Wednesday, September 04, 2002

FAST COMPANY has always been a favorite read (once they rid the mag of all that yoga-in-business crap). "Microsoft Eats The Dog Food" (September 2002, pg 46) caught my attention for a number of reasons. Let me cover TOPIC ONE, which really resonates in the markets we are working today. Chris Capossela, General Manager for Microsoft Project, acknowledges that projects are highly unstructured business practices that have massive collaborative aspects. Adding onto that statement, he asks for software that mimics the key practice issues surrounding successfully (read; cost and impact) managed projects. I would offer that the software framework that he speaks of would support the structured nature of work breakdown structures, but also optimize the massively unstructured human interactions around the execution of said tasks. But there is more. Time for a Little Known Groove Networks Fact: When we were originally setting our sights on the enterprise market, we devoted a large portion of our attention to supply chain collaboration. It was obvious to us that supply chain processes were largely transactional in nature, where there was little opportunity to impact the actual cost-of-transaction. But there was a dirty little secret that none of the trades talked about.  It was in early 2000, during a meeting with the CEO of a net market, that it was revealed that 50% of all netmarket transactions kicked out into some form of exception handling. Credit letters wouldn't come in, or, downstream suppliers couldn't produce the final SKU in time. Razor thin margins on penny transactions did not mesh well with $100 exception conditions. Offering a historical perspective on the netmarkets is a futile task at this point, but this notion of exception handling drives home yet another key point of the "project management as collaboration" argument. Which brings me to TOPIC TWO: Capossela also acknowledges much of the same notion when it comes to projects, in that most projects derail when faced with unanticipated exception conditions. He offers the basic fact that a project team must understand the issues that CAN derail a project well before the issue occurs. Add to that a game plan that provides an ability to act. These are human practices and ones that only human interaction can address. He seals the deal when he is quoted as saying, "Managing small problems could be the centerpiece of managing a project well." Again, a laser focus on humans handling exceptions and deviations rather than discrete, fixed, predictable, structured, task items. Let's face it, we all run our businesses through many, many project teams doing their stuff and praying that it all comes together. MS Project is the killer application for the structured aspects, but collaborative frameworks like Groove provide the best chance at managing the unanticipated exception conditions. Fusing the two environments together provides perhaps yet another killer app for the enterprise. This fusion reinforces another core tenet we have: Success in the enterprise should be measured on human accomplishment, not activity (thank you Chuck Teubner and Kappa Group). Real business leaders recognize that task completion (unstructured, human execution), and appropriate collaboration frameworks that help them get there, has a greater impact than merely measuring time-spent-in-task. This is the stuff that drives excellence in execution and innovation.  8:52:15 PM