Once upon a time there lived a rather round wizard named Hocklart who worked at the FogWorts school of witchcraft and wizardry. Hocklart was a very proud wizard, perhaps the proudest in all of FogWorts. His pride did not stem from being a great wizard or a great teacher; in reality, he was neither of those. In fact Hocklart was never much good at wizardry itself, but he knew a lot of people who were – and therein lay the reason for his pride. For what Hocklart lacked in magic ability, he more than made up for with his attention to detail, love of process and determination to rise to the top. From the day he arrived at FogWorts as one apprentice amongst many, he was the first to realise that the influential wizards liked to unwind on Friday nights with a cold ale at the Three and a Half Broomsticks Inn. Hocklart sacrificed many Friday nights at that pub, shouting rounds of frothy brew to thirsty senior wizards, befriending them all, listening to their stories and building up peerless knowledge of FogWorts organisational politics and juicy gossip.

This organisational knowledge brought just enough influence for Hocklart to climb the corporate ladder ahead of his more magically adept colleagues and presently he was very proud. As far as Hocklart was concerned, he had the most important job in all of FogWorts – Manager of the Department Responsible for the Integrity of Potions (or DRIP for short).

You see, in schools of witchcraft and wizardry, wizards and witches concoct all sorts of potions for all sorts of magical purposes. Potions of course require various ingredients in just the right amount and often prepared in just the right way. Some of these ingredients are highly dangerous and need to be handed with utmost care, while others might be harmless by themselves, but dangerous when mixed with something else or prepared incorrectly. Obviously one has to be careful in such a situation because a mix-up could be potentially life threatening or at the very least, turn you into some sort of rodent or small reptile.

The real reason why Hocklart was proud was because of his DRIP track record. You see, over the last six years, Hocklart had ensured that Fogwarts met all its statutory regulatory requirements as per the International Spell-casters Standards Organisation (ISSO). This included the “ISSO 9000 and a half” series of standards for quality management as well as the “ISSO 14000 and a sprinkle more” series for Environmental Management and Occupational Health and Safety. (Like all schools of witchcraft and wizardry, Fogwarts needed to maintain these standards to keep their license to operate current and in good standing).

When Hocklart became manager of DRIP, he signed himself up for a week-long training course to understand the family of ISSO standards in great detail. Enlightened by this training, he now appreciated the sort of things the ISSO auditors would likely audit FogWorts on. Accordingly, he engaged expensive consultants from an expensive consultancy to develop detailed management plans in accordance with wizardry best practices. To deliver this to the detail that Hocklart required, the consultants conjured a small army of business analysts, enterprise architects, system administrators, coordinators, admin assistants, documenters, quality engineers and asset managers who documented all relevant processes that were considered critical to safety and quality for potions.

Meticulous records were kept of all activities and these were sequestered in a secure filing room which was, among other things, guaranteed to be spell-proof. Hocklart was particularly fond of this secure filing room, with its rows and rows of neatly labelled, colour coded files that lovingly held Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) for each potion ingredient. These sheets provided wizards the procedures for handling or working with the ingredients in a safe manner, including information of interest to wizards such as fulmination point, spell potency, extra-magical strength, reversal spells as well as routine data such as boiling point, toxicity, health effects, first aid, reactivity, storage, disposal, protective equipment and spill-handling procedures. All potion ingredients themselves were stored in the laboratory in jars with colour coded lids that represented the level of hazard and spell-potency. Ever the perfectionist, Hocklart ensured that all jars had the labels perfectly aligned, facing the front. The system was truly was a thing of beauty and greatly admired by all and sundry, including past ISSO auditors, who were mesmerised by what they saw (especially the colour coded filing system and the symmetry of the labels of the jars).

And so it came to pass that for six years Hocklart, backup up by his various consultants and sub-contractors, saw off every ISSO auditor who ever came to audit things. All of them left FogWorts mightily impressed, telling awestruck tales of Hocklart’s quality of documentation, attention to detail and beautiful presentation. This made Hocklart feel good inside. He was a good wizard…nay, a great one: no one in the wizard-world had emerged from an ISSO audit unscathed more than twice in a row…

On the seventh year of his term as FogWarts head of DRIP, Hocklart’s seventh audit approached. Although eagerly waiting to impress the new auditor (as he did with all the previous auditors), Hocklart did not want to appear overly prepared, so he tried to look as nonchalant as possible by casually reviewing a draft memo he was working on as the hour approached. Only you and I, and of course Hocklart himself, knew that in the weeks prior to today, Hocklart was at his meticulous best in his preparation. He had reviewed all of the processes and documentation and made sure it was all up to date and watertight. There was no way fault could be found.

Presently, there was a rap on the open door, and in walked the auditor.

“Potter – Chris Potter,” the gentleman introduced himself. “Hocklart I presume?”

Hocklart had never met Potter before so as they shook hands he sized up his opponent. The first thing he noticed was that Potter wasn’t carrying anything – no bag, notebook and not even a copy of the ISSO standards. “Have you been doing this sort of work long?” he enquired.

“Long enough,” came the reply. “Let’s go for a walk…”

“Sure,” replied Hocklart. “Where would you like to go?”

For what seemed like an uncomfortably long time to Hocklart, Potter was silent. Then he replied, “Let’s go and have a look at the lab.”

Ha! Nice try, thought Hocklart as he led the auditor to the potion laboratory. Yesterday I had the lab professionally cleaned with a high potency Kleenit spell and we did a stocktake of the ingredients the week before.

Potter cast his sharp eyes around as they walked (as is common with auditors), but remained silent. Soon enough they arrived at a gleaming, most immaculate lab, with nothing out of place. Without a word, Potter surveyed the scene and walked to the shelves of jars that held the ingredients, complete with colour coded lids and perfectly aligned labels. He picked up one of the red labelled jars that contained Wobberworm mucus – a substance that, while not fatal, was known to cause damage if not handled with care. Holding the jar, he turned to Hocklart.

“You have a Materials Safety Data Sheet for this?”

Hocklart grinned. “Absolutely… would you like to see it?”

Potter did not answer. Instead he continued to examine the jar. After another uncomfortable silence, Potter looked up announcing, “I’ve just got this in my eyes.” His eyes fixed on Hocklart.

Hocklart looked at Potter in confusion. The Wobberworm mucus was certainly not in Potter’s eyes because the jar had not been opened.

“What?” he asked hesitantly.

Potter, eyes unwaveringly locked on Hocklart, remained silent. The silence seemed an eternity to Hocklart. A quick glance at his watch then Potter, holding up the jar in his hand, repeated more slowly, “I’ve just got this in my eyes.”

Hocklart’s heart rate began to rise. What is this guy playing at? He asked himself. Potter, meanwhile, looked at his watch again, looked back at Hocklart and sighed. “It’s been a minute now and my eye’s really starting to hurt. I risk permanent eye damage here… What should you be doing?”

A trickle of sweat rolled down Hocklart’s brow. He had not anticipated this at all.

Potter waited, sighed again and grated, “Where is the Materials Safety Data Sheet with the treatment procedure?”

A cog finally shifted in Hocklart’s mind as he realised what Potter was doing. Whilst he was mightily annoyed that Potter had caught him off guard (he would have to deal with that later), right now however he had to play Potter’s game and win.

“We have a secure room with all of that information,” he replied proudly. “I can’t have any of the other wizards messing with my great filing system, it’s my system…”

“Well,” Potter grated, “let’s get in there. My eye isn’t getting any better standing here.”

Hocklart gestured to a side door. “They are in there.” But as he said it his heart skipped a beat as a sense of dread came over him.

“It’s… “ he stammered then cleared his throat. “It’s locked.”

Potter looked straight into Hocklart with a stare that seemed to pierce his very soul. “Now I’m in agony,” he stated. “Where is the key?”

“I keep it in my office…” he replied.

“Well,” Potter said, “I now have permanent scarring on my eye and have lost partial sight. You better get it pronto…”

Hocklart continued to stare at Potter for a moment in disbelief, before turning and running out of the room as fast as his legs could carry his rotund body.

It is common knowledge that wizards are not known for being renowned athletes, and Hocklart was no exception. Nevertheless, he hurtled down corridors, up stairs and through open plan cubicles as if he was chased by a soulsucker. He steamed into his office, red faced and panting. Sweat poured from his brow as he flung a picture from the wall, revealing a safe. With shaking hands, he entered the combination and got it wrong twice before managing to open the safe door. He grabbed the key, turned and made for the lab as if his life depended on it.

Potter was standing exactly where he was, and said nothing as Hocklart surged into the room and straight to the door. He unlocked the door and burst into the secure room. Recalling the jar had a red lid, Hocklart made a beeline for the shelf of files with red labels, grabbed the one labelled with the letter W for Wobberworm and started to flick through it. To his dismay, there was no sign of a material safety data sheet for Wobberworm mucus.

“It’s…it’s not…it’s not here,” he stuttered weakly.

“Perhaps it was filed under “M” for mucus?” Potter offered.

“Yes that must be it”, cried Hocklart (who at this stage was ready to grasp at anything). He grabbed the file labelled M and flicked through each page. Sadly, once again there was no sign of Mucus or Wobberworm.

“Well,” said Potter looking at his watch again. “I’m now permanently blind in one eye… let’s see if we can save the other one eh? Perhaps there is a mismatch between the jar colour and the file?”

Under normal circumstances, Hocklart would snort in derision at such a suggestion, but with the clock ticking and one eye left to save, it seemed feasible.

“Dammit”, he exclaimed, “Someone must have mixed up the labels.” After all, while Wobberworm mucus was damaging, it was certainly not fatal and therefore did not warrant a red cap on the jar. This is why I can’t trust anyone with my system! he thought, as he grabbed two orange files (one labelled W for Wobberworm and one labelled M for mucus) and opened them side by side so he could scan them at the same time.

Eureka! On the fifth page of the file labelled M, he found the sheet for Wobberworm mucus. Elated, he showed the sheet to Potter, breathing a big sigh of relief. He had saved the other eye after all.

Potter took the sheet and studied it. “It has all the necessary information, is up to date – and the formatting is really nice I must say.” He handed the sheet back to Hocklart. “But your system is broken”

Hocklart was still panting from his sprint to his office and back and as you can imagine, was absolutely infuriated at this. How dare this so-called auditor call his system broken. It had been audited for six years until now, and Potter had pulled a nasty trick on him.

“My system is not broken”, he spat vehemently. “The information was there, it was current and properly maintained. I just forgot my key that’s all. Do you even know how much effort it takes to maintain this system to this level of quality?”

A brief wave of exasperation flickered across Potter’s face.

“You still don’t get it…” he countered. “What was my intent when I told you I spilt Wobberworm mucus in my eye?”

To damn well screw me over, thought Hocklart, before icily replying “I don’t care what your intent was, but it was grossly unfair what you did. You were just out to get me because we have passed ISSO audits for the last six years.”

“No,” replied Potter. “My intent was to see whether you have confused the system with the intent of the system.”

Potter gestured around the room to the files. “This is all great eye candy,” he said, “you have dotted the I’s, and crossed the T’s. In fact this is probably the most comprehensive system of documentation I have ever seen. But the entire purpose of this system is to keep people safe and I just demonstrated that it has failed.“

Hocklart was incredulous. “How can I demonstrate the system works when you deliberately entrapped me?”, he spat in rage.

Potter sighed. “No wizards can predict when they will have an accident you know,” he countered. “Then it wouldn’t be an accident would it? For you, this is all about the system and not about the outcome the system enables. It is all about keeping the paperwork up to date and putting it in the files… I’m sorry Hocklart, but you have lost sight of the fact the system is there to keep people safe. Your organisation is at significant risk and you are blind to that risk. You think you have mitigated it when in fact you have made it worse. For all the time, effort and cost, you have not met the intent of the ISSO standards.“

Hocklart’s left eye started to twitch as he struggled to stop himself from throwing red jars at Potter. “Get out of my sight,” he raged. “I will be reporting your misconduct to my and your superiors this afternoon. I don’t know how you can claim to be an auditor when you were clearly out to entrap me. I will not stand for it and I will see you disciplined for this!”

Potter did not answer. He turned from Hocklart, put the jar of Wobberworm mucus back on the shelf where he had found it and turned to leave.

“For pete’s sake”, Hocklart grated, “the least you could do is face the label to the front like the other jars!”

=========================

I wrote this parable after being told the real life version of a audit by a friend of mine… This is very much based on a true story. My Harry Potter obsessed daughter also helped me with some of the finer details. Thanks to Kailash and Mrs Cleverworkarounds for fine tuning…

.

Paul Culmsee

Hi all

*sigh*

This post comes to you during my reality check of returning to work after the bliss of 1 month of vacation in New Zealand. After walking on a glacier, racing around in jetboats and relaxing in volcanic hot springs, the thought of writing SharePoint blog posts isn’t exactly filling me with excitement right now. But nevertheless I am soldiering on, because as Ruven Gotz frequently tells his conference attendees – I do it because I love you all.

Now this is article ten (blimey!) in a series of posts about my insights of being a cross between a SharePoint architect and facilitator/sensemaker. In case this is your first time reading this series, I highly recommend that you go back to the beginning as we have covered a lot of ground to get to here. Inspired by the late, great Russell Ackoff, I used his notion of f-laws – sometimes inconvenient truths about what I think is critical for successful SharePoint delivery. At this point in proceedings, we have covered 6 f-laws across 9 articles.

• F-law 1: The more comprehensive the definition of governance, the less anybody will actually understand it
• F-law 2: There is no point asking users, who don’t know what they want, to tell you what they want
• F-law 3: The chances of SharePoint success is inversely proportional to how long it takes to come up with a measurable KPI
• F-law 4: Most SharePoint objectives are platitudes: They say nothing but hide behind words
• F-law 5: Confidence is the feeling you have until you understand the problem
• F-law 6: Geeks are far less important than they think they are

The next f-law we are going to cover is a bit of a mouthful. Are you ready?

F-Law 7: The degree of governance strictness is inversely proportional to the understanding of the chaos its supposed to prevent

So to explain this f-law, here is a question I often ask clients and conference attendees alike…

What is the opposite of governance?

The answer that most people give to this question is “Chaos”. So what I am implying? Essentially that the stricter you are in terms of managing what you deem to be chaos, the less you actually understand the root causes of chaos in the first place.

Ouch! Really?

To explain, let’s revisit f-law 5, since this is not the first time the theme of chaos has come up in this series. If you recall f-law 5 stated that confidence is the feeling you have until you understand the problem. In that article, I drew the two diagrams below, both of them representing the divergence and convergence process that comes with most projects. The pink box labelled chaos illustrated that before a group can converge to a lasting solution, they have to cross the ‘peak’ of divergence. This is normally a period of some stress and uncertainty – even on quite straightforward projects. But commonly in SharePoint things can get quite chaotic with lots of divergence and very little convergence as shown by the rightmost diagram where there appears to be little convergence.

“Thou shalt not…”

There are clearly forces at play here… forces that push against convergence and manifest in things like scope creep, unreconciled stakeholder viewpoints and the stress of seeing the best laid plans messed with. The size and shape of the pink ‘chaos’ box reflects the strength of those underlying forces.

To manage this, many (if not most) SharePoint practitioners take a “thou shalt not” approach to SharePoint delivery in an attempt to head things off before they even happen. After the dissection in f-law 6 of how IT people channel Neo and focus on dial tone issues, it is understandable why this approach is taken. Common examples of this sort of thinking are “Thou shalt not use SharePoint Designer” or “Thou shalt use metadata and not folders” or “Thou shalt use the standard site template no matter what.”

These sort of commandments may be completely appropriate, but these is one really important thing to make sure you consider. If having no governance indeed results in chaos, then it stands to reason that we need to understand the underlying divergent forces behind chaos to mitigate chaos and better govern it. In other words, we need look inside pink box labelled chaos and see what the forces are that push against convergence. So lets modify the diagrams above and take a look inside the pink box.

For me, there are four forces that govern the amount of chaos in SharePoint projects, namely:

1. Pace of Change
2. Problem Wickedness
3. Technical Complexity
4. Social Complexity

Let’s examine each one in turn…

Pace of change

Remember the saying “The only certainty in life are death and taxes”? Outside of that, the future is always unpredictable. In between SharePoint 2003 and SharePoint 2007, the wave of web 2.0 and social networking broke, forever changing how we collaborate and work with information online. In between SharePoint 2010 and SharePoint 2013, the wave of cloud computing broke, which is slowly but surely changing the way organisations view their IT assets (both systems and people). The implications of this are huge and Microsoft have to align their product to tap into these opportunities. Net result? We all have a heap of new learning to do.

If you read the last post, you might recall that pace of change was a recurring theme when people answered the question about what is hard with SharePoint. But let’s look beyond SharePoint for a second… change happens in many forms and at many scales. At a project level, it may mean a key team member leaves the organisation suddenly. At an organisational level, there might be a merger or departmental restructure. At a global level, events like the Global Financial Crisis forced organisations to change strategic focus very quickly indeed.

The point is that change breeds innovation yet it is relentless and brings about fatigue. Continual learning and relearning is required and even the best laid plans will inevitably be subject to changing circumstances. The key is not to fight change but accept that it will happen and work with it. In terms of SharePoint, this is best addressed by an iterative delivery model that has a high degree of key stakeholder involvement, recognises the learning nature of SharePoint and fosters meaningful collaboration.

Problem “Wickedness”

Some problems are notoriously hard to solve because they evoke a lot of diverse, often conflicting viewpoints and it can be difficult even agreeing on what the core problem actually is. F-law 1 examined how we sometimes fixate on the means of governance when the end goal of SharePoint is uncertain. Over-reliance on definitions is the result. F-law 2 looked at how users understanding of a problem changes over time and f-Law 4 looked at the folly in chasing platitudes. The underlying cause for all of these f-laws is often the very nature of the problem you are trying to solve.

You might have heard me talk about wicked problems or read about it in my blog or my book. In short, some problems are exceptionally tough to solve. Just trying to explain the problem can be hard, and analysis-paralysis is common because it seems that each time the problem is examined, a new facet appears which seemingly changes the whole concept of the problem. This phenomenon was named as a wicked problems by Horst Rittel in 1970. One of the most extreme examples right now of a wicked problem in the USA would be the gun control debate since depending on your values and ideology, you would describe the underlying problem in different ways and therefore, the potential solutions offered are equally varied and contentious.

While there are actually many different management gurus who have also come up with alternate names for this sort of complexity (“mess”, “adaptive problem”, “soft systems”), the term wicked problem has become widely used to describe these types of problems. I suspect this is because Rittel listed a bunch of symptoms that suggest when your problem has elements of wickedness. Here are some of the commonly cited ones:

1. There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem (defining wicked problems is itself a wicked problem).
2. The problem is not understood until after the formulation of a solution.
3. There is no immediate and no ultimate test of a solution to a wicked problem.
4. Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation”; because there is no opportunity to learn by trial and error, every attempt counts significantly.
5. Wicked problems do not have an enumerable (or an exhaustively describable) set of potential solutions, nor is there a well-described set of permissible operations that may be incorporated into the plan.
6. Every wicked problem is essentially unique.
7. Every wicked problem can be considered to be a symptom of another problem.
8. The existence of a discrepancy representing a wicked problem can be explained in numerous ways. The choice of explanation determines the nature of the problem’s resolution.
9. Stakeholders have radically different world views and different frames for understanding the problem.
10. The constraints that the problem is subject to and the resources needed to solve it change over time.
11. The problem is never solved definitively

Can you tick off some of those symptoms with SharePoint? I’ll bet you can… I’ll also bet that for other IT projects (say MS Exchange deployments) these symptoms are far less pronounced.

Guess what the implication is of wicked problems. They tend to resist the command-and-control approach of delivery and require meaningful collaboration to get them done. That is kind of funny when you think about it since SharePoint is touted as a collaboration tool yet falls victim to wicked elements. That suggests that there was not enough collaboration to deliver the collaboration platform!

Technical Complexity

Technical complexity involves difficulties in fact finding, technical information and the systematic identification and analysis of options and their likely consequences. It is an understatement to say that SharePoint is full of technical complexity. In fact, it is one of the most complex products that Microsoft has ever produced (and that’s before you get to dependencies like SQL Server, IIS, FIM, Federated authentication and the myriad of other things you need to know)

A typical characteristic of technical complexity is information overload in fact finding. There is far too much information to make sense of and as a result, no one person has the cognitive capacity to understand it all. Thus, stakeholders have to rely on each other and, on occasions, rely on outside experts to collaboratively work towards a solution. Technical complexity requires a lot of cognitive load to manage and it is easy to get caught up in the minute detail and lose the all important bigger picture.

Problems also arise when different technical experts come to opposite conclusions. This gives rise to the last and most insidious divergent force underlying SharePoint chaos and the governance that goes with it – social complexity.

Social Complexity

The first three symptoms tend to create a perfect storm of complexity, since we have a situation where there is a lot of uncertainty. Many people hate this because unknown unknowns creates fear if sufficient trust does not exist between all key parties. Developing trust is made all the harder because we are all a product of our experiences, with different values, cultural beliefs, personality styles and biases so reconciling different world views on various issues can be difficult. Then you have the issue that many organisations have a blame culture and people position themselves to avoid it. This my friends is social complexity and I know that all of you live this sort of stuff everyday.

Yet under the right circumstances, groups can be remarkably intelligent and are often smarter than the smartest people in group. Groups do not need to be dominated by exceptionally intelligent people in order to be smart – in fact diversity of group makeup is a much more important factor than individual IQ. Without this diversity, groups are less likely to arrive at a good answer to a given problem because they are likely to fall into groupthink. Groupthink is when highly cohesive groups make unsound decisions due to group pressures, ignoring possible alternatives. Every management team that only wants to hear the good news is likely to have fallen foul of groupthink. The same applies to dismissing all SharePoint governance except for the dial tone stuff.

However, there is an inherent paradox here:

• The more parties involved in a collaboration, the more socially complex;
• The more different these parties are, the more diverse, the more socially complex; and
• This creates tension, resentment and lack of communication and a strong desire to go back to business as usual

This paradox between diversity and harmony is the toughest aspect of the four forces to tackle.

Key takeaways…

Way back in the very first post I stated that a key job of a SharePoint architect is to architect the conditions by which SharePoint is delivered. By this I mean that the architect has to grease the gears of collaboration between stakeholders and provide an environment that has the safety and structure for people to raise their issues, speak their truths and not get penalised for improving their understanding of the problem.

To enable this to happen, we need to tackle all four of the forces behind chaos that we have covered here. In short, if you focus governance efforts only on one of the forces you will simply inflame the others. Accordingly, the final diagram illustrates the key takeaway from f-Law 7. Since the four forces behind chaos push out and create divergence, our governance efforts needs to push back. But the important thing to note is the direction of my arrows. It is not necessarily appropriate to provide a direct counterforce via the “thou shalt not” type of all-or-nothing approach. Governance always has to steer towards the solution. The end always drives the means and not the other way around! Arbitrarily imposing such restrictions is often done without due consideration of the end in mind and therefore gets in the way of the steering process. This is why my arrows point inwards, but always push toward the solution on the right.

In this context, it can be seen why envisioning, stakeholder and goal alignment is so critical. Without it, its too easy for governance to become a self fulfilling prophecy. So when you look at your own projects, draw my divergence/convergence diagram and estimate how big the pink box is. If you sense that there is divergence, then look at where your gaps are and make sure you create the conditions that help mitigate all of the forces and not just one one of them.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.hereticsguidebooks.com

Hi all and welcome back to my ever growing series which attempts to codify a lot of learning over a long period of time into something that I hope is readable, rigorous and is useful to anyone tasked with successful SharePoint project delivery. This is the 7th post in a what is turning out to be a large series. It is large for a good reason: SharePoint is complex and the problems it attempts to solve (collaboration) are complex as well. If this is your first article, I super-strongly suggest you take it from the beginning as these articles build on each-other.

