A Consulting Ecosystem
I recently attended a dinner meeting addressing, among other things, the future of work. That reminded me of a book that I read a long time ago in which the same thing was discussed. That book is titled “The Future of Work”. An image of that book cover is shown here (click on it to see that book on Amazon.com). I’m not going to attempt to do a book review here. I will address one of the points made in the book and what it means to the consulting business.
In Grantham’s book he describes the “Hollywood Model”. That business model is based on the movie making business in Hollywood where teams of independent, self-supporting specialists group together for a project. At the completion of the project, these teams disband. These specialist entities may be individuals, small organizations, larger organizations or yet another small team of specialists. As this idea evolves we start to envision a network of entities that begin to look like a complex molecule.
Maybe it would be more meaningful to refer to a molecular consulting ecosystem. Just for kicks I did a Google search for “molecular consulting ecosystem” and got no hits. I think I’ll include that phrase in my keywords for this post. Or not. Back to a serious note, the notion of comparing coordinated groups of independent entities for some common purpose to something like a molecule is not a new idea. Actually, if you think about it, we are talking about a fairly structured collection of entities focusing on very specific goals or projects. I think the best analogy is a crystal. Crystals are composed of atoms in a very specific structure. They tend to be stronger and more predictable than more typical organic molecules. They also tend to last a long time. Maybe naming such a business model after a crystalline structure is a good idea.
So what should be done to actually use this idea in a more general purpose consulting environment? Let’s think about a few more details and specific goals of such an arrangement. So what are the basic goals for the group?
- The entities (individuals or small groups) must be knowledgeable.
- The entities (individuals or small groups) must be perceived as knowledgeable by the group’s clients.
- The entities (individuals or small groups) must be safe to do business with.
- The entities (individuals or small groups) must be perceived as safe to do business with by the group’s clients.
- The group must have a means of generating new opportunities.
- The group must have a means of presenting a unified presence to the marketplace.
- The group must have an accepted means of distributing revenue among the entities.
- The group must have an accepted means of distributing operating costs among the entities.
- The group must have an accepted means of distributing liability among the entities or centralizing it as appropriate.
- The group must have an accepted means of recruiting and vetting new entities.
- The group must have an accepted means of allocating rights and access to any intellectual property generated by the group during an engagement and not the exclusive property of the client.
- The group must have access to systems to support collaboration among the entities for skills exchange and training.
- The group must not be constrained by national boundaries.
- The group must have access to systems to allow the collaboration on work product documents and proposals.
- The group must be able to scale to perform various sizes of engagements.
- The group must be able to include external entities as necessary for specific engagements.
- The group must be able to include clients as appropriate.
Basically, the group must be able to function very much like a company but maintain the ability to expand and contract as needed. It strikes me that what the group needs is an infrastructure that looks much like a PMO, or Project Management Office. That PMO must have some of the attributes of a business and not just a department within a larger organization. Going back to our crystal analogy, there must be a seed crystal around which other crystals form or connect. That seed crystal becomes the key to making everything else stable and effective. The seed crystal contains the PMO.
Maybe I’ll just call this the “Crystal Consulting Model”. Google doesn’t have anything for that phrase either. Anyway, consider this a part of an upcoming series of posts. I don’t know how many or when they will appear but this topic is important to our business so defining it more clearly is very important to us.
Thanks for stopping by. Any comments would be much appreciated. See you next time…
IT Maturity in E&P
I recently viewed a webinar on Exploration and Production (E&P) Technology Trends (link here ; registration is required). It was hosted by Hart Energy Publishing. The presenters were Halliburton (Landmark) and NetApp. The intent of the presentation was to promote Landmark’s software and services as well as NetApp’s offerings in data storage and data management. While both companies have impressive credentials in their own right, neither are analysts (as in taking subscription money from clients for vendor neutral, informed opinions). The presentation was interesting and credible in supporting their respective offerings. However, I believe that some interesting points were glossed over. I am not implying that they were misleading, just that the points that jumped out at me were not major points for them given their goals for this presentation.
Maturity
They presented the maturity model shown below. I have seen similar ones from analysts like Gartner and Forrester and this one is relatively consistent with those. A little later a Domain Specific – Data Management Maturity Assessment, shown below, was provided. While I find the maturity assessment diagram to be a little vague (the difference between the hexigon, square and circle shapes was never clarified), I assumed that each symbol represented an E&P company. The point the presenters made was that the E&P world needed help in managing and storing their Drilling and Engineering data (Landmark software generates Petabytes of data while NetApp can provide and manage the subsequent storage requirements). From the discussion this diagram it was implied that red is bad, yellow is marginal and green is good although that was not said specifically.
The point that was not mentioned is that the maturity assessment diagram implies that the “surface” domains, i.e., Operations and Business are in marginal or good shape. I believe their data implies something else. Later in the presentation we see the Production Data Management Challenges slide. There are three bullet points shown on that slide. All are big problems. The first two, Fragmented Solutions and Variations in Workflow, are huge. Those of us who have spend years managing operations and business organizations understand just how huge.
Spending
That brings us to another slide. The Data Management (DM) Investments in 1 to 3 Years. I have provided an image of the entire slide as well as a larger image of the graph portion. The larger image is to make the information easier to read and the entire slide is to provide context. In this slide the Landmark data tells us that in the 64 customers surveyed four of the top five budget items over the next three years address business and operations needs.
Conclusion
My point is actually very simple. It’s easy for E&P companies to focus on the downhole stuff. Just don’t loose site of where your competition is placing their bets for the near term. While that downhole technology is vitally important, getting the business and operations technology right can be a game changer too. It’s been the ugly stepchild of the E&P world for years. Now it’s time to let it out of it’s back room and let it join the party.
StrAIT Blogging on Blogging
Well I’m back on a social media post. I know, I know, I promised the last post on social media was my last post on social media. So shoot me (just kidding). I just attended a webinar put on by HubSpot and the American Marketing Association. It reminded me of one of my blogging hot buttons. One of the recommended best practices in blogging is to specify keywords in the metadata, i.e., data describing the post but not visible in the post that you can see. Then the author uses them as much as possible in the body of the post. This is supposedly a good thing for search engines to see in the post. I suppose that it tells them that the author is talking about what he claims he’s going to talk about. When I do that, my wording sounds forced and artificial. Some people can write that way and it sounds natural. I suppose that when I’m writing that way I feel artificial, so that’s the way it comes out. Excessive wordsmithing can be a bad thing.
Raisin Bran
The presentation also included some interesting ways to categorize blog posts. I have included some of the slides from the presentation. The first category is Rasin Bran. This metaphor speaks to the most basic form of blog post. The presenter told us that they are typically small but useful posts, typically providing “how to” type information. While I don’t write as many of these as the presenter recommends, I do try to make mine useful. The slide tells us to be able to “whip these out”. To be honest, it’s unlikely that I pop out posts as quickly as this slide would imply. I have to catagorize my posts as more of a cup of rasin bran than a bowl.
Spinach
This category of posts are intended to be more thoughtful and be intended to establish a reputation as a thought leader for the author. I confess that is one of my goals. My goal is not so much to be an academic wizard on the technology but to be a practical voice for the use of technology to derive real business benefits. I do spend quite a bit of time thinking about a subject, mapping the major points back to my own experience and applying some common sense in my recommendations. The slide tells me to not do too many of them. Well, this category has been my bread and butter (no pun intended) since I started my blog. I guess that gives me a dinner plate full of spinach or a smaller plate if it’s steamed.
Roasts
This category implies a post that is more like a whitepaper or some other more serious academic work. While I don’t think this is my style, some of my posts have drifted in this direction. Typically, if I feel strongly about a topic and feel that my experience is particularly valuable, I may generate more words than normal. This is fairly rare but they are definitely here. It is impractical to make this the norm because they are more work, especially if I have to create diagrams or illustrations. These topics tend to focus on managing people, organizational communications and aligning technology to the needs of its customers. These are core issues in the successful alignment of technology to business process and aligning those business processes to a clients business goals (“alignment” is one of my keywords but maybe I’ll get credit for “aligning” as well).
Tobasco and Chocolate Cake
I’ve grouped these las
t two together since I don’t intentionally do many of either of these. The Tobasco category implies making inflamitory statements that promote a lot of comments. I suppose I should do more of these type of posts but I’ve never been one to say inflamitory things just to get a rise out of people. That’s never seemed like a useful thing to do. I seem to be able to be mildly inflamitory without even trying and the purpose of this blog is to be a useful reference for my viewers.
I think that this post is probably as close to Chocolate Cake as any post I’ve written. It has nothing to do with any type of alignment (there’s that keyword again) and probably isn’t that useful in running an organization. The Chocolate Cake slide recommends using video and images. Well these slides are images and videos of raw food doesn’t sound like the thing to do. However, I must admit that I am having fun writing this and I’m not being all that serious. I guess that means this post is mostly Chocolate Cake with a side of Spinach. If you like thise slides here is a link to more HubSpot presentations.
The presentation also said that a good post should be between 500 and 800 words. This one is slightly over 800 words, so it’s tim
e to shut it down before the blog police come for me. I hope this post was a good mix of Chocolate Cake and Spinach for you. See you next time…
Observing Communications
I attended a dinner this week which had an interesting presentation. It was the monthly dinner meeting of the Society for Information Management here in Houston. The presentation revolved around the usefulness of IT leadership surveying their customers and doing some amount of statistical analysis on the results to understand customer satisfaction levels. I agree with the speaker that this is very useful and can provide IT leadership with insight on the perceptions of their customers.
The idea of IT leadership maintaining a clear understanding of their customer base is a big deal to me. However, statistics can’t do it all. During my tour of duty in IT leadership, I spent a non-trivial amount of time trying to understand how our customers saw us and our value to them. In my case, I spent more time talking with them directly than doing surveys (a luxury of a mid-size manufacturing company). What I concluded is that many problems are just communications and perception problems. I’m sure you’ve heard that before but it’s really true. In the world of IT operations it really boils down to vocabularies. In many cases, the business customer doesn’t have the IT vocabulary to articulate their problems to the IT support staff trying to help them. Conversely, the IT support staff often doesn’t have the business vocabulary to articulate their thoughts to the business customer. Communications suffer and customer satisfaction can go in the tank.
