Wednesday, March 23, 2011

Is Your Team a Winner?

Now you have a team, put together your priorities, defined team and individual responsibilities and ready to take on the challenge of achieving the overall objective. However how do you know if your team is up for the job?

Theodore Roosevelt once said "The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick god men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint enough to keep from meddling with them while they do it."

In business school (most of them) talks about The Team Model, its a kind of principle on how to judge your team. This takes into account the following
* Do you have the right members in your team?
* Are the right people in this project?
* Are the skills of the team members corresponding to their objectives?
* Is the entire team capable of delivering to its promise?

OK. How do you use this model to judge your team. It’s quite simple actually. Begin by defining the skills, expertise and resources you think are required for successfully carrying out the project. Give particular importance to the skill sets that are really necessary for the job at hand. Distinguish between soft skills and hard skills. Soft skills are in the line of loyalty, reliability, motivation, drive and commitment. Hard skills include programming, negotiations, foreign languages, problem solving, etc.

For each skill set define where your critical boundary lies from a scale of 0 to 10. For example Java programming could be 7 while algorithm expertise is 9. Now judge your team members according to the criteria you have laid down. To find out the team’s strength and weaknesses simply connect the dots.

I played competitive basketball so let me use that as an example. Now let's take the most popular basketball team, the Los Angeles Lakers. I have illustrated the team model below:



As you can see the team is very strong, however when they face a long, emotionally filled and very heated they have the tendency to crumble.

Thursday, March 17, 2011

How can leaders and managers focus on multiple projects?

On my previous post I touched upon building teams out of a group of individuals. From each project team leaders and managers emerges ort assigned. In most cases we find that the project leaders/managers are involved in multiple projects, not only company related but personal related as well. This involvement in several projects can have negative consequences to the team. Marci Alboher, a New York author described a growing number of people who leads and manages multiple projects and can’t identify where they really below as a “slasher”. This phenomenon is now very common since most of us starts to multitask and sometimes lose focus. For the team leaders/managers to be effective and efficient they should always maintain an overview of each project they are involved and balance their priorities. How can this be done?

The best way to get an overview of various projects (company related and personal) managed by a single person is to create a project portfolio matrix and plot each project in terms of cost and time, where cost means financial cost, resource cost, efforts and possible stress it brings. Add in a way to prioritize the projects as (1)Does it help achieve your objectives and (2)Are you learning from this project? When you define objective and goals it must be high enough that it is challenging. Michelangelo once said that “the greatest danger to most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it but it is too low and we reach it”. I have created simple illustration below:


Now for projects that you don’t learn from and does not correspond to your vision and objectives you should reject those and never take them in your task or responsibility list. Projects that you can learn from but does not help you achieve your goals or objectives are interesting but it makes you lose focus, so try to change those in such a way that the project result is directed towards your objectives. If a project corresponds to your vision and objectives but you learn nothing from it, then it is best to delegate that to another person. If the project helps you achieve your goals and objectives and help you learn something new, then this is the project you must focus on.

Hold on! Wait a minute here… you might ask, how do I know what is the right goal or objective? Let’s consult Sir John Whitmore who emphasize that the final goal should be distinguished from the performance goal. For example your final goal can be winning the New York Marathon, an example of a performance goal to achieve is running 10 km on Monday, Wednesday and Friday then running 20Km on Tuesday and Thursday and running a full marathon on Saturdays. Following the John Whitmore model, check that your goals corresponds to the 14 requirements of being SMART, PURE and CLEAR stated below:

Specific
Measureable
Attainable
Realistic
Time Phased

Positively Stated
Understood
Relevant
Ethical

Challenging
Legal
Environmentally Sound
Agreed
Recorded

Having said that do not compliment things always think of a simple acronym derived from Albert Einstein’s principle of “Everything should be made as simple as possible. But no simpler” called KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid)coined by Kelly Johnson.


Are your goals SMART, PURE and CLEAR? Does it correspond to the KISS principle?

I have written something for team leaders/managers or slashers, however it actually applies to everybody from the way you prioritize your task and the goals you set to yourself.

Sunday, March 13, 2011

Optimizing mobile networks without drive testing, is it really doable and practical?