My motivation for getting this stuff out there is to tap into the shift I now sense in how organisations approach the SharePoint platform. Through a combination of organisations living through SharePoint project failure, practitioners experiencing SharePoint fatigue syndrome, as well as the strength and congruence of the messages of many wise people in the SharePoint community, organisations now realise that SharePoint is a “different” kind of project.  This realisation represents the first stage of any form of learning where people have moved from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence.  These terms sound rather confronting but are common in training-speak…

• Unconscious incompetence refers to people who do not realise they lack certain skills and therefore don’t realise they need training to address the gap. That explains pretty much every IT centric SharePoint deployment based on the “built it and they will come” delivery model (and we all know how much fun those projects are).
• Conscious incompetence means that people now see the gap between their knowledge and know they need help. Much of my company’s work is in this area – as is our close friends at Dynamic Owl and 21apps. Aside from our own clients, all of us are often sought out by other Microsoft partners who have learnt the hard way that the classic model of sales guy, project manager, business analyst and developer doesn’t always crack the SharePoint nut.

So newfound realisation among clients and consultants is there and that’s all well and good. Now the issue is to get past the cover story and take it to the next level. We have to go beyond the oft-used hippie clichés like “It’s all about the business, man” and make the art of SharePoint delivery real, pragmatic, rigorous and tangible. This series aims to be my attempt to do just that, complimenting leaders like Andrew Woodward, Ruven Gotz, Michal Pisarek and Sue Hanley. To that end, as I continue writing the series I hope that you:

• laugh at the various truths behind the various SharePoint governance f-laws;
• smile knowingly at the folly of some of the elaborate project and governance rituals you have to do now;
• have your own biases challenged as you either cringe in embarrassment or think “he has gone too far with *that* comment”; and
• have enough solid ammo to get through to influence other key stakeholders in your organisation

Allrighty then! Let’s get down to business. Our f-law for today’s article comes from Woody Allen. I have never actually watched one of his movies, but I have to give him credit for this pearl of wisdom…

F-Law 5: Confidence is the feeling you have until you understand the problem

Most projects start with a honeymoon phase. A newly formed team gets to deliver some new technology that is high profile and bolster their CV’s while “taking the business to the next level” (platitude black belts take note!) Morale is high and the team feel the sort of excitement one feels when going on a first date. Like a bad first date however, it doesn’t take long for the slow but relentless imposition of reality to take hold. Accordingly, as understanding of the problem grows, uncertainty grows commensurately. This in turn tests the initial project assumptions which an optimistic budget was likely pinned to. Most people can’t handle this sort of uncertainty because it confers risk of blame – something we all seek to avoid if we can. Thus on a complex project where the problem has elements of wickedness, blame avoidance results in things becoming quite dysfunctional and often project teams lose confidence that they can solve the problem.

There is an underlying phenomenon at work here that seems to be part of the human condition. Check out these two diagrams below as both of them show the same pattern. The left image is by Gartner and is their famous hype cycle that they pin technology fads to. The other won a Nobel prize for the originators and refers to a phenomenon called the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The diagrams should be self explanatory as both are a representation of increasing ones understanding of a problem over time. Both diagrams powerfully illustrate that as understanding grows, one never regains the same level of confidence that one had at the start! Take a look at the red line which reflects level of understanding of a problem. In both cases, the red line never reaches the same peak as it did at the very start when confidence was high and understanding was low. In other words, as your understanding grows and you become more informed about a problem, you will never be as certain as you would like to be.

Now in my mind, anyone who tries to argue against truth of the above patterns have fallen victim to the pattern. Furthermore, if you are dealing with someone who fits that level of optimistic naivety like a command-and-control project manager or CIO, just tell them that this has Nobel prize winning backing. For those CIO types who get all of their gospel from Gartner, use the hype cycle instead. After all, what would those Nobel dudes know eh? 🙂

So here is a tip. Next time you are kicking off a SharePoint project and need to assess risk, try this: First up, explain platitudes as described in the last two posts. Then draw one of the above diagrams on a whiteboard and ask your stakeholders to place an X on the above diagrams where they see the project team, themselves and where they see others! I guarantee much fun and frivolity will ensue…

Divergence and Convergence

Now if you work for an organisation where the idea of ranking ones naivety is a bit confronting, let me offer you something gentler. This alternate way of looking uncertainty over time is similarly powerful to the images above. I first saw this diagram used by Jeff Conklin, who got it from a book by Sam Kaner called the Facilitator’s Guide to Participatory Decision-Making. My diagram below was modified from Kaner for my own purposes.

Like the Gartner and Dunning-Kruger diagrams above, the X axis represents time, with a problem at one end and the solution on the other. The Y-axis represents the level of uncertainty and it illustrates that project teams typically go through a cycle of divergent thinking, followed by a period of convergent thinking as the team becomes more aligned and the problem is better understood. What is interesting to note is that the point where divergence ends and convergence starts is never clear. No-one ever stops and pronounces “Okay guys, I think we have sufficiently diverged. Let’s converge now.”

To converge, one has to cross over the ‘hump’ of divergence. Imagine climbing a mountain and there are thick clouds that obscure the peak. For all you know, the peak might be a couple hundred feet further, but equally so, you might only be halfway up. For this reason I draw a box in the middle rather than connect the arrows. it is important to note that when I draw the box in the middle, I make a point of asking people to tell me the sort of words they would use to convey what they are feeling during this time. Without fail, I always get negative responses like “confusion,” “irritability,” “stress” and “uncertainty.”

Now consider this: Some projects tend to diverge sharply and convergence seems almost impossible. No attempts to reign things in by asserting control seem to work. In fact, they usually make things worse. Accordingly, SharePoint projects commonly look like the figure below. They are highly divergent with little convergence as a result of the varied implicit assumptions that stakeholders have about SharePoint that have not been aired and reconciled. The power of those pesky platitudes, eh?

When I show this version of the diagram to people, I always ask a simple question:

• If you do not have governance for SharePoint, what do you have?

The answer I get is always “Chaos,” which I write in the box as you can see above. My next question to the group is this:

• “So by definition, to understand SharePoint governance, we all have to metaphorically open this box we have labelled “Chaos” to understand the forces that create the divergence?

So far, nobody has disagreed with that logic. So I then I hit people with the punch line…

• “So how can you tell me that your governance approach is addressing the forces of divergence if you don’t know what’s in the box?“

That is usually the great silence moment… Despite the logic of my argument, most organisations never open the damn box and then approach SharePoint project delivery in a manner that is very likely to exacerbate the problem, rather than address it.

False convergence…

Check out the figure below. It is a variation of the divergence/convergence figure and represents a common approach to rein in SharePoint going haywire. If you look closely, you can see that an attempt has been made to force convergence. This manifests in different ways, but is most often the scenario when a sponsor or key stakeholder starts to make key decisions on behalf of others. In the short term, this approach tends to feel good because there is a sense of momentum and something is “being done” to get things under control. Project managers stop palpitating for a time because their Gantt charts start to see some progress…

After explaining this diagram, I then ask my audience. “So has this dealt with divergence?”. To this day, not a single person I have ever asked has said yes. In fact, everyone implicitly seems to realise that this is a false convergence and the underlying divergent forces have not truly been addressed at all. There is usually a short term feeling that things are getting back on track, but it doesn’t last long because it is actually little better than an illusion and things starts to get fishy – both on the project and in my diagram as shown below…

So eventually we will be smacked by the chaos baseball bat whether we like it or not. Despite this, many organisations will persist with the forced convergence approach many times (with a different set of consultants each time) and of course continue to get crappy results. Eventually though, the attrition of this approach will exceed the commitment of stakeholders and something gives. It is at this point where some organisations react by doing another dumbass thing…

Overly constraining divergence…

Once there is a realisation that an elite coterie (like the IT department or a single champion in the business) cannot solve the information management problems for the entire organisation via false convergence approaches, the next approach seems to artificially constrain the divergence via controlling the terms of reference – aka lock the crap out of the scope. This is seductively tempting since scope creep is the quintessential symptom of stakeholders who are still in divergent thinking.

While I have no problem with determining an appropriate scope, as we all operate within time, people and budgetary limits. But it has to be done for the right reasons and constraining divergence is not a good reason. Why? Because it means that stakeholders have very little shared understanding at the point scope is decided. This is a problem because ideally, divergent thinking should be reconciled to be able to decide on scope. From a diagrammatic point of view, this is like putting clamps around the level of allowable uncertainty. The classic example of this approach is when an organisation opts for the installation and deployment of SharePoint itself as phase 1 of the project. Ever done that before?

Like the previous example, I ask my audience whether this approach deals with divergence. Also like the first example, the answer is a universal no. The underlying divergent forces have not truly been addressed at all and things are still fishy – although on the diagram below it is a difference species of fish! 🙂 In fact what you are doing here is penalising people for their learning – something I warned against doing in part three.

Key takeaways

I hope that you find these diagrams useful when discussing SharePoint delivery with your own stakeholders. By explaining SharePoint delivery in terms of divergence, convergence and a pink box labelled “chaos” we are able to provide a frame to show why artificially constraining divergence often has the opposite effect of what is intended. It is also worth pointing out that both of the above approaches are not particularly collaborative either – which tends to go against what one is trying to do with SharePoint in the first place.

Many SharePoint projects proceed on the assumption that the problem is well understood – that divergence has peaked and we are heading down the slope of convergence. If this is indeed the case, then the SharePoint project should go reasonably well since all of the tools for managing and delivering projects are convergence tools and do a good job in assisting this process. When this is not the case however, those same approaches have a bad habit of getting in the way by precluding the sort of learning and exploration needed for stakeholders to align around a problem. Returning to my mountain climbing metaphor I used earlier, these tools are like gravity assist to help you get down the mountain, but they weight a lot when you are trudging up a steep mountain and when clouds are obscuring the peak.

My takeaway for f-law 5 is not to jump straight to convergence. It might give you an initial sense of certainty and momentum, but only for a short time. I have said it many times and I will say it again. While there is a lack of shared understanding among participants of a problem, you will never get the shared commitment you need to see a solution through. Shared commitment is critical because without it, projects lose their energy and momentum to be seen to conclusion. Persistent divergence is a sign of a lack of shared understanding so the trick of course, is to harness divergence and turn it into something positive. Create the conditions that allows for some uncertainty, reduce the blame culture and tolerate mistakes. Invest in tools and methods that allow collective sensemaking and give people safety and structure to raise and reconcile their concerns.

Achieving shared understanding of the problem is for me the essence of SharePoint governance. In the doctors vs. midwives post in this series I explained how the goal of an architect is to create the right conditions for SharePoint success. The conditions to manage and harness divergence is a critical skill.

If you can achieve this end you should be bloody proud of yourself – as you have done 80% of the work of SharePoint delivery already.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.hereticsguidebooks.com

Hello kung-fu students and thanks for dropping by to complete your platitude training. If you have been dutifully following the prior 5 articles so far in this series, you will have now earned your yellow belt in platitude kung-fu and should be able to spot a platitude a mile away. Of course, yellow belt is entry level – like what a Padwan is to a Jedi. In this post, you can earn your black-belt by delving further into the mystic arts of the (post) SharePoint architect and develop simple but effective methods to neutralise the hidden danger of platitudes on SharePoint projects.

If this is your first time reading this series, then stop now! Go back and (ideally) read the other articles that have led to here. Now in reality I know full well that you will not actually do that so read the previous post before proceeding. Of course, I know you will not do that either, so therefore I need to fill you in a little. This series of articles outline much of what I have learnt about successful SharePoint delivery, strongly influenced from my career in sensemaking. I have been using Russell Ackoff’s concept of f-laws – truth bombs about the way people behave in organisations – to outline all of the common mistakes and issues that plague organisations trying to deliver great SharePoint outcomes.

So far in this series we have explored four f-laws, namely:

• f-Law 1: The more comprehensive the definition of governance is, the less it will be understood by all
• f-Law 2: There is no point in asking users, who don’t know what they want, to say what they want
• f-Law 3: The probability of SharePoint success is inversely proportional to the time taken to come up with a measurable KPI
• f-Law 4: Most SharePoint governance objectives are platitudes. They say nothing but hide behind words

In the last post, we took a look at the danger of conflating a superlative (like biggest, best, improved and efficient) with a buzzword like (search, portal, collaboration, social). The minute you combine these and dupe yourself into thinking that you now have a goal, you will find that your project starts to become become complex, which in turn results in over-engineered solutions solving everything and anything, and finally your project will eventually collapse under its own weight after consuming far too many financial (and emotional) resources.

