How to develop team capabilities by tapping into strengths

Peter Nichol
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How to develop team capabilities by tapping into strengths

Are you trying to grow exceptional teams? Are you tired of building teams only to be told to focus on identifying their weaknesses? Are you done running uphill trying to improve areas where teams naturally suck? I’m going to provide some insights on how to turn around team performance.

Hi, I’m Peter Nichol, Data Science CIO.

One of the first things we learn as leaders is to focus on areas where we have a weakness. We’re told about this from teachers and advisors starting when we’re young. Ultimately, whether you’re talking about your resume, job performance, or job opportunities, the discussion always seems to start by identifying areas where you’re weak and require improvement. Fortunately, I don’t buy into this theory. Focusing on your weaknesses won’t help you grow. It also doesn’t always empower your team.

My theory of growing and building teams centers around optimizing and maximizing their strengths. I look for strengths in individuals and match them to opportunities within my team, departments, and organization. This approach allows resources to excel by embracing their strengths and amplifying areas where they’re naturally already good.

A book came out from the Gallup Institute a while back called StrengthsFinder 2.0. This book provides a great starting point for leaders interested in applying a similar approach of focusing on what’s already good in their team.

Essentially, Gallup collected data from 2 million surveys, and they began to get an excellent understanding of people’s natural strengths. As a result of their research, they came up with 34 different themes, which are categorized below.

Strategic Thinking

  • Analytical
  • Context
  • Futuristic
  • Ideation
  • Input
  • Intellection
  • Learner
  • Strategic

Influencing

  • Activator
  • Command
  • Communication
  • Competition
  • Maximizer
  • Self-assurance
  • Significance
  • Woo

Relationship Building

  • Adaptability
  • Connectedness
  • Developer
  • Empathy
  • Harmony
  • Includer
  • Individualization
  • Positivity
  • Relator

Executing

  • Achiever
  • Arranger
  • Belief
  • Consistency
  • Deliberative
  • Discipline
  • Focus
  • Responsibility
  • Restorative

By purchasing the book for your team, each member can take this survey and generate their top five strengths, listing them in order of most significant or most dominant. You might be thinking that you’ll probably have the same strengths as others on your team. However, that’s unlikely to be the case with over 34 million combinations based on the priority order of five strengths.

After your team takes the survey and identifies their strengths, plot those strengths into quartiles. This exercise is fascinating, as it offers insights into where the team is most substantial. Peter Drucker has a famous quote that says, “If you ask most Americans about their strengths, they look at you with a blank stare because they don’t know or they provide some subject background.” For example, “I’m knowledgeable in accounting.” But that’s not a strength. What’s interesting about StrengthsFinder 2.0 is that this model allows your teams to flip their paradigm from focusing on areas of weakness to focusing on areas where they’re good and potentially significant.

It’s essential, as you build a team, to identify each individual’s strengths. By definition, when you identify the team’s strengths, you’re also defining your team’s capabilities. This affords you, as a leader, the ability to align individuals to roles where their strengths become most dominant and are most impactful.

The StrengthsFinder 2.0 exercise identifies many great themes or strengths that already live within teams. For example, the Maximizer theme is a strength in which that individual enjoys going from good to great. They aren’t going to enjoy standing up a process from scratch, but they love optimizing it.

The Learning theme is another kind of strength. In this case, the individual is drawn to learning and acquiring knowledge before others have that information. They’re often the first to volunteer for new challenges and are willing to step into areas they initially don’t understand.

The Intellectual theme dials into the strength where an individual is fascinated by understanding the details and the small nuances of some engineering marvel or scientific invention. Each of these themes is unique, and each can unify and transform teams from average to world-class!

By leveraging your team’s strengths and not focusing on the weaknesses, leaders can optimize performance and allow teams to perform at their best. Isn’t our goal as a leader to create conditions that enable our teams to unlock their potential and perform at their very best?

If you found this video helpful, that’s great! Check out my books, Think Lead Disrupt and Leading with Value. They just came out early in 2021 and both are available on www.datsciencecio.com.

Hi, I’m Peter Nichol, Data Science CIO. Have a great day!

The keys to successfully navigating agile transformations

Peter Nichol
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The keys to successfully navigating agile transformations

Are you trying to transform from a waterfall methodology to a more agile process in your organization? Is your organization launching agile initiatives throughout the company? They’re both tough challenges. I have some insights for you.

Hi, I’m Peter Nichol, Data Science CIO.

There are some questions you need to ask yourself before starting a new agile initiative. What’s the business driver? What’s the business problem that you’re trying to solve? Start by defining the fundamental business problem. Define the “what” that you’re trying to accomplish. Often, we run too fast and don’t take the time to understand the requirements.

You’ve heard about changing wheels on a moving car and changing wings on a flying plane; well, we can apply these near-impossible feats to agile transformations. When you think about agile, you must identify the opportunity you’re trying to solve before introducing a new methodology to the organization. The art of agile doesn’t solve anything in a silo. It’s the operating model and the interactions that agile enables that allow resources to work more effectively—but only if they have a shared goal.

Changing the wings on a plane in flight creates unnecessary challenges, and so does the introduction of a new agile methodology. Both present similar organizational challenges. Here’s how to stay ahead of the waves.

Understand how “agile at scale” affects workforce management

When we introduce agile, one of the biggest obstacles is culture and organizational change. You might think it’s the tools to run a Kanban or drive an effective Scrum meeting, but that’s not the case. If you want to be a leader in an organization and make an impact, consider the fact that people generally are averse to change. (They more likely hate it, but we’ll use “adverse” to be polite.)

People don’t like to change. I recently spoke with a CIO of a large health plan in the United States that has lofty goals. The company just received board approval for a multi-year, $500-million agile transformation initiative. This initiative will ripple throughout the organization and is anticipated to be so disruptive in securing enterprise-wide adoption that it’s assumed 20% of the staff will be turned over during the three-year transformation.

