A handy leader’s tool for identifying and developing talent

Peter Nichol
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A handy leader’s tool for identifying and developing talent

Are you clear who you’re going to invest more time in this year? Are the top performers evident within your team or department?

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

If you haven’t already subscribed to my newsletter, please check out it at newsletter.datasciencecio.com. This is where I provide custom content to subscribers for FREE.

Are you a business leader trying to figure out how to define your role? You’re in luck. I’ve just designed a course titled, Define Your Role for BRM Success! In this course, you’ll learn how to define your role in the organization and maximize your effectiveness as a BRM.

Why use the 9 blocker model?

Today, we’re going to get a better understanding of how to evaluate members of your team quickly. You might have heard of the Nine Box Talent Review Model, commonly referred to as “9 blocker” (because the model has nine core blocks) or “9 box matrix.” McKinsey created this model in the 1970s to help GE prioritize investments across its nearly 200 business units. They centered the model around industry attractiveness and competitive strength as their two primary dimensions. Our model is an extension of the McKinsey model with a twist. In our model, we’ll use job potential and job behaviors as our two major dimensions.

So, why is this model helpful? First, it provides a simple framework by which to evaluate team members quickly. Whether they’re high-potential or need some additional help, this model offers an efficient classification. Second, it’s a consistent way to quickly assess how an individual is doing and if you should be investing time in them.

Illustration 1.0 Nine Box Talent Review Model Template

How is the 9 blocker interpreted?

So, how does it work? On the x-axis, we evaluate the team member’s job potential, and on the y-axis, we assess the team member’s job behaviors. In the lower-left quadrant, we classify team members with low potential and poor performance. In the upper right quadrant, we have high-potential and excellent performance. And, of course, the quadrants in between have a myriad of different combinations of those two.

Illustration 2.0 Nine Box Talent Review Model Interpreted

How is this model applied in practice?

Many approaches and techniques leverage the 9-blocker model to evaluate staff. I’ll share my process and the steps behind it.

  1. Identify all employees you want to assess.
  2. Choose two dimensions that best represent your environment.
  3. Classify each team member into one of the nine blocks.
  4. Review to assure that team members are actually in the correct box.
  5. Confirm that the categorization aligns with the preferred investment for each team member.

Identify captures a list of all the team members that you believe are in scope for the assessment. For example, if a new team member joined the team just a week prior, it’s too early to evaluate that individual. You’ll have an opportunity to assess their performance during the next round of performance reviews. Choose is one of the most critical steps. It’s essential to think through what dimensions will best represent your initiative. For example, if you’re targeting talent development, focus on “Talent Development” and “Performance.” There are a lot of dimension permutations when applying this model:

  • Ability and performance
  • Employee potential and performance
  • Leadership potential and performance
  • Engagement and performance

Classify simply slots each team member into one of the blocks based on the two dimensions selected. Review asks the assessor to take another look. Oftentimes, single events tend to cloud judgment or introduce confirmation bias. This step ensures that the complete picture of the team member is considered. Confirm is similar to the Review step. However, in the confirm step, it’s vital to look at your categorization based not only on performance but also on how much you want to invest financially in a team member’s growth.

Illustration 3.0 Nine Box Talent Review Model Example

This model can also be leveraged to classify team members into three main buckets:

  1. Lower left – correct or manage out
  2. Middle – core performers
  3. Upper right – ready for the next-level job

Additionally, it’s easier to see the blocks in three main sections using this model. This approach helps quickly classify a team member as performing or not and then narrows down that individual’s performance within that column:

  1. Far-left column – below performance standards
  2. Middle column – meets performance standards
  3. Far-right column – exceeds performance standards

How to manage training budgets using the 9 box matrix?

You ranked your team. You now have a good idea of how each individual performs and how they perform in comparison to other team members.

We’re already at mid-year. Have you even put a dent in your annual training budget? It gets better. We can use this model and start to evaluate how we’ll invest our annual training dollars. It’s easier than you think to use the 9-blocker model to help predict how training and dollars should be allocated. We spend 90% of our time managing the problems, and 10% of our time managing “the good” as leaders. It’s just the nature of the business that those problems consume the majority of our time, leaving little room for investing in those high-potential employees. Budgets should be divided by the number of members on the team. Why force someone to go to training who has zero interest? Additionally, if you reward that individual with paid training, it reinforces the right behaviors.

Illustration 4.0 Nine Box Talent Review Model For Training Investments

I’d like to share a training guide on how to budget for employee training if you have only $100 to spend. I use $100 because it can be easily converted into a percent. Here’s how it works. Let’s assume that you budget $10,000 for each individual on the team. You have 10 team members, which makes up an annual training budget of $100,000. Do you distribute this evenly, irrespective of performance? No.

The upper-right performance (high potential and excellent behaviors) would earn 100% of that budget—in this case, $10,000. However, a team member that’s in lower-left performance (low potential and poor behaviors) would only earn 5% of that budget or $500. This model aligns with a merit-based performance system for training and investment dollars.

As you move through this year and think about distributing your training budget, consider using a 9 blocker to make that job more manageable. Who are your top performers? Are you taking the time today to invest in those resources?

Leaders often get dragged into the weeds and ultimately spend a lot of time with individuals that, unfortunately, need a lot of help or are underperforming. It’s natural to focus on the problems, as that’s required to keep things running smoothly. However, those high performers need to be coached and guided as well. For example, suppose you want to decrease attrition and increase retention. In that case, you need to have a plan to improve training and provide additional opportunities to people who need to be brought up to average as well as to people who are trying to get to that excellent level.

Here are the images in higher quality for download.

9 Blocker Template (PDF)Download
9 Blocker Target Performance (PDF)Download
9 Blocker Example (PDF)Download
9 Blocker Training (PDF)Download

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 2021 and are available on Amazon and at http://www.datsciencecio.com/shop for author-signed copies!

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

How to lead a passive-aggressive employee

Peter Nichol
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0
How to lead a passive-aggressive employee

How do you encourage good performance and dissuade bad? Are leaders going through the motions but not embracing the heart of the mission? Are you being misled?

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

If you haven’t already subscribed to my newsletter, please check it out at newsletter.datasciencecio.com. This is where I provide custom content to subscribers for FREE.

Are you a business leader trying to figure out how to define your role? You’re in luck. I’ve just designed a course titled, Define Your Role for BRM Success! In this course, you’ll learn how to define your role in the organization and maximize your effectiveness as a BRM.

Today we’re going to talk about managing behaviors on your team—specifically, passive-aggressive behavior. Rarely do we, as leaders, have challenges we can’t see or face. If the market is shifting, we can feel small tremors and position our organization ahead of the next rumble. If any individual doesn’t please a key stakeholder, we can offer suggestions to mend that social divide. The challenge with managing passive-aggressive behavior is that it’s primarily intangible. You can’t find it. It’s hard to wrestle. It isn’t easy to nail down the source.

Whether you’ve been around for 30 years or you’re new to the leadership or BRM scene, passive-aggressive behaviors are something we all can brush up on.

Passive-aggressive behavior: the definition

What is passive-aggressive behavior? Passive-aggressive behavior is behavior that’s essentially aggressive behind the scenes. Passive-aggressive behaviors are indirectly aggressive rather than directly aggressive. Individuals that display passive-aggressive behavior obey authority in its presence but are positioned to turn their backs at the first chance.

It wasn’t until 1952, in the first edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), that passive-aggressive behavior was explained in detail. The term was coined by an Army psychiatrist named William Menninger. Following the Second World War, Menninger published a document called Medical 203. This was a major overhaul of the existing US classification of mental disorders, and it was within this document that Menninger spelled out passive-aggressive behavior. It originated from a disturbing pattern among soldiers. These soldiers technically obeyed orders but executed them with subtle disobedience. For example, in some cases, they’d execute the orders to the letter but ignore the spirit of the command entirely.

There’s a good quote that sums up passive-aggressive individuals nicely: “Some people are like clouds—when they’re gone, it’s like a beautiful day!”

Why is diagnosis hard?

The greatest challenge is quiet aggression. Many times, you feel something, but you can’t specify what’s actually occurring that disrupts achieving results.

Complex actions

Often, the actions of passive-aggressive individuals are complicated. Their actions might even appear confusing, as they’re mixed with stress, anxiety, or insecurity in the individual.

Mask behavior

Another reason these behaviors go undetected is that they’re hidden from view. These individuals’ behavior is a way to veil their discontent, hostility, or anger. Because they mask their true feelings, detecting and interpreting the emotions of these individuals can prove challenging for leaders. If you’re not familiar with identifying micro-expressions, you’ll enjoy my article titled, Micro Expressions: The Art of a Lie. This article helps you to determine what to look for in mixed-emotion responses.

Quiet Disobedience

A passive-aggressive individual isn’t going to say they disagree with your strategy. They’ll do the very opposite. Their genuine emotions are suppressed. However, they’ll disagree with you offline by sharing their opinion powerfully with other team members, creating a manufactured situation where you, as a leader, can’t defend and justify your rationale for the given course of action.

Denial

People who engage in passive-aggressive behavior won’t admit anything’s wrong. Have you ever wrapped up a discussion and said, “Does anyone have concerns or questions about what we covered?” Passive-aggressive individuals usually won’t speak up against your strategy. However, once that meeting has wrapped, they’ll relive that discussion and talk to others about how your system doesn’t make sense and why the approaches won’t work. You might think, “I want people to challenge the direction.” That’s a good gut feeling to have. However, in this case, you can’t explain any of those decisions because the individual or individuals are exhibiting this passive-aggressive behavior in the organizational shadows.

Resistance to change

Typically, these folks don’t like any change that might pivot them from being an expert. Often these individuals will blanketly disagree with change—any change—presented to them. This resistance is rooted in an inability to communicate effectively.

How do you spot passive-aggressive behavior in action?

Passive-aggressive behavior slowly erodes team unity and cohesion. These are actions and behaviors that take place quietly when most leaders are unaware. To mitigate or stop passive-aggressive behavior, we first need to be able to identify it.

Exclusion from emails

The act of being left off an email seems innocent enough. On occasion, it’s a simple oversight in judgment that’s never repeated. However, it’s also a prevalent example of someone being passive-aggressive. There was a critical communication that a member of your team sent out, and it wasn’t sent to you. Maybe it’s just an omission. Be a good leader and assume good intent. However, if this happens two or three times, it’s not a simple lapse in judgment. It’s deliberate.

Pushing back on reasonable change

Let’s get real. Almost no one loves to change. So, when you’re getting resistance to change, that makes sense. For example, a new executive was hired to mature departmental processes, and the individual doesn’t feel documentation adds value. This is a classic example of passive-aggressive behavior.

Here are some additional signs to look for that may appear to be omissions but, when they occur together, are more likely deliberate:

  1. Intentional procrastination: pushing off tasks because of other “priority” work that’s never initially identified
  2. Disruptive behavior: voicing their opinion at the wrong time
  3. Blaming others: never accepting their communication could be the source of the issue
  4. Gossiping behind colleagues’ backs: oversharing information
  5. Pushing the demands of others: not communicating to them but rather on behalf of others
  6. Intentional mistakes: scheduling a critical stakeholder meeting before your team meeting
  7. Hostile attitude: isolating from other people because of impatience or stubbornness
  8. Disguising criticism with compliments: offering negative opinions wrapped in positivity
  9. Silent treatment: building a culture of disengagement
  10. Sullen attitude: always finding fault in others for delays
  11. Stubborn: lack of interest in change
  12. Leaving things undone: not finishing assignments before taking a vacation (even if one day)
  13. The indirect request: executing the letter but not the intent of a direction or assignment
  14. Sabotage: rarely overt and often designed to make someone go crazy

The good news is that, over time, passive-aggressive behavior makes its way into the light. I enjoy the following quote from Haruki Murakami: “Sometimes, it’s not the people who change, it’s the mask that falls off.” Eventually, all truth is told.

The delay in recognizing passive-aggressive behavior is what makes it challenging to address. Usually, there are soft signs such as childlike behavior designed to keep you, as a leader, submerged.

How do we get ahead of this behavior?

There are three basic approaches for dealing with passive-aggressive behavior:

  1. Establish team norms
  2. Set standard team principles
  3. Define the standard for good

First, establish team norms that set the behavior guidelines for your team. If you need to, brush up on my article, Why team norms transform team dynamics. It provides a great start. Team norms help the team define what’s acceptable behavior and what isn’t. A few good examples of team norms include:

  • Avoid hidden agendas
  • Listen to understand
  • Provide assurance that issues discussed will be kept in confidence
  • Give your colleagues the benefit of the doubt
  • Respect the time and convenience of others

By defining good behaviors, you help to identify unwelcome behaviors. In essence, you’ve clarified how a high-performing team should be operating.

Second, set standard team principles. These principles establish the guiding framework for the team or department. Sometimes, these principles are defined by the organization or company; you need to generate them other times. Good examples of team principles might include a few of the following:

  • An excellent approach to conflict management
  • Effective allocation of resources
  • Stepping in to help before asked
  • Mutual respect for team members
  • Identifying what unites us
  • Respecting the opinions of others
  • Acting as one team

Third, define the standard for good. How do team members know how to perform if performance standards haven’t been established? Short version: they don’t. There are a lot of ways to tackle defining “good.” Here are a few ideas:

  • Define roles and responsibilities for the team
  • Use a rubric based on job function
  • Develop a standard operating procedure (SOP) for the team
  • Establish objective and critical results incorporated into annual performance

How you define the standard isn’t crucial, but making it clear is vital. Team members must know what behavior and associative performance are encouraged and what performance isn’t. If you have an individual who’s not performing, it’s essential to have a standard to measure their actions, behaviors, and outcomes against.

Taking corrective action

What happens if you find yourself in the position of dealing with a passive-aggressive team member?

You might feel the team is starting to gel. Yet, there are undertones indicating that people disagree with the strategy. However, when you inquire individually, you can’t tell where all the noise originated. The excellent news is that usually this intangible noise is being driven by one or two people creating and reinforcing the negative culture. Make no mistake—they’re sabotaging your strategy and how you’re executing that strategy. Where do you start in taking corrective action?

There’s a three-step process that’s failproof:

  1. Clarify the performance standard
  2. Identify the behavior gaps
  3. Explore corrective action

First, you need to sit down with that individual and have a conversation. Discuss what you expect and what good performance looks like. Second, you need to identify behaviors that don’t align with the team norms, principles, (maybe) competencies, or the standard for good. It needs to be made clear which team norm they violated and what behavior was unacceptable. Third, if, at this point, you’ve not seen significant performance gains, or you’ve been made aware of another occurrence of this behavior, it’s time for corrective action. This means the behavior needs to be formally documented. It doesn’t matter if this is shared with the individual or not. However, the documentation must exist in case this situation continues to surface.

It’s challenging to identify the emergence of negative team aspects when they’re not directly presented to you. For example, if somebody doesn’t attend a meeting on time, the performance gap is apparent. If a team member shows up at 10 am—two hours late for work—that’s obviously a performance gap. When a deliverable is delivered two days late, we can immediately explain the performance expected and what was achieved. In each of these examples, it’s obvious what happened. How to correct that behavior is also straightforward.

With leadership, situations are rarely just black and white. What do you do when the team just isn’t working well together? Where do you look when your approach isn’t realizing its goals? Passive-aggressive behavior is subtle. Acts of sabotage or quietly challenging authority don’t occur in the daylight.

Hopefully, this article provides some practical tips on how to get ahead of managing passive-aggressive employees. Here are a few templates to help document your conversation with team members exhibiting passive-aggressive behavior.

Employee Discussion Example (PDF)Download
Employee Discussion Template (PDF)Download

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 2021 and are available on Amazon and at http://www.datsciencecio.com/shop for author-signed copies!

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

https://youtu.be/ckr5-CPbZ8c

Remove the middleman with a business partner survey

Peter Nichol
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0
Remove the middleman with a business partner survey

Are your business relationship managers performing as expected? Do your leaders meet business partner expectations? Are you sure?

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

If you haven’t already subscribed to my newsletter, please check it out at newsletter.datasciencecio.com. This is where I provide custom content to subscribers for FREE.

Are you a business relationship manager trying to figure out how to define your role? You’re in luck. I’ve just designed a course titled, Define Your Role for BRM Success! In this course, you’ll learn how to define your role in the organization and maximize your effectiveness as a BRM.

So, into our topic we go.

How to manage expectations

Today, we’ll explore how to ensure you have an accurate pulse on your business partners’ expectations. We all know that building relationships and maintaining those relationships is paramount in being successful within any environment.

The success of your relationships largely depends on the amount of time you invest in developing them. Unfortunately, we all know that hard work alone doesn’t equal success. We must measure and validate that we’re meeting or exceeding expectations. It’s imperative to manage expectations and get direct feedback on how the team’s performing, and, more specifically, how individuals on your team are being perceived. Perception is reality. To do this effectively and fairly, we need to evaluate the team externally.

I’ve found the introduction of a business-partner survey to be invaluable. Maybe you’ve just joined a new team. If so, this is a great tool. Maybe you’ve been on the team for years. If that’s the case, this is a great tool to refresh your understanding of what’s working and better clarify what’s not. Don’t assume. Validate your understanding with a survey.

Why the business-partner survey is a game-changer

Years ago, these surveys were referred to as “360-degree Surveys” or “360 Leadership Assessments” or simply “360s.” Speaking from the experience of having gone through a full 360-degree leadership assessment, this is a tool that confirms individual and organizational biases.

However, the business-partner survey is framed differently and is applied in a new context. First, the goal of the business-partner survey isn’t to jam up your team. It’s designed to amplify the good and get ahead of the bad. The business-partner survey allows you, as a leader, to get direct feedback from your business partners about individuals on your team in an unfiltered format. The benefit here is that you’re receiving direct input. No middleman is filtering the message to make it softer. There’s no relay of leaders to distort the original form of the message. You’re hearing raw, unedited feedback about your leaders.

Have you ever been in a situation where you received inaccurate feedback on your performance? How frustrating was that? You knew how you performed, and yet the narrative you received didn’t reflect reality. It’s not a great feeling.

As a leader, we must ensure this doesn’t happen to our team on our watch. It’s not your boss’s responsibility. It’s not the duty of the leader on your team. It’s your responsibility. Own it.

Are you removing your team’s roadblocks? When was the last time you accelerated their performance to make them more effective? How have you amplified the strength of a team member this month? By applying a business-partner survey, you’re also able to take action.

Are you providing timely information?

Did you ever sit down for a performance review discussion only to find you’re talking about an incident that occurred months ago? It’s an uncomfortable place to be. It’s also strangely curious that this is the first time you’re hearing about the situation. Don’t let that happen to your team. Have those one-minute updates frequently. Using a business-partner survey allows you to provide timely and actionable feedback to your leaders on how to bring their game to the next level.

Rarely do I receive business-partner surveys that have disastrous results. Of course, the feedback is biased by the individual’s role in providing the feedback. However, it’s also the reality of how they perceive the world. Guess what. This is a perception they’re already sharing with others. Whether you agree or not, you must have that information to make future decisions.

Less favorable information allows those leaders to course-correct before situations spiral into a place where options are limited due to executive frustrations. This is the exception. For the most part, favorable feedback has benefits for your team.

The survey DNA

The ultimate power of this survey is to elevate your team’s image. Using a business-partner survey can help get your team promoted.

To administer the survey correctly, it’s essential to understand how the template is laid out. The business-partner survey has four sections:

  1. Introduction
  2. Who’s being evaluated
  3. Specific questions
  4. Additional comments

The first section, the introduction, talks about why the business-partner survey is being conducted. Mainly, the goal in this section is to stress that this survey isn’t a corporate mandate. It’s being used as a measure to improve and elevate your team’s performance to the next level.

The second section, who’s being evaluated, deals with who’s in scope for the survey. This section covers the business departments units covered within the survey.

The third section outlines the specific questions being asked of the respondent. These questions are all in the form of yes/no. Intentionally, there’s no middle. There’s no scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being exceptional performance. The process uses a forced-choice methodology. Forced choice requires the respondent to answer (e.g., yes or no), which causes them to make clear decisions about each response option. (There’s an option of “N/A” if the leader is new or the question doesn’t apply to that individual.)

The fourth and last section covers additional comments. This is a free-form section to allow respondents to provide a narrative in their own words. This section is extremely powerful. Here’s where the respondent can offer up kudos for the leader’s hard work.

Survey question examples

You’re likely wondering what questions I include when I send out a business-partner survey. The focus isn’t on measuring net value but rather the behaviors of that individual leader that contribute to team, department, or organizational value.

Here are examples of questions about leaders with delivery accountability. Does the leader:

  1. Have a sense of urgency?
  2. Use good judgment when making decisions?
  3. Demonstrate respect for peers and colleagues?
  4. Welcome suggestions from team members when appropriate?

When you create your questions, make sure they relate to your leaders while being generic enough to identify general behaviors.