This is because the goal you are chasing looks seductively simple, but ultimately is an illusion. All of your stakeholders might use the same words, but have very different interpretations of what the goal actually looks like to them. The diagram that shows the problem with this is below. On the left is the mirage and to the right is the reality behind the mirage. Essentially your fuzzy goal actually is a proxy for a whole heap of unaligned and often unarticulated goals from all of your stakeholders.

Now in theory, you have read the last post and now have a newly calibrated platitude radar. You will sit at a table and hear platitudes come in thick and fast because you will be using Ackoff’s approach of inverting a goal and seeing if a) the opposite makes any logical sense and b) could be measured in any meaningful way. As an example, here are three real-world strategic objectives that I have seen adorning some wordy strategic plans. All three set off my platitude radar big time…

“Collaboration will be encouraged”

“A best-practice collaboration platform”

“It’s a SharePoint project”

I look at the first statement and think “so… would you discourage collaboration? Of course not.” Ackoff would take a statement like that and say “Stop telling me what you need to do to survive, and tell me what you need to do to thrive”.

What do you mean by?

So if I asked you how to unpack a platitude into reality, what might you do?

For many, it might seem logical to ask people what they really mean by the platitude. It might seem equally logical to come up with a universal definition to bring people to a common understanding of the platitude. Unfortunately, both are about as productive as a well-meaning Business Analyst asking users “So, what are your requirements?”

With the “what do you mean by [insert platitude here]” question, the person likely won’t be able to articulate what they mean particularly well. That is precisely why they are unconsciously using the platitude in the first place! Remember that a platitude is a mental shortcut that we often make because it saves us the cognitive effort of making sense of something. This might sound strange that we would do this, but in the rush to get things done in organisations, it is unsurprising. How often do you feel a sense of guilt when you are reflecting on something because it doesn’t feel like progress? Put a whole bunch of people feeling that way into a meeting room and of course people will latch into a platitude.

By the way, the “mental shortcut” that makes a platitude feel good seems to be a part of being human and sometimes it can work for us. When it works, it is called a heuristic, When it doesn’t its called a cognitive bias. Consult chapter 2 in my book for more information on this.

Okay, so asking what someone means by their platitude has obvious issues. Thus, it might seem logical that we should develop a universal definition for everyone to fall in behind. If we can all go with that then we would have less diversity in viewpoints. Unfortunately this has its issues too – only they are a little more subtle. As we discovered in part 2 of this series appropriately entitled “don’t define governance”, definitions tend to have a limited shelf life. Additionally, like best-practice standards, there are always lots of them to choose from and they actually have an affect of blinding people to what really matters.

So is there a better way?

It’s all in the question and its framing…

If there is one thing I have learnt above all else, is that project teams often do not ask the right question of themselves. Yet asking the right question is one of the most critical aspects to helping organisations solve their problems. The right question has the ability to cast the problem in a completely different light and change the cognitive process that people are using when answering it. In other words, the old saying is true: ask a silly question, get a silly answer.

Let me give you a real life example: Chris Tomich is a co-owner of Seven Sigma and was working with some stakeholders to understand the rationale for how content had been structured in a knowledge management portal. Chris is a dialogue mapper like me – and he’s extremely good at it. One thing Dialogue Mapping teaches you is to recognise different question types and listen for hidden questions. The breakthrough question in this case when he got some face time with a key stakeholder and asked:

• What was your intent when you designed this structure for your content?

The answer he got?

• “Well, we only did it that way because search was so useless”
• “So if I am hearing you, you are saying that if search was up to scratch you would not have done it that way”
• “Definitely not”

Neat huh? By asking a question that took the stakeholder back to the original outcome sought for taking a certain course of action, we learnt that poor search was such a constraint they compensated by altering page template design. Up until that point, the organisation itself did not realise how much of an impact a crappy search experience had made. So guess where Chris focused most of his time?

In a similar fashion, my platitude defeater question is this:

So if we had [insert platitude here], how would things be different to now?

Can you see the difference in framing compared to “what do you mean by [insert platitude here]?”. Like Chris with his “What was your intent”, we are getting people to shift from the platitude, to the difference it would make if we achieved the platitude. No definitions required in this case, and the answer you will get almost by definition has to be measurable. This is because asking what difference something would make involves a transition of some kind and people will likely answer with “increased this”  or “decreased that”.

Now be warned – a hard core middle manager might serve you up another platitude as an answer to the above question. To handle this, just ask the question again and use the new platitude instead. For example:

• Me: Okay so if you had improved collaboration, how would things be different to now?
• Them: We would have increased adoption
• Me: And what difference would that make to things?

I call this the KPI question because if you keep on prodding, you will find themes start to emerge and you will get a strong sense of potential Key Performance Indicators. This doesn’t mean they are the right ones, but now people are thinking about the difference that SharePoint will make, as opposed to arguing over a definition. Trust me – its a much more productive conversation.

Now to validate that these emerging KPI’s are good ones, I ask another question, similarly framed to elicit the sort of response I am looking for…

What aspects should we consider with this initiative to [insert platitude here]?

This question is deliberately framed as neutral is possible. I am not asking for issues, opportunities or risks, but just aspects. By using the term aspects I open the question up to a wider variety of inputs. Like the KPI question above, it does not take long for themes to emerge from the resulting conversation. I call this the key focus area question, because as these themes coalesce, you will be able to ensure your emerging KPI’s link to them. You can also find gaps where there is a focus area with no KPI to cover it. As an added bonus, you often get some emergent guiding principles out of a question like this too.

The thing to note is that rather than follow up with “what are the risks?” and “what should our guiding principles be?”, I try and get participants to synthesize those from the answers I capture. I can do this because I use visual tools to collect and display collective group wisdom. In other words, rather than ask those questions directly, I get people to sort the answers into risks, opportunities and principles. This synthesis is a great way to develop a shared understanding among participants of the problem space they are tackling.

If we were unconstrained, how would we solve this problem?

This is the purpose question and is designed to find the true purpose of a project or solution to a problem. I don’t always need to use this one for SharePoint, but I certainly use it a lot in non IT projects. This question asks people to put aside all of the aspects captured by the previous question and give the ideal solution assuming that there were no constraints to worry about. The reason this question is very handy is that in exploring these “pie in the sky” solutions, people can have new insights about the present course of action. This permits consideration of aspects that would not otherwise be considered and sometimes this is just the tonic required. As an example, I vividly recall doing some strategic planning work with the environmental division of a mining company where we asked this exact question. In answering the question, the participants had a major ‘aha’ moment which in turn, altered the strategy they were undertaking significantly.

Note: If you want some homework, then check Ackoff’s notion of idealised design and the Breakthrough Thinking principle called the purpose principle. Both espouse this sort of framed question.

Sharpening the saw…

Via  the use of the above questions, you will have a  better sense of purpose, emergent focus areas and potential measures. That platitude that was causing so much wheel spinning should be starting to get more meaty and real for your stakeholders. For some scenarios, this is enough to start developing a governance structure for a solution and formulating your tactical approaches to making it happen. But often there is a need to sharpen the saw a bit and prioritise the good stuff from the chaff. Here are the sort of questions that allow you to do that:

No matter what happens, what else do we need to be aware of?

This question is called the criterial question and I learnt it when I was learning the art of Dialogue Mapping. When Dialogue Mapping you are taught to listen for the “no matter what…” preamble because it surfaces assumptions and unarticulated criteria that can be critical to the conversation and will apply to whatever the governance approach taken. Thus I will often ask this question in sessions, towards the end and it is amazing what else falls out of the conversation.

What are the things that keep you up at night?

I picked this up from reading Sue Hanley’s excellent whitepaper a while back and listening to hear speak at Share2012 in Melbourne reminded me why it is so useful. This question is very cleverly framed and is so much better than asking “What are your issues?”. It pushes the emotive buttons of stakeholders more and gets to the aspects that really matter to them at an gut level rather than purely at a rational level. (I plan to test out dialogue mapping a workshop with this as the core question sometime and will report on how it goes)

What is the intent behind [some blocker]?

This is the constraint buster question and is also one of my personal favourites. If say, someone is using a standard or process to block you with no explanation except that “we cannot do that because it violates the standards”, ask them what is the intent of the standard. When you think about it, this is like the platitude buster question above. It requires the person to tell you the difference the standard makes, rather than focus on the standard itself. As I demonstrated with my colleague Chris earlier, the intent question is also particularly useful for understanding previous context  by asking users to outline the gap between previous expectation and reality.

Conclusion…

To there you go – a black belt has been awarded. Now you should be armed with the necessary kung-fu skills required to deflect, disarm and defeat a platitude.

Of course, knowing the right questions to ask and the framing of them is one thing. Capturing the answers in an efficient way is another. For years now, I have advocated the use of visual tools like mind mapping, dialogue mapping and causal mapping tools as they all allow you to visually represent a complex problem. So as we move through this series, I will introduce some of the tools I use to augment the questions above.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

Hi all. It’s been a while I know, but it is time to continue along my journey of confessions of a post SharePoint architect. As I write this, the SharePoint community is in Vegas, soaking up the love of the biggest SharePoint conference yet. For the other twelve SharePoint professionals who are not there, I know your pain.

If this is your first  foray into this series of articles, consider it the closest I will ever get to a SharePoint governance book. Since all new knowledge is gained through the lens of existing knowledge, it is important to note that my world view has been shaped by the increasing amount of non IT work I do in various complex problem solving areas. Essentially this work has had a major effect on the lens that I view SharePoint projects and the approaches I use to steer them. When developing a class on the topic of SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture, I found a fun yet effective way to put coherence around things via Russell Ackoff’s concept of f-laws. These are simple home truths about the way people behave in organisations than explain much more than the complex ones proposed by theorists of various persuasions.

So far in this series we have explored three f-laws, namely:

• f-Law 1: The more comprehensive the definition of governance is, the less it will be understood by all
• f-Law 2: There is no point in asking users, who don’t know what they want, to say what they want
• f-Law 3: The probability of SharePoint success is inversely proportional to the time taken to come up with a measurable KPI

The next f-law is straight from Ackoff himself and is a universal truth in any project, but absolutely chronic in SharePoint projects as well as many SharePoint slide decks:

F-Law 4: Most  SharePoint governance objectives are platitudes. They say nothing but hide behind words

Most people in the IT industry (with the obvious exclusion of sales guys, Office365 MVP’s and Google employees) tend to inwardly cringe or outrightly roll their eyes when the word “cloud” is uttered during conversation. This is because people instinctively know that what follows is either:

• Gushing hyperbole squarely aimed at getting you to part with some cash
• Gushing hyperbole squarely aimed at convincing you that they know what they are talking about
• Gushing hyperbole in the form of FUD laden counter-arguments from server hugging sysadmins who reject “cloud” outright because they fear irrelevance

These reactions in such conversations result from the term “Cloud” being used in a platitudinal sense. In case you were not aware, a platitude is referred to as “a trite, meaningless, biased, or prosaic statement, often presented as if it were significant and original”. Platitudes are everywhere and usually unavoidable since many people use them unconsciously – especially politicians, senior executives and the aforementioned sales guys. Want proof? Just look on the wall behind the reception area of your office – chances are there is a mission statement there somewhere that would read something like:

“We are dedicated to ensuring a long-term commitment to stakeholder value from performance and improved returns at all levels.”

Does a mission like that sound familiar? What if I told you the line above was generated from a website that generates mission statements like a poker machine. Just pull the lever and within a few seconds, a random assortment of small quotes are mashed together to create a cool sounding sentence. If you enter your company name into it, you can even print a certificate.  I generated this  one for the Heretic’s Guide book. Neat, huh?

The problem, of course, with a platitude is that while it sounds significant, it doesn’t actually tell you much at all. So this f-law states that most SharePoint governance objectives are platitudes. One of the core reasons for this is a side effect of Microsoft’s marketing approach. Consider Microsoft’s SharePoint marketing material as it has evolved. Take a look at how many words survived the transition from Microsoft’s SharePoint pie of 2007, the Frisbee of 2010 and now the square of 2013. Do you see a pattern? What is the average shelf life of a word in each of these diagrams?

Now, let me start out by stating that I have no problems with any of these diagrams. Microsoft is perfectly entitled to develop the message it wants to convey in whatever means it sees fit. The biggest travesty is when people frame the above words as deliverables. They take a superlative word like “improved”, “best practice” or “effective” and then add one of the above words to it. This combination inevitably forms the basis for the justification of putting SharePoint in.

The classic example that still pervades SharePoint projects to this day is the perennial mirage of “Improved Collaboration.” If we return to the “here” and “there” diagrams of the previous posts, it looks like this… note the aspiration goal has a happy smiley on it!

Platitude detection 101

So the first thing you have to do as a SharePoint architect or practitioner is to develop a finely tuned platitude radar. The thing to be aware of is that platitudes come in many forms – some which are obvious and some much more subtle. Thus we will start your platitude radar calibration via a quick and easy method that Ackoff came up with. Years ago, Russel Ackoff critically examined mission statements and said that a mission statement that merely restates the obvious does not say anything that is truly aspirational. To quote from Ackoff:

They often formulate necessities as objectives: For example, ‘to achieve sufficient profit’. This is like a person saying his mission is to breathe sufficiently.

Ackoff’s test to judge the quality of a mission statement was to inverse the statement and see it still made logical sense. If you could not reasonably disagree with this negative version, then the original statement was a platitude. As an example, consider this mission statement from a well-known global organisation:

… our mission and values are to help people and businesses throughout the world realize their full potential.

So, our inverse here is that we are working to hinder people and businesses to realise their full potential. Who in the hell would ever do that? Well – given this is Microsoft’s mission statement, suddenly Windows Vista is finally starting to make sense to me.

Now, go and take any word from the 3 diagrams above and put a superlative like “biggest”, “best”, “optimum” or “improved” in front. If I use my example – “Improved Collaboration” – Ackoff’s inversion approach results in “Worse Collaboration” and is therefore a platitude. I mean – aside from the odd command and control boss, would anybody seriously want to make collaboration less effective?

So, to put it simply – stop stating the bloody obvious! If your SharePoint goal doesn’t satisfy Ackoff’s simple platitude test, you have a problem.

The seeds of doom are sown at the start…

Now that I have wired up your platitude detector via Ackoff’s inversion test, you will start to notice how utterly pervasive they are in SharePoint projects and beyond. As Kailash and I state in the Heretics Guide book:

A platitude is a mental shortcut we take, a deceptively quick way to cut through uncertainty. We clump our unclear, unarticulated aspirations in a bunch of platitudes. It is easy to do and it gives us a sense of achievement. But it is a mirage because the objective is not clear and we cannot define sensible measurements of success if the goal is fuzzy. It never fails to amaze us that many organisational endeavours are given the go-ahead on the basis of platitudinous goals. Mind-boggling, isn’t it?

What is really amazing and sad at the same time is how badly the platitude problem is misattributed. One of my students at a recent SPGovIA class said that with SharePoint projects “the seeds of doom are sown at the very beginning”. He’s right too…project teams will commit significant time and money into a project that is chasing a platitude, and when things inevitably go haywire, will blame the process, methodology, people… everything but the mirage at the root of it all.

The seduction of a platitude is strong. Many have been entranced by some nice sounding desirable future state incorporating some superlative like “Improved quality” or “Best practice collaboration”. But the key point is this: The platitude becomes a sort of proxy for the end in mind rather than the real end. We have no shared understanding of what where we want to get to. Empty words preclude a shared understanding because they mean nothing at all.

The image below illustrates the effect of a platitude being confused with the actual desired state. We do not have an aspirational future state at all. Instead, we have many possible, fuzzily-defined future states.

If you look really closely, the future state is a sad smiley. This is because the visible symptoms of a project with a divergent understanding among participants are well documented. Scope creep and vague requirements mean that the project will start to unravel, yet the platitude-driven journey towards the mirage will continue. The project will lurch from crisis to crisis, with scope blowing out, tensions and frustrations rising. This is accompanied by classic blame-shift or hind-covering moves that people make when they realise that their ship’s taking water.

How to defeat a platitude…

I am going to conclude this post at this point because it is starting to get too long. But I will leave you with a teaser about the next post…

One of the most important things about dealing with a platitude is knowing what *not* to do. I know that what I am about to say may sound counter intuitive to many readers, but trust me when I tell you that there are two things you should avoid doing.

1. Never, never, never ask someone what they mean when they use a platitude
2. Never try and come up with a definition for a platitude

In the next post, I will elaborate on these two contentions and provide you with a much better way to get past the seductive danger of platitudes, so you can find out what really matters to your stakeholders.

Until then, thanks for reading…

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

Hi and welcome to another SharePoint (post) architect confessional post. In case you are here via the good grace of whatever Google’s search relevance algorithm feels like doing today, I need to give you a little context to this post and the larger series of which it is a part. These days, I spend a lot of time working on projects beyond the cloistered confines of SharePoint; in fact, beyond the confines of IT altogether. Apart from being a cathartic release from SharePoint work, I’ve had the privilege to work with various groups on solving some very complex problems in a collaborative fashion. As a result of these case studies, I’ve become a bit of a student of various collaborative problem solving approaches and recently released a business book on the subject called “The Heretics Guide to Best Practices” co-written with mild-mannered mega-genius Kailash Awati. Despite (or because of) the book having no absolutely SharePoint content whatsoever, it managed to win an Axiom Business Book award and I feel it’s indirectly a good SharePoint governance book in its own right.

Now, for the rest of you who have been following my epic rant thus far, you will now be familiar with the notion of Ackoff’s f-laws: “truths about organisations that we might wish to deny or ignore – simple and more reliable guides to everyday behaviour than the complex truths proposed by scientists, economists, sociologists, politicians and philosophers.” Via the f-law metaphor, you now also understand why midwives are more valuable than doctors, the word “governance” should not be defined if you actually want people to understand it and that people should not be penalised for their learning.

The next f-law that we will explore provides an explanation to why organisations so consistently and persistently apply the wrong approaches to SharePoint-type projects. IT departments have genetic predisposition to falling into this trap, as do other service delivery departments such as Finance and HR when they put in ERP systems. To explain my assertion, we are going to revisit the governance diagram that I used in the first f-law. You can see it below:

I used the above diagram to to explain f-law 1 which was “The more comprehensive the definition of governance is, the less it will be understood by all”. The above diagram serves to point out that governance is not the end in mind, but the means by which you achieve a desirable future state. Without any context to an end in mind, we have to accommodate many vague potential ends. To deal with this uncertainty, we inevitably look to definitions to provide clarity about what governance means. Unfortunately, this form of “definitionisation” tends to confuse more than clarify because it sneakily starts to drive the end, rather than be the means. This inevitably results in over-engineered, over-complicated and likely inappropriate governance approaches that do more harm than good.

It should be noted that “governance” is by no means the only word that falls into this trap. Words like quality, effective, “best practice” and even “SharePoint” should all be put in the green star above too because all of these words have no inherent meaning until they are applied to a given situation or context. This point is echoed by people like Andrew (“SharePoint by itself knows nothing”) Woodward, Dux (“SharePoint doesn’t suck – you suck.”) Sy and Ruven (“Can I use this diagram in my Information Architecture book?”) Gotz.

To that end, our next  f-law expands on this notion of means vs. ends and provides you with a practical way to assess the clarity of a SharePoint goal or outcome.

F-Law 3: The probability of SharePoint success is inversely proportional to the time taken to come up with a measurable KPI

Hmm… f-law 3 is a mouthful isn’t it. For a start I used the acronym of “KPI”, which in case you are not aware, stands for Key Performance Indicator – something that we can measure to visibly demonstrate that we have not sucked and actually achieved what we have set out to do. In essence, this f-law states that the longer it takes to determine a reasonable and measurable indicator that SharePoint has been a success, the less likely your SharePoint project is to succeed.

To demonstrate this, I am going to give you one of my patent pending techniques that is highly useful in client engagements to get people to think a little differently about their approach. Let’s reuse my “from here to there” diagram above to perform a basic experiment. Check out the project below and tell me … what project is this?

Hopefully, it did not take you long to work out that this project is the Apollo moon missions. Now, for the experimental bit. Grab a stopwatch, start the clock and answer this question:

“How do you know you have succeeded with this project?”

Once you have your answer, stop the clock and note the time. I’m willing to bet that you gave one or two answers:

• You successfully landed a person on the moon
• You got the person back to Earth again

I am also willing to bet that you worked out that answer within 2 to 15 seconds of pondering my diagram. Am I right?

Now, consider for a moment the sheer scale of of this project in terms of size, risk, innovation and level of expertise required to land a person on the moon and bring them back safely. Imagine the sheer number of projects within multiple programs of work that had to be aligned. Imagine the tens of thousands of people who directly and indirectly worked on this epic project. It is mind boggling when you think about it and it is little wonder that putting a man on the moon is regarded one of mankind’s greatest technical achievements.

And then we have SharePoint…

Now let’s contrast the moon project with another one likely to be very familiar with readers. So once again, tell me what project this is…

This one takes some people a bit longer to answer, but when I ask this in workshops and conferences I sometimes get people jokingly saying “my SharePoint project!” or “a nightmare.” So once again I want you to answer the following question:

“How do you know you have succeeded with this project?”

I bet this one has you a little more stumped and is much harder to answer than the moon example above. What is funny with this one is that, when you consider that in terms of scope and size, using SharePoint to improve collaboration is a mere pimple on the butt of sending a rocket to the moon. Yet, despite the moon example being much larger in scope, cost, degree of innovation and engineering, the success criteria is clear and unambiguous to all. People can identify what success looks like very quickly. No-one will point to Venus and say “I think that’s the moon.”  You either got there or you didn’t.

Yet, when I show a SharePoint project that is framed like the above example, people have a much (much) harder time describing what success would look like. In fact, I have asked this question many times around the world and most of the answers I am offered do not hold up to any serious form of scrutiny. Consider these common suggestions of SharePoint success and my response to them:

• “People are using it.” My response: “Yeah, but people use email and the file system now, so why are you putting SharePoint in?”
• “People are happy.” My response: “I bet if I replaced the crappy coffee with a top of the range espresso machine I could make people really happy and it’s a fraction of the cost of SharePoint.”

Sorry folks, but this isn’t good enough… in fact it’s a recipe for a situation where, in the name of “governance,” you deliver a bloated, over-engineered failure.

When problems are complicated…

My two project examples above highlight a particular characteristic of problems that is at the root of the difference between the moon and SharePoint example. Consider the following common IT projects:

• Replacing your old email system with Microsoft Exchange
• Consolidating Active Directory
• Replacing your old phone system with Voice over IP system
• Upgrading your storage area network  to new infrastructure

All of these are like the moon example. None of them are easy – in fact you need specialist expertise to get them successfully implemented. But when you put each of these in the green star of my “here to there” picture, criteria for success is fairly clear and unambiguous. For example, if email comes in and goes out of everyone’s inboxes, Exchange is a usually success. If you can pick up the phone, get a dial tone and make a call, then the VOIP upgrade has been a success.

These are all examples of complicated problems. With complicated problems, the criteria for success is clear and unambiguous and there is a strong relationship between cause and effect. You can be highly confident that doing X will lead to Y. In these sorts of problems, experts can come together and analyse the problem by breaking the problem down neatly into its parts to develop a high-confidence solution. Furthermore, there are likely to be many best practices that have emerged from years of collective wisdom of implementing solutions because of that relationship between cause and effect.

Wouldn’t it be nice if reality was always like this. Project Managers and tech people would actually get on with each other! But of course, reality paints a different picture…

When complicated approaches fail…

In a 2002 discussion paper about reform of the Canadian health system, authors Sholom Glouberman and Brenda Zimmerman make a statement that is completely applicable to how most organisations approach SharePoint:

In simple problems like cooking by following a recipe, the recipe is essential. It is often tested to assure easy replication without the need for any particular expertise. Recipes produce standardized products and the best recipes give good results every time. Complicated problems, like sending a rocket to the moon, are different. Formulae or recipes are critical and necessary to resolve them but are often not sufficient. High levels of expertise in a variety of fields are necessary for success. Sending one rocket increases assurance that the next mission will be a success. In some critical ways, rockets are similar to each other and because of this there can be a relatively high degree of certainty of outcome. Raising a child, on the other hand, is a complex problem. Here, formulae have a much more limited application. Raising one child provides experience but no assurance of success with the next. Although expertise can contribute to the process in valuable ways, it provides neither necessary nor sufficient conditions to assure success. []

In this paper we argue that health care systems are complex, and that repairing them is a complex problem. Most attempts to intervene [] treat them as if they were merely complicated. [] We argue that many of these dilemmas can be dissolved if the system is viewed as complex.

The key point in the above quote is that the tools and approaches that work well with complicated problems actually cause a lot of trouble in complex problems, where certainty of an outcome is much less clear. My point is that while the notion of using SharePoint to get from “poor collaboration” to “improved collaboration” might seem logical on the surface, it is hard to come up with any sensible criteria for success. Therefore you are setting yourself up for a fail because you have made SharePoint take on the characteristics of complex problems. Without unpacking these implicit assumptions about “Improved Collaboration,” our aspirational future state will look like the diagram below. The reality is we have many aspirational future states, all hidden beneath the seductive veneer of “improved collaboration” that in reality tells us nothing.

What blows me away is that to this day most project governance material published consistently fail to realise this core issue while trying to treat the very symptoms caused by this issue!  They provide you with the tools, means and methods to chase goals which are little better than an illusion, with no means to measure progress and therefore guide the very decisions that are made in name of governance.

Without unpacking and aligning all of these different future states above, how can any SharePoint architect be sure that they are providing the right SharePoint-based enabler? If you cannot tell me the difference made by implementing a project, how can anyone else know the difference? Even if you can, how do you know that everybody else sees it the same way as you?

Is it little wonder then, that after more than a decade of trying, SharePoint projects (complex problems) continue to go haywire? While approaches to governance force a complicated lens on a complex problem and assume the goal as stated is understood by all, governance itself will be one of the root causes of poor outcomes. Why? Because governance will require people to focus in all the areas except the one that matters. When this gap in focus manifests visibly (for example SharePoint site sprawl), governance is seen as the means to address the gap. Thus governance becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy “We will get it right this time” is the mantra, all the while, we still chase those rainbows of “improved collaboration.”

Conclusion and coming next

I do not recall where I first heard the distinction between “Complicated” and “Complex” problems because I came across it some time after I discovered the term “wicked problem.” I suspect that it was the Cynefin model that first pushed my cognitive buttons on the idea, although I distinctly recall Russell Ackoff also making the distinction between complex and complicated. Irrespective of the source, I find this a hugely valuable frame of reference to examine problems and understand why SharePoint projects are routinely tackled in an inappropriate manner. With it, I have been able to give IT departments in particular, a frame of reference to understand why they have trouble with particular kinds of projects like SharePoint.

Many people in organisations do not discern the difference between a complicated and complex problem and use the tools of the “complicated problem toolkit” to address complex problems when they are inappropriate at best and will kill your project at worst. I will expand on why this happens in the next and subsequent posts. But my key takeaway is that addressing the issue of multiple interpretations of the future is not only the key SharePoint governance challenge, it is the key challenge for any complex project.

The sorts of tools and approaches that are part of the “complex problem” utility belt are numerous and are really starting to gain traction which is great. There is plenty to read on this topic elsewhere on this blog as well as people like Andrew Woodward and Ruven Gotz. The great irony is that if you do manage align people to a shared sense of what the end in mind will look like, things that might have been seen as complex will now become complicated and the traditional tools and approaches will have efficacy because outcomes are clear and the path to get there makes more sense.

In the next post and f-law, I am going to outline another chronic issue that further explains why we get suckered into chasing false goals…

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

Hi all

Just to let you know that in October, I will be in the UK to run a SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture class with Andrew Woodward. Additionally, I am very pleased to offer a Dialogue Mapping introductory course for the first time in the UK as well. Work has been extremely busy this year and this is my only UK/Europe trip in the next 9-12 months. In short, this is likely to be a once-off opportunity as I travel less and less these days.

Introductory Dialogue Mapping October 17-18, 2012

• Venue: The Custard Factory, Birmingham, UK
• Cost: £995

The introductory Dialogue mapping class will arm you with a life skill that can be used in many different situations and has changed my career. If you have been following my “confessions of a (post) SharePoint Architect” series, a lot of the content is based on my experiences of Dialogue Mapping many different projects in many different industries. Dialogue Mapping is a novel, powerful and inclusive method to elicit requirements, capture knowledge and develop shared understanding in complex projects, such as SharePoint or broader strategic planning. It was pioneered by CogNexus Institue in California, and is used by NASA, the World Bank and United Nations.

My book, “The Heretics Guide to Best Practices” is based on my Dialogue Mapping work and if you liked the book, then I know you will love the course!

What does a map look like? Check out my map of the AA1000 Stakeholder Engagement Standard or my synthesis on problems with intranet search below…

I should stress that this is not a SharePoint course. If you are an organisational development practitioner, facilitator, reformed project manager, all-round agitator or are simply interested in helping groups make sense of complex situations, then you would find this class to be highly valuable in your personal arsenal of tools and techniques. When performed live during a facilitated session, it is a highly efficient and engaging experience for participants.

Please note that seats are limited in this class and it cannot be more than  10.

• Date: October 17-18, 2012
• Venue: The Custard Factory, Birmingham, UK
• Cost: £995

Aligning SharePoint Governance & Information Architecture to Business Goals October 15-16 2012

• Venue: The Custard Factory, Birmingham, UK
• Cost: £995
• Limited seats available: 12

Previous Master Class Feedback:

• "This course has been the most insightful two days of my SharePoint career"
• "…Was the best targetted and jargon free course I’ve ever been on"
• "Re-doing my draft SharePoint Governance. Moving away from blah, blah technical stuff"
• "Easily one of the best courses I’ve been to and has left me wanting more!"
• "Had a great couple of days at #SPIAUK loving IBIS"
• "The content covered was about the things technically focussed peeps miss.."

Most people understand that deploying SharePoint is much more than getting it installed. Despite this, current SharePoint governance documentation abounds in service delivery aspects. However, just because your system is rock solid, stable, well documented and governed through good process, there is absolutely no guarantee of success. Similarly, if Information Architecture for SharePoint was as easy as putting together lists, libraries and metadata the right way, then why doesn’t Microsoft publish the obvious best practices?

In fact, the secret to a successful SharePoint project is an area that the governance documentation barely touches.

This master class pinpoints the critical success factors for SharePoint governance and Information Architecture and rectifies this blind spot. Based upon content provided by Paul Culmsee (Seven Sigma) which takes an ironic and subversive take on how SharePoint governance really works within organisations, while presenting a model and the tools necessary to get it right.

Drawing on inspiration from many diverse sources, disciplines and case studies, Paul Culmsee has distilled in this Master Class the “what” and “how” of governance down to a simple and accessible, yet rigorous and comprehensive set of tools and methods, that organisations large and small can utilise to achieve the level of commitment required to see SharePoint become successful.

Seven Sigma, together with 21apps, are bringing the the acclaimed SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture Master class back to the UK, October 2012.

• Date: October 15-16, 2012
• Venue: The Custard Factory, Birmingham, UK
• Cost: £995
• Limited seats available: 12

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

Hi all and welcome to another small piece of my SharePoint architect manifesto. In the previous post I introduced you to the notion of f-laws, which were first coined in a book co-authored by Russell Ackoff. In the process of developing a SharePoint governance and information architecture class, I was inspired to use the idea of an f-law because they appealed to my contrarian sense of humour and also contained some interesting nuggets of wisdom. I ended up coming up with a heap of f-Laws for SharePoint, and plan to write an article to cover each one.

In the last post, we learnt that f-Law 1 was all about the contention that the more you try and define what governance is, the less anyone will actually understand it. If you never read the first SharePoint Governance f-law then I suggest you do so, because these articles do tend to build on the foundation set from the previous. On that note, the focus of todays f-law extends on one that Ackoff himself came up with. All I am doing it putting a SharePoint bent on it…

F-Law 2: There is no point in asking users, who don’t know what they want, to say what they want.

This f-law comes with an additional corollary: There is even less point in thinking that you already know what they want! (IT departments – I am looking at you here!)

The definitive way to explain this f-law is to leverage the work of one of my mentors – Jeff Conklin. In 2007 I read a paper of his that literally changed my career. It was titled “Wicked problems and social complexity” and despite me reading many papers since, to this day it is one of the best introductions to complex problem solving you could ever read.

In this paper, Jeff talks about the fact that many prevailing methodologies suggest that the best way to work on a problem is to follow an orderly and linear “top-down” process, working from the problem to the solution. You begin by understanding the problem, including gathering and analysing “requirements” from customers or users. Once you have the problem specified and the requirements analysed, you are ready to formulate a solution and eventually implement that solution. This is illustrated by the red line in the figure below.

Now many project managers, cheque signers and just about every program management office I have ever worked with try to operate this way because it promises order, certainty and control. This is understandable when ones performance is being judged on getting stuff done to an agreed time and cost. It is also understandable if you are a manager and will get your ass kicked if you blow your budget. There is only one teeny issue. For some scenarios, it simply does not work.

In Conklin’s paper, he detailed a 1980’s case study at the Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation (MCC) that looked into how people solve problems. A number of designers participated in an experiment where they were give a one page problem statement – not too different to many SharePoint business cases I have seen. Participants in the experiment had to design an elevator control system for an office building. Despite participants being experienced and expert integrated-circuit designers, none had ever worked on elevator systems before. Each participant was asked to think out loud while they worked on the problem. The sessions were videotaped and analysed in detail.

Below is what really happened. Check out the green line…

Clearly, the subjects in the elevator experiment did not follow a linear approach. They would start by trying to understand the problem, but they would immediately jump into formulating potential solutions. Then they would jump back up to refining their understanding of the problem. Rather than being orderly and staged like the red line, the line plotting the course of their thinking looked more like a seismograph for an earthquake. Now if you are looking at the green line and thinking “my god I better put a stop to that sort of shenanigans,” consider what Conklin had to say about it in his paper:

These designers are not being irrational. They are not poorly trained or inexperienced. Their thought process was something like: “Let’s see, idle elevators should return to the first floor, but then, you only need one elevator on the first floor, so the others could move to an even distribution among the floors. But the elevators need to be vacuumed regularly. I suppose we could add a switch that brought idle elevators down to the first floor. But then what happens in an emergency?” In other words, what is driving the flow of thought is some marvellous internal drive to make the most headway possible, regardless of where the headway happens, by making opportunity-driven leaps in the focus of attention. It is precisely because these expert designers are being creative and because they are learning rapidly that the trace of their thinking pattern is full of unpredictable leaps.

When I am speaking at conferences I like to mess with project managers in particular (who doesn’t eh?), because they are an easy target and already an insecure lot to begin with. I will ask the audience if anybody has an industry certification, such as a PMP or Prince II. Several hands usually go up. I then point to the phases of the above diagram and ask them if – when they were studying hard to obtain their certification – they actually followed the discrete phases that everybody else is supposed to follow. No single person has ever suggested that they did, instead all acknowledging that their process of learning looked more like the green line. I then point out that I’ve always found this perversely funny that people follow the green line to learn a process that tries to insist that everybody else must follow the red line. Ironic huh?

Knowing vs. learning problems

It should be stated at this point that you can use the red-line approach for certain types of problems so I am not outright dismissing it. In fact, within SharePoint projects there are indeed elements that can work quite well this way. The green line on the other hand, represents a phenomenon that Conklin called “Opportunity driven problem solving” and is the de-facto way we work on problems that are new or novel. For example, if you have ever experienced an “aha” moment, it was probably a leap of cognition that followed the jagged green line up or down, where you suddenly saw the problem in a different light. (Shhhh… don’t let your project manager know because you will have to fill in a form of some description!)