This information almost blew my mind. However, I then started to realize, you know what, this estimation probably isn’t unreasonable given the high degree of organizational change being introduced into the environment.

Define and monitor sprint velocity

Managing sprint velocity with a single team is a skill taught in just about every agile course. Here we’re talking about monitoring the sprint velocity of multi-teams that are multi-cultural, multi-functional, multi-role, and multi-location.

Most environments embrace the concept of hybrid teams. These teams consist of internal employees, contracted individuals, and various vendor partners offering resources as they can. Resources tend to ebb and flow in the team. For example, consultant A performed Sprints 1, 2, and 3 but then became sick or had personal issues. This resource was quickly replaced with consultant B, who’s been engaged on zero sprints within that department or even the organization. This happens across a team of 150 resources and with dozens of vendor partners. In parallel, we discover that, shockingly, our sprint velocity—the pace of throughput or output—starts to vary and generates unpredictable results. This is a genuine challenge and occurs in virtually all environments due to the human factor of work.

Align the funding to work performed

Another obstacle that comes to mind is funding that disrupts agile flow; it’s not all engineering-side challenges. The orchestration of work is at the heart of how agile operates. The wrong funding model can make agile extremely difficult to implement successfully.

One of the biggest challenges when launching agile initiatives—especially large-scale transformations—is funding. It’s a fundamental part of agile. Usually, organizations perform top-down funding. Funding is established by a leadership team that defines a budget for projects that cover the scope and cost of the initiative to be executed in theory. That model has its challenges, but, generally, it works. It doesn’t, however, work with agile.

Agile focuses on achieving results that the business owner immediately defines. What’s different here is that agile considers that those needs, wants, desires, and, ultimately, the requirements may have changed since that funding was secured three or nine months previous.

Agile needs to be supported with a funding model that supports iterative, short bursts of work. What will be completed is always defined in the sprint. However, all that work scoped in sprints, EPICs, or release trains is less defined. This model directly conflicts with the idea of a tight budget. I’ll submit that these agile components can be added up to show how the budget will be spent. But the reality is that the velocity is forecasted in, say, Sprint 12. The velocity isn’t a known fact today. We’ll estimate it, but we don’t know. This could either pull in our timeline or extend it. This is where contract management for agile is critical. I’ll be covering that in a future #CIOmindset discussion.

Allow the work to evolve from business partners

Lastly, waterfall and agile have established a separation in how work is sequenced. In waterfall, we have this mental process break where everything has to be in order, and everything has to be sequenced. In our new transformation initiative, we’re now agile. We want to be hip. We want to leverage the latest technologies and methodologies to deliver value. Yet, when we queue the work, what do we end up with? We end up with a linear Gantt type of roadmap that doesn’t allow for edits, iterative designs, or unscripted or unplanned activities. Ironically, that’s precisely where agile provides value. Value is harnessed in the methodology’s ability to flex, adapt, and evolve based on new or changing business needs. Agile teams change near-immediately; i.e., within a week or two, not in months “once this phase is completed.”

Agile doesn’t always equate to high performance

Suppose you envision a traditional project delivery. You might think of multiple gating processes, continual delays based on who’s involved, or even producing outcomes no one cares about; e.g., a system goes live with no users.

Without question, the single biggest obstacle for agile transformations is piss-poor performance. There, I said it. Everything that agile touches don’t immediately turn to gold. It requires leadership with previous experience shepherding companies through these types of transformations.

Leaders are often excited about the potential of agile and spin up agile Scrum teams or SAFe teams without a SAFe Program Consultant (SPC) or similar role. As outlined by SAFe, the SPCs are change agents who combine their technical knowledge of SAFe with an intrinsic motivation to improve the company’s software and systems development processes. They play a critical role in successfully implementing SAFe. How will we ensure a smooth transformation if no one is certified who can teach what the heck is going on with agile or if resources charged with the transformation aren’t adequately trained? The bottom line is this is just another factor that introduces unnecessary risk into our transformation initiatives.

We, as leaders, have a duty to ensure that resources understand agile principles and the tools and techniques to make them operate efficiently independently.

Launching agile successfully requires focusing on efficiency

What does it take to be efficient? There are three major things.

First, you need executive support. Without it, you’re not going very far. I’m not talking about a manager-champion who went through a bunch of different agile classes. I’m talking about a leader at an executive level who buys into the concept of agile and the powerful benefits it can bring to an organization when implemented effectively.

Second, take the time to clarify what “done” means. Define “done.” Don’t focus on when you think this project or the whole initiative will finish. Focus on the interim steps:

  • When are features due to be released?
  • When will EPICs be signed off?
  • When are the value streams planned to be completed and validated?
  • How does your organization define done?

Agile has an interpretation of done. Often, this is from an agile or purist viewpoint. Alternatively, we have the company’s version of done. Rarely do the two match up. Take a minute to understand what’s envisioned as an end state.

Third, don’t scale while moving. If you have five people, great. Build an agile methodology around those five or 10 resources. If you have a team of 100 or plan to grow the team from 10 to 100, 200, or 500, think about scale today. Define a roadmap of what scale looks like for your organization, and build that vision before you start to develop and bring teams on board.  

The goal of agile methodologies is to produce consistent results, whether we’re talking about Scrum or SAFe.

As you think about introducing a new team, a new agile approach, or have been challenged with transforming from waterfall to agile, start defining what it takes to produce consistent results.

If you found this article helpful, that’s great! Check out my books, Think Lead Disrupt and Leading with Value. They were published in early in 2021, and both are available on www.datsciencecio.com.

Hi, I’m Peter Nichol, Data Science CIO. Have a great day!

