Managing Information Technology Meetup - Kirkland, WA - 6/20/2017 - Recap Notes and Podcast Prep

In attendance were: Richard Schurman (Attorney), Mark Mitchell (CFO), Eric Veal (Technologist), Richard Webb (Technologist), Dominic Wong (Management Exec), Steve Kubacki (Psychologist and Inventor), Kifaya Dawud (Marketer)

RW talked about “Business Stacks”.

RW talked about how good the Amazon TPM (Technical Program Manager) role is:

They own the architecture, PM role and tech

They have clear scope

They are organized to work together

They are measured objectively and fairly: difference between TPM doing poorly themselves (as a leader/worker) and the thing they are producing failing

Example TPM role: there is a person who is responsible for running “events” for Amazon (like father’s day).  Mark: Walmart did this as well with stores in Texas with stuff like Cinco de Mayo.

Amazon TPM rollup structure:

TPM

Regional TPM

Top TPM – meets with Bezos

Same role with widening scope that aggregates

Communication flows up and down this TPM chain

Tools for organizing management:

- Mark: adaQuest has a way to communicate strategy throughout the org

- Also ManageHub - Eric and Mark to further look into ManageHub for organizational uses for process improvement with Doug Hall

CRM Systems

Are they important?  Eric says they are central but there is an issue of adoption and data capture, data quality and people playing games with their data like hiding it strategically.

Examples of modern integration frameworks: Zapier, IFTTT, etc. for integration vs. old tools and people that integrated systems.  "We don't do it like we used to.  It's all as a service now." - EV

RW coined that these types of integration utilities are “(Hardware and Printer) Drivers at a different level”.  Totally agree, very interesting.

Drivers are hard to write because they break if either end changes, which prevent scale.

RW had some funny commentary about SOAP and REST and why one didn't work and other did: "SOAP didn’t work because programmers are dirty.  REST worked because programmers are lazy."  Microservices architecture becoming a big deal.

Eric had a recent VR experience with HTC Valve simulating “in the office” where he made coffee, 3D printed things and ate a donut.  Very amazing stuff.  Changes your mind and belief of what's possible.

Current “dialogs” and programs are too linear in their current form and are too project/product-oriented (developers need to finish and can't guild the lily, just want the basics to get done). 

Eric's vision of the world of the web now (as different from APQC + Process Triggers 10+ years ago):  There are "Listeners" (the people gathering the data with instrumentation and telemetry) + they provide or sell WebHooks to others who + People that write services that hand off of the events.

EV had a question, “Can we teach computers how to HARD SELL and effectively CLOSE a person on a big transaction while the person knows it is happening?”

We seemed to agree that we could and that it was actively happening now.

RS said that it depended on how the information is presented and when.

Richard gave examples of Blue Apron knowing if he read an email from them or not (by tracking a pixel).

Mark said that Google know if you walked into Nordstrom (location services on).  This is clearly very powerful for very many marketing-related things.

Companies every day are designing and running campaigns that work against (with/for) people’s weaknesses, predilections and interests.  Insidious from one perspective, genius, smart, intelligent and useful from another.

Excellent sales processes happen all the time in games (in app purchases), etc.

This can get into some edge / unethical realms if there is blackmail, for example. Open issue/question:  What's a person's recourse against these systems?

Richard talked about how Americans respond best to English and Australian accents, so they are used a lot in advertising to us.

We talked about humans training computers (other-learning) vs. computers training themselves (self-learning).  Humans can also train humans and computers can train humans and humans can train themselves.  Lots of vicious loops and cycles here.

We wondered, "What are the limitations of IT today?"

Richard said, "We have to get rid of the I.T. and make it “we” (make it work for us)

Eric and Richard talked about Enterprise Architecture, strategy and a recent HBR article on data strategy which talked about Offensive and Defensive uses for data.

Steve Kubacki showed up and was entertaining as usual.  Steve, “How many project managers does it take to screw in a lightbulb?  It depends on the location of the lightbulb?”  Har-de-har-har but also fairly insightful and true in my opinion; everyone is or should be a PM.