For example, you may have already identified many of the behaviors as team norms. If you haven’t identified team norms, check out my previous article, “Why team norms transform team dynamics.”

The power of words over metrics

Consider for a minute the following two situations. In the first situation, the leader achieved $5 million in costs avoided by implementing a complex, data-analytics, cross-functional initiative. The initiative was a wild success. In the second situation, the CEO heard about this accomplishment from multiple team executives and said the following during a departmental meeting: “Paul’s ability to unify the company was amazing. Through his leadership, his team saved the company $5 million. Please thank Paul during our ‘Bits, Bytes, and Beers’ social hour this Friday. The hard work of his team paid for our event!”

Both statements reflect on the same accomplishment. However, somehow, the spoken words of the CEO are far more powerful. This is the impact of kudos—expressing verbal praise for an achievement.

The additional-comments section allows respondents to offer feedback in their own words. There are five to eight blank lines. However, respondents usually either write a book or only provide a brief phrase.

The beauty of this design is that even if you don’t receive additional comments, you can leverage the questions as a statement. For example, “works with a sense of urgency”—referring to the Senior Director of IT Operations—would be an accurate and helpful quote taken directly from the canned questions.

The benefit of the business-partner survey is to empower your team. Of course, if corrective action is necessary, you also have a great tool to facilitate that conversation. You can provide context-specific examples of behavior heading in the right director or behavior that needs some adjustment.

If you’re leading a rock-star team, this single tool might be your best friend. The business-partner survey is an excellent method to document performance to build a business case for employee promotions.

Start today by taking simple steps to gather the information necessary to conduct a business-partner survey to empower your team. Give your team direct and timely feedback so they can soar!

Download the template

Business Partner Evaluation SurveyDownload

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 are available on Amazon and at http://www.datsciencecio.com/shop for author-signed copies!

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

Validate your mid-year goals to lock in success

Peter Nichol
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0
Validate your mid-year goals to lock in success

Do you have a plan to validate that you’ve met your mid-year objectives? Does your team have a plan to confirm that end-of-year objectives are on track for completion?

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

If you haven’t already subscribed to my newsletter, please check it out at newsletter.datasciencecio.com. This is where I provide custom content to subscribers for FREE.

Are you a business relationship manager trying to figure out how to define your role? You’re in luck. I’ve just designed a course titled, Define Your Role for BRM Success! In this course, you’ll learn how to define your role in the organization and maximize your effectiveness as a BRM.

The guideline for goal achievement

Today I’m going to get into how to make sure you align your mid-year objectives and have an approach to validate that you achieved those objectives.

Let’s start with a hierarchy of how these different parts relate and explore the relationship between objectives and goals. I want to introduce a new pneumonic:

Victory Means Giving Others Credit and Keeping Mild Manners

  1. V = Vision
  2. M = Mission
  3. G = Goals
  4. O = Objectives
  5. C = Critical success factors
  6. K = KPIs
  7. M = Metrics
  8. M = Measurements

I often recall this pneumonic, but I rarely remember the details if I don’t write it down. However, when I do write out, “Victory means giving others credit and keeping mild manners,” I find it’s much easier to remember the details.

Additionally, these concepts build on each other and are quasi sequential. It’s not that they can’t be performed in parallel, but each is usually envisioned as an output of the prior group.

Let’s explore briefly what each term means in more detail. Vision is a statement that describes the future position of a team, department, or company. Mission defines a team, department, or company’s purpose in reaching their goals. The goals are general guidelines that explain what your team, department, or company intends to achieve. Objectives are more specific and define strategies or the implementable steps required to attain the identified goals. Critical success factors are goals that are crucial for a team, department, or company to meet. KPIs (key performance indicators) is a method to measure value and evaluate how a team, department, or company is achieving key business objectives. Metrics differ from KPIs because metrics track the status of a specific business event, process, or outcome, and often calculate multiple measures. Measures or measurements are data points for a particular point in time and in context.

Using a pneumonic is helpful in recalling the details and understanding how these elements of performance fit together.

Validating that you achieved your goals

Think for a minute about what you achieved year to date. What products did your team introduce? How did your department grow and mature over the last quarter? As you recall the accomplishments within the previous six months, you’ll find your team probably achieved some excellent outcomes.

Now ask yourself if what your team achieved is genuinely connected to your objectives. How can you prove this? This is where things start to go off track with most leaders. They know they achieved solid results. However, they’re unclear on how to connect the results they achieved to objectives—and, more specifically, how to prove—beyond all doubt—that those objectives were successfully met.

As a result of coaching many leaders over the years, I developed what I call, “The Goal Plate.” This is a combination of five key elements that confirm that your goals were achieved beyond all doubt.

Elements of The Goal Plate:

  1. Objectives
  2. Goals
  3. Strategies
  4. Action plans and measures
  5. Validation of completion

This is a simple model that’s easy to communicate to leaders.

How does it work?

The process starts with the objectives you were given at the start of the year. However, often in many immature organizations, those goals are either nonexistent or incomplete. If you’re in that situation, take time to elaborate and define the objectives that align with your role. It might be helpful to reference my article on objectives and key results (OKRs) titled, “The system adopted by Intel for goals.”

Next, we add on our goals. These are usually a bulleted list of approaches or guidelines that you’ll use to achieve your objectives. These could be general behaviors that get your team, department, or company closer to achieving the objectives.

After we have our objectives defined and our goals established, we begin to document our strategies. During this step, we identify the specific methods for how we’ll enable our goals. These could be, for example, new initiatives to drive a particular outcome.

Action plans and measures define the specific steps we plan to take to realize our strategies. These are prescriptive and specific activities that we’ll perform to achieve the desired objective outcomes.

Lastly, we identify the validation of completion. In this step, we define yes/no questions that, if affirmed, validate that our activity was completed, links to our strategy, connects to our goals, and directly affects our objective being achieved.

The Goal Plate example

  • Objective
    • Continue to develop leaders that can drive and have accountability for delivery across the organization
  • Goals
    • Develop and mentor the team to become subject matter experts (SMEs) on the issues, defects, and project challenges for the business units that team members represent.
  • Strategies
    • Build a culture of PPM excellence, where portfolio, program, and project management are viewed as a business accelerator
    • Quantifiably improve the PPM maturity for the analytics and agile delivery team
    • Implement quarterly PM-demonstrated competency checks or maturity measures.
    • Develop a training approach to increase domain and channel knowledge systematically
    • Develop and communicate a transparent escalation model
    • Institute a model to collect and aggregate project status for empowered executive decision making
    • Provide new training opportunities for PMs; e.g., Smartsheet
  • Action plans and measures
    • Conduct quarterly demonstrated competency checks to evaluate the team using competencies and maturity measurements
    • Design and communicate resource backup coverage plan
    • Forecast and model program-manager utilization through year-end
    • Design and generate a weekly project-summaries document for leadership awareness
  • Validation of completion
    • “In progress” or “complete” (aligned with each action)

Download the templates here

The Goal Plate Template (PDF)Download
The-Goal Plate Example (PDF)Download
Job Performance Mid-Year Template (PDF)Download
Job Performance Mid-Year Example (PDF)Download

Hopefully, this article provided some insights into how you can confirm and validate that you have achieved your mid-year goals.

