they cannot do this job for me, then there are plenty of other jobs around for them to do…outside this company!

Nothing is more annoying and frustrating early in a project life cycle than when a CRM or ERP or Enterprise Content Management (ECM) project is communicated to me as a Microsoft SharePoint, SAP or Oracle project even before the full requirements for the project are determined.

Do you actually have a clue as to what we want to achieve with this project from a business perspective?

Ensuring the business requirements of the project are clearly defined, consensus and agreement amongst stakeholders is realized and clearly communicating the process changes the new systems will create are what I see as key requirements for a successful project and key requirements for making the correct technology decisions.

Do most techs care about this or are they more interested in padding their Resume with more qualifications? Do manager’s focus on best practices or are they convinced by great advertising and corporate lunches (read articles on consumer buying behaviour)? Does the organization have an incentive structure in place that adequately rewards project, therefore business successes, and punishes the opposite?

It’s not as simple as what technology is best. If that was the case, I wouldn’t be constantly hearing about IT projects taking twice as long to complete or costing twice as much as budgeted or not delivering the benefits expected.

There! The big boss has told it like it is! Note that my learnered CEO friend mentioned "building consensus around strategy".

If you would like know more about the skills and competencies required for a truly effective global manager, check this post. For the rest of us, let’s examine strategy some more…

Organisational Strategy (and Nintendo Wii)

If I ask you to tell me your organisation’s strategy, can you answer it off the top of your head? Now be careful here, if your answer was something like "we sell Britney Spears CD’s" you have misinterpreted my question. I’m not asking you what your organisation does, I’m asking for your organisation’s strategy. (And clearly, selling Britney Spears CD’s is probably not a smart long-term strategy).

I’m sorry it seems I can’t write a SharePoint post without making Britney Spears jokes! I can’t help it – its a compulsion! Mind you, if you’re a Britney fan, you should be used to it by now anyway

Do you want an example to make the "strategy" question clearer? Then you need to go no further than the very console game that is hurting my arm as I write this – the Nintendo Wii.

Before the Wii came out, Sony’s PS2 reigned supreme, selling some hundred-million-billion units. Microsoft had thrown its hat into the ring with the XBox with moderate success (mind you, is a 4 billion dollar loss a success?) and Nintendo was there in 3rd place with the GameCube. Microsoft then released XBox 360, packed with more power and graphic capabilities, directly targeting Sony’s dominance. Sony meanwhile released the PS3, also crammed with more ‘grunt’, building on the formula that made the Playstation brand so successful. Both Microsoft and Sony were playing the "mine is bigger than yours" game, upping the ante in terms of processing power, graphics engines and the like. But the basic formula of a game console was unchanged.

What did Nintendo do? After the relatively flat sales of the GameCube, they could have abandoned their ‘cutesy’ heritage and attempted to play the same "pissing in the wind" game with Sony/Microsoft and had Mario and Luigi "poppin a cap in yo ass" in "Grand Theft Auto" style.

Can you picture that? (It’s clear someone did – just doesn’t work does it?)

(Broken image alert – sucks to be you if your organisation blocks youtube)

So what was Nintendo’s strategy? They shunned graphics, power and went solely for *fun*. "So?", you say, "The GameCube and N64 did the same thing and were a poor cousin to the Playstation in terms of sales". But they added an extra gameplay element – the WiiRemote – a whole new gaming experience.

The result is that the Wii has completely smashed Sony’s PS3 and Microsoft’s XBox 360. It has now shipped some 25 million units since its release. Furthermore, if you don’t shop early on the day stock arrives, then forget about getting your hands on one of the consoles! – at least in Australia.

PS3 has gone from top seller to third place. The XBox360 has been a solid improvement by Microsoft, but it’s clear they were too caught up in the strategy of out-playstationing the Playstation. Wii basically snuck up under everybody’s nose and have completely stolen the show.

…and I bought one too.

So there you have it. Strategy 101 – Nintendo Wii

Organisational Strategy and Communicating It

So assuming a SharePoint project (or any other project for that matter) goes bad, how much blame should be lumped at management? You of course have to be careful here, blaming "management" might be a great way to let off steam, but sometimes it is easy to be misinformed. If you simply see "management" as a bunch of suits, up there in their ivory tower, getting paid way too much, chances are you are misinformed to some level. (Please note that at no point am I advocating *not* indulging in manager-bashing as it is as cathartic as bashing Microsoft)

But ask an ex-Enron employee whether management are to blame for all the world’s evils and I would argue that they are extremely well informed.