SK when talking about Virtual Reality applications and Andrew Sengul's work with Scenario Tech, "You want people to come forward with their own imagery."

LISP.  Andrew Sengul and Ben Sidelinger are both working on modern applications using the LISP language now.  What's up with that?  List of JavaScript LISP implementations.

We had a discussion about the design/experience of video games being way too open or way too closed/structured and cited examples.

Eric talked about a future computer design where there is immediate feedback between the writing of code and the existence of the application (run time and design time).  "Real time run time."  You heard it here, folks!

SK had many great quotes:

“The Theory of Totality”.  Everything is incomplete.  Goedel. 

SK: Can a corporation have empathy?

SK: “A corporation “has a” sociopath.” (as a property) pretty funny

SK: “We are fundamentally social creatures.  Self-interest is directed by the social interests.”

SK: “Brownian motion” how things aggregate

Eric made the point to Steve at some point about different types of grouping: Aggregation (requires a common interface of the members) vs. Composition groupings (no commonality required, they are simple assembled and joined...but could be very well designed to work together systematically like a car has many parts).

Steve made some great points about how we need to intentionally design and implement systems that decentralize.  Such a great point and such an interesting area.

Someone said that IT Development has been declining over the last 20.  I guess this was something Eric Schmidt of Google has said.

Steve says that we are seeing an increase of democratization within the workplace which sounds like a really good thing to me.

Eric made the point that "ownership" (of the work ie things were fully delegated) was previously delegated to the VPs (for example, the APQC model would probably recommend that someone owns each area and are responsible for throughput and continuous improvement of it) and is now delegated to actual and real units of business (products and projects).  This is the TPM role and how this power has shifted/is shifting from functions and processes to products, which is generally great for innovation, for example.

Steve shared more ideas about how different the culture will be on Mars: it is an un-earth-based culture.  Totally different than anything we have ever known?

Richard Schurman talked about some book tech and mentioned Scrivner, 

Kifaya showed up, too.  Thanks for coming, Kifaya!

Developing and Managing Human Capital - Notes from the May 23, 2017 AppsJack Business Services Meetup in Kirkland, WA

"Human Capital" was the topic to be discussed.  It was a sunny late-May afternoon and I headed down to Big Fish Grill to have the discussion with about 10 others who had gathered.  Unlike the normal gathering, we were given a smaller table, which in the end wound up being a little better: cozier and easier to hear people.  We never broke into smaller groups and had a good dialog with a big group.

At first it was just me, leadership coach Alan Andersen and coach Susan Stringer.  I had never met Susan before and was immediately impressed by her grace, experience and knowledge.  She has a great present and is a very fun conversationalist.  Eventually, more arrived and we kicked off the discussion about "Developing and Managing Human Capital", the first support process in APQC's process classification framework.  The first thing that was made clear is we all agreed that the CAPITAL word in human capital is evil, wrong, etc.  Richard Webb suggested that thinking of people as money is no worst than thinking of them as slaves.  There was agreement on this point.

In search of a starting point, I rattled off the APQC's subtopics:

• Develop and manage HR planning, policies and strategies
• Recruit, source and select employees
• Develop and counsel employees
• Reward and retain employees
• Redeploy and retire employees
• Manage employee information

I told people that I was personally most interested in the "Manage Employee Information" area, where I had the most experience.  It's subtopics are as follows: Manage reporting processes (who reports to whom), Manage employee inquiry process (how management gets info from employees), Manage and maintain employee data, Manage human resource information systems (HRIS), Develop and manage employee metrics, Develop and manage time and attendance systems (we agreed this was an optional step for some places), Manage employee communication.

No one seemed to bite on the above high-level concepts so I started rattling off the discussion topics that we'd covered over the last year: good books we'd read about HR and people-management, alternatives to the resume and is the resume dead, how to get a great job, how to get maximum wages sustainably, what are the current trends and issues, problems in HR management, what does the modern worker like, what do they expect and need, what is the future of employment, what will technology do to HR and management with tools like LinkedIn and CrystalKnows?  Before I could get too far down the list, people locked on the resume topic and we were off on our first big topic.

