I’ve worked around corporate IT systems for most of my adult life and what follows is a common, if slightly embellished, history of how organisations get into a mess:

• We had a need for a system to do X.
• Another team had a need to do Y. The managers of team X and Y are in different parts of the organisation that don’t like to collaborate.
• Despite the lack of collaboration we decided that we needed some of the information from Y in X. We built another system, Z to move some of the data between them.
• Y didn’t work very well so we built A, but never decommissioned Y. We had already added some customers to Y and it is always difficult to move customers. One customer who uses Y is particularly difficult.
• People liked to use A so we added some customers to it, but different customers from the ones that use Y.
• Another team in another part of the organisation build B. We then discovered that B was similar to Y but worked differently, so we built C to make them work together in a similar way to Z.
• We then got a new leader who had worked with D in their previous organisation and have spent the last year trying to get D to work like Y, with data from X, A and B. We needed another system, E, to move the data between D and Y as an interim solution while we did the development.
• The leader who was a fan of D has since left the organisation and everyone is unsure of its future. The technical people the leader recruited from their previous organisation have also left to join them at their new venture.
• The team that built Y has since been allocated to other work so no-one in the team knows how it works anymore. We need Y to work, because the difficult customer is still using it.
• We’ve recently experienced problems where we’ve been getting inconsistent results from some of these systems and it’s becoming embarrassing with our customer.
• Given these recent issue there’s a strong tendency for action hanging over everyone and the prefer actions is to add something. “Perhaps we need system F?” says someone “I’ve used it before and it was brilliant.”
• The reality is, though, system D will do everything every team needs and D is already being paid for, but moving everyone over to it will take work. It’s going to be particularly difficult to move the long-term middle managers over who are heavily invested in X, Y, and Z. Each team is convinced that what they do, and how they do it, is unique and vital to the running of the business.
• No one really knows how A, B and C work and are scared of touching them, fearing a catastrophic breakage. That fear includes a fear of shutting them down.
• Another challenge is going to be moving the customers away from Y and A, what’s in it for them? There’s also that difficult customer to worry about.
• Perhaps adding in F isn’t such a bad idea after all?

One addition has lead to another. The result has created further complication and even more technical debt.

There were plans to remove some of the technology, but they were never achieved. The whole thing has become like that tangled box of cables you have stored away somewhere.

I’ve seen the same thing with processes with particularly experience of review processes. The story is almost identical to the above:

• Review A spawns review B and C.
• Review B and C spawn reviews D, E, F, G and H.
• Review H spawns review I and J.

Each of these reviews takes an hour and 5 people (if you are fortunate) – the burden of a simple review is 50 hours without preparation time.

There’s always going to be a noisy middle manager who insists on having their own review meeting and it’s not always easy to resist these demands, but giving in to them has a very high cost.

Before you know it people are spending more time reviewing things than creating things, particularly the poor people presenting.

It is hard to remove in these situations, but the results are way better than adding “system F”. You know that taking everything out of that cable box and throwing half of it in the recycling is a much better answer than trying to wheedle out the one cable that you are looking for. You know that shutting down the spawned reviews is a much better answer than keeping them going and frustrating everyone.

Adding “system F” might feel like a better answer, but it’s a bit like eating another cookie to help you feel better about being unfit.

Header Image: This is St. Mary’s Church, Longsleddale looking down the dale on a recent spring morning.

This post portrays a fiction, a caricature. I have never worked in this organisation, but I have seen parts of it in many organisations.

There’s a much-used management saying that often get mis-attributed to Peter Drucker: “What gets measured get managed” it also exists in the negative form “What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get managed.”

This is a mantra bouncing around inside the head of millions of people and today it will be regurgitated in hundreds of thousands of meetings.

Somewhere in the world, right now, there is a team of people meeting together who have been given a problem to solve and one of their first tasks will be to get the data together.

“How often has this happened?”

“Who has this problem?”

“What is the evidence for this problem?”

Somewhere else a team will be trying to work out how they complete a task, run an operation, define a service level, design a sales campaign, or any one of a thousand scenarios. In each of them somewhere conscious and subconscious will be the phrase “What doesn’t get measured doesn’t get managed.”

To many this is known as the understanding phase, or the problem definition phase, sometimes it’s known as the fact-finding phase. In this time of chaos people need information to help them to make decisions and take actions.

This is where it can all start to go a bit wonky. Somewhere in the mind of one of the meeting participants is another phrase “How are we going to measure success?” This question is followed by an equally wonky question “What are we going to report to the management?”

These two thoughts coalesce together into another thought “We need a metric.”

Not “some metrics”, not “a balanced scorecard”, not “metrics and observations”. That’s all too complicated for “the management”, they are too important and too busy to cope with anything fuzzy or squishy, they need a metric.