The customer shouldn’t be required to have an IT vocabulary (although it sure helps a lot). One solution to this dilemma is that the IT support group either needs each IT support person to have both vocabularies (very rare) or have a few “Translators” on staff to translate business speak to IT speak, as shown in the diagram on the right. The effect is that your IT support staff only needs sufficient business vocabulary to communicate with the Translator and the Translator only needs sufficient IT vocabulary to communicate with your IT staff. I would articulate this with a bridge metaphor, like to one implied by the diagram on the right. The simple idea was that half a bridge doesn’t get the job done.
When I added the staff to actually deliver on this idea, the results were dramatic. In larger IT organizations, such staff additions are becoming the norm but in mid-size companies resources are much leaner. Adding semi-technical staff to those IT organizations is a much bigger deal. I suggest to those of you in such organizations is that it’s worth the effort and will pay huge dividends. The idea of complementary skills is addressed in an earlier post called Alignment to the Core. It highlights that there are different frames of mind or paradigms that need to be bridged. The basic idea is that there is the paradigm where it tools (IT hardware and software) is the primary focus and there is the paradigm where the application of the tools (business uses, workflow, etc.) is the focus. As with the bridge metaphor these overlapping paradigms must communicate with each other as well.
As you can tell, I am a big fan of overlapping, complementary skills inventory in IT organizations. It’s the best way to align the IT function with the business requirements and people. I hope I have increased your interest as well.
Thanks for stopping by. Until next time…
Wrapping Up Timeboxes
In my last post I addressed our decision to use DSDM Atern for the projects generated by an SLR engagement. Now comes the decision on what I call the “engagement architecture”. What this phrase means is what are the tools we will use and how will we use them to actually execute projects. No one tool does everything needed to execute projects in an environment of empowered, collaborative teams executing an iterative methodology. Trust me, I’ve extensively looked for the “silver bullet” application that does it all and could only find several lead bullets and a couple of bronze ones.
We need to remember that we’re also talking about doing projects as consultants working with both our resources and the client’s. That means that the chosen approach must have negligible impact to the client’s IT infrastructure and not commit the client to additional long term recurring costs. When we leave the engagement, we must be able to fold up our tent and take our working environment with us. That certainly isn’t always true but our planning must be based on the most conservative scenarios. The only materials that must be left behind are sufficient documents to support SOX requirements and audits. For any client, the answer is one of three modes.
Mode 1 (primary)
The primary collaborative environment is Microsoft Groove 2007 (soon to be Microsoft SharePoint Workspace 2010). In this mode the client provides a copy of Groove to each team member. Groove functions primarily in a peer to peer architecture but has a server-based architecture available when/if needed. For small teams peer to peer is appropriate and convenient. That approach can definitely scale to larger sizes but at some point a server option may be more appropriate. I know many readers will start to groan at the mention of peer to peer. I have discussed the value of this approach before. A link to that post is here. It fulfills the requirement of leaving no lasting footprint on the client’s IT infrastructure (only user PCs), does not inflict a recurring cost on their business (there is a minimal onetime cost) and definitely provides a flexible collaborative environment for the project team. I will not elaborate on how Groove is used because I don’t want this post to turn into a pitch (it’s already more pitchy than I would like).
The brainstorming and creative component uses MindManager from Mindjet. I have found it to be very useful and its integration to Microsoft’s Office Suite is very beneficial. The use of the Microsoft Office Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.) is assumed. For project schedule management we use the venerable Microsoft Project tool. For the methodology and document control we use Project in a box. We use the client’s storage/portal for archiving project information or we can archive it on our own SharePoint server. The use of all of these tools can be adjusted based on the client’s preferences or the client can just use our default engagement architecture.
Mode 2 (cloud)
Here the primary collaborative environment is one of several cloud-based project management tools. There is a wide assortment of them available and we have a few preferences. But the client’s preferences are what count so we’ll review the options with them and go from there. The reason this is not our primary approach is that I’m not satisfied that all the security “rude surprises” are all know yet for that approach (see this link) and it can inflict a recurring cost on the client. However, it’s all the rage now, very popular and growing. It will mature in time to address all of my concerns. We acknowledge that and will be happy to not fuss too much with the client about it if that’s what they want. The bottom line is that it can work for this requirement.
Mode 3 (whatever)
This is simply the case when the client is a larger, more IT-mature organization and wants to do it their way. If this is their preference we say “yes, sir”, salute and do it their way. This is true of any consultant in the world. We will do the best to adapt the core parts of our approach to that environment to assure of project success. We won’t let the client shoot themselves in the foot (or at least not contribute to it) but we will be adaptable.
In conclusion
We’ve covered a number of tools at a very high level. Each of you has to find the combination that works for you. I believe these approaches work for us and our clients to deliver professional and successful results for each project. If anyone from the DSDM Consortium reads this please harass the Project in a box people to expand their tool from just a document repository to include some of the functionality described above. If anyone from Project in a box reads this please consider yourself harassed.
Thanks for stopping by. See you next time…