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 are available on Amazon and at http://www.datsciencecio.com/shop for author signed copies!

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

Navigating the BRM role in a world of squad, chapters, and tribe leaders

Peter Nichol
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0
Navigating the BRM role in a world of squad, chapters, and tribe leaders

Is your organization racing toward agile? Are you a BRM that’s confused about what your role is?

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

I’m going to help clarify why you don’t have a role today and how to get one for tomorrow.

Let’s begin by discussing each of the different leadership roles for squads, chapters, and tribes. First, we’re going to talk about a squad leader, a chapter leader, and a tribe leader. And then we’ll briefly get into where the business relationship manager (BRM) role fits in.

If you haven’t already subscribed to my newsletter, please check it out at newsletter.datasciencecio.com. This is where I provide custom content to subscribers for FREE.

Are you a business leader trying to figure out how to define your role? You’re in luck. I’ve just designed a course titled, Define Your Role for BRM Success! In this course, you’ll learn how to define your role in the organization and maximize your effectiveness as a BRM.

The squad leader

Let’s get into the role of the squad leader. This role is primarily tactical. These leaders typically have six to 12 members in their squad. They aren’t a line manager. Therefore, squad leaders don’t have direct reports. There are no resources that hard-line into the role of squad leader.

However, this role is accountable for coaching, maturity, and mentoring the squad.

The squad leader is accountable for ensuring the squad achieves its desired goals. This role frequently deals with management reporting. This may include publishing weekly or monthly reports to improve transparency around squad performance.

What does the squad leader do?

  • Team leader
  • Unit leader
  • Not a boss for the team
  • Plans work
  • Focuses on tactical elements
  • Collaborates with product owners
  • An orchestrator of work execution
  • Builds and designs cohesive teams
  • Isn’t a functional line manager
  • Works to have the squad function as a single productive unit
  • Coaches and mentors the team
  • Reports progress to tribe leaders
  • Provides input on team members to chapter leaders
  • Leads without pushing controlling behaviors
  • Great for developing a leader

The chapter leader

The chapter leader is a similar role to that of a traditional line manager. However, this role combines both a tactical focus and a strategic element.

This role does have direct reporting hard-lined into it. A chapter leader is an expert in both a domain area and in the management of people. For example, a chapter of architects would be led by the architecture chapter leader. This leader would have years of experience performing the architecture role and multiple years as a leader or architect manager in traditional organizations. Likewise, a project management chapter leader may lead project managers and business analysts. Again, this leader would have prior experience as an analyst or project manager in addition to conventional resource management (managing directs) experience.

The chapter leader manages less than seven directs with typically less than 30 people under them, including all organizational layers.

What does the chapter leader do?

  • Line leader
  • Not day-to-day oversights (squads do that)
  • Focuses on building the right capabilities of the squad
  • Enables the right tools
  • Makes sure the squad has the skills required
  • Focuses on building value-creation opportunities
  • Reports on multiple squads to the tribe leader
  • Focuses on tactical and strategic elements
  • Gathers feedback from tribe members to evaluates performance
  • Assigns the right resources to agile squads
  • Designed around specific competencies; e.g., testing, project management, or sales
  • Assigns the right people to the squads
  • Ensures squads have balanced competencies
  • Drives near-term priorities and objectives

The tribe leader

The tribe leader’s role is strategic.

Typically, the tribe leader has less than 100 people in their area of responsibility. Their focus is on being a mini CEO or mini CIO for that area. They’re trying to optimize value creation and understand what outcomes the business partners are expecting. Tribe leaders help to ensure that business partners’ needs are being met. They’re looking at a longer-term horizon, a strategic vision.

What does the tribe leader do?

  • Acts as a mini CEO or mini CIO
  • Think general manager type of role
  • Focuses on value creation
  • Concentrates on driving growth
  • Consistently considers how to serve their business partners better
  • Requires leadership and strategic understanding
  • Requires a cross-functional mindset
  • Necessitates a profit-and-loss viewpoint
  • Doesn’t own people
  • Accountable for squad and tribe performance
  • Makes informed business decisions
  • Manages to goals and objectives
  • Sets priorities

Where does the BRM role fit?

With the mental framework of squad, chapter, and tribe leaders defined, we now can get into the meat of where the BRM role fits into accelerating agile methodologies.

Squad leader (tactical)

The squad leader is a tactical role. This role aligns with a tactical BRM. Typically, this is an associate director role. This role is also viewed as consultative.

Chapter leader (connector)

The chapter leader is a tactical and strategic role. This role aligns with a connector BRM. Typically, this is a director-level role. This role is considered a key advisor.

Tribe leader (orchestrator)

The tribe leader is a strategic role. This role aligns with a strategic BRM role or an orchestrator type of role. Often, this is a senior director role. This role is valued as a strategic advisor.

As a BRM, by default, you don’t have a seat at an agile leadership table. That’s unfortunate. It’s also the reality. Anyone that says different simply isn’t living these concepts in a corporate environment.

However, this also presents a massive opportunity for BRMs. First, you must define your role. You also must define your role before an agile leader defines you as redundant. Second, you have to take control. How does your role integrate with agile? Where do you add value? As a BRM, it’s imperative that you address these critical questions.

Unsure where to start? Begin with my course titled, Define Your Role for BRM Success! This course gives you the tools to define your BRM role in terms that organizations understand and allows them to play nice with agile. Stop wasting time guessing. Start listening to answers that you can apply to your organization tomorrow!

How do I start?

Begin by identifying principles that the methodology promotes. Don’t just copy another organization’s process. The “lift-and-shift” method rarely works when introducing an existing methodology into a new company. In almost all cases, some elements can be reused, but rarely in the exact form. So instead, identify core principles (autonomy, trust, community, transparency, self-management, etc.) and think through the process to discover what’s best for your organization.

Hopefully, you’ve gained insights into how squad leadership, chapter leadership, and tribe leadership align with conventional BRM roles!

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 are available on Amazon and at http://www.datsciencecio.com/shop for author-signed copies!

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

Scaling agile with squads, chapters, tribes and guilds

Peter Nichol
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0
Scaling agile with squads, chapters, tribes and guilds

Are your teams starting to double down with agile? Are they focusing on new concepts like squad, tribe, chapter, and guild? Is it a little bit confusing trying to understand how those concepts relate to conventional frameworks like Scrum and SAFe when these methodologies don’t use those types of terminology, especially in their training?

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

Today, we’re going to dive into those specifics and provide some answers. But first, let’s get a better understanding of why agile teams evolved as the focus of higher performance and improved quality.

Smaller teams generate better throughput

If we look at Francis Bacon in the 1620s and his invention of the scientific method, his focus was on identifying opportunities and trying to capitalize on what works and discard what doesn’t. He embraced the simple idea of “fail fast” or “fail quickly.” If it worked, he leveraged it; if it didn’t, he discarded it and quickly moved on.