In these types of problems, we do not start by gathering and analysing data about the problem because the problem itself is moving target and varies depending on different stakeholders and their world views. Thus, there is no pure and concrete understanding of “the problem” because it is still forming as you think about solutions. In short, the jagged green line is a picture of learning. Quoting again from Conklin:

The more novel the problem, the more the problem solving process involves learning about the problem domain. In this sense the waterfall is a picture of already knowing – you already know about the problem and its domain, you know about the right process and tools to solve it, and you know what a solution will look like. As much as we might wish it were otherwise, most projects in the knowledge economy operate much more in the realm of learning than already knowing. You still have experts, but it’s no longer possible for them to guide the project down the linear waterfall process. In the current business environment, problem solving and learning are tightly intertwined, and the flow of this learning process is opportunity-driven

I believe that many innovations stem from the opportunity driven, creative leap of faith of the green line. On that note, I’d say that one of the greatest opportunity driven learners had to be Einstein. An article by Mort Orman suggests that Einstein was intrigued by “holes” in prevailing theories and enjoyed posing “mind riddles” to himself, just to see if present theories could satisfactorily explain them. Unlike many others who might have given up when they got stuck, Einstein was persistent and kept at it for 10 years before he came up that little formula everyone knows. After explaining this story at conferences, I sometimes ask people “Do you think Einstein used waterfall when he came up with relativity?” No one has said yes yet…

Implications…

The pattern of behaviour between the red and green lines represents the difference between a knowing problem and a learning problem. With a knowing problem, the problem is clear to all participants and even though it might require specialist expertise to solve, many of the variables are well understood. But for a problem that is novel or requires learning from participants Conklin’s case study illustrates that:

1. People will examine potential solutions just to explain the problem.
2. Each instance of examining the solution will impact the understanding of the problem.

Given that SharePoint is almost always starts out as a learning problem for the majority of participants, I do not see the point in trying to fight that green line. Instead, it is critical that you work with it rather than against it. The difficulty people have with this is that to do so conflicts with that promise of certainty, order and control that the red appears to offer. Why? Well among other things, you have to:

1. Expect fluid requirements and scope changes
2. Involve stakeholders from the start (they have to live with the result and their up-take is presumably a key KPI)
3. Expect resistance and pullback from stakeholders (because people attribute more to what they perceive to lose compared to what they might gain)

Above all, you have to avoid penalising people for their learning. If you put barriers in front of people who are trying to improve their understanding of a multi-faceted problem they will eventually disengage from you. If you want to guarantee this sort of disengagement, go right on ahead and solve some problem before your stakeholders even realise there is a problem. Then when they do realise, smack them with the metaphorical baseball bat known as the scope variation form. One of two of those babies and those annoying stakeholders are guaranteed to go away. A pity your solution will go away with them but hey, it was in scope right?

Confessions…

I deal with this core issue of not penalising learning in a number of ways… some of which I have outlined in blog posts and many that I will cover in detail as we progress in this series and examine more f-laws. If you simply can’t wait for me and want “the answer” then I have news for you. If it were that easy there would be a “best practice” for it and someone would have created a certification by now!

So instead I will give you a couple of KPI’s to work to.

• KPI 1: You get to a stage where your clients questions are “informed”. It is pretty easy to tell as a SharePoint professional where your stakeholders are at in their understanding of SharePoint. Over time there is a certain level of maturity in the questions asked of you and the way they are asked. This reflects both stakeholder learning as well as your ability to teach. If you get to this stage, you have increased your chances of SharePoint success significantly, which leads onto the next KPI…
• KPI 2: You get to the stage where your clients are asking you well informed questions that you don’t know the answer to. Trust me that they will not mind that you don’t because their awareness of the product will no longer be naively simplistic anyways. You will also have developed a great collaborative partnership by then too. Also don’t forget my quote from Horst Rittel in the midwives post. There is a symmetry of ignorance with complex problems. The knowledge required to solve a complex problem never resides with a single person.

This leads me onto the final KPI:

• KPI 3: Your clients should start telling you stuff about SharePoint that they have done that you have never done before or didn’t know you could do. In short, they will start teaching you stuff.

If you can create those conditions, be happy that they don’t need you that much anymore.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.hereticsguidebooks.com

www.sevensigma.com.au

Hi all and welcome to the second post of a series that I have been wanting to write for a while. In this series, I am going to cover some of the lesser considered areas of being a SharePoint architect and by association, key aspects to SharePoint governance. In the first confessional post I alluded to the fact that a good SharePoint architect also need to architect the right conditions for SharePoint success. As I work through this series of articles, I will elaborate further on what those conditions are and how to go about creating them.

To do this, I am drawing from my non IT work as a Dialogue Mapper and facilitator, and where applicable, will cover these case studies to see if they give us any insights for SharePoint. I also hope to dispel some common myths and misconceptions about SharePoint project delivery in organisations. Some of these might challenge some notions you hold dear. But for the most part, I hope that many of you reading this find this material to be instinctively compatible with what you have already come to believe. If you are in the latter group and feel as if you are an organisational agitator, this just might give you that rigour and ammo that you need when getting through to the powers that be. Better still, tell them to read this series and let them decide for themselves.

Backstory: Ackoff and f-Laws

For what it’s worth, a fair chunk of this material comes from my book, as well as the first module of my SharePoint Governance and Information Architecture class that I run a few times a year in various places around the world. When I designed that class, I was inspired by Russell Ackoff, who co-wrote a funny and highly readable book called “Management f-LAWS: How organisations really work”. F-Laws were defined as:

“truths about organisations that we might wish to deny or ignore – simple and more reliable guides to everyday behaviour than the complex truths proposed by scientists, economists, sociologists, politicians and philosophers”

In case you hadn’t noticed, if you remove the hyphen, each f-law become a flaw. You could also consider them as #fail laws. Years ago, I laughed and at the same time, inwardly cringed when I read each f-Law that Ackoff and his co-authors had come up with. I came to realise that SharePoint problems are simply a microcosm of broader issues that plague organisations. If you read Ackoff’s book (and I highly recommend it), you will soon realise that the word “Management” could easily be substituted with “SharePoint” and it doesn’t take much to come up with a few of your own f-laws. This is exactly what I did and at last count, I have 17 of them. In this post, I will detail the very first one.

F-Law 1: The more comprehensive the definition of governance is, the less it will be understood by all

The first condition that I need to design as a SharePoint architect is to put to bed the many misconceptions about SharePoint governance. In this f-Law, I state that the more you try and define what SharePoint governance is, the less anybody will actually understand it. If you consider this counter-intuitive, then let me take it even further. For any project that has a change management aspect (SharePoint projects often are), definitonising not only doesn’t work, but it is actually quite dangerous to your projects health.

To explain why I have come to this conclusion, I’d like to tell you a little story from my non IT work. Several years ago, I was working in a sensemaking capacity with an organisation to help them come up with a strategic plan and performance framework for a new city. This was not a trivial undertaking. The aim was to create a framework with an aligned set of KPI’s to realise the vision for what the city needed to be in the year 2030. While the vision for the city had been previously agreed and understood, the path to realise that vision had not been.

Now if you have ever been involved in strategic plan development, and think that working out your corporate strategy is difficult, I have news for you. Aligning an organisation to a 3 year plan is one thing. Working with a diverse group to determine performance measures of a future city 25 years away is a different thing altogether. I never realised at the time we did this work, just how unique and (dare I say) “cutting edge” it was. Participants were highly varied in skills and areas of interest, and to say each had their own world-view was an… understatement to say the least.

I my book I describe this case study in detail but for the sake of post size, let’s just say that the opportunity to do this work arose from a failed first attempt to create the framework. The first time around an excel spreadsheet was projected onto the wall that looked like the example below. Attempts were made in vain to fill in the strategic outcomes, strategic objectives, key result areas, key performance indicators and measures. After a frustrating few hours of trying this approach, we gave up because participants spent all of their time arguing over the labels and got bogged down in a tangle of definitions and ambiguous terminology. Was it a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) or a KRA (Key Result Area)? Was it a Guiding Principle or a Strategic Objective? Was it a KRA or a Critical Success Factor?  Attempts to resolve this issue with definitions got nowhere because even the definitions could not be agreed upon.

In the end, we solved this issue via a rather novel use of Dialogue Mapping along with a problem structuring approach outlined in a book called Breakthrough Thinking. If you’d like to know more on how it was done, then take a look in chapter 12 of the Heretics Guide.

The criticality of context…

The core problem boiled down to context – or lack of it. What I learnt from this is that in situations without a shared context (and the wrong tools to deal with it), we fall back to using definitions to try and fill the gap. When faced with a blank spreadsheet and just some labels, participants attention was fixated on the definitions of the labels, rather than the empty cells where the focus needed to be. This resulted in a bunch of long winded discussions about what terms meant. This seriously stymied efforts aimed at making progress.

I have since performed many workshops, both SharePoint and non SharePoint ones and the pattern is clear. In fact I contend that if you proceed down the road of trying to build context via definitions for complex problems, one of three things will happen.

1. The definition becomes more verbose. There are a couple of reasons for this:
   • – The definition is expanded to incorporate new aspects of the topic space. In an organisational setting, this creates confusion because the definitions of multiple disciplines can often seemingly contradict each other and thus, careful “wordsmithing” is required to navigate a path through it.
   • – New qualifications or exceptional situations have to be excluded. This leads to more new terms being used in the definition.
2. As a result of #1, a broader, fundamental definition is developed. This broader definition encompasses more and so is prone to motherly sounding platitudes. Further, such definitions also run the risk of being interpreted in ways other than the one intended by those who worked so hard on the definition.
3. As a result of #1 and #2, a new word is used or an existing word is used in a new context to try and convey the new meanings or concepts proposed. I have heard governance described as “stewardship”, “risk management” and (guilty as charged), “assurance”.

The effect of this can be far reaching in a bad way because definitionising has a habit of blinding people to what really matters. This leads to terrible project decisions being made up front that have serious consequences. To understand why, consider the image below:

This image represents how governance of a SharePoint project should be viewed. A SharePoint initiative takes time and effort which costs money. We presumably have recognised that the present state is lacking in some way and want to get to somewhere better – an aspirational future place (if you look closely in the left above image note the happy and sad smilies). Accordingly we accept the cost of deploying SharePoint because we believe it will make a positive difference by doing so. If this was not the case, you would be wasting your time and resources on a pointless initiative. Therefore, it is the difference made by the initiative that will tell you if you have succeeded or not. As a result, we have to have a shared context on what that aspirational future looks like!

Don’t confuse the means with the ends…

Governance is, therefore, the means by which you will achieve the end of getting to some better place. It is informed by the end in mind and this is why I drew it in the star in the middle of the above diagram. For example; If the end in mind was compliance, then I will govern SharePoint a heck of a lot differently than say, if the end in mind was improving collaborative decision making.

But consider the diagram below. In this context, it should be clear why working from a definition of governance is often problematic. It implies that:

1. Governance is not being informed by the end in mind;
2. Your team do not have a shared understanding of what the end in mind actually looks like.

When this happens, project teams rarely realize it and respond by substituting the end with the means. We overly focus on governance via definition without any clarity or context as to what the aspirational future state actually is. Like the example of the blank spreadsheet example I started with, reality starts to look more like the diagram below: (note the happy smilie is gone now)

Steering…

So how do we steer out of this definition pickle? Interestingly “steer” is a appropriate choice of word if we look at the origin of the word “Govern”. This is because “Govern” is a nautical term from Latin and actually means “to steer”. So if your SharePoint project has been more like the Titanic, and hit a giant iceberg along the way, then clearly you need to focus your governance efforts to looking at what is in front of you, rather than scrubbing the deck or keeping the engine room well oiled. The latter tasks are important of course, but you can do all that, still hit an iceberg and waste a lot of money.

To steer, we all have to understand what the destination is, or at the very least, all agree on the direction. To help you with that journey, consider my final diagram. To steer SharePoint the right way for your organisation requires you to answer four key questions:

1. What is the aspirational future state and what does it look like?
2. Why is this the aspirational future state we want?
3. Who will do what to get us to that state?
4. How will we get to that state?