Traditional network optimization always involves drive testing. Since the first generation of mobile/cellular (AMPS, TACS, NMT) networks were built drive testing has been a core component in optimizing performance. However is it possible to optimize a 2G, 3G and 4G network without drive testing? Most engineers have doubt that it can be done since the most difficult part of the network to operate optimally is the air interface or the RF part of the network. Further to that most engineers first learn optimization through drive testing. Is it really possible to optimize a mobile or cellular network without drive testing?

We all know that drive testing is costly, time consuming and difficult to implement. Having that said there are several ways to optimize a network without using drive testing. This involves the use of network recordings, statistical counters, customer mobile measurements and probes. The simple idea is to optimize the KPIs in a way that the performance gain are much better than using drive testing alone. The question is can you really optimize the RF part (antenna configuration and parameter settings) without drive testing. The answer is YES, it is possible as long as the KPIs are correlated across multiple data sources such as network recordings and statistical counters at the very least. If you can bring in probes and customer mobile measurements the better the results will be.

There are of course a very few tools or software systems and solutions in the market that can do this today, most especially correlating multiple data sources for optimization. One such tool is Actix One which relies mostly on the drive test input and another example is the Wireless Explorer that uses all available data sources and is open source. The challenge of course is to find out a solution that satisfy the custom requirements of every operator and the differences in processes and procedures.

The best optimization results are of course obtained by incorporating and correlating drive test data to the network recordings, performance statistics, probe measurements and actual customer experiences. Customer experiences are captured through detailed network or probe recordings and more accurately directly from the customer mobiles. So if you can utilize each and every subscriber in your network as a drive tester collecting massive amount of data, wouldn’t that be better than sending out several teams of drive testers? At the end of the day drive testing is still needed for trouble shooting and competitive benchmarking. It will not completely go away but it can be complemented and at the same time reduce its overall cost.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Can you turn a group of individuals to a TEAM?

Success is a product of teamwork! This is true in all aspects from sports to the corporate world. Even successful athletes that play individual games such as golf and tennis have a team behind them.

The task of turning a group of individual into a cohesive and well integrated team is never an easy one; it takes more than team building. AmanziTel is in the process of integrating several individuals and groups into its team, how can that be done effectively? The task is the same for any company hiring new employees or merging human resources.

In my younger years I played team sports, basketball and volleyball and what I learned is that to build a well functioning team the roles of each individual must be clearly defined, a leader naturally emerges and a coach should provide directions. It does not stop there... to get the team to gel practice is needed, lots of it. Apart from the constant practice, team building activities are incorporated especially encouraging trust and confidence in each team members and most importantly open communications. During a basketball game for example winning or losing is a byproduct of how well the players communicate on the court.

Now, how do we apply that to the corporate world where the numbers of people in teams are larger? There of course several team performance models we can use. The easiest way to build successful teams I think is to assign groups into projects and in each group becomes the foundation of a team. A helpful way in planning projects where a group of individuals are turned into a cohesive team is GRPI – an acronym for goals, roles, process, and interpersonal relationships. The GRPI model suggests that team and their leader functions most effectively if they address the four aspects during team building:

* Goals – What is the team going to accomplish? What is its core mission?
* Roles – Who will do what on the team? Are the roles and responsibilities clear?
* Process – How will the team work together to solve problems and make decisions?
* Interpersonal relationships – How do the team members get along?

This same principle is also applied in sports. There are several models for high performing teams including ones that focus on individual strengths of each team member.

One particular model that is widely used in the corporate world is the Drexler - Sibbit model which is visually represented below. Developed by Allan Drexler, David Sibbet, and Russ Forrester, this model comprises seven stages to help optimize the workflow of a team effort: orientation, trust building, goal clarification, commitment, implementation, high performance, and renewal. Each stage is identified by the primary question of concern for team members when they are in that phase. When in the stages toward the top of the diagram (the beginning and end), teams will often feel a greater sense of freedom – the orientation and renewal stages provide opportunities for limitless potential and possibility. As a team moves into stages toward the bottom of the diagram (the middle stages), there are more constraints. Goals are set, and some things end up being included, while others do not.



There are seven stages to this bouncing ball type of performance model

(1)Orientation: The primary question asked during this first stage of the model is, “Why are we here?”. Identify a task that each individual finds personally beneficial, useful, or important to the team. There's a need for team members to feel more connected where they are more likely to participate in achieving the group’s goals.

(2) Trust Building: This is the stage during which “people want to know who they will work with – their expectations, agendas, and competencies.” Trust can only be established once team members become clear on their individual roles and responsibilities and establish a better understanding of each other’s work styles and experience.