The resume, truth, recruiting and qualification

Susan gave us some great and interesting facts about millennials in the workforce: that 50% of the workforce will be millennials by 2020 and 75% of the workforce by 2025.  Incredible statistics.  Susan is doing a presentation soon on millennials in the workforce that I will plan to attend.  She is a student of the topic.  I raised issues about complexity dealing with individuals vs. working with people in populations.  Working with 'classes' and things in groups is far easier than but as humans we seem very reluctant to exclusively deal with things in groups and need to give the attention that people and organizations need at an individual level.  

Richard said that the age of authenticity is what's next and was seeking a term for millennials.  I suggested that they were Generation M to keep it simple then we laughed about sequence issues.

We talked about predictive analytics and the power of organizations like Facebook and LinkedIn to predict events from data such as divorce with very high confidence.  Data is a very powerful thing.  

  

I suggested that the resume is just one signal in the collection (stack) of things necessary to understand and work with a person professionally.  Other signals include online profiles like LinkedIn, social media presence, reference checks and the interview.  We didn't believe that the resume would be going away and generrally believed that i was a gateway and door-opener to other aspects of the person.

Susan impressed us with some of her experiences doing hiring at the executive level and gave examples of people she had vetted by requesting 12 references from them: 3 supervisors, 3 peers, 3 suppliers and 3 others.  This sounded very rigorous to me but I could appreciate just how important getting this information really is for some high-risk, high-reward opportunities.

Susan shared that she asks these questions to the candidate, "How would your former managers describe you?" and to the former managers, "How would you describe your former employee?"  They are very open questions and she would listen for incongruity between the stories.  She said she had been referred to by some in the past as "the female version of Columbo", the TV show detective.  What an amazing skill to go this deeply into someone's background not make sure they are who they say they are.

Talent

We got off on a discussion about the quality of leaders and the leadership and it was stated that only A players can hire A players.  Richard told us stories about the Drugstore.com days (joint-venture between Microsoft, Walmart, and some India companies) and how complex and different those cultures were and how they used a 'bus' to communicate effectively.  Another aspect of that collaboration that worked well was to pass information through a key resource they called the seamstress (it was a man) who would bridge the gap and coordinate between the three different teams.  

Books

We talked a little about books here and there and Andrew Sengul regaled us with stories from Aaron Hurst and The Purpose Economy.  The book says that people can be broken up into three categories: those motivated by money, prestige/fame or a deep personal commitment.  The book suggests to only hire the people with deep personal commitment.  Andrew cited quite a few examples of how it is hard to manage and create organizations of these kinds of individuals.

Alan and Susan both highly recommended the book Leadership and Self-Deception.  Alan believes that everyone is a leader (at least sometimes) and they have to start by leading themselves.  

Corruption

Richard is obsessed with the idea that things and people are corrupt.  He believes and here was agreement in the group that one thing we are trying to do with all of these systems and controls in businesses is to weed out corruption, corrupt people and takers.  Richard says that there is a worthy goal to "instrument corruption" (develop systems that can measure and detect corruption at all levels).  Andrew jumped in and offered that experts at corruption really are good at it: that low-grade corruption is easy to detect and that some people really are grade A snakes.  

Steve Kubacki showed up a bit late (but I had already referenced a couple of his ideas) and we talked more about his idea of random firings to weed out corruption and sick cultures.  

Steve says that more of this needs to happen at the top of the organization than the bottom.  Susan said that, "A good leader assesses the talent and weeds out the tenured people."  So her theory is that this can be done by good people but I agree with Steve in some ways that this needs to be done by policy and not just by people (heroes).  We went into a discussion about CEO and he Board and how those two things should work together for control and regulation of the organization.  

Richard wanted to know how to test for integrity.  Everyone agreed that business and corporations really was a battle or war and that more people need to understand that situation.  We went into a discussion about the role of the HR department (few liked it) and Susan gave us examples of HR departments that provided coaching through the "HR Business Partner" who coached the manager of the group.  I have personally witnessed limitations of this model, especially when the management is not ready for coaching.  