Fast forward to the 1930s. Walter Shewhart, a physicist and statistician, developed the Plan-Do-Check-Act while working at Bell Labs. He designed this model after hyper-focusing on lean optimization and continuous improvement concentrated in the manufacturing space. His approach, in concept, was similar to Bacon’s. Shewhart was experimenting with what worked and optimizing the model by removing the waste activities that weren’t value-added.

In 1986, Hirotaka Takeuchi and his coauthor, Ikujiro Nonaka, published an HBR article titled, “The New Product Development Game.” The article bought attention to the fact that smaller teams were producing better results than larger teams. Fuji-Xerox applied these techniques in its copier production lines. Cannon took a similar approach to produce cameras. Even Honda implemented these techniques in manufacturing when designing and building engines.

Takeuchi discovered that smaller teams had more effective output. They had higher throughput and more consistent throughput levels than their counterparts running larger groups in competing organizations. In contrast to conventional thinking at the time, more control and greater top-down authority decreased productivity.

Give me the short version

A squad is a group of cross-functional team members. Multiple squads roll into a tribe. Chapters are groups with similar competencies. All squad members are part of a chapter. Guilds represent themes or communities of interest that anyone can freely join.

What’s a squad?

So, what’s a squad? A squad is similar to a Scrum or an Agile Team in SAFe.

The squad is made up of between six to 12 members. Each member is an expert in their field. They work autonomously, and they’re self-motivated. No one’s telling the squad what to do. They already know. They’re working to burn down a backlog list and leveraging Kanban principles to manage work-in-progress (WIP). The team has a product owner, squad leader, and agile coach assigned. But remember, there’s no official management oversight of this squad (no one identifies as a boss).

Facts about squads:

  • Primary working unit
  • Self-organizing and autonomous
  • End-to-end accountability for delivery
  • Sit together
  • Six to 12 members
  • Similar to a mini startup

What’s a chapter?

Chapters are focused on the individual group and the development of that group with team members that share similar competencies.

Chapters ensure that squads are made up of the right people. In addition, they address missing or weak competencies and identify the abilities necessary to optimize squad productivity.

The line manager is part of the chapter. Typically, the line manager is also the chapter leader. So, for example, if a team member wants Friday off, they don’t go to their squad leader. Instead, the team member would ask their chapter leader.

Usually, team members are farmed out to squads from Monday through Thursday. On Friday, the team members return to their chapters. Within the chapter team, members share practices and lessons learned. Frequently, chapters are designed with similar functions. As a result, there might be a chapter of architects or a branch of business analysts.

Additionally, because chapter team members have similar roles and expertise, we find centers of excellence within the chapter. So, for example, we might have a Business Analyst Center of Excellence within a chapter, or there could be a Project Management Center of Excellence.

Facts about chapters:

  • A group of members with similar competencies
  • Where personnel development and training take place
  • Talent is assessed
  • Centers of excellence live here
  • Usually, team member performance is assessed by a combination of the chapter leader and the product owner
  • Team members work here on Fridays

What’s a tribe?

This brings up the concept of a tribe. Typically, multiple squads roll into a single tribe. Usually, eight to 14 squads make up a tribe. A tribe usually has less than 100 members. Tribes are also grouped around logical or similar areas; e.g., business domains or product domains. For example, if Squad A was focused on back-end development, and Squad B was focused on front-end development, there could be a tribe that made up a holistic view of that product ecosystem (front-end and back-end delivery).

Facts about tribes:

  • Tribes support squads
  • A collection of squads that work on related areas to solve a specific business problem
  • Team members work here Monday through Thursday
  • Made up of less than 100 members
  • Built by combining eight to 14 squads
  • Tribe leader provides the right environment

What’s a guild?

Guilds are cross-functional common areas or communities of interest. Unlike centers of excellence, guilds don’t bring together only team members with the same competencies. For example, they’re not all architects. Maybe somebody is a developer, business leader, or even a sales representative. Instead, guilds are a cross-pollination of different roles with a similar interest; e.g., customer enablement, data transformation, or agile delivery.

Facts about guilds:

  • An interest group that anyone can join
  • Purpose of sharing knowledge, code, or practices
  • Guilds can be formed any time when there are enough people
  • Frequently, a coordinator is assigned to the guild to improve efficiency
  • Often led by a strong domain expert

How do you get there?

By now, you’re likely thinking, how do I get involved in building the capabilities of squads, tribes, chapters, and guilds today?

First, you need to develop a flat hierarchy. The way this works is you must empower those squad teams to make decisions. They also must have authority to make decisions. This requires leaders to delegate authority, at some point, or those decisions will be revisited wasting precious time.

Second, make sure you allow team members enough room to operate. Your job as a leader is to remove the bureaucratic obstacles that slow squad efficiency. For example, if you still require weekly status reports (on top of Sprint summaries), you haven’t allowed your teams to make their own decisions and work autonomously.

Lastly, the organization needs to support this type of methodology. It’s great to promote concepts of grandeur or idealism. Still, the reality is, if the organization doesn’t have a cultural mindset to work independently and autonomously, you’re ultimately not going to be effective.

Empower your teams. Give them the authority to make decisions and allow them to work autonomously. Make these simple changes, and you’ll start building a productive squad, tribe, chapter, and guild.

If you found this article helpful, that’s great! Check out my books, Think Lead Disrupt and Leading with Value. They were published early in 2021 and are available on Amazon and at http://www.datsciencecio.com/shop for author-signed copies! Hi, I’m Peter Nichol, Data Science CIO. Have a great day!

The disruptive idea low-code platforms

Peter Nichol
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0
The disruptive idea low-code platforms

Are you trying to get another 10% out of your development team? When it comes down to the wire, is development always taking the longest time to deliver? Today, I’m going to provide insights into how to get over that organizational obstacle.

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

One of the most significant changes in information technology is in development. Over the last decade, we’ve experienced a pivot in what’s included in corporate development teams, the state of development performance, and many questions around the future of development.

Is IT development going offshore? Will tomorrow’s development teams be comprised of hybrid and onshore models? What’s the future of development? Do we even need developers anymore?

Here’s my take on these questions. Yes, progressing companies will require in-house developers to build and expand on organizational core competencies. However, new development models are emerging in the corporate world.

We won’t be talking about the onshore, near-shore, far-shore, or off-shore models of yesteryear. Instead, IT development models need to account for changing business demands. Most specifically, conventional development time can’t be cut by 10%. Rather, it has to be chopped by 50% or 70%. That’s what’s required to keep up with the dynamic business environment of today. Technology leaders understand this, and they’re responding and changing the composition of their teams.

New IT development models need to respond faster and specifically anticipate changing business demands while the traditional costs of large development teams need to fade into the sunset.

Leaders are looking to no-code, low-code, and full-code as the future. So, let’s get into it.

As I walk through these models, consider applications in your environment today. Which applications might be more conducive to low-code versus full-code? How can you optimize your development teams to squeeze out that 10% or 50% of efficiency that’s required? What if you limit your power developers and bring up potential developers through a no-code or low-code model? It might just work and save you millions.