(3) Goal Clarification: Identify a shared vision by discussing possibilities, variations, and the reasons these goals may or may not be the best options. It is important to make sure that everyone is on the same and to address any conflict between individual and team goals.

(4) Commitment: For the team to succeed in reaching its goal each individual must be committed to reaching the goal.

(5) Implementation: Success is 20% planning and 80% implementation where it can make or break the team and dominated by timing and scheduling. The key is to have good plan and adapt to unforeseen obstacles and to impose some shared processes for completing the team’s work such as online project management tools, flowcharts, or work plans.

(6) High Performance: The process outlined in the Drexler/Sibbet model is designed to increase the likelihood of becoming a high-performance team and spending more time in this stage.

(7) Renewal: You can think of renewal as both an ending and a new beginning. Each team member may want to reflect on what worked and didn’t work, what was achieved and can now be left behind, and what issues remain to be solved.

Monday, March 7, 2011

Understanding your Past helps you to Determine your Future

So we can learn from our mistakes after all. How does that equate to us knowing our future. Can we foresee the future? Or do we need to consult a fortune teller? Can our past help us predict our future?

When we make strategic decision we usually focus at the future, our hopes and dreams are pinned on the future. Why is that? Do we think we can determine our future? Sometime we tend to forget that future has a past and that past is the foundation of the future. So how do we find a connection between the past and the future? Can we draw a bridge to connect the past and the future?

In business school you are thought to look for trends, for history, for past performance. The question is does this really help in predicting the future such as betting your life savings in a company's publicly traded shares... This is actually applicable in most aspects in life, so here's the secret.

Ok. pick up a pen and a paper let's use a project, well any project could be from starting a company or planning for a big event or a party or just about anything in the future. Define a time line from the beginning to today and a time in the future. Now add the following to the timeline: the people involve; the goals in the beginning and future goals, successes, obstacles overcome, potential obstacles and lessons learned. The items you filled in reveals the importance attached to the past and your vision of the future.

Now how do you connect the past to the future? By analyzing the trends and applying the lessons learned not only from the project but on past projects as well.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Learning from your Mistakes - Double-loop learning model

In my previous blog I looked at why experience does not make us wiser. Having said that we learn from our mistakes, if only if we know how to... In 1974 Chris Argyris and Donald Schön published the book Theory in Practice. Increasing professional effectiveness which later was revised to become the 1996 book "Organizational Learning II". The importance of this Argyris and Schön work is the introduction of Double loop learning model of which you can read some of it here. It is important since it teaches us to learn from our mistakes. It is about reflecting on your actions and learning from them. This mode of learning is based on the works of Heinz von Foerster and Niklas Lhumann in particular the idea or "second order observation".

We can categorize humans in two modes of learning. One is the simple first-order observer where they see things as they appear to them. The other is the second-order observer who observes the first-order observer and how they see things. Let’s put that in perspective, in a basketball game the referee is the first order observer while the fans that criticizes wrong calls made by the referee are the second-order observer. The second order observer has a perspective removed from what is happening enabling him/her to judge the situation better.

Argyris and Schön developed double-loop learning based on the ideas above where in the best case scenario is the first order observer or as they call it single-loop or more commonly known in business as best practice. The problem with best practice is that whatever works well is not changed it is simply repeated including the mistakes attached to it. In the worst case scenario this mode of learning makes the practitioner repeat the same mistakes since the results are not questioned. Now with a double-loop learning you think about what are you doing, and analyze the patterns of how you do things and not simply doing it differently. The key lies in understanding why you do something the way you do it. If you are fully aware of this then you are able to change your actions or decisions, thus learning from your mistakes.

In artificial intelligence and cybernetics this works well since it considers the intelligence as facts and no emotions attached and the absence of illogical choices and unconscious actions. The question to you is, are you going to go for best practice or a learning system…? Having said that, in humans this does not really work very well.

The problem of this decision model is the discrepancy between what we say we are about to do and what we actually do. If we really want to learn from our mistakes we should completely reassess our more deeply rooted reasons, objectives and values.

Imagine this in the normal and natural world our actions leads to results which we can them compare and analyze (double-loop) but end up doing the same action again. Now if you step back and analyze the values and objectives of why we took the decision or action that we took we took then we can avoid any mistakes we did the first time around and not repeat them at all.