The secret sauce when staffing successful business relationship managers

Peter Nichol
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The secret sauce when staffing successful business relationship managers

Are you on a team where two people are both high performers, yet they don’t get along? Maybe you’re trying to work with a vice president and, for some reason, your team leader doesn’t get along with that individual. I’m going to offer some insights today on how to address this situation.

Hi, I’m Peter Nichol, Data Science CIO.

One of the challenges that leaders face is placing resources for the best organizational fit. A lot of the time, success is more dependent on people getting along and working well together than the actual skills and competencies required in the domain. For example, two people might be skilled and competent, yet nothing seems to click between them. This situation results in little output and a large degree of friction. I want to offer a different perspective on how to solve this challenge.

In the 1960s, Carl Jung came up with a series of personality assessments. He was trying to uncover the variance among different types of personalities and how these affected people’s interactions. The Merrill-Reid method that was developed later expanded on this research.

Fast forward to 2009. Robert and Dorothy Bolton developed a similar idea as the basis of their book titled, People Styles at Work. The book helps readers identify how people get along and how they think and communicate.

This book focuses on the four primary personality styles. The first personality type is the “Driver,” which is characterized by directness. This personality type is straightforward and is only interested in what they’re required to know and nothing else. The second personality style is called “Analytical.” This type is only interested in getting work done their way or “the right way” and often prefers to work independently. The third personality type is “Amiable.” This personality type wants to get the work done eventually, but they have a desire to include everyone during discussions. The last personality type is “Expressive.” This type is more outgoing and wants to get the work done while being inclusive (usually involving resources outside the core process). You have all these types blended into your teams today.

Let’s quickly review each style:

Driver

  • Focused on getting work done.
  • Sets high yet realistic objectives and accomplishes them.
  • Able to pivot positions when better information surfaces.

Analytical

  • Most perfectionistic of the styles.
  • High achieving and high time-consuming work engagement.
  • Systematic and well-organized.

Amiable

  • Less assertiveness with better-than-average responsiveness. 
  • Often a team player.
  • Performs best with defined structure and stable environments.

Expressive

  • High emotional expression and very outgoing.
  • Focused on ideal thinking and rarely confined by pragmatic constraints.
  • Tendency to act first and think later.

When you start to explore the people-styles model and the four different quadrants, it’s exciting to see how people get along and why they don’t. An individual who’s a Direct type of communicator isn’t necessarily going to get along with somebody who’s an Amiable. Of course, this doesn’t mean people can’t flex in and out of personality types. However, it does suggest that their natural state of communication may result in conflict and, eventually, that will create problems. Similarly, a resource whose style is Analytical isn’t going to get along with an Expressive leader. One leader will want to analyze the data by themselves, and the other leader wants to have multiple discussions as they think through the data (before they read or review it, most likely).

Flexing your style

On average, 75% of the population has a different style than you, according to People Styles at Work. They think differently. They decide differently. They communicate differently. Flexing your people style involves adjusting your behavior to be more in line with another person’s style. Think of this as a temporary modification of your behavior to help improve your team interactions. Here’s how it’s done in practice.

  1. Identify: Be mindful of your style. Take note of the other person’s style.
  2. Plan: Determine how you’ll adjust your style for the best results.
  3. Engage: Interact with the person, and monitor whether your style modifications have the desired effect.
  4. Evaluate: Assess whether the conversation was more productive than usual.

Example: Flexing to a Driver

Here are tips when you’re conversing with a Driver:

  • Speak more rapidly.
  • Be prepared to decide quickly.
  • Be on time.
  • Limit gestures.
  • Stick with results-driven objectives.
  • Tell more; ask less.
  • Use accurate, fact-based evidence.
  • Focus on the high-priority items.

Example: Flexing to an Analytical

Here are tips when you’re conversing with an Analytical:

  • Get to business.
  • Limit small talk.
  • Decrease eye contact.
  • Avoid touching.
  • Develop detailed step-by-step plans.
  • Stick to the plan.
  • Be overprepared.
  • Go into considerable detail.
  • Provide written support materials and follow up in writing.
  • Talk less.

Building the foundation for success

Do you have team conflicts? Are leaders not getting along that should be getting along great? Start to assess if you’re matching up the right personality types for the executives you’re supporting. Focus on where they’re strong:

Whether you’re focused on business relationship management, agile delivery, or delivering projects, it’s important to make deliberate decisions and align personality types to stakeholders.

Now, it’s great to have a diverse group of people, and I’m a big fan of diversity of ideas. However, when it comes to aligning individuals for optimal productivity, you need to align similar personality types.

A leader who enjoys working independently and is paired with a leader who loves to collaborate and involve lots of people will be frustrated in that environment and ultimately not perform optimally.

Consider how your team is structured. Which leaders are supporting which stakeholders? Have you deliberately linked critical internal resources to executives based on personality types?

Interested in performing the People Styles exercise with your team? Here are the essentials you need to make that happen. Download these files to start the exercise and better understand how your team naturally interacts and behaves.

  1. People Styles Worksheet: the questions necessary to determine your style
  2. The Four People Styles Performance Grid: better understanding your style
  3. The Four People Styles Descriptions: building awareness of style tendencies

Evaluate the people styles on your team and the stakeholder alignment that’s in place today. It might make sense to implement early adjustments for a more productive year.

Hi, I’m Peter Nichol, Data Science CIO. Have a great week!

The missing element when improving team quality of remote teams

Peter Nichol
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The missing element when improving team quality of remote teams

Is your team viewed as not pushing out quality deliverables? Is your team perceived as not delivering to high enough standards? I’m going to offer a few suggestions.

Hi, I’m Peter Nichol, Data Science CIO.

