The "Leadership" that I perceived

Recently, I made a casual invitation to my friends on the discussion of "Top 3 Leadership Attributes". My friends are really good and enthusiastic. They gave me their answers quickly.

During this little exercise, I learnt 2 things:

1. Everybody expects differently from "leadership"
2. Surprisingly, we could apply a well known requirement management technique - pairwise comparison - to more scientifically evaluate our personal priorities.

Guess I don't need to talk about (1) as it's obvious.

For (2), my way on doing pairwise comparison is like this:

For the first step, I write down all the attributes that I think important for a leader, like the following:

• Adaptive to changes
• Appropriate use of talent
• Charismatic
• Clear and efficient communication
• Decisive
• Empathetic
• Forgiving
• Honest
• Influential
• Innovative
• Open-minded
• Persistent
• Positive thinking
• Problem solving
• Self-discipline
• Visionary

Then I do a pairwise comparison using a spreadsheet (it takes me about 20 minutes) and get the following:
(Here, I compare them one on one and give a score for each pair: 2 for the winner, 0 for the loser and 1 for each attribute if they tie.)

• (Score Attribute)
  
• 28 Visionary
• 27 Influential
• 27 Persistent
• 26 Positive thinking
• 24 Decisive
• 21 Innovative
• 19 Problem solving
• 16 Clear and efficient communication
• 15 Open-minded
• 13 Appropriate use of talent
• 10 Charismatic
• 9 Adaptive to changes
• 7 Forgiving
• 7 Honest
• 6 Empathetic
• 1 Self-discipline

So my answer is:

1. Visionary
2. Influential
3. Persistent

When applying back to requirement management, imagine if you have tens of requirement items (if too many, you may need to group them first and compare the groups) and if we would like your stakeholders to prioritize, give them a task (or most of the time, you need to work with them or interview them) to do this pairwise comparison. And you have strong justifications for the priorities yielded. Most of the time, with a not-too-emotional stakeholder, you will get a comfortable compromise among related parties.

Enjoy!

IT Professional Certification in Hong Kong

Today I joined the HKITPC (HK IT Professional Certification, http://www.hkcs.org.hk/itpcrs/eng/) launch. I knew it was done by a marvelous team. People in the team are very dedicated.

I have gone through the whole program of the launch and indeed it was wonderful. Not wonderful because of the program, it's because I see the passion of the industry to build its own recognition, just like other professions of longer history. You can easily find examples like accountants, lawyers, doctors, architects and many other professions that are well respected around.

Certainly, they have their professional skills and know-how that worth much respect. However, much more important is their professional pride, discipline and ethics. These enables them to form a standard. A standard for being a qualified professional.

So, can IT gain a professional respect like others? My answer is 100% sure.

But how can the IT practitioners achieve that? In other words, how could IT practitioners be one day be referred to as IT professionals (with respect!)? I think there are several keys:

1. The practitioners should be demanding on their work products, work process & work ethics
2. There should be independent bodies that set the expectations on these aspects
3. There should be independent bodies that assess the level of performance
4. Practitioners realize the importance of building a professional respect in others' eyes
   

I see HKCS is doing a good starting job. They build a certification program that could achieve 2 and 3. To achieve number 4, I believe it's through more marketing and education, especially targeting for employers of IT professionals. Only 2-4 be done well before number 1 could be achieved.

Being an IT practitioner, I realize one thing important: we have to participate and unite in order to make the profession gain respect. If we do not step forward and participate, if we do not respect our own profession, can we hope to gain others' respect?

How could we be more participating? I think probably one way is to apply for the certification, be it deem to be successful or not.

Look, a simple chemistry is there:

• A certification program gains its respect and authority by
1. not easy to pass the assessment (of course, cannot be too difficult also)
   
2. having a transparent, accountable and quality process in certification
3. desired or supported by a lot of practitioners
4. gain a legislative position, i.e empowered by the law and government
• A practitioner desires to be certified because
1. he/she is capable enough to look for differentiation from others
2. his/her employers or clients recognize the certification
   
3. he/she thinks the certification agent is trustworthy, prestigious and authoritative

At the end, it becomes an chicken-and-egg problem. The certification agent has to be authoritative to attract practitioners while the practitioners have to participate to make the certification agent authoritative. Now, a certification agent (HKCS) is trying hard. Should the practitioners also play their part?

Governance: The Magic Triangle

Key concepts:

1. Underlying an effective ITO execution, a governance structure that sets a proper power and responsibility balance is crucial.
2. Power and responsibilities could be separated into 3 roles, namely sponsor, architect and execution agent.
3. The Magic Triangle is a model that enables the roles to balance their power and responsibilities. In turn, this enables the proper mutual governance that leads to the ultimate success of ITO.

Separation of Powers, in an IT Project's Perspective

In an IT project, typically there must be the following powers. They have to interact efficiently and effectively in order to yield the success for the project.

• Budget - cash is king. Project sponsors control the project budget. They have all the rights to appoint appropriate parties, enforce necessary governance and require compliance to execution policies. The key to exercising the budget power effectively is how sponsors make use of the right chemistry created by a wise budget control. It is about the right allocation of budget to different area of responsibilities and different corresponding roles.
  
• Control - the soul and brain. A proper control structure, together with a proper control mechanism, brings the necessary chemistry as mentioned above. Here, the key is the clear understanding on what have to be controlled and who is appointed to control. It is crucial that the party exercising the control is independent from the party under control. Otherwise, it is tempted for this single party responsible for control and execution to take a more cost effective but less transparent approach for the whole execution cycle.
  
• Execution - hands over the realization. Execution agents always have the final say on how a work product becomes. It is not their responsibility for non-complying work products should the expectations not well communicated. It is not their responsibility should the road to meeting expectations not well controlled. To properly manage this power of execution, formal and proper demands, and subsequently the control to achieving such demands have to be institutionalized into the execution environment.
  

The Orthogonal Roles

By the separation of powers, each power has to be exercised by a separate role and each role has to be played by an individual party.

In an ITO setting, there at least the following mutually exclusive roles and they should be mapped to the above powers accordingly:

• Sponsor possesses the Budget power. The sponsor is the source of ideas, demands and resources. By these tokens, it is inherently the ultimate source of all powers. However, by delegating the control and execution powers, it ensures the best talents could be assigned to the best suitable jobs.
  
• Architect possesses the Control power. The architect is responsible for further developing the ideas of the sponsor. Hence, the architect has to perform feasibility study and the overall architecture design, if the feasibility is assessed to be positive. An architecture design provides the blueprint for governance and control of execution. As the origin of this design, the architect is also the best role to enforce project control. However, to ensure the architect is optimizing the benefits and balance of the project, on behalf of the sponsor, the architect should be prohibited from performing the actual implementation, i.e. execution.
  
• Implementer posesses the Execution power. The implementer is contracted for a simple and singular purpose - to implement the design by the architect. Certainly, an effective implementer should also suggest to the architect know how the implementation could be performed more efficiently and effectively and advise on any risks identified along the project execution.
  

The Magic Triangle

"The Magic Triangle" is a model that we used to evaluate the balance of powers among the 3 roles - Sponsor, Architect & Implementer. This model could be used as a tool for visualizing different patterns of power balance. Real cases of ITO projects could then be evaluated using this model.