Mountain observations

Sitting on a mountain in the summer sun reading my email and scanning what is happening in the world, is the perfect place for collecting some thoughts and commenting with a “high altitude” view on things that bother me. If you think I’m over simplifying, just blame it on the lack of oxygen!

Crises, what crises?

The advantage of irregularly reading a newspaper and not being bombarded by the internet newswires every five minutes is that you see trends more easily. And my conclusion is: the crises is over! We are talking about downfall stop and even growth again. The number of vacancies, certainly in IT seem to grow even during the traditional slow summer season and (smaller) takeovers in our industry are starting to emerge. But…. Europe is discussing widely about raising the retirement age to 67 and even 69, states and counties are broke and unemployment indicators are still battling a steep uphill race. From my philosophical mountain view I ponder that we will be riding an economic roller coaster with fast changing local highs and lows depending upon your boarding scheme. Agility will be the name of the game to survive.

Prince idiocracy

The universal insurance policy for IT projects seems to be Prince. If your project managers use this holy grail, nothing can go wrong. At least this seems to be the way since no IT vacancy is published without a reference or key demand for this administrative approach. Wake up: this is bloody nonsense! There are good and bad project managers. The bad ones document and measure for arguments sake; the good ones to be able to pro-actively steer the project. A Prince certificate does not make the difference, smart management does. In my old days the insurance premium was called System Development Methodology (SDM) and is likely that the tomorrow one will be a Six Sigma variant. I personally vote for a methodology called KISS Keep It Simple Studid)…

The ultimate universal KPI

There is a general lack of decision making capability. Killing a project, licensing a piece of software, firing a non-performing resource, investing in an idea, hiring somebody that will force a change: there are thousand reasons not to decide upon it but instead think, analyze, contemplate further upon it until the window of opportunity is closed. Somebody said that the sole purpose of a manager is not to take a risk, hence not to take any decisions. Over the last few months I have seen too many occasions whereby this cynical statement proved right. Since as I like business based KPI’s, this can be easily changed if we were to give any manager just one KPI: the number of binary (a documented yes or no and thus no stalling, delaying or whatever other measure) business decisions taken per day. A good starting point would be to aim for one decision per hour. The quality of the individual decision would be irrelevant: over time the results will be obvious to boss, board or shareholders.

Is it the mountain air or a heat stroke? Please let me know about your “elevated” ideas.

Results2Match has a strong vision on successful business strategies and result driven implementations.

This blog is written by Hans van Nes. Hans is a very experienced interim manager and (radical) change management consultant. You can contact Hans through his Results2Match email address.
Hans.van.nes@results2match.com