So, what have we learned from the Nintendo Wii strategy example? A well crafted and well executed strategy can have a dramatic effect on an organisation’s success – and therefore their bottom line. But it is clear that a good strategy can be derailed by poor execution. Let’s now look at the execution of strategy in more detail.

Muddling through Misinformation…

The fact is that we are all misinformed in our way, even the boss. We can’t know *everything*, and thus we need to rely on the combination of life skills and experiences of participants.

But an organisation with poor management likely results in much higher level of misinformed staff than a well managed organisation. So what is the difference between a well managed and poorly managed organisation? Whilst the differences are well beyond the scope of this post, it is fair to say that to stay consistently successful for a long period of time, the crafting and execution of strategy is a massive factor.

A critical part of executing strategy is making sure that all of your employees are on-board, owning and evangelising the strategy.

Is this easy? Hell no, but it has been done many times and there are actually plenty of good examples. Most products that are household names are beneficiaries of well executed strategy. But for a particularly interesting case, go and research into the turnaround of carpet company, Interface Inc if you feel like doing homework.

I have stressed a few times in this series, that wicked problems are often characterised by people having differing interpretations of the problem to solve. A well thought out, but poorly communicated strategy can have a devastating effect on this. The most wicked problem that I ever worked on, was at a company where I really had no idea of what the strategy was. Nor did the stakeholders, because not only were they not able to agree on requirements and scope, they were actively engaged in turf-wars and mini fiefdoms.

For what its worth, if you think I’m just a jaded ex-employee, then I should point out that the share price of this company has badly under performed against its competitors and the broader market over the last few years as well. If you subscribe to the view that long-term shareholder returns is the ultimate scorecard for directors and senior management, then that fact should offer insight into why several large projects were not a success there.

Between writing part 4 and part 5 of this series, I was reading a book on the strategies of successful global managers. It is called Global Strategies: Insights from the World’s Leading Thinkers (The Harvard Business Review Book Series). After reading it, I felt an irrepressible urge to write about it, as I knew it was related to the overall "theme" of this project failure series, but I couldn’t quite see where it would fit at that time. So I wrote an interlude, looking at where technology in general fits into global strategy.

If you check that interlude post, I made a case of Whirlpool’s performance through the 90′s. One of the most interesting things about Whilrpool’s example was that the CEO, David Whitwam went to great lengths to communicate the corporate strategy.

If you’re going to ask people to work together in pursuing global ends across organisational and geographic boundaries, you have to give them a vision of what they’re striving to achieve, as well as a unifying philosophy to guide their efforts.

That’s why we worked so hard at Whirlpool to define and communicate our vision.

The pivotal thing that Whitwam did however was teach financial metrics to all employees. Specifically, return-on-equity. (No I am not going to explain return on equity in this post – maybe a future "Learn to Speak to Your CFO" style series.). Below is a quote from Whitwam, specifically talking about this.

… Other programs … pay people – from top management to those on the factory floor – on the basis of return-on-equity (ROE) or return-on-net-asset (RONA) goals. Employees at Whirlpool all understand what ROE and RONA mean, what drives those measurements, and how they’re linked to shareholder value

I was impressed at this because the "learn to speak to your CFO" series was aimed squarely at nerds (and IT Managers for that matter), who seem incapable of looking at IT decisions based on a measurable financial metric. It’s all well and good to talk about TCO but you know there actually is that the middle letter that acronym is called COST! The thing about cost is if it can’t be quantified in some way, then how the hell are you supposed to know if you have improved things? It’s a slow drift back to the whole "choose the product before working out the problem to solve" issue talked about in part 3.

The brilliance of the Whirlpool strategy – teaching and communicating the metrics by which the organisation is judged and linking it to pay/performance incentives has many positive effects. One of which is now when a potentially wicked problem is being tackled, stakeholders are at the very least, arguing their interpretation of the truth based on a commonly defined metric!.

So rather than the people arguing a course of action because they think it’s the "right way", they are now forced to argue their action in terms of a tangible return on investment measure. This has a distinct and subtle effect on decision making also. Now people start to think about the organisation as owners!

