I recently read an interesting blog post by Steve McConnell on the question of whether the Chief Programmer Team model makes sense if your Chief Programmer isn’t 10x more productive than the average programmer. In the comments, someone suggested you’re better off putting the best programmers in a lead and coaching role for the good programmers. I think the same is true for project managers.
You can achieve greater overall results if you put your best project managers in a lead and coaching role for the good project managers. A typical great project manager may be able to successfully manage 2-3 challenging projects simultaneously. If you put that same great project manager in a lead and coaching role for 5-10 good project managers, they can spread their time, expertise, and experience across 2x-5x more projects.
My experience has been that the best managers of project managers were previously great project managers themselves. They are able to achieve greater results with a team of good project managers than a manager who was previously a poor to good project manager or not a project manager at all.
This helps to make the case for pooling all project managers in a Project Management Office or Center of Excellence and matrix them out to the Business Unit IT groups. The key is to promote the best project managers into manager roles within the PMO/CoE organizations.
Bottom Line: All too often, the great project managers don’t get promoted into manager roles as they are too valuable managing projects. The reality is that they would be 2x-5x more valuable leading and coaching 5-10 good project managers.
One of the primary goals in managing a technology acquisition is to objectify what is ultimately a subjective decision on which vendor and technology is best for your business and situation. The challenge is that most people are by nature not objective. There’s a good chance that some or all of the decision-makers involved already have a bias towards one of the vendors. So how can you address this challenge and objectify the decision-making process as much as possible? Here are a few suggestions that have worked for me in the past:
- Make the most biased people, or a designated representative who has their respect, a member of the vendor selection team. If you challenge them to conduct a thorough and fair research and evaluation of each vendor before making their opinion known, you will be surprised at how many will change their mind by the end of the process.
- Utilize a Scoring Matrix to objectify the decision by breaking the overall decision down into many smaller decisions and weighting each component score appropriately based on priority. The key is to set the categories and sub-categories and prioritize them prior to contacting vendors. Then build the research around answering the questions that will help you score each sub-category of the Scoring Matrix. Even if the decision-makers select a different vendor than the one that scores the best overall, they will at least be making an educated decision.
- Document all research results to support the Scoring Matrix results and back-up the selection team’s recommendation to the decision-makers. I once had a new IT executive join my company the week that we made our vendor recommendation to the decision-makers. He visited me and said he had used the other vendor successfully at his last company and wondered why we hadn’t selected them. I was able to hand him a 2 inch binder and say “here’s why this vendor is better for our company and our specific situation”. I never heard back from him on the matter. I suspect if I hadn’t documented the results, he would have overridden our recommendation given that he was ultimately going to be responsible for the new vendor relationship.
- If you are leading the vendor selection, take yourself out of the voting process and become strictly a facilitator of the vendor selection process. This way your focus will be solely on ensuring you conduct a fair, thorough, and objective process. It will also allow you to address vendor bias without being accused of it yourself.
- If you have an entrenched incumbent vendor, don’t sell the project as an opportunity to replace the vendor. Instead, sell the benefits of competition in creating negotiation leverage with the incumbent vendor. A fair and objective vendor selection process will take care of identifying whether there is a vendor that better fits your current business and situation.
Bottom Line: When managing a technology acquisition, confront vendor bias head-on to ensure an objective decision-making process produces the best vendor and technology for your company’s specific situation.
If a sales team treats a potential buyer to dinner, is this considered investing in relationship building or is it a bribe? Some buyers say it’s unethical to allow a vendor to pay for a meal as it may be construed as buying favor (a bribe). I think taking a hard line on this limits the opportunity to build relationships with prospective vendors.
A better approach is to define a clear policy of reciprocation from the beginning with all vendors. For example, if your team will be visiting a prospective vendor’s site, allow them to treat your team to dinner only if they agree to you treating their team to dinner when they visit your location. If each vendor has this opportunity, they gain no advantage or favor. By doing this, you will create an opportunity to build a relationships that will help you evaluate the people in each company. More importantly, I have found from experience that these relationships will grow and become the foundation for success later in the relationship. When things get rough, you need to be able to pick up the phone and call someone for help in resolving the situation. It sure helps if you have met that person and spent some time getting to know them.
Bottom line: Promote reciprocal investment in relationship building to ensure you don’t cross an ethical line.
Most people are not objective in selecting vendors. Many have a favorite before the selection process begins. Your job in leading a vendor selection is to objectify the decision as much as possible. How do you objectify what is ultimately a subjective decision in the end? I have found the best approach to be breaking the big decision down into many small decisions. Start out by creating a scoring matrix:
- Define 3-6 categories to evaluate vendors (ex: Functionality, Technology, Partnership, and Costs)
- Divide 100 points (100% of your decision) between these categories based on priority
- Define 3-8 sub-categories under each category
- Divide the major category’s points up between these sub-categories
You now have a scoring matrix that will help align scoring with your priorities. Each point represents the percentage of the decision. As you begin researching vendors, make sure your research will help you fairly and consistently evaluate each vendor in each sub-category of the scoring matrix. I like to build RFPs around the scoring matrix by including questions that will help me score each category. Additionally, I will ask questions of references that will help me validate the vendor’s responses.
Once you complete your research, score each vendor in each sub-category of the scoring matrix. Document clearly how you are determining each score. The completed scoring matrix should tell you which categories vendors are strong in and which vendor is closest to your priorities (remember, the points were allocated based on your priorities). While the decision-makers will not always select the vendor with the highest score, at least they will be making an educated decision.
Executive decision-makers: Introducing this tool to your project teams will result in a complete and objective assessment, enabling you to make an educated vendor decision.
A lawyer’s job in a negotiation is to advise on risk and the law. Lawyers are not typically the decision-makers in a negotiation. The worst-case scenario for a lawyer is that they fail to uncover every possible risk that may become an issue in the future. For this reason, lawyers will often fight to the end to create the perfect contract with zero risk for their client/employer.
This is where I use the phrase “Fire the Lawyers”. I don’t mean this literally but there comes a time in every negotiation when you cross the threshold and have only small, inconsequential terms left to resolve. This is the time to take the negotiations out of the lawyer’s hands (”Fire the Lawyers”) and escalate the remaining terms to the decision-makers.
It’s an art to determine when you have reached this point in a negotiation. One sign is when the lawyers begin arguing over a single word. While a single word can change the term significantly, it is also an indicator that 95% of the contract is completed and you are now down to the small stuff. The decision-makers can often resolve these small issues quickly when it means completing the deal.
Next time you see your negotiation starting to drag on endlessly and shift to fighting over the small stuff, “Fire the Lawyers” and drive the contract to completion.