Once the team has a metric they can create dashboards, draw charts, create RAG (Red, Amber, Green) status charts. They can show that all of the effort is producing results because the metric says it is. The team is a success because you can’t argue with the metric.

The team looks around to see what the metric could be. Measuring overall business value is too difficult, too abstract, but there is a metric that can be used. This metric is easy to collect from the systems available and doesn’t require any complicated analysis. If the team focuses on this metric then it’s “guaranteed” to increase the value to the business, isn’t it?

And thus the task is set: the metric will be communicated, a dashboard will be built, the metric will be reported, the metric will be reviewed, the metric will be served. There will be consequences if the metric doesn’t go in the right direction.

Unfortunately, no-one in the team has given any consideration to the law of unintended consequences. The metric has been chosen without any consideration towards the people factors involved in the metric.

The communication of the metric begins “Reducing/increasing the metric is our highest priority.” The organisation has been set a new focus and the new focus will be served.

People’s focus switches to the metric and away from all other metrics. One unintended, but inevitable, consequence of an increase in focus on one area is a decrease in focus on all other areas.

Middle managers suspect that this will be another one of those short-lived initiatives so look at ways in which they can influence the metric without doing too much work. As they analyse the metric they realise that there are several factors involved in its composition.

These middle managers are wily operators who’ve seen this show before, they know that there are things that they can do to manipulate the metric.

They instruct their staff to enter details onto the system early/late so that the next collection of the metric is higher/lower.

They look through the list of things that are included in the metric and reclassify work into/out-of the metric.

They split/join records in the systems so that the metric is again higher/lower.

They start to record some records in an excel spreadsheet away from the corporate system to serve the metric.

They shift their focus away from the big things that only influence the metric a small amount onto the little things that influence it a lot.

They move staff away from work that doesn’t influence the metric and onto metric changing activities.

These middle managers are careful though, they don’t use all these measures from the beginning. They know that the metric and how it is shown on the dashboard will need to continue to change. It’s not enough for the metric to change once, it needs to change every week/month/quarter. The dashboard needs to move from red to amber to green. It can’t suddenly go green no-one will believe that. They sandbag some of their manipulations for the next iteration of the metric.

Steadily the metric begins to move. Everyone involved waves their hands in the air and cheers the success.

The team is seen as a huge success and is moved onto another project/problem/etc. where they again analyse the problem, define a new metric, and develop a new dashboard. No one visits the old dashboard anymore. The senior managers cancel the review meetings for the original metric, it’s still collected but it’s ignored. Everyone’s attention has moved to the new metric, the new dashboard and the new meetings.

Only a few people notice the irony of the attention given to the original metric being the cause of the new problem and the need for the new metric. The new metric, again, ignores the human aspects.

Beware of the metric – cave de metrico.

Header Image: This is a view of the Vatnajokull Glacier as it flows out toward the south of the island. (No, I don’t know how to say that word.)

I have worked with many different organisations, mostly businesses, in many different sectors.

In that time, I have noticed this general rule: businesses think at the pace of their product life cycle, in everything.

Where this applies to me is the knowledge that there isn’t a pace at which organisations think about their IT, organisation think at their pace a pace that is set by their product life cycle.

I first noticed this when I switched projects between two organisations in two completely different sectors. The first organisation was a utility engineering organisation where the product life cycles could be measured in the decades, the second an advertising and marketing organisation where they were launching products all the time and campaigns might only last a few days. One was purposeful and methodical in its adoption of IT and consumption of change, some would say, slow. The other was all about action with quick fire decisions made every day, and the worst thing you could do was not act.

I’ve since observed different organisations in different arenas and found this rule to be generally true (with some exceptions of course).

Manufacturing organisations where the life cycle of the product is 20+ years think at a similar pace to financial services organisations that focus on long life cycle products like pensions.

Consumer insurance companies can be launching new products all the time and think at a similar pace to a consumer technology organisation.

Deep in the back office of these organisation you have the corporate IT team, which itself has a desired life cycle and a desired pace. There is some flexibility in that pace, but there are huge external forces defining the minimum pace. Security compliance demands a rate of patching and updates. Technology vendors demand a pace of upgrades to retain supportability, and profitability. The currency of skills also plays a significant part.

The person stuck in the middle of these mismatched paces is the IT manager who needs to think at two paces. They are a bit like a drummer trying to make music while playing one tempo in their left hand and another one in their right.

The current transformation around AI is, again, highlighting this dilemma.

I am sure there are IT managers in long life cycle organisations who are head down avoiding the bright young things in their own team who want to transform their company by adding AI here or by sprinkling an agent there. Meanwhile, in these more methodical organisations, the IT manager is trying to work out how to get spare parts for the 1980s manufacturing systems that keep the organisation solvent. Or they are trying to work out how much longer they will have the skills available to maintain the pensions application last updated in 1999. Over in the faster-paced organisation the IT manager is trying to work out how they get all of those bright young things to talk to each other and stop the costs ballooning.