Ah – an energised staff who have a strong sense of ownership in the organisation! Such a corporate culture can yield tremendous benefits beyond delivering a good project. Google is a great case in point.

Corporate Culture and Project Failure

Corporate culture is a direct result of the attitude and values of an organisation. Management have a huge influence on this and in fact it is incumbent on them to influence and direct corporate culture to as part of executing organisational strategy.

I would argue that a weak corporate culture has a big impact on organisational maturity, which in turn affects morale, which in turn directly affects project success. The bigger the project, the greater chance of failure.

Here’s a short 10 question test to assess your corporate culture

• Are Herculean tasks are the norm? Do jobs get done via someone taking "above and beyond" to a stratospheric level?
• Is the above "doing the impossible" attitude encouraged or expected?
• Do staff complain that "no-one follows process" and play the people blame game?
• Does the organisation seem to make the same mistakes over and over?
• Are people timid when it comes to taking on responsibility due to the aforementioned blame game?
• Is corporate information shared along "turf" lines? Is there an "us" and "them" mentality in relation to other departments or offices?
• Are there customer or supplier complaints?
• Do your BDM’s promise things that defy the laws of physics?
• Are there lots of knee jerk reactions to issues or problems?
• Is the organisation suffering from employee absenteeism and turnover?

If this sort of thing is rampant at your organisation, and it has been for some time, then I believe that it is really a failure on the part of senior management to cultivate a organisation culture conducive to project success. The more you relate to the above list, the more you are set-up to fail.

Conclusion – Manager Bashing

So I conclude part 7 by partaking in the very thing that I earlier suggested was being misinformed.

It is all senior management’s fault! Those up-themselves "suits", up there in their ivory tower, getting paid stupid amounts of money while us little guys get screwed over working 80 hour weeks for not enough money! Someone should do something!

On a serious note however, senior management and boards have to accept that they often need to do more to articulate and execute their strategy in a way that engages with staff, and instils a strong sense of ownership. Failure to do this sets up many projects for failure before they even begin.

(I told you this post would be idealistic!)

Thanks for reading

Epilogue

                      

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My wife is studying a business course at university and I have been reading some of her reference books. One book was particularly good and really got me thinking about technology’s contribution to global organisations and how at this scale, most problems likely have a large degree of wickedness.

This edited book is called Global Strategies: Insights from the World’s Leading Thinkers (The Harvard Business Review Book Series), and it is well worth reading – even for you technical geeks.

What it does is look at the strategy, and execution of strategy, that has led some organisations to make the transition from regional to global success story at the expense of their competitors. We are talking corporations with tens of thousands of employees here too, and the CEO perspective really hits home to you – the sheer *mammoth scale* of it all.

Trying to change a culture at an organisation of 20 employees can be an insurmountable challenge. Try 45,000 employees across 15 subsidiaries in 10 different countries. (Makes a SharePoint rollout seem like a walk in the park.)

Two chapters of the book that really struck me, were “The Right Way to go Global: An Interview with David Whitwam”, and “Local Memoirs of a Global Manager”. After I read them, I tried to think about the impact technology would have on helping them with their strategy – more on that in a moment.

Also, in reading this book, it made me cringe when I remember what I used to be like, as a younger idealistic twenty something with a huge passion for technology, but utterly nil business acumen.

I was an anal-retentive security and infrastructure specialist trying to impose order on the typical chaos that is a typical IT environment, large and small. But in defence of this attitude, I think it was more that I was trying to find better ways to help the organisation in the only way I knew how to – try and tame the technology.

So nowadays I look at the sheer passion behind proponents of various dogmatic technology wars like Windows vs *nix, Java vs .Net, C# vs VB, Security at all costs, SharePoint vs ?,  and smile in a kind of way that I’m sure that more experienced people smiled at me back then. This sort of passion that if harnessed can be used for tremendously positive outcomes, if you can get past the initial *naivety* to technology’s place in it all.

David Whitwam and Whirlpool

David Whitwam was the CEO of Whirlpool Corporation from 1987 to 2004, the white goods manufacturer. In this 1994 interview, he outlined some of the strategies he embarked on to catapult Whirlpool into the global market. 

