Your Attitude Sets Your Success Altitude

Author: Rajesh Patil (PMI-ACP, CSM, CSPO, MS in Engineering Management and Leadership)

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/pmrajpatil

Email: pmrajpatil@gmail.com

One a Sunday evening, I planned to visit a long time friend for dinner just  because I have been working all weekend  on a ROI and NPV Analysis presentation for my Executive team and I needed a break from financial data.

Most of the times my interest to meet someone is an opportunity to learn something new. Smart people have smart conversation and I sit there listening to these guys and absorb as much knowledge I can possibly take in and later analyze it.

My friend introduced me to Aaron, who greeted me but it was hard for me to understand what he said due to his speech problem, but I responded back with my greetings. As we continued talking about different topics, new ventures , new technologies; Aaron was constantly interacting with us and was trying really hard to make sure we understand the words he spoke. He was kind enough to repeat his sentences for us multiple times.

Late after dinner we changed our discussion topic on how one's attitude will make or break a persons life or career. My friend told me Aaron's story that he was deaf and speechless from his childhood and his parents identified the problem early and  worked really hard to help Aaron do good at school and be successful.

Aaron, did his Engineering in India , later completed his Masters degree in technology in US university of Wisconsin and today working on embedded systems for a startup in Bay Area. Aaron was leading a happy life with his wife and a 8 month old daughter.

I was amazed to learn about Aaron success , many times its hard to communicate clearly to our teams and for Aaron it probably takes a lot of effort to communicate. I learnt that he is a blessed writer and he mostly communicates through email and his emails speak his voice much better than an outstanding speaker.

While I was driving back home, I kept thinking how one's attitude can set what altitude they want to rise or fall to. I have seen many individuals who have not been successful in life even after having all the facilities, these are the people I call "Born with Silver spoon in their mouth" and there are many others who are very successful even after having many hurdles that life throws at them.

This reminded me something I read in a book long back about a Typical belief cycle.

Beliefs  lead to Actions and Actions lead to Results and Results lead back to Beliefs

If you have wrong beliefs you will take wrong actions and wrong actions will lead to wrong results and these results will influence you beliefs and make them worse. Always having the right belief is very important.

Here is something I had written down in my notes, it was copied from some book I read while I was doing my Masters in Leadership at Santa Clara University.


A Wrong Belief: Non-Productive Cycle

"This is the way it's always been"
"This is not my issue"
"I am already working too hard"
"I am burned out"
"I should not stick out my neck"

Leads to Wrong Actions:

"Sticks with status quo"
"Does not initiate new solutions"
"Discourages team members from taking the initiative"

Ending in Wrong Results:

"Managerial work is stressful and draining"
"Senior management applies pressure to improve results"
Nothing changes"
"It takes more work to maintain current productivity"
"Results suffer"


A Right Belief : Productive Cycle

"I need to fix this"
" We will save time and effort in the long run"
"Something must change to produce different results"
"This is why I am here"

Leads to Right Actions:

"Initiates improvements"
"Open to new ideas"
"Team members encourage to think"
"Team members encouraged to offer ideas"

Ending in Right Results"

"Problems get resolved"
"Opportunities are recognized and seized"
"The business improves"
"Failures are quickly reworked"
"Managerial work is fruitful and meaningful"

I am fortunate to be on the Right Belief Cycle because I have the right attitude and unfortunately I see many people who constantly circle within the wrong cycle and start feeling comfortable, but they are never happy about their own results and are always finding faults in others and don't want to change it.

It is very important to have the right attitude and the right beliefs to be successful in life, these two things decide on what type of a life you will have and what type of a person you will be.

The best thing is both attitude and belief are not inborn abilities nor a disease, they are just habits which can be changed anytime, anywhere by anybody; it just takes a strong mind and a healthy body to sustain.

After you read this blog post, do this exercise for me .
Find a mirror and stand in front of it and make a list of all your beliefs and your attitudes, think of  what actions you took and what results you got from each attitude and belief .
Now separate good and bad beliefs and start thinking of ways to change your bad beliefs to good .
The results will speak for themselves.

Happy Self Attitude and Belief Profiling.

My tonight's inspiration saga did not stop here, trust me I was not hunting for any stories, but another inspiring story
came to me on its own that made me feel stronger and thankful to the life I have.

https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=195944253755131&id=135732123137595

 Good Night! its past midnight. Forgive my typo's and grