I have created this table to remind when work performance “whatever” is mentioned:
Work Performance, data, reports, information
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Abilene paradox
In the modern corporate world, sometimes this happens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abilene_paradox
Stop this type of situation is key, and someone has to be “the adult” on the call.
Kaspersky cybermap
Nice visual way to analyze the situation of malware, vulnerabilities, web virus, spam, botnet activities…
Interesting, at the time I’m checking the data the list of countries with more attacks are:
- Vietnam
- Russia
- India
- Germany
- USA.
The Performance-Values Matrix
I need to remind this picture from time to time and send to other people, so we can work and talk about the values we want to build on the team.
The actions in the different cases are simple:
- Incompetent Assholes (Fire Fast)
- Competent Assholes (Remediate or Separate)
- Incompetent Nice Guys (Manage (train, coach) or Move)
- Competent and Outstanding Nice Guys (Praise and Raise)
Other statement to remind:
“The actual company values, as opposed to the nice-sounding values, are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.”
From mess to an organized environment
The work on organizations can be sometimes a completely mess.
I’m working on an initiative to turn this “mess” into a more organized and efficient delivery.
The basic approach we are following is:
- To have a clear, complete and detailed organizational chart.
- Understand what are the governance rules defined by contract with the customer.
- Define role and responsibilities for the different players (using a RACI).
- Communicate the roles, expectations and a defined reporting templates.
- Promote escalations on specific conflicts that could arise, work on these aspects and refine the RACI.
- Prioritize the focus on the major, critical hurdles.
- Work always on practical scenarios, avoid just to define theory.
- Lead by example.
- Promote ITIL, PMI, Six Sigma best practices.
- Repeat the process again and again.
After 1 month of work, results start to show green signals, but we are still RED 🙁
Fintonic, FinScore
I have discovered this page after digging into other concepts.
The story goes like this. The banks in Spain classifies the customer with respect your FinScore, that goes from 0 to 900.
Fintonic helps you to understand your Finscore and understand how it fits into the market, and it offers you specific products aligned with your possibilities.
It’s free, well, you have to show-up your finance profile to obtain the right score, so they know how you are in terms of finance conditions.
The other point I do not like is that to work on it, they ask your access credentials to obtain data from your bank. I’m sorry but at this minute this does not work to me.
https://www.fintonic.com/app/landing/home.do
VRoom’s Expectancy theory
Expectancy theory proposes an individual will behave or act in a certain way because they are motivated to select a specific behavior over other behaviors due to what they expect the result of that selected behavior will be.
Expectancy theory has three components:
- Expectancy: effort → performance (E→P)
- Instrumentality: performance → outcome (P→O)
- Valence: V(R) outcome → reward
Motivational Force (MF) = Expectancy x Instrumentality x Valence
“If I work hard and do well, I will be rewarded with something I find valuable”
Bike-a-thon Bridge to the Beach, 2017
Last year we did the ride from Philadelphia to Atlantic City, this year we repeated.
The weather this time was better and we completed the distance at 13.30. We stopped a lot and we were talking to so much people during the whole journey.
So when we arrived to Atlantic City, we were in better shape than last year.
(Start line in the Benjamin Franklin bridge at 6.50)
Thinking, Fast and Slow
After have read The Undoing Project I was investigating about some of the books published by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Finally I found this Thinking, Fast and Slow.
This psychology essay goes chapter by chapter decomposing the different ways the mind works, doing it in plain English. Chapters are short and concentrated on an specific aspect and contains very good experiments that helps you to understand the human behavior.
I see so many of the things on myself and I see so many of these behaviors reflected on people when I see TV advertisement, when I see people on a supermarket, when I read newspaper, etc.
SWAT or Rapid Response Team
I’m engaged on a team where rapid interventions are required to fulfill a specific goal.
Basically these interventions are set when an escalation comes from senior customer stakeholder or there are signals of contract breach.
The typical cycle of these interventions are composed by a 12 weeks interventions, with weekly reports to the project sponsor and escalation points with different relevant people of the organization. After the 12 weeks the intervention is evaluated and if extra time is required other period of intervention is prepared with new goals.
Project charter is the formal vehicle used to obtain the formal approval and authorization to work on these activities. If not, I continue working on my account delivery activities of my formal customer.
The initial stage is to analyze the situation (2 weeks), determine short term and medium term goals. Once done, chase the completion of these goals during the next 10 weeks.
Chase, escalate and get the things done is the more time consuming tasks. They are also the ones that consumes more energy: from the existing team, and from myself.
During the analysis is important to gather as much relevant data as possible, contrast the data and turn these facts into indications or root causes of a detected issue. It’s important to contrast the findings and get a common consensus of what happens.
I’m using a mind map tool to enable a visual representation of the root cause vs the proposed short term actions. This helps to senior managers to quickly understand the situation.
Conflicts will arise as soon as special pain points of relevant decisions are touched. In any case, the only goal is to fix the short term action and forget about what happened in the past. The goal of the SWAT team is not to perform a forensic analysis, it’s to fix the issues.