In 1987 Whirlpool was facing margin pressures in the mature North American white goods market. In 1989 Whirlpool purchased the under-performing NV Phillips appliance business in Europe, that was facing similar pressures. Rather than immediately cut costs and change operations, Whitwam implemented a strategy to create a “unified, customer focused organisation capable of using its combined talents to achieve breakthrough performance in markets around the world“. Below are some of his reasons as to why they took their chosen course of action.

Most international manufacturers aren’t truly global. They’re what I call ‘flag planters’. They may have acquired or established businesses all over the world, but their regional or national divisions still operate as autonomous entities

Let me use the washing machine as an example. Washing technology is washing technology. But our German products are feature-rich and thus considered to be higher-end. The products that come out of Italy run at lower RPM’s and are less costly. Still, the reality is that the insides of machines do not vary a great deal. Both the German and Italian washing machines can be standardised and simplified by reducing the number of parts, which is true of any product family. Yet when we bought Phillips, the washing machines made in the Italian and German facilities didn’t have one screw in common. Today products are being designed to ensure that a wide variety of products can be built on the same basic platform

Duh! Makes perfect sense doesn’t it.  Phillips manufacturing costs cannot compete in terms of economies of scale on account of no re-use between divisions. There are so many costly consequences to this problem to mention. But this wouldn’t take too much effort to model on the immediate cost savings to be had with the ‘platform’ strategy implemented. Well executed, the sort of competitive advantage that could be derived is significant.

Now let’s think about the issues at the Philips plants again. When you think about the sort of technology that facilitates the execution of the strategy to standardise, what would we need? Of course, it would be nice if we all used the same tools, all shared the same data, all had access to the most up to date information at the right time.  But the reality is that at this point, it is far too early to deal with the technological aspects. Let’s see why…

Now I don’t know about you, but I have worked in companies where sub-divisions of the one company were so autonomous that communication and co-operation was very poor. The “us and them” mentality was very prevalent indeed. As a result of this technology ‘maturity’ was inconsistent, with rampant vendor, functionality and interoperability overlap. But it went deeper than that – suspicion and mistrust manifests itself across an organisation at many levels.

On an even more micro scale, take that example of the two Philips factories and think about it in terms of your own IT department workplace within your division. How many little turf wars are there being played out on a micro scale on a daily basis. Do you have your Apple fanboi who is intent on getting rid of all those crappy Windoze PC’s? Do you have a conspiracy theorist security “nazi” who insists that your Antartica office MUST have 802.1x security implemented at all costs? Do half the programmers hate .NET and the other half hate Java? Does your Packeteer and RiverBed fanbois think each-other are idiots?

Now focus back out at an international, multi-organisational level. Go from one IT department, to in the case of Whirlpool and Phillips, the triple whammy of regional, cultural and dual corporate walls to break down across many disciplines – not just IT. So that is a whole stratospheric level of hurt to turn around…

If you’re going to ask people to work together in pursuing global ends across organisational and geographic boundaries, you have to give them a vision of what they’re striving to achieve, as well as a unifying philosophy to guide their efforts.

That’s why we worked so hard at Whirlpool to define and communicate our vision.

Okay, so we have top level commitment – tick that box. This is standard recommendation fodder in pretty much *every* best practice methodology that exists out there. Pity it doesn’t happen often enough but for Whirlpool it has and that’s great.

So what about selling that vision to the organisation? Where is the resistance and how to you break through it?

Top level managers often incorrectly assume that since consumers differ from location to location, their businesses can’t operate effectively as a unified entity. … And you have to remember that we were planning to build a global enterprise, not a US army of occupation. If you try and gain control over an organisation by simply subjugating it with your preconceptions, you can expect to pay for your short-term profits with long-term resentment and resistance …

This is interesting because it is counter to the way IT departments tend to conduct themselves. When a company merges, the big fight begins between IT departments on whose technology ‘wins’. But why are IT departments even fighting this battle? It’s not even their call! The question they should be asking the executive is “What is the vision and philosophy we are striving for? How can we help the organisation achieve this? Are we even ready to deal with the technology issues?”

When we first took engineers and manufacturing people from the US to Europe to go through the plants, they would spend all their time walking around and saying to themselves, “We do all of these things better at home.” The Europeans who toured the US facilities had the same parochial attitude. Neither group spent any time looking at what it could learn from the other.

There are numerous companies and many improvement experts that talk of satisfying internal customers. At Whirlpool, we once did the same, but we currently believe that internal customers do not exist. … Companies that believe they have internal customers … lose sight of what they’re trying to accomplish as an organisation.