Let’s being with no-code. This type of technology typically consists of mainly drag-and-drop functionality. This basic functionality is leveraged for reporting or elementary transactional systems that citizen-developers can drive. You don’t need full-fledged developers to drive low-code solutions.

Here are a few solutions you can consider when exploring no-code development environments:

  • Adalo
  • Visual LANSA
  • GeneXus
  • Zoho Creator
  • Appy Pie
  • AppSheet
  • Airtable
  • Visual LANSA
  • GeneXus
  • Zoho Creator

Immediately, applications like Abby Pie, AppSheet, or Airtable come to mind.

However, if you require functionality to support a bit more complexity, we enter the low-code environment. In this environment, you may have more complicated database calls. In addition, there may be multiple integrations that don’t lend themselves so well to drag-and-drop functionality (ActionDesk, Parabola, Flow, IFTT, Zapier).

In the low-code space, there are numerous options to explore:

  • WordPress
  • Appian
  • Boomi
  • Creatio
  • GoodBarber
  • Mendix
  • Microsoft Power Fx
  • Oracle Application Express

I think of companies like Mendix, Appian, or even WordPress that are a little more plug-and-play. The benefit of low-code is you begin to have a more capable interface for drag-and-drop functionality. You also have access to include custom code, call APIs, and more complex database calls into your deployed applications.

Last, we have full-code environments. When deciding to adopt a full-code model, you want precise flexibility. You must architect a system for a given purpose. Your designs don’t support template-based architectures but are fit-for-purpose solutions that are generally viewed as highly capable—otherwise known as complex.

Typically, these applications are designed for high availability (HA) or deal with big data sets. These systems are usually highly transactional in nature and support high throughput and significant transactions per second.

There are loads of great examples of full-code environments. These languages are commonly complex and can support very prescriptive coding to address very narrow business cases:

  • JavaScript
  • Python
  • C/C++
  • JAVA
  • R Language
  • Kotlin
  • C#
  • PHP
  • Go
  • Scala

Traditional full-code environments that come to mind include Java, Python, or C++. Each of these is a full-fledged programming language.

Do you genuinely require all your developers to be full-code capable? Is there another option to segment your team’s capabilities and align them to departmental or organizational needs?

What would your future-state architecture look like if your model supported no-code, low-code, and full-code development environments? Not every business unit requires custom applications. Many are satisfied with accurate reports that are developed and published promptly.

Here are questions to consider:

  • Where is our future-state architecture headed?
  • How many full-code developers do we require on staff?
  • Which organizational needs can be met with no-code or low-code capabilities?
  • What percentage of developers are full-code?

Suppose your technology capabilities have only been focusing on full-code environments. In that case, you might be able to pull and grow some internal resources into the low-code or no-code areas to optimize outcomes. These are just a few ideas to think about as you consider your development team.

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 are available on Amazon and at http://www.datsciencecio.com/shop for author-signed copies!

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

A dynamic collaboration model for introducing change that sticks

Peter Nichol
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0
A dynamic collaboration model for introducing change that sticks

Have you ever joined a meeting only to find that a new initiative was being launched that you had no idea about? Have you ever been on a conference call—curious to hear about the next steps of the project—only to find it had pivoted 180 degrees and was now rushing off in a new direction?

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

Today, I’ll provide some insights into and how to get ahead of some of these challenges. As our teams have transitioned from working almost entirely on-site—with some remote access—to working almost entirely remotely, the number of micro-interactions have decreased. As a result, teams are feeling disconnected from their members and their organizations. They’re often not involved early in initiatives but, instead, informed quite late in the process.

Our challenge, as executives, is to make sure we present and introduce new ideas and opportunities to our teams and organizations early. We need their input and engagement in order to be successful. We want leaders and team members to feel connected, feel they had a chance to contribute, and believe their voice was heard.

A model has been developed to tackle these questions:

  • How do you introduce a new concept to an organization?
  • How will that change affect your teams?
  • How do you build a community of support to help advance and accelerate organizational adoption?
  • So how do you meet deadlines when communication organizationally is a slow process?
  • How do we drive positive tactics to encourage outcomes?
  • Can we validate that our teams have effectively socialized the idea?

Over the last several years as a business relationships executive, I generated a model called, “ONE Team,” also known as, the “Collaboration Model.” Essentially, this model helps focus on the critical elements of socialization that we often overlook as leaders.

The collaboration model has five steps:

  1. Exploration
  2. Socialization
  3. Agreement
  4. Adoption
  5. Expansion

The first step, exploration, is all about creativity and thinking about the possibilities. After that, it’s about identifying the idea and determining feasibility—is it sustainable?

The second step, socialization, is focused on making sure that people are on board with the idea. It’s the process of communicating, sharing, and presenting the idea to others. It’s the exercise of socializing and getting people to understand where you’re going and what’s behind your intent (and is less focused on what you’re going to be doing). Finally, it’s shopping the idea around for input.

The third step is agreement. This means getting people to accept the definition of the problem statement, the solution, and how you’ll approach the opportunity.

The fourth step is adoption. Once you reach an agreement, the idea starts to get traction, and it’s necessary to share it with the organization. At this point, the idea was explored, socialized, agreed to, and rolled out to realize the desired outcomes. It’s ultimately about propagating the concept throughout the organization. This is the process of implementation.

The fifth step is expansion. This step is about evangelizing the idea and sharing the concept throughout other areas of the organization. The theory has been proven to be viable. The desired outcomes—post-implementation—are being realized. It’s now time to share the idea with other areas of the organization. This is where the benefits can be multiplied or duplicated.

The Collaboration Model brings teams together.

This model helps your leadership team get ahead of the challenges and opportunities that affect all leaders as they start to drive and introduce new ideas. Is there is an area other than communications where you spend the most time? Do you spend time buried in production defects? Is your time spent in meetings discussing IT technical debt? Most likely, no. You spend the most time communicating to others the concepts that were deployed or in-flight today or planned for tomorrow. This model solves that problem. It creates a departmental standard for early communication of ideas and broad initiatives that will impact your teams.

One method for presenting this model is to communicate who’s going to be involved at each step. This helps team members know that you’ll be reaching out to them for input. Likewise, this also clarifies that you won’t involve the world in the “exploration phase,” when you don’t even know if the idea will work. Finally, tagging who’s affected by name and including date ranges for each step helps remove assumptions and clarify expectations.

Nobody likes to change, but today’s reality is that change is everywhere. It’s injected into our shifting job roles. Change manifests in how we respond to environmental factors and stimulants. Change is a reality that we must embrace. Moreover, for leaders to have a 10x impact, change needs to occur and behavior modifications need to happen rather quickly across an organization.

You might find yourself recalling Kotter’s change-management model, McKinsey’s 7-S change-management model, or maybe even Lewin’s change-management model. They all offer interesting perspectives, but none is simple enough to be foundational for introducing new initiatives into a department.

We, as leaders, will continue to introduce more and more change into the environments that we’re transforming. Applying the Collaboration Model is one simple process that will help ease people into adopting and changing some of their values, beliefs, and behaviors.