This IT manager is the same one who thought they had managed to ride out the same pressures from everyone wanting them to move at the pace of the cloud.

The life cycle correlation is often strongest in organisations where the IT department report to the VP for Finance, so perhaps it’s Finance that sets the pace?

(It’s also worth noting that both the fast-paced and more slow-paced organisations both have a problem with technical debt. One struggles to make decisions fast enough to keep up, the other struggles to give attention to decommissioning things.)

Personally, the lesson here is one of expectation. I set my expectations on pace by the life cycle of the customer product. Expecting a slow-moving, methodical organisation to make decisions fast is a road to frustration. Expecting the fast-paced organisations to consider their decisions leads to a different frustration. Sometimes I am wonderfully surprised, I’d rather be surprised than frustrated.

Header Image: We are in snowdrop season as the first signs of spring start to show. These are on the grounds of a local historic house which is now owned by the local community.

How busy are you? Was your immediate response “too busy”? You aren’t the only one.

Many of us know that frustrating feeling of being asked about an action in a meeting only to realise that we haven’t made any progress because we’ve been in back-to-back meetings since the action was given to us. Why didn’t we make progress on the action? Because we didn’t have any margin.

If we don’t even have margin to complete our actions then how are we going to start new things, more interesting, more fulfilling things.

There’s a relationship here with my previous post Irreplaceable = Unpromotable | Working Principles.

Organisations are littered with activity that is no longer required, things that are being done because they’ve always been done, business that is consuming our margin to do that special something.

When was the last time you looked through your daily activities and asked yourself – why? Why am I doing this? If I stopped doing it would anyone notice, would anything break? If I don’t attend this meeting, will it make a difference to the outcome?

I have occasionally run little experiments where I have quietly stopped doing things. In most of these experiments my lack of activity went entirely unnoticed. A big part of my workday is taken up with meetings and it turns out that there are many meetings that run just fine without me.

If we don’t even bother asking ourselves why we do things when was the last time you contemplated these questions? Is there a better way of doing this? How does Jane/John do this so much quicker than I do? Where can I learn from others? What can I do to simplify and automate this activity?

Remaining curious is a wonderful thing and another great way of ceasing activity, but we need margin to even start to answer these questions.

Another question we should be asking ourselves is, what is all this activity costing? I’m primarily talking here about the missed opportunities. Yes, there’s a cost in the churn of time, but there’s a much bigger and far more significant cost when we consider the things we didn’t do.

What if we had attended that training rather than attend that meeting?

What if we had worked through that difficult problem rather than respond to those 200 emails?

What if we had ignored all those chats and instead taken a walk at lunchtime?

There are all sorts of complex reasons why we don’t do this, it’s not easy. Life is full of competing “what if’s.” What if I don’t attend that meeting and something vital happens? What if I don’t respond to those emails and miss one that is crucial? What if I ignore those chats and one of them is from my boss needing my urgent help? There’s a potential cost to stopping, but there’s already a cost to continuing.

We need to create and guard the margins, the best way to create margin is to stop doing things, but that’s just the first step. Having eked out a margin, we need to protect it. Sadly, not many of us work in organisations where they manage our margin for us, we are going to have to be the watchkeepers of our time and attention.

For me there are a few ways that I try to master my margin. The first way I do it is to use the tools available to me and define Focus Time in Outlook. This is one of those areas where a little bit of AI helps in the form of Viva Insights and the Focus Plan. Rather than booking the same time every day which is impractical for most of us, using Viva Insights my Focus Time is created in the slots without prearranged meetings. The Focus Time is booked with notifications turned off and my status set to “Do not disturb.” There are some people who I need to respond to if they reach-out, so they are defined as “priority contacts.” They know that if they really want me to respond they’ll have to mark the message as urgent.

The other thing that I do is to make sure that my priority list for the day starts with the high-value item that I want to do in my Focus Time. There’s a mental note there that the highest priority is in the highest value, not in the meetings, the messages or the emails.

Even with Focus Time defined I still need to protect my margin from myself. It can be a temptation to regard Focus Time as a great time to go through my inbox which is highly unlikely to result in anything of true value. The curse of urgency over importance.

Another important part of guarding my margin is my morning walk, a time when I try to focus on being present. Margin is as much about mental state than anything else.

Some people have more freedom and flexibility than others. Some people are better at this kind of self-organisation than others. We each need to find our own way but if we don’t create margin we generating huge missed opportunity costs.

Header Image: A recent frosty morning walk sunrise.

A version of this has happened to me multiple times in my career:

I get chosen as the technical person on a new project.