"Balancing the bottom line and people" is a big topic that Susan thinks is a key challenge for organizations.  

We went off on a long rabbit trail tangent about sociopaths and predators (evil people) who are ladder climbers.  We tried to separate between those who are sick, ambitious and charismatic.  There is a desire by people to detect and weed these people out.

We talked about the authoritarian personality and how many people are okay with it (even seek it out) and like to live inside of authoritarian structures because they are given something from daddy.  

Conclusions and Next Steps

We had a great turnout.  It was me, leadership coach Alan Andersen, executive coach Susan Stringer, technology architect Richard Webb, professional services pro Lee Carter, delivery operations pro Dena Carter, operations manager Dominic Wong, business owner Thomas Mercer, business leader Thomas Mercer, software product developer Andrew Sengul and creative psychologist Steve Kubacki.

Please join us soon for Episode 8 of the AppsJack Capable Communities Podcast on the HR/Human Capital topic which will feature consulting business owner Aftab Farooqi, coach Rachel Alexandria, psychologist Steven Kubacki, executive and consultant Joe OKonek and professional services sales director Lee Carter.  We will record on Saturday 6/10 and the conversations will be dripped to the major podcast outlets each Sunday morning during June and early July. 

Our next topic for the meetup and podcast will be managing information technology, a topic near and dear to my heart and another key enabler to business.

Managing External Relationships - The Skill of Balancing Clear Contracts With Open, Long-Term Communications

Open door policy or....

staying well protected....

or...well, like many things...it depends.

Business leaders from the Seattle area and I gathered in Kirkland on Tuesday, November 22nd to talk about the "Managing External Relationships" category of the APQC's Process Classification Framework.  At the event were me (Eric Veal, Owner of AppsJack Corporation); Berry Zimmerman, Owner of BizEnrich; Richard Schurman, an Intellectual Property Attorney; Andy Scott, a Fortune 10 Executive; and Christian Harris, owner of a media and real estate business.  Richard and Andy were first time attendees and it was a pleasure to have them there.

Earlier in the month, AppsJack released its first podcast episode about the same topic.  On that podcast Leo Lam, Scott Davis, James Tuff and I talked about the issue in depth.  More information on the podcast can be found at http://appsjackcorp.blogspot.com/p/podcast.html.  After the podcast I was left with a big question: "But what about compensation?  If we were to further understood and analyze the various forms of compensation, would we have a clearer answer about the nature of managing external relationships?"

We talked about a multitude of issues within the category and I noted the following ideas:

• Andy shared that he prefers contracts to be "open".  Flexibility is a necessary part of business relationships.  Being overly controlling, not so much.
• Berry shared with us some wonderful models that he has built and promotes:
• The 7 Stakeholders (in priority order):
• Employees
• Customers
• Owners
• Suppliers
• Community
• Competitors
• Government 
• The 3 Assets
• Relational (At the core)
• Enrichment
• Financial
• More information about these models can be seen on Berry's Gifted Referrals website.
• Andy has a list of 104 items that he has compiled and he could see how these items in many cases bit into the frameworks that Berry has built.
• We talked about differences between improving-something-exising and building-something-new.  The Six Sigma process has Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control (DMAIC) for improving-something-existing and Design for Six Sigma for building-something-new.
• Andy made a good comment that the Japanese are good at continuous improvement but not necessarily quantum leaps.  There is an opportunity to smoothly and reasonably lead quantum leaps (big changes).
• Someone told me that I should come up with a list of Guiding Principles to help me serve as the core of all of my contracts and business dealings.  Sounds fun.  Here's a first start:
• Be fair
• Choose relationships
• Quality over quantity
• Level up
• Choose experience
• We talked about the correspondence between compensation and identity.  For example, how someone compensates (makes promises) in business is very closely related to who the other party perceives they are.  Compensation is both the offered, promised, and actual value given, therefore it is a pretty loaded term.  Performance is the gap between perceived delivery on compensation (value) promises and what is actually delivered.  This is also known as quality.  There is a very close association between quality and performance.
• When contracting, quality and performance very much need to be defined through good requirements.  Bodies of work abound about writing and managing requirements.
• We talked a lot about negotiations.  It used to be about "winning" negotiations, and then it became about "win-win".  This is how I learned it at UW in 2005.  We now believe there is "continuous win-win" or process-oriented selling.
• Berry liked the ideas of "invested" and "vested" and for employees to have skin in the game to encourage better performance.  But I would suggest that there is a class of worker that just works and has no skin in the game.  It might be best to always manage employees to have skin in the game...if only a little...because it makes work more fun and interesting and motivating.
• Someone mentioned Daniel S. Peña, who I had never heard of.  Sounds like quite an eccentric fellow.