Unfortunately in the interview Whitwam talks of strategy to overcome these barriers, but does not quantify how long it took. In fact he stated that he did not believe that Whirlpool were ‘there’ yet and were not yet a truly global organisation. This is despite the fact that revenue increased a little over 4 billion in 1988 to over $7 billion in 1992.

Of all of the strategies that he outlines to align people and break down these barriers (too many to mention), there was one quote in particular that I loved.

… Other programs … pay people – from top management to those on the factory floor – on the basis of return-on-equity (ROE) or return-on-net-asset (RONA) goals. Employees at Whirlpool all understand what ROE and RONA mean, what drives those measurements, and how they’re linked to shareholder value

This quote for me, is very important, and really was what inspired me to write the SharePoint ROI series. It gets to the essence of why senior managers really couldn’t give a toss about why, say, Linux is more or less secure than Windows or why SharePoint is better or worse than Google Apps, or why their security guy gets so uptight about them using Blackberry’s. They are answerable to shareholders and they are measured by the performance of the company in terms of profitability and growth. Profitability and growth is much more about the alignment of people to a common goal than it is about picking a particular technology. If you can achieve the alignment of a global organisation to the execution of your strategy, then the technology side of things will take care of itself.

So here is a company, actively teaching its workforce to think like a CFO, to make decisions and look at problems with the view of its potential to impact the bottom line. This type of education has two other added bonuses too. As I mentioned in my post about Selling SharePoint, if you can’t describe a problem in terms of a quantifiable problem, how can you measure if you have solved the problem? By having a continued focus on the performance goals of the company, you can tackle the solution to problems in terms of how much they will improve that bottom line.

And finally, the workforce might gain a few skills in their budgeting at home

Gurcharan Das

So now we take another tack and look at a slightly different perspective and talk about Vicks Vaporub – the stuff you rub on your chest and soles of your feet when you have a cold.  Vicks is owned by Procter & Gamble, and Gurcharan Das ended up as the CEO of Procter & Gamble India, and later Managing Director, Procter & Gamble Worldwide in Strategic Planning.

Now Vicks is a global brand, sold all over the world. But this story is one of knowing your local market, and I think a good case study on global companies, strategy and technology.

But this story is earlier than that and tells of when Das was product manager for Vicks in India. He noticed that sales were particularly strong in the South, but poor in the North. He had the choice of pouring more marketing resources into the poorly performing North, or invest those resources into further developing the South. He chose the latter, and it was the right choice. As it happened, North Indians didn’t like to rub things onto their bodies. In the South, people were accustomed to rubbing all sorts of balms onto their bodies for aches, pains or whatever else.

…yet the more important lesson was that it is usually better to build on your strength than try to correct a weakness. Listen and react to the market. Resist the temptation to impose your will on it.

Also when Das took over Vicks, the marketing was run in the same manner as North America. The bulk of the advertising was in winter, yet sales data showed that in India, significant sales occurred in the monsoon season – summer. Das brought forward his marketing to these warmer months and was rewarded by an immediate sales gain. Further capitalising on this notion, Das invented a brand new ailment for Vicks to treat – “the wet monsoon cold” – clever

Now this is good, clever local business strategy, but this next move for me was a stroke of utter genius. In the mid 1980′s the company was in a stand off against chemists and pharmacists who had boycotted sale of Vicks and other products in a fight for higher margins from the pharmaceuticals companies. Das realised that the ingredients of Vicks were all natural, herbal formulas.

All their ingredients were found in thousand year old Sanskrit text. What was more, the ancient Ayurvedic system of medicine enjoyed special patronage of the government. If we could change our government registration from Western medicine to Indian medicine, we could expand our distribution to food stores, general stores, and street kiosks and thus reduce dependence on the pharmacists … what was more, a new registration would allow us to set up a new plant for Vicks in a tax-advantaged “backward area,” where we could raise productivity dramatically by means of improved technology, better work practices, and lower labor costs.

This turned out to be a master stroke, and highlights the importance of local focus in the success of products in a global market. Das makes the point though, that he is not suggesting that managing a global brand is a completely localised process.