The fundamental problem with most SharePoint projects is that questions 1 and 2 are not answered sufficiently, if at all. The next few posts will explore why this is the case, but in the meantime, remember that we could do a SharePoint project that is to scope, time and cost, yet still have no user up-take if we are solving the wrong problem in the first place. Therefore remember that:

1. Governance is a means to an end, and not the end in itself.
2. We shouldn’t undertake a “SharePoint governance” project, or consider “SharePoint governance” as deliverable on a project plan. The act of developing a shared context of what the problems are and using that to always steer the governance decision making is paramount. Failure to do this and and your best plans will not save you.

Conclusions and coming next…

This is the second post on what will be a large series – possibly the largest series I have written so far. In the next post in this series, I will continue into our journey of SharePoint governance mistakes and along the way, start to identify what we can do to better answer the “What”, “Why”, “Who” and “How” questions. If you enjoy this series, then consider signing up to one of my classes if one is running in your neck of the woods.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee

www.sevensigma.com.au

www.hereticsguidebooks.com

Bjørn Furuknap you have gone too far this time! There I said it.

On behalf of the SharePoint community, I feel that someone needs to speak up about your reprehensible behaviour, so I have taken it upon myself to right the wrongs that you so needlessly inflicted onto the community. You see, Bjørn has gone and written a non controversial post on the confused role of the SharePoint architect. I am extremely concerned about this abrupt change of behaviour and worry about the example he is setting for the young and impressionable members of the SharePoint community. If Bjørn keeps going down this rational road, then he will make the rest of us look irrational and tip the delicate balance of the SharePoint blogging ecosystem into unknown territory. In other words, we will lose the excuse of “Well, at least I’m not as nuts as Furuknap!”

That said, I have been meaning to write about insights from my life as a (post) SharePoint architect anyway. I have a few of my own lessons learnt and Bjorn has inspired me to finally get a few written down. So in this preamble post, and in a forthcoming series on common SharePoint governance mistakes, I will give you a dose of the opinionated world according to Paul, but I will back it up with some juicy references that you can check out for yourself if you are that way inclined.

Why (post) SharePoint Architect?

You might be wondering why I referred to myself as a “post” SharePoint architect. Unfortunately its hard to answer this question without sounding self-indulgent so I will keep it brief.

In 2007, I got my first non IT gig in a highly complex urban planning project. I had no contribution to make in terms of technical or discipline knowledge to this project at all. My job was to enable others to develop a shared understanding on a highly complex problem they all faced, to enable shared commitment to a course of action. Since that time, this non IT side of my work has continued to grow in terms of number of clients and the scale of the problems being tackled. Like any skill, I have gotten better with practice, which in turn has led to larger and more complex scenarios.

This year in particular, I’ve helped the executive teams of several large organisations re-find their purpose, realign their strategy and make some very difficult and courageous decisions in redesigning their organisations. Just to be clear, we are not talking SharePoint and we are not talking IT. I am talking about how these organisations adapt to changing conditions that, in some cases, affect their very existence. These organisations span the public and private sector across Australia.

From a SharePoint perspective, you could say I have moved from the server room to the meeting room and now to the boardroom. In spite of my self-indulgence warning earlier, you have to admit – this is damn cool!

Who’s misunderstood anyway?

So with that little preamble done, let me return to Bjørn’s post. He feels the SharePoint architect role is misunderstood and I agree with this, but in a different way. I feel the core issue is that SharePoint architects themselves are often the ones who misunderstand what they need to do and how they should go about it. This in turn manifests in the rest of the world not understanding what they ought to be doing.

To elaborate on this contention, let’s meet the four most common SharePoint architect stereotypes that I see in organisations:

The SharePoint architect who used to be a developer

This stereotype comes in two flavours. The alpha developer who had attained top dog status among peers via bluffed programming prowess, or the developer who always struggled and finds that this is a way to get out of hands on coding. Either way, this person still lives through the SharePoint object model. They will focus on ensuring that there are unit tests, solid source control and solutions packaging regime. Utilising the object oriented view means that metadata is king and folders are to be despised. They will not think twice about utilising content types in any situation because it is completely obvious that you would work this way. Their information architecture will be a work of art, and they are not shy in telling everyone so. To sum up, their SharePoint solutions will be logical, well coded to defined standards and completely useless to users.

The SharePoint architect who used to be an infrastructure guy

This stereotype tends to bewilder clients and colleagues alike with a seemingly endless set of options and considerations that need to be made up front. It is likely this architect will introduce SharePoint via the pie/frisbee diagrams, but discussions will focus on architecting for scalability, security and fault tolerance. This architect will likely mandate strict governance rules on those cowboy developers, untrustworthy site admins, and downright scary users to ensure that the environment remains pristine. Accordingly, SharePoint Designer will be outlawed – it’s so obvious that one shouldn’t even be asking why. Any burden imposed by these governance rules will be seen as a necessary evil and will be addressed by mandatory user training and besides, the next SharePoint version will definitely address the gaps. Their solutions will be scalable, architecturally sound and completely useless to users.

The SharePoint architect who thinks they are an enterprise architect

This stereotype – despite their obvious protests to the contrary – is the right brained equivalent of the infrastructure guy. This person absolutely gets off on making models because conceptual reality does not involve making any actual commitments. In fact as soon as there is any push to a commitment, they feel an irrepressible urge to resist and push everyone back into make-believe world. Over-utilising the line “Oh, I am business you see, not technical” as if it’s a sign of maturity, they will plan, plan and plan again, drawing many cool diagrams on whiteboards but never a task on a Gantt chart. The models they come up with are abstract, over-engineered and they always fall deeply in love with them. They won’t let anybody touch their models for fear of their abstract thing of beauty being messed with. The irony is that the basis for their models will actually be underpinned by some solid theoretical frameworks. Unfortunately, this person actually doesn’t understand them in any depth, but the terms used sound really cool. Their solutions will be … Wait, who am I kidding? They won’t have any solutions because they plan forever…

The SharePoint project manager who thinks they are an architect

This stereotype is arguably the most dangerous of the lot because they are driven by the need to “Get Things Done Now!” whether those “Things” make sense or not. Consequently, they jump into solution mode without a full understanding of the real problem the business is facing. Scope documents, plans, schedules and Gantt Charts abound, but the chances are that all these are geared towards solving the wrong problem. Talking to annoying stakeholders just gets in the way of the scope statement and besides, that’s what Business Analysts are put on this earth to do anyway. Their solutions will be built to time and cost, but completely useless to users.

“Let’s drill halfway…”

Bjørn also spoke of architects needing breadth of knowledge over depth of knowledge. This is completely true, but is not the full story. You see, there is a common bad habit that our stereotype architects often make; a bad habit that is in common with many other consultants who end up doing damage to organisations.

Irrespective of their breadth of knowledge or otherwise, these architects act like doctors prescribing remedies. They breeze into organisations, making sweeping statements that contain cool sounding maxims like “business value.” Then, using their clearly superior intellect based on years of experience and that cherished breadth of knowledge, they assess the organisational symptoms and prescribe the appropriate SharePoint medicine to address them.

I can hear it now… “Got an organisational headache? Just take this SharePoint content-type three times a day and see me if pain persists.”

I’m sure people can see the obvious problems with this approach (If you can’t then you are in the wrong business – seriously). One of the many issues is that organisational symptoms are often just visible manifestations of deeper underlying issues. The late, great Russell Ackoff once stated that you would not use brain surgery to cure a headache, despite the pain being felt in your head. Instead you would take a pill, even though there appears to be no direct relationship between the pill and the pain being experienced. Ackoff mused that organisations routinely use brain surgery for their headaches and tools like SharePoint are the blunt instrument of choice to do the drilling. Add to this, the technical complexity of SharePoint means that brain surgery has to happen in discrete phases.

“Okay guys we don’t have enough budget for this, so let’s drill halfway into the skull for phase 1.”

The SharePoint midwife…

SharePoint architects have to understand that the solutions they architect are actually not for them. “Gee Paul that’s profound,” I hear you say sarcastically. While this statement might sound obvious, why is it that many architects exhibit behaviours that contradict it?

If you want to know why this happens I suggest that you read part 1 of the Heretics book. But rather than rehash that here, let’s see what we can learn about problem solving from the insights of Horst Rittel and Ron Heifetz. In case you are wondering, no they are not SharePoint MVPs. Rittel coined the term “wicked problem” and is highly influential in various fields due to his early insights into complex problem solving. Heifetz is well known for his work on the theory and practice of adaptive leadership: how to mobilise people through what he termed adaptive change.

Note: If you have not heard of the term “wicked problem”, then go and read this old post of mine. It’s assumed knowledge here…

Rittel stated that when solving problems, nobody wants to be “planned at.” Additionally, the knowledge required to solve a complex (wicked) problem never resides with a single person. Instead, there is a symmetry of ignorance (I love that term). Rittel characterised symmetry of ignorance as situations “where both expertise and ignorance is distributed over all participants and no-one ‘knows better’ by virtue of degrees or status.” Accordingly, the process of problem solving must involve those who are directly affected by the problem. These are the key stakeholders “living” the problem, rather than experts who “know” the problem theoretically. The aforementioned experts should guide the process of dealing with a wicked problem but not impose solutions. In Rittel’s words, the planner is the “midwife of problems rather than the offerer of therapies.” It is the group that must come up with the answers.

Ron Heifetz echoed Rittel in his advice to leaders. One key strategy of adaptive leadership is to give the work back. Heifetz warned that when a leader undertakes to solve a problem, the leader becomes the problem in the eyes of many stakeholders. The implication is that the leader also becomes the convenient scapegoat if the solution goes awry as blame can be attributed to the leader. Instead by placing work where it belongs—with employees responsible for doing the work—Heifetz argued that issues will be internalized and owned by the parties best placed to deal with them. The best solutions, he maintained, are when the people with the problem become the people with the solution.

Confessions…

Given what Rittel and Heifetz have to say, it should be little wonder that I feel SharePoint architects should not be doctors prescribing remedies. SharePoint is often an adaptive change because you are asking people to change their behaviours. Those architects (and management consultants) who act like doctors tend to find out fairly quickly that the solutions they so lovingly come up with do not always get traction. Therefore, as Rittel suggests, a SharePoint architect needs to be more of a midwife than a doctor. It’s the client who is giving birth to this thing and you are there to create the conditions for them to make that journey as stress free as one can. Who is the one who has to adapt and live with the result anyway? Certainly not the consultant.

For some, this comes at a cost to architect ego because architects often have to let go of their creations. An architect cannot revel in the glory of their masterpiece if those affected by it do not buy into it. It will have a crappy legacy no matter what the intent. In letting go, one has to accept that stakeholders will also have an incomplete world view and will make mistakes. Therefore as an architect, how about architecting not just the SharePoint platform, but architecting the conditions by which SharePoint is delivered.

An obvious condition is one of real collaboration among stakeholders (which when you think about it, is kind of important when putting in collaborative systems!) Another condition that should be there is one that allows people to fail forward. Assume that mistakes will be made, take away the blame and architect SharePoint to be resilient in the face of change instead of making it brittle. Create the environment conducive to co-creation by painting part of the picture and allow participants to fill it in. After all, the learning that occurs via the journey is often just as important as the result achieved.

My confession is that I often say to my SharePoint clients that it is inherently more efficient for me to transfer my knowledge of SharePoint to them, than for them to transfer their deep knowledge of their organisation to me. To do the latter would be highly inefficient for both my clients and me, and my clients would not have the same opportunity to build their own SharePoint competencies and adaptive capacity. At the end of the day, they architect a lot of the solutions. Sure… I might offer suggestions here and there, and I might nudge them when I feel they need to be nudged, but more often than not, I lay some core foundations and they are the ones who do a lot of the legwork.

So to conclude, while I agree with everything Bjørn said in his post, I think the real key to being a good SharePoint architect is to architect the conditions by which SharePoint is delivered, just as much as SharePoint itself. While being a midwife may not be as glamorous as being a doctor, the solutions delivered will have more staying power.

Thanks for reading

Paul Culmsee