The next podcast recording is Sunday, Dec 4th at 2 PM and the next open meetup is on Tuesday, December 20th at 4 PM.

November is about Managing your External Relationships: Don't get it wrong

The November AppsJack Business Conversation is about Managing External Relationships.  Start thinking about how this area affects your life and business.  In October, the topic was Risk, Compliance, and Resiliency (RCR).  On Tuesday, I met with Dave, Corey, Todd, and Thomas and we discussed RCR over food and drinks.  The December topic is Develop and Manage Business Capabilities and then in January we return to our Operating Processes, starting with Developing Vision and Strategy.

Like the other 12 business practice areas, Managing External Relationships is a fascinating and important topic to me.  APQC says that this practice area is about managing relationships and communications for your: Investors, Government, Industry, Board of Directors, Advisors, Friends and Family and your Public Relations program.  I totally agree.  And I think there are a lot of other stakeholders to consider as well such as employees.  The real question is: what is external, and what is internal?

Internal relationships are those with your trusted advisors and core teams whereas external communications are with all others.  As leaders we must be very strategic and intentional about our external relationships.

I find this area to be quite similar to Stakeholder Management and Communication Management in PMBOK.

Here are some thoughts from me on the various areas in the case of my business:

Investors.  I don't have those yet but would like to get them.

Government.  Sigh.  Those guys.  City, State, Feds.  Not fun but you have to keep up with them.  You need a plan and practice to comply with, communicate with and pay these folks.

Industry.  In my case I am in the tech and business services industries.  I do my meetup to keep up with the industry and I read a lot to keep up with tech.

Boards.  My board of directors is currently non-existent.

Friends and family.  This is more of a personal comment.  I know in my life, I have to continue to focus on this topic to find balance, help, support and value.

Your customers.  What's more important than those who pay you?

Your employees.  What's more important than those who supply your customers?

Your suppliers.  What's more important than those who supply you?

Other stakeholders.  Who else do you need to consider?

PR Program.  The public relations program is the plan I said above.

Some questions to consider this month.  Please feel free to write in with your thoughts:

• What 
• do you find 
• interesting / challenging 
• about this managing external relationships?  
• else 
• do you see 
• as part of this area?  
• questions or issues 
• come up for you
• about this topic? 
• help
• do you need or want
• with this topic?

• How 
• do you 
• practice this area?
• does this area affect 
• your business? 
• your workday?
• your life?

How do you manage and think about your external relationships?

Two resources for managing your time more effectively

Lately, I've been struggling in my thinking about time management.  I think with the summer upon me and pulls from friends and family to get out, have fun, etc. it's been a tough finding enough time for some things that do indeed matter.  The question I've been asking myself is:

With the resources and tools I currently possess, and with the notion of "trying to keep it simple" in mind, how do I A) do business development and grow in my career B) be physically active and C) deal with the rest of life?  

I asked a new associate for some help in this area and he recommended Anthony Robbins' Rapid Planning Method (RPM), which is apparently similar to David Allen’s Get Things Done method.  Have you heard of these?  From what he said, Robbins' mindset & methods for succeeding in life and business have been a great source of inspiration for him and he uses RPM as a tool to baseline himself when he finds that he's getting ‘lost in the weeds’, overwhelmed, etc.

What have you found to be useful methods for managing your time, staying motivated and organized?  (I'm not talking about technologies here, per say, more simple tools and methods).