If we introduce change early in the process, the probability of adoption is greater, and the results are better. You’ll no longer join that zoom meeting only to find that a new initiative that impacts your team goes live in a week. Why? You were aware of the change months prior because the team used the Collaboration Model for all new initiatives.

As you become educated on the change, you better understand its purpose, who’s involved, and what’s behind the objectives. The result is that you’re less concerned about the specific details—the milestones and dates—because you were involved from the beginning.

Hopefully, you now have a better idea of how to ensure that your team is tightly connected when launching new, complicated change initiatives throughout your organization. Use the Collaboration Model, and save time communicating by communicating early.

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 are available on Amazon and at http://www.datsciencecio.com/shop for author-signed copies!

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

MLOps moves into production environments for pipeline automation

Peter Nichol
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0
MLOps moves into production environments for pipeline automation

A new and exciting area is machine-learning operations or MLOps. Today, we’re going to get into how to start and evaluate your machine-learning operations environment.

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

What is ModelOps?

One of the fascinating aspects of data science is understanding models. Usually, we begin with model operations or ModelOps. ModelOps includes everything that’s required to orchestrate your AI pipeline. A traditional definition of ModelOps might be the lifecycle management of all AI and decision models (including models based on machine learning, knowledge graphs, rules, optimization, linguistics, and agents). ModelOps is the foundation of many data-science environments.

MLOps or machine-learning operations is a subset of ModelOps. MLOps involves models that are trained using data. These models don’t simply replicate or duplicate human actions. They can learn based on outcomes and data loaded or digested into the model. Mature machine-learning operations have to do with the encapsulation and monitoring of those different areas. Essentially, MLOps holds the technical requirements required to keep our models up and running.

Feeding and caring for MLOps

MLOps isn’t explicit. This creates a challenge when we’re trying to deal with models—especially machine-learning models—as they’re not a simple business rules engine. These models have implied inferences that evolve. The data learns on its own. This leads to one of the biggest challenges—model degradation. The models can become highly inaccurate quickly when not properly maintained, especially if there’s an unplanned pivot in the environmental situation. A good example was the Coronavirus. Imagine a ModelOps environment that was creating forecasts in February 2020, and imagine the models it forecasted for March 2020. These didn’t have the same level of quality in terms of accuracy.

Machine-learning models can lose their predictive efficacy quite rapidly.

Here’s one more example. Let’s say we built a machine-learning model and operationalized it using ModelOps and MLOps. Our model was created for the travel industry. The model took into account factors such as airplane reservations, room, and board and built a package based on target demographics, location, and some other geographic factors. All this information was used to develop custom-priced packages with optimal price points. As soon as the Coronavirus wave spanned the country, our model almost immediately became valueless. Consider for a minute how quickly this model became useless. Almost overnight, that model turned out to be grossly inaccurate and, as a result, it probably didn’t help promote the growth it was intended to promote.

Models must be continually tuned and adapted to new conditions. Where does this tuning, maintenance, and upkeep responsibility live? It’s possible ModelOps lives under the CIO. Assuming the CIO owns AI architects and other types of business architects, this might be a logical place of ownership.

Where does MLOps live within the organization?

ModelOps could also live under a CTO. Many CTOs already have accountability for compliance and internal targets that lend themselves well to owning ModelOps.

Lastly, ModelOps might be most at home being nested under the Chief Data Officer’s responsibilities. It’s logical that ModelOps and MLOps are part of larger and more complex organizational digital transformations. These digital transformations also cover cloud-first and move-to-the-cloud initiatives that help to orchestrate new technical pipelines.

How do you get started with MLOps?

As you start thinking about how to apply improved MLOps operational efficiencies in your organization, allow me to provide a few pieces of insight:

  1. Define a common vision – The team needs to understand where the flagpole is located.
  2. Establish a leader –You must find a leader who understands how to lead.
  3. Identify candidate models for experimentation – Choose models that your team has defined that exhibit the highest degree of future potential.
  4. Define the operational requirements – Have a shared definition of what MLOps is and where it will live within your organization.
  5. Create visualizations (dashboards) – Make benefits tangible by evangelizing the benefits with a dashboard or visualization that allows people to understand where you are in the lifecycle of delivery and realization of that value for your MLOps initiative.
  6. Create a learning process – None of this stuff works perfectly the first time. You must provide feedback loops for learning and for the team to evolve.

It’s vital throughout the process to collaborate and work cross-functionally to engage individuals and groups that might not be technical but can provide insights based on their domain expertise.

Hopefully, you found the insights on ModelOps and MLOps useful and the discussion helped to add some clarity to a typically grey area of operational excellence.

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 are available on Amazon and at http://www.datsciencecio.com/shop for author-signed copies!

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

Explaining the buzz around non-fungible tokens

Peter Nichol
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0
Explaining the buzz around non-fungible tokens

If you’ve been online and surfing around some of the tech news, you’ve inevitably heard of NFTs. Today I’m going to explain what NFTs are, give some common examples of why they’re interesting, and approach the topic from a technology as well as a consumer perspective.

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

NFTs stands for non-fungible tokens—digital, blockchain tokens representing a physical or digital asset. Let’s get into what fungible means because that gets to the heart of NFTs. First, we’ll review what fungible and non-fungible are all about.

Fungible means that something can be replaced. Fungible things might include dollar bills, common shares, options, gold, oil, #2 yellow corn, etc. Fungibility, in this context, means that #2 yellow corn, regardless of where it’s sold, has roughly the same intrinsic value. Inversely, non-fungible implies that the object or thing in question is unique, not replaceable, or non-interchangeable. Great examples of non-fungible goods include art, baseball cards, real estate, etc. In each case, these things aren’t directly replaceable with something that’s exactly the same. However, they can be replaced with something similar, as in the case of oceanfront property. They also might hold a similar type of total cumulative value, as in the case of two old but “excellent” condition baseball cards. But, ultimately, a particular piece of land is the only piece of land in that spot with its specific attributes.

As we ponder the potential of non-fungible tokens, we realize there’s a clear benefit when you have something that’s non-fungible, unique, or non-interchangeable. Once in the form of a digital token, these items are permanently stored and recorded as proof of ownership.

We can observe the dynamics of fungibility from two differing perspectives—the seller and the buyer.

This model works well from a seller’s perspective when selling something unique and challenging to monetize. For example, we came up with a great idea for organizing our to-do lists using an AI algorithm that we developed. How would we monetize this idea? We might even have a working prototype. Squeezing out financial value from this remarkable idea will be very challenging. However, this is an excellent use case for building an NFT and selling this on a marketplace as a token. This would be one approach to monetizing the idea for investment purposes.

From a buyer’s perspective, we also have benefits. First, we have the classic benefits of supporting the original authors of assets; e.g., music, art, and ideas. Second, there are the advantages of clearly defined usage rights that often accompany the asset. Additionally, you have the right to sell or transfer as a seller, and you have immutable proof of ownership.

As you explore the use, utility, and benefits of NFTs, you should now be empowered to understand NFTs, the benefits of fungibility, and how these tokens are being leveraged to capture potential value.

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 are available on Amazon and at http://www.datsciencecio.com/shop for author-signed copies!

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

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