This new project is seeking to do something that’s never been done before in my organisation, and I start the project by researching the new topic and develop a plan. I love getting to know something new with all its intricacies and foibles.

The project is hard work but is successful and soon I’ve become known as the expert for this new capability.

Within a short while I’m receiving emails and teams chats from all around the organisation asking for my help. People are contacting me from every layer of the organisation and if I’m honest I love the notoriety.

It doesn’t take long for me to become the “go-to” person. In extreme cases I’m taking my work phone with me on holiday just-in-case I’m needed.

“Get Graham on a call I’m sure he’ll know what to do.”

“Graham, can we get 5 minutes of your time to work through this issue.”

All the while I’m becoming ever more proficient and seeing all sorts of opportunities for the new capability. I’m also seeing other areas where I could apply what I’ve learnt to really benefit the organisation.

It’s time, though, for others to start picking up some of the responsibility. I can’t be the only person in the organisation who knows how things work. I look around and realise that I’ve not invested enough in the skills of other members of the team, and they aren’t picking up their responsibilities. I’ve let the notoriety get to my head and tried to be the person who answers everyone’s questions and now I’m the only one that anyone asks.

Organisations love to build dependency and I’ve let myself become the one on whom that dependency has been built.

I see a project that I think would be a great next step so talk to my boss about a shift. They say, “Well Graham I think, for now, you are irreplaceable. on this capability.”

It’s then that some of my Dad’s advice comes to me: “If you are irreplaceable you are also unpromotable.”

How have a I let this happen again, haven’t I learnt from last time?

There is a lot in the human psyche that seeks out adulation, notoriety and the approval of others. There’s also something deep in many of us that means we want to do a good job. I’m not saying that’s any of that is bad, what I am pointing out is that these feelings come with a trap. Lean too much in and we become hemmed in. By becoming the “go-to” person we risk being stuck as that person.

Most of the time recognising the position that I’ve put myself in and making a few adjustments has been all that I’ve needed to do. There have, however, been times when I’ve needed to make more drastic shifts just to be able to get out from under the constraint of dependency.

If you are struggling to make a move perhaps it’s because you are too valuable in your current position. If you think you are irreplaceable, then remember that you are also unpromotable.

Header Image: We’ve had a little winter recently and it’s been great to get out into the calm and cold. This is the view across Grasmere from Loughrigg Terrace.

I’ve been writing the Working Principles posts for a little while now and really enjoyed the process.

Different ones have received different levels of engagement, with most of them provoking a response from someone. Thank you for the time you spend reading and responding.

If you’ve not seen all of them here’s a little bit of a Top Ten on the basis of the number of views for each post:

Repeat after me: “Meetings are work” | Working Principles

In which I wrestle a bit with an inner tension to regard work as the things that happen outside of meetings and a tendency to regard meetings as somehow not work.

We are wired for story | Working principles

We live in a world of data, but it’s not data that moves us it’s story that does that.

Optimise the System | Working Principles

There are many point-solutions to make individual parts of our working life more productive that result in little or no impact overall. We only get true change when we look at the whole system.

Complain to the Empowered, Complain with your Power | Working Principles

Few people complain effectively because people tend to complain to the wrong person. We should spend more time working out who has the power to change a situation.

“Expensive” is a definition of value not cost | Working Principles

When someone says something is expensive our tendency is to try to work out how to make it cheaper when we should really be trying to communicate the value.

Watch out for the autonomy thieves | Working Principles

People who take the initiative are highly valuable and yet much of what we do strips away peoples ability to take the next step.

Resist the urge for action | Working Principles

The need for action is a strong force and often takes us nowhere. By taking some time to consider we can often get to a better conclusion in less time.

We need to feel the urgency | Working Principles

Without a stimulus things don’t get done. In a busy world we need to feel an urgency.

You can hear a smile (and a frown) | Working Principles

Even if people can’t see you, they can hear your demeanour. People who smile project that smile in their voice, people who frown likewise.

“Just” can be an extremely expensive word | Working Principles

“Just” is a bit of a trigger word for me. Rarely is something “just” anything, behind the four letters lurk all sorts of trapdoors.

Notable Favourites

This list is missing some posts that I expected to be in the Top 10 viewed and as this is my blog I’m going to add them in here as my recommendation of ones you should look at:

• Be a Good Customer | Working Principles
• Deployment is just the first step – Adoption takes longer | Working Principles
• Questions are Powerful | Working Principles

I’ve still got plenty of Working Principles idea, some of which will be coming soon.

Header Image: The bracken is brown and the wind is chill. This is the view from above Watendlath looking down onto the hamlet and tarn from the Dock Tarn path on an early autumnal day. To the right is High Seat, in the distance is Skiddaw.