Nasty Angels & Nice Demons

Internal projects within an organization always face one common challenge: struggling of resources. Project Managers have to fight for resources from functional groups to form project teams. But in this fierce reality, key people in the organization are frequently shared among different projects.

The project manager, in this case, usually approaches those "helpful" colleagues to negotiate/beg for higher portion of participation/dedication to his/her projects. Those helpful colleagues, based on their goodwill (not capability), usually provide positive feedback to the project manager like "no problem, I will try my best to help". In fact, those people are just "nice demons" doing something harmful to the project.

Such positive but no commitment feedback such as "try my best" only posts a false hope to the project manager. Unless those people can commit a measurable input/effort to the project, there is no true commitment and the project is usually doomed to failure because of lack of dedicated resources. The project manager will finally suffer from those helpful and nice "demons".

In reality, resource is limited and there is no superman in the world. If any colleague (resource) can doubtlessly spare his/her substantial effort/time to provide additional assistance to others without hesitation (evaluation), I will first question his/her capability (see my previous article about "the busiest people") instead of simply believing the uncommitted commitment.

In such situation, responsible colleagues should first evaluate the situation (the scope of request, the capability, the resources....) before making any commitment. If they realize that they are not able to help, they should turn down the requests politely and I call them "nice angels". (How to say "No" nicely is another topic; there are lot of books about self-improvement teaching how to say "No". To name one is the classic from Dale Carnegie - "How to Win Friends & Influence People"). I summarize my view about "Angels & Demons" in the following matrix:

Angel & Demon Matrix (by Gavin Lam, 2007)

Personally, I am not a nice guy. But at least, I still belong to the "Angel" category upholding my professional ethics, albeit at the nasty side.

Picking the Busiest People

"A Right Project Team" is one of the key success factors to an IT project. This is what many project management textbooks claim. The maxim is well-understood without ambiguity, but this does not mean it can be realized easily.

Several days ago when I talked to my friends about the challenges of managing projects, we all agreed that the maxim is in fact a delusion. In most cases, a project manager has not much choice in selecting his/her project team-members: There is no "superstar", no one from his/her previous projects, but a group of unrecognized colleagues within the organization for your selection. So before the project manager can build a right project team, first of all, he/she has to choose the "right" candidates.

Apart from reviewing appraisal reports or curriculum vitae of the colleagues, one simple and effective criterion can be adopted for the selection: Take the busiest people as the project team members.

I learned this from a book about six sigma (I forget the name of the book) five or six years ago when I was undertaking my MBA degree. The rationale behind the criterion is very straightforward. In many organizations (especially large enterprises where firing a staff is unusual unless the staff is extraordinary incapable over a long period of time), supervisors or managers tend to avoid assigning tasks to less capable staffs. Instead, they are willing to assign tasks to more capable staffs (capable with regard to productivity, reliability, and obedience). Eventually, those capable staffs will become the busiest colleagues in the organization and they are the best choice to be the project team-members.

Having the right project team-members, of course, does not mean a right project team. There is still a long way to go (the usual HR works of team building like forming, storming, norming and performing...).

Therefore, if you find yourself being treated unfairly (with lots of work compared with your colleagues), you may be the one!

Japanese Green

I made this shot couple days ago at the street side when I was on the way to learn driving. The bright sunlight was shining on the plants creating a very good view with freshly composition of "green". However, I knew that I was not able to capture such rich color correctly and so I changed my DC's color setting to "F-Chrome" (a special color mode in this particular Japanese brand of DC providing a rich color effect simulating the characteristic of a color positive film) before making the shot. Though the result was still a bit different from what I could see, the green color captured was very vivid and rich compared with conventional color mode (without the need of further photo retouching).

This photograph recalled my days when I was working for Japanese photographers. Japanese photographers are very serious about every shots they made. They are very attention to detail including picture composition, object fine positioning, subtle lighting and even minor color difference.

Did you notice that couple of years ago when Japan was still the leader in offset printing in terms of techniques/qualities. You would find that photographs on most Japanese calendars were much more beautiful than that of others. This was especially true for nature scenery shots where the green color found on every pictures were extraordinary clean and fresh. The reason was not just because of good creative and photographic skills, but also due to Japanese's attention to "detail". This was also the such minor attention creating the difference between "good" and "better" (or even "the best").

Conventional four color printing (CMYK: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow & Black) can never achieve a good green color. Therefore, Japanese utilize "spot color" (green) on top of the four colors to achieve such brilliant results.

Such "spot" color technique is now widely adopted in color inkjet printers where you can find six or even seven colors inkjet printers with two to three special colors inks to achieve extraordinary color rendition output.