Multinational companies have a natural advantage over local companies because they have talented people solving similar problems for identical brands in different parts of the world, and these brand managers can learn from each other’s successes and failures. If a good idea emerges from Egypt, a smart brand manager in Malaysia or Venezuela will at least give it a test.

Managerial basics are the same everywhere, in the West and in the Third World. there is a popular misconception among managers that you need to push a powerful brand name with a standard product, package, and advertising in order to conquer global markets, but actually the key to success is a tremendous amount of local passion for the brand and a feeling of local pride and ownership.

Das made one other comment that I liked too.

The irony is that all the money a company makes is made outside the the company (at the point of sale)., yet the employees spend their time inside the company, usually arguing over turf.  Unfortunately, we don’t see customers around us when we show up for work in the mornings.

When I became CEO I made a rule that every employee in every department had to go out every year and meet 20 consumers and 20 retailers in order to qualify for their annual raise. This not only helps to remind us who pays our salaries, we also get a payoff in good ideas to improve our products and services

And Technology?

In reading this book, you can see that those companies who have succeeded have combined global ideas in terms of standardisation, simplification and economies of scale with a sharp local focus on what the consumer wants in each region. This puts me in a conundrum. For it to succeed, technology to support this has to both be standard, yet completely localised.

IT departments are generally not a profit centre and in general, are fairly far removed from the end customer. Thus it is unsurprising, in my experience, that most tend to act in a way that Whitwam described  “a US army of occupation”. A recent example for me was a worldwide company who insisted that Outlook Web Access (webmail) should not be allowed at all for un-quantified “security reasons”. The time zone difference between Australia and Africa (the two locations with the largest staff presence) were such that there was barely any time overlap from when the Australian office closed and when the African offices started for the day. Since staff could not log in to webmail when at home, many decisions took much longer to be made, because the average email took a day to get a reply.

Consider a competitor who can get decisions made, actions agreed upon without this day’s lag? Who is going to be more efficient and nimble in the marketplace? Which company is better placed to learn from the experiences of each-other?

At a macro level, there will always be a need for some technology to be the same. For Whirlpool, to base their product range on a common platform aimed at the reduction of costs of bringing new products to market, require good technology to go with the willpower and vision. But as illustrated with Vicks, to service a local customer, with different needs to customers in other areas, some flexibility is required to this over-arching attitude.

Vision always comes first. Selling the vision to the organisation and aligning staff to it comes second and then, technology to facilitate the execution of the vision comes third.

I think that a lot of IT organisational problems stem from either failure of setting a clear vision or failure in articulating and selling of that vision to staff. I think that the closer you get to the customer (point of sale), the more flexibility is needed in your application of technology. Back in the bowels and engine room of the company consistency of technology and process is very important.

Ultimate arbitration on whatever your leaning is bottom line, right now and into the future.

And SharePoint? (and why SharePoint can fail?)

SharePoint (and products like it) of course are tools that facilitate information sharing among a group of people via a variety of great features. The irony is (and this has been explored in the posts on wicked problems), that it requires a lot of planning, due to the architecture of the product in particular, the broad nature of how it can be used, and the way the product requires practitioners to think in *advance* of how to classify, segregate and divide up information, as well as staff to un-learn practices that they have been performing a certain way for years.

But without a shared understanding of the vision and strategy of an organisation to achieve that vision, SharePoint can exacerbate the problem of silos, turf wars and staff not working in a coordinated fashion to achieve the strategic organisational goals. Whitwam went against the grain of conventional process improvement theory when he stated that that internal customers did not exist at Whirlpool. “Companies that believe they have internal customers lose sight of what they’re trying to accomplish as an organisation”.

So you may have gotten to here and you are still wondering what the hell is the point of this post? Well thanks for sticking with me – I am finally there

In my last post, I talked about “organisational maturity“, in relation to how SharePoint projects can be doomed to fail from the start. I never really provided a definition for organisational maturity other than “awareness and pragmatic adoption of best practice methodologies”. In reading this book I realise that it goes much deeper than that, right back to organisational vision, formulation of strategy, buy-in of that strategy globally and quality of execution of that strategy.

At the start of this post I mentioned that if you could channel the sort of passion that IT professionals have in technology, inspire them into thinking beyond the technology and incorporate them better into global strategy, that is going a long way towards improving “organisational maturity” and therefore better equipped to handle problems that could easily become “wicked”.

Thanks for reading

Paul

                      

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