One of the big leadership challenges is managing expectations. A lot of times, we give our teams the benefit of the doubt. We encourage them to produce high-quality artifacts, whether that’s data models, data-mining analytics or project plans from a project and portfolio management perspective. Regardless of the actual results, we assume good intent. We hope the deliverables our teams produce will either meet or exceed our stakeholders’ expectations. However, sometimes it’s just not possible. We didn’t design in quality. Only one person is accountable for poor quality, and that’s the leader.

I want to introduce the idea of portfolio staff leveling. The purpose behind portfolio staff leveling is to ensure that your team has the ability to meet quality standards. For example, let’s assume your team is perceived as not meeting quality standards. The team might produce low-quality project plans that aren’t detailed enough, or the business requirements aren’t elaborated to the degree required. Regardless of the issue, they aren’t reaching the bar. If this occurs and the team is allocated at 110%, it will be tough to have those resources add extra effort to their work products because they’re already maxed out.

This is where portfolio staff leveling comes into the mix. Instead of taking every initiative or project at face value and delivering all artifacts or deliverables for that project, use some judgment as to which elements are adding value. Start to consider which artifacts are necessary based on the size of the work. If the program is a multi-year, multi-million-dollar effort, you probably need some due diligence—again, if that project is architecturally significant. You probably need additional documentation for compliance and audit. Inversely, suppose that project is two or three weeks long. In that case, it’s a weak argument to lean toward creating detailed communication plans or elaborate, complicated architecture documents when the initiative isn’t significantly impacting architecture.

When we apply portfolio staff leveling on top of team dynamics and—more specifically—team performance, we see positive results. We must allow for quality to be designed into the process. Ask yourself some questions:

  • What’s my team allocated to this month?
  • Is the team delivering consistently?
  • Where are the quality gaps?
  • Are the critical resources allocated at over 90%?

Realize that if you do allocate resources at 100% or greater, these resources will have no additional time to elevate their standards or improve quality. However, if these resources are allocated at 80% or 85%, they now have extra time to think, be strategic, and plan their next week or month ahead of time.

Aligning a team to expectations is hard work. The quality level is never where you want it. Delivery always seems to be slower than planned with more rework. When you feel your team is perceived as not performing, make sure that team has an allocation that promotes quality.

Often when I’m engaged to correct low-performing teams or evaluate a team that’s missing delivery standards, what I discover is they’re maxed out. These resources are working 50 or 60 hours a week. It might appear to a new leader that there’s some complex and underlying mysterious problem. The reality is that the team simply needs time to design quality into the process. As leaders, we need to provide that team sufficient time to think and give them time to increase quality.

As you head into this new week, take a look at your team. Take a good, hard look. Is your team meeting your expectations? Are they meeting the expectations of your colleagues and peers? If the answer is no, first analyze whether your team has the time to improve their quality.

Be a more decisive leader and give your team time to bake in quality.

Hi, I’m Peter Nichol, Data Science CIO. Have a great week!

Stop project delivery delays for good

Peter Nichol
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Stop project delivery delays for good

Have you been on a project where the dates slipped? Maybe you’re using agile and, despite the team’s best efforts, dates consistently drift away from you. I plan to offer some insights today on that exact topic and how to remedy these situations.

Hi, I’m Peter Nichol, Data Science CIO.

One of the challenges with delivery is that we don’t set it up to be efficient or incentivize partners correctly. A lot of times, it’s not the team’s fault that things don’t go as planned. It’s also not the fault of the vendor. It’s usually that the contract structure doesn’t support efficient delivery, and it may include backwards incentives.

One of the most powerful concepts I’ve discovered throughout my entire career is called a delivery expectation document (DED). It sounds like a simple concept, but guess what. Almost no one uses them. Why? you ask. Because they hold everyone—especially vendors—accountable.

The purpose of a DED is to absolutely and explicitly clarify delivery expectations. It removes all doubt about what the vendor is expected to produce and how to perform. The document also specifies the format and style of what’s expected in each artifact or deliverable.

The DED is attached to the end of a contract. This attachment is essential as the final addition to the contract, and it’s part of the signed and executed official contract. There are no gentlemen’s agreements conducted after the contract is signed. DEDs are part of the formal contract.

The underlying value of a DED is that it shifts the contract focus from time and materials to linking payments to delivery.

Have you ever had a vendor tell you they won’t be able to hit a release or business go-live date? I think we’ve all been in that uncomfortable position more than once. The issue is that the vendor makes more money when delays occur. When using DEDs, we all feel that same uncomfortable feeling of not hitting our target, but the vendor eats the cost of that delay with the DED model. Vendors are incentivized to perform to the contract—because it links payment to delivery. When there’s a miss, it’s bad for everyone. This creates a shared goal for both client and contractors. This helps unify the team.

In most contracts, the payment schedule states something like there will be a monthly calendar, and on March 1, April 1, and May 1, payments will be made. The problem with this model is that payments are made and contractually required regardless of delivery. We aren’t tying payments to delivery with this old paradigm.

I recently learned that a critical project for a May 1 go-live was negatively impacted by two weeks. With less than two weeks before go-live, the vendor informed us that the delivery would be delayed two weeks. This announcement was anchored with a lot of excuses (and no reasons). Of course, this was sensitive, and I immediately started looking into the root cause and who was at the heart of this delay. What I discovered was that our vendor partners weren’t impacted at all. They all got paid on time. Shockingly, because the delivery was extended two weeks, they actually made an additional two weeks of billing for the 12 consultants engaged on that project.

Using some quick math—our 12 consultants were paid $250/hour ($3000/hour total) and multiplying that by 80 hours—I discovered that those two weeks cost us $240,000. Not only did we incur a two-week delay, which our business partners didn’t take well, we also needed to communicate that we were forecasted to now overspend $240,000 on our budget for the initiative. Needless to say, this information wasn’t well received.

As you may know, managing consultants are paid their salaries based on two primary factors. First is growth—how many new contracts dollars (net new) they sign every quarter. The second is the calculated margin on those signed contracts. In our situation, the managing consultant just increased their total net sales for the quarter. Also, given that the margins of the old contract were inflated, the vendor maintained very high margins on those two weeks of additional and unplanned work. Eventually, this work would have to be rolled into a new contract—because we’d overspend our existing contract.

If you’re not linking payments to delivery, you’re not incentivizing your strategic vendor partners to be good business partners.

The idea behind a DED is to formalize deliverable expectations and clarify the intent of the artifacts provided as part of contract delivery. I’ll share a couple of examples.

Let’s say the deliverable is a project plan. I’ve seen partners provide a simple PowerPoint document comprised of a single slide with a couple of milestones and chevrons representing generic dates claiming the project plan was delivered. Technically, this is a project plan, and, as a client, we need to continue to make payments.

We all know this level of detail doesn’t constitute a useable or reusable project plan. It’s not actionable. It’s not sufficiently detailed. By using a DED to define the project plan’s intent and what you expect as part of that delivery, you clarify expectations for all parties involved. You also don’t have to pay if that artifact isn’t useable.

When I think of a project plan, what comes to mind is an integrated project plan that captures the initiative’s end-to-end work. The plan includes the requirements to get the initiative over the line, and it concludes with a warranty. It also includes follow-up items required as part of the warranty and the post-implementation phase. It answers questions such as:

  • Who did you talk with to build this plan?
  • What departments added to the development of the plan?
  • Who contributed which sections to the plan?
  • Was the plan made in isolation by the vendor, or was it a collaborative work product?

When you elaborate through the DED sections, you begin to understand how a DED is outlined to ensure that the full intent of the document is being captured. Here’s a sample DED outline to provide a framework to define intent:

  1. Distribution of final document
  2. Introduction
  3. Purpose
  4. Scope
  5. Audience
  6. Deliverable information
  7. Document approach
  8. Document structure
  9. Document acceptance criteria

The DED identifies the intent, purpose, audience, format, structure, approval cycle, and how exceptions will be handled for that artifact. How are we going to deal with changes? Who’s going to sign off on this artifact? These questions all get addressed by a DED.

When a DED model is implemented, I’ve found there are immediate changes in the vendor partner performance. Why? Now incentives are aligned to performance.

Here are some examples of DEDs I’ve developed over the years:

  1. Automated Code Review Results DED
  2. Business and Functional Requirements DED
  3. Business Design DED
  4. Capability Maturity Assessment DED
  5. Completion of all Code Modules DED
  6. Conclusion of Warranty Period DED
  7. Configuration Management Plan DED
  8. Contingency/Recovery Plan DED
  9. Data Migration Mapping Specification DED
  10. Deployment Plan DED
  11. Design and Build of Target State Operating Model DED
  12. Design Specification DED
  13. Future and Current State Assessment DED
  14. Operational Support Plan DED
  15. Operations and Maintenance Manual DED
  16. Organizational Readiness Plan DED
  17. Project Management Plan DED
  18. Project Schedule DED
  19. Release Plan DED
  20. Requirements Validation and Prioritization DED
  21. Security Plan DED
  22. SIT Test Plan DED
  23. System Acceptance Plan DED
  24. System Design Document DED
  25. Technical Design DED
  26. Training Plan DED
  27. Transition and Knowledge Transfer Plan DED
  28. Wireframes DED

Instead of having that delay and trying to convince the vendor to find a way to deliver on the May 1 date we require, they’re fully incentivized to ensure they deliver on time.

Now, sometimes, situational or environmental factors prevent delivery. This could be a delay in the business leader’s availability or a delay in receiving a critical product or a supplier delay. Things happen in life and in business, and it’s important to be reasonable. In these cases, you work together as partners and figure it out. However, for most situations, you want that vendor partner incentivized to deliver on time or even early.

When you tie payments to delivery by leveraging the DED model, things start to happen. Do you wonder why you have project delays and then more delays? Are you curious why agile really isn’t making the waves you anticipated and why you consistently have to push out timelines? You might want to consider implementing a deliverable expectation document (DED) approach in your contract lifecycle.

If you’re interested in a sample DED, send me an instant message on LinkedIn; I’d be happy to share an example with you. Hi, I’m Peter Nichol, Data Science CIO. Have a great week!

How to stretch your workday by 20%

Peter Nichol
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How to stretch your workday by 20%

Is the executive leader you support especially busy? Does that leader not have time to attend all the meetings they’re supposed to participate in? I have some insights for you.

Hi, I’m Peter Nichol, Data Science CIO.

One of the challenges we all experience is that we’re over-committed. We have too many meetings and too many things to do, and there are only so many hours in the day to get all those tasks completed.

One of the techniques I used just last week was to optimize my supervisor’s time by reviewing our communication model’s effectiveness; i.e., I assessed the meetings we attend. Often, we step into new teams, or we’re on a team, and we assume the status quo is acceptable. There are X number of meetings we have to attend. We don’t look at optimizing our communications. We’re too busy running from meeting to meeting.

It’s a wise idea, every so often—whether that’s monthly or quarterly—to assess the meetings you’re participating in. Ask yourself if you’re making decisions in those meetings, or would an email suffice. Is it possible that sending out an email update would generate similar awareness to attending a meeting? Ask yourself, “Am I required to be at this meeting because I’m making active decisions?”

One technique I developed over the years is to continually reassess my communication effectiveness and the effectiveness of meetings for executives I support.

  1. Start by making a list of all the meetings that your supervisor (CFO, CIO, CTO) attends in which you’re also in attendance. There may be 20 or 30 meetings per week that both you and your supervisor jointly attend. It’s probably not required that you both attend every one of these meetings.
  2. Make a list of who’s usually in attendance at these meetings and identify who’s making decisions.
  3. Then, classify these meetings into two groups: Group A meetings are meetings that the supervisor must attend. Group B meetings are meetings you can take over and provide updates in writing post-meeting. This follow-up could be in the form of a simple, bulleted email or be more formal, such as complete meeting minutes. The goal is to alleviate the burden of that leader by attending some or all of these meetings.

Taking this approach has two main benefits. First, it elevates your role in the environment and offers you some additional visibility as you attend these executive-level discussions. Secondarily, it helps free your supervisor from attending non-value-added meetings.

After making a list of meetings, I discovered there were almost 25 meetings that my supervisor and I both attended. Many discussions were deemed to be necessary and couldn’t be flat-out canceled. Each one of these was a meeting in which decisions were being made. However, after a more detailed analysis, I discovered that we didn’t both need to attend every meeting.

As a result of that analysis, I was able to offload most of those meetings from my supervisor. I then quantified how many meetings occur, whether they’re weekly, daily, bi-weekly, monthly, or whatever, and started to total up those meetings. The result was I had a common denominator of how many total meetings we had that overlapped. Then I took all the meetings and calculated the monthly time that each one consumed. This created an “hours per month” metric that was common and relatively generic. This allowed me to quantify and compare apples to apples in terms of savings and, ultimately, the hours avoided.

Maybe you can’t free up the supervisor’s time for all the meetings you both jointly attend. However, if you could eliminate even half of those meetings and free up 15 or 20 hours a week, that’s almost 50% of the time. Maybe, you’re unable to gain that degree of efficiency, and you’re not avoiding 20 hours a week; perhaps it’s more like 20 hours a month. Even so, that’s a lot of freed-up time for an executive to use to focus on more strategic initiatives. This enables the leader to spend more time planning, thinking, and being more strategic. If your supervisor isn’t in the weeds, they’re going to be thinking ahead and removing roadblocks for your department.

Interested in an example of how these concepts are applied? Here are the before-and-after results of an exercise I conducted recently with a senior leader:

The facts

  • 28 meetings analyzed
  • 12.78 average people in each meeting
  • 2-41: the range of meeting attendees
  • 24 total meetings monthly
  • 42.4 hours in meetings monthly

The results

  • 12 total meetings avoided monthly
  • 32.4 total hours avoided monthly
  • 50.0% of meetings avoided
  • 76.4% of hours avoided
  • 144 total meetings avoided annually
  • 388.8 total hours avoided annually
  • $58,320 in cost avoided annually

As you jump into the new week, start by reflecting on the communication styles you’ve enabled, and count the meetings you’re attending each week. Think for a second, and ask yourself, “Am I needed in this meeting? Are there meetings my supervisor and I both attend that I could pick up to make his life or her life a little bit easier?”

Hi, I’m Peter Nichol, Data Science CIO. Have a great week!

Uncovering the root cause of poor team performance

Peter Nichol
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Uncovering the root cause of poor team performance

Is your team struggling to perform, and you’re not sure what’s going on? Are you having challenges with delivery, but you can’t put your finger on the problem? I’m going to provide some insights to help answer these questions.

Hi, I’m Peter Nichol, Data Science CIO.

One of the challenges we experience as executive leaders is that we focus on all the qualifiable delivery aspects. For example, we concentrate on the number of product launches, the number of projects delivered, or the number of sprints deployed. In doing this, we forget about the softer side of delivery; i.e., the values, beliefs, and behaviors the team embraces to enable delivery and achieve successful outcomes.

I want to share a couple of ideas that will help you as a leader. These techniques allow you to dial in to the softer side of delivery and assess what’s required for your team to win. This will give you the confidence to know whether the team is performing or not. These assessments and maturity tools are available to professional members with training provided by the BRM Institute.

The first idea is a business value ability assessment. This assessment helps to measure maturity and determine whether you’re connecting behaviors to outcomes. It determines where your team is from a maturity perspective:

  • Sporadic: occasionally does stuff to identify value
  • Definable: usually performs steps to capture value
  • Attainable: always takes steps to understand the value
  • Optimized: focus on dialing in and quantifying the business value

The assessment allows leaders to get a better framework of which behaviors and social aspects drive and contribute to successful team deliveries.

The second assessment is called a cultural readiness assessment. This assessment asks questions that help narrow down which internal and external factors impact your delivery and your delivery success.

The assessment focuses on stimulating, surfacing, and shaping business value. The questions help identify the values, beliefs, and behaviors that your team is enabling. The assessment answers the question, Is the team using the right behaviors to enable the outcomes? Questions uncover not just what outcomes were achieved but how they were achieved.

For example, a question might probe into budgeting and explore not whether the team is budgeting but how that’s being done; i.e., from the top down or the bottom up. The question won’t ask whether the team is successful. It will filter out the behaviors driving performance and similarly ask whether those behaviors are healthy. Another question might explore whether the team celebrates successes and then immediately asks whether failures are also celebrated. A question won’t simply ask how team members rise to be leaders but rather how those leaders are elevated.

When you go through these exercises, you discover that the results uncover correlations and causations between team behaviors, performance, and outcomes. From this assessment, we, as leaders, begin to understand the softer side of delivery.

Hopefully, you can experiment with a couple of techniques and discover if they can work for you. If you’re interested in more details, I’ll put a link in the post so you can get some additional information from datasciencecio.com.

Hi, I’m Peter Nichol, Data Science CIO. Have a great day!

Surprisingly small shifts that can improve your productivity

Peter Nichol
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Surprisingly small shifts that can improve your productivity

Do you take time to identify tasks you have to complete for the following day or week? A lot of us do. Is it working for you, though? I want to present some alternative approaches.

Hi, I’m Peter Nichol, Data Science CIO.

How do you start your week? What method or approach do you take to ensure you meet your daily, weekly, or monthly objectives? Many of us sit down and try to articulate what activities we have to focus on or complete for the week, and that’s pretty normal. The challenge is that this gives us a false sense of productivity. For example, if we have 15 tasks and complete 10, we think, “Wow, I’m two-thirds of the way through, or 66 percent complete, with those initiatives.” But the reality is, we didn’t weigh those to-do list tasks based on either priority or the time it takes to achieve them. As a result, while 10 of 15 activities may be completed, 70% of the time required to complete all the tasks falls on the remaining five uncompleted tasks. This is why we feel a false sense of productivity.

There’s a new approach I’d like to present. This idea begins with a premise built around procrastination. When we think of procrastination, a lot of images fill our minds. We think of somebody lounging on a couch and eating a bag of chips or vegging out watching Netflix. The individual could even actively walk around the house while snacking but not accomplishing their target goals. These are common images that come to mind when thinking about the concept of procrastination.

There’s another side of procrastination, however, and it’s called productive procrastination. The idea behind productive procrastination is that you’re doing something, but it isn’t adding to what you’re trying to accomplish. Some examples might be attending meetings. In theory, you’re busy because you have back-to-back meetings all day. However, when you look at what you’ve accomplished at the end of the day, you haven’t made any real progress on your goals or objectives.

Another example is performing busywork. The work is independent and doesn’t require you to collaborate or work with a team. You might be updating a spreadsheet or drafting an executive brief. These are activities you need to complete. The catch here is that you end up spending extra time on these activities because they’re easy and can be performed without others’ involvement. Time spent on these activities can be slightly helpful, but they ultimately don’t get you closer to your primary objective for the day. It’s important to note here that while you feel you’re being productive, you aren’t.

Brian Tracy, a productivity and self-development author, came up with a new concept to address this exact problem. It’s called the A-B-C-D-E method. Using this method, Brian prioritizes activities on a spectrum of the most critical to the least important and then identifies actions he can eliminate. He performs the A-B-C-D-E method every day.

  • A activities: activities that must be completed and have a hard deadline.
  • B activities: essential, but they don’t necessarily have a hard date for achieving them.
  • C activities: typically what we spend most of our time on. These activities don’t have a target date, and they might be necessary or might not. But, ultimately, they’re straightforward to complete. As a result, we spend a lot of time feeling great when completing C-level activities.
  • D activities: activities that don’t belong anywhere. They don’t have a priority. They don’t have a hard deadline. These are generally considered nice-to-have-completed activities.
  • E activities: tasks or to-do items we want to eliminate. Often, when we spend time on E activities, we aren’t completing tasks. Instead, we’re working to identify how to free up our time. Maybe we can delegate the job to a team leader or subordinate. E activities can also be tasks we choose to automate, such as daily reporting, status reports, or health checks.

Think about using the A-B-C-D-E method to prioritize your activities for the week. You might even gain some productivity!

Hi, I’m Peter Nichol, Data Science CIO. Have a great week!

The single best productivity hack for managing remote teams

Peter Nichol
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The single best productivity hack for managing remote teams

How are you managing your remote teams and ensuring that they’re at the maximum level of productivity? Today I’m going to provide some insights on that topic.

Hi, I’m Peter Nichol, Data Science CIO.

Recently, we talked about the Ivy Lee Method, which ensures productivity on a team by focusing on individual performance. The method centers on six key activities. It’s similar to a to-do list but is limited to six items that must be completed during that day to maximize productivity. These items are also weighted from most important (one) to least important (six). Suppose you do complete all six items in a given day. That’s great. The following day, you generate six new priorities to focus on. If, however, any of the six things aren’t completed that day, they’re rolled into the next day in order of importance, and these items are completed in order of priority.

Today, I want to share my insights on a leadership technique that I’ve been using for years. I’ve found the results compelling. It’s also a great tool to leverage when working in a remote environment with global teams. It’s called the Top 5. It originated, in part, from the Ivy Lee Method; however, instead of six priority items, the Top 5 focuses on five significant classifications of work:

  1. Top five issues you’re facing (e.g., project-related start with project name)
  2. Top five business partner updates (i.e., scientists, stakeholders, and internal or external customers)
  3. Top five accomplishments
  4. Top five accomplishments planned for the following week
  5. Project or product status

Now, let me go through each of these quickly.

First, we have issues. These aren’t the typical issues you’d find in a risk register or a public-risk tracker. These items are the quiet and unheard issues that create team dysfunction. They include personal disagreements among individuals and political aspects impacting team performance. These issues are never going to make it into an official risk log. This is why the concept is so powerful. You, as a leader and a supervisor, need to understand what’s genuinely creating obstacles that prevent your team from performing at their maximum level.

Second are business partners. This section tells me what I’ll hear if I get a call from a business partner or a customer. Am I going to hear something positive? Did something happen that will create friction; e.g., a poorly run meeting, deadline missed, resource performance problems, etc. Regardless, I want to know how that conversation will unfold, and I want some talking points before I receive a call. This helps me stay on top of the latest business-facing concerns.

The third classification is accomplishments. What did the team complete last period? I don’t care what the manager or leader did. I care about the team results and the leader driving the team results.

Fourth is accomplishments planned for the following week. This step forces the individual to think ahead and anticipate change. If items are missed (this is similar to the Ivy Lee Method), they roll along to the following week. This helps to narrow in on soft delays. These are last-task completions, but they don’t necessarily impact the project’s go-live.

Fifth is the product or project status. I’ll go into more depth in another article about activity status because it’s a bit more complicated. This section has three main areas:

  1. 5’ONs: Schedule, scope, quality, value, budget
  2. Red, amber, green
  3. Comments

The 5’ONs are either “ON” or “OFF.” If they’re ON and green, that’s great. However, any of the 5’ONs that are red or amber require an open issue to be logged. The individual can determine if a risk is created or not. However, at least one single issue must be created to show how the item is driving the status. For example, if the schedule is OFF and amber, this is how that line item would read:

  • Schedule (A): Issue 199234. Based on initial timelines, the schedule may be impacted by two weeks for the SOW approval delays.

This tells me the schedule is impacted, there are action and mitigation plans in place, and it identifies that, if resolved, these would bring the project back to green. Think what getting the project back on track looks like or, said another way, think about “the road to green.”

Leveraging these five buckets allows the team to focus on the burning imperatives. It also removes the need for the leader to be a micromanager. Teams hate being micromanaged, and as managers, supervisors, and executives, we hate micromanaging. Yes, sometimes it’s a necessity. However, generally, this approach affords the leader a bird’s eye view of how the team is performing.

The Top 5 solves these questions:

  • Which individuals need support?
  • How can I, as a leader, be most impactful for my team?
  • What obstacles does my team need me to remove?

As you run Top 5 weekly reports with your team, you’ll quickly find patterns and common issues among individuals’ Top 5’s. There will be overlap, and there will be similarities. This is precisely what you’re looking for—common themes that are affecting not one leader on your team but many. These are the core challenges that you, as an executive, need to spend your time resolving. For you, as a leader, this removes the guesswork, because you now know exactly where to get involved. This ensures you’re removing the most critical roadblocks first and keeping your team performing at their best.

Think for a minute as you jump into this new week: Do you have a clear understanding of the roadblocks your team is experiencing? If you can’t answer which roadblocks that surfaced last week are common to more than three team members, you might want to consider implementing a Top 5.

If you’re interested in receiving a copy of a sample Top 5, no problem. Please message me on LinkedIn, and I’ll be happy to share an example with you.

I’ll offer up an additional idea regarding managing and leading remote teams. It’s called a WHIP.

Q: What’s the number-one problem with remote teams? A: Engagement.

A WHIP solves this challenge. Here’s how it works. Let’s say you have 15 people on the team. You queue up an idea—for example, “What’s the single most-impactful change we could make for 2021?” Then you allow each member of the team 30 seconds or less (timeboxed) to offer their idea. If they can’t come up with something in three or four seconds, they’re skipped and you WHIP around them and circle back at the end.

Why does this work? It works because it forces people to think of answers they don’t have—unlike, “Tell me about your last product meeting,” which is about memory recall. This method requires zero preparation time. A WHIP is a new idea that takes a minute to think about. It goes without saying that no ideas can be repeated within the WHIP session.

Are you looking for better engagement during your next remote team meeting? Try a WHIP!

Curious about what the Top 5 template looks like? Download it here.

Top 5 Leadership Communication Tool Example (PDF)Download
Top 5 Template (PDF)Download

Hi, I’m Peter Nichol, Data Science CIO. If you liked this article, please like or comment below, and have a great week!

Spend more time playing and less time working with this productivity hack

Peter Nichol
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Spend more time playing and less time working with this productivity hack

Are you trying to figure out the next productivity hack? Interested in discovering a way you can improve? Curious how to accelerate how much time you have every day?

I want to share something that I’ve used for many years. This method is the main reason I’m so productive; why can I write more every day, create more content, and ultimately spend time doing the things I love like sailing, flying planes, and scuba diving.

Hi, I’m Peter Nichol, Data Science CIO. Today we’re going to talk about different approaches to improve your productivity. In the 1990s, Charles Schwab was trying to come up with ideas to help his management team. At the time, he was president of Bethlehem Steel out of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, an extensive production facility producing steel for the military and many other operations.

He was trying to figure out that next productivity hack. When brainstorming, he decided to reach his old friend, John D. Rockefeller, Senior, and asked for suggestions. John referred him to a gentleman named Ivy Ledbetter Lee. Lee was known more as a public relations specialist. However, he also had built a reputation as a productivity expert. Charles asked Lee to come to the PA plant and work with his management team. Lee interviewed Schwab’s management team and only spent 15 minutes with each team member. Once Lee was done, he provided each executive with a single tool. Later, Schwab discovered that Lee introduced each team member into what later will be known as the Ivy Lee Method. This is an approach to keep hyper-focused on your top priorities.

The concept was beautifully simple, write down your top six priorities and do them every day. If you only could get six items done each day, what would they be? This latest dovetailed into Tim Ferris’s concept, asking, “What would you do at work if you only had two hours a day.”

Lee suggested each executive work their list top-down (1 through to 6) in order of priority. Completing the most important item first, then the next most important, and so on. Distractions are a reality in any environment. The higher your seniority the more frequent fire drills pop up that are unexpected and critical. If you did not complete your list of six items at the end of the day, those items roll forward onto your list for tomorrow. If you did complete all six things, you would create a new list of six things for the following day. This method keeps the focus on the items that add the most impact to your day.

The method allows leaders to focus on their work’s most critical aspects while spending less time on the least essential elements. We often apply the Pareto 80:20 rule, where 20% of the activities provide 80% of the value. Unfortunately, we often focus on that 80% because these are the low-hanging fruit items. They typically more tactical, and usually, they can be completed independently. As a result, this makes these tasks easy to complete. Yet, they don’t always provide the most value. This is where the Ivy Lee Method comes into play.

If you can apply this method to your daily activities, what you’ll find is you slowly increase productivity. Of course, dramatic transformations don’t occur overnight, but over months and years, it’s unbelievable how much more productive you’ll be. As you think about what you want to accomplish this week that will keep you on track for your quarterly goals, consider using the Ivy Lee Method. Begin with the top six most important items, and if you get those completed, great work on the following six.

Hi, I’m Peter Nichol, Data Science CIO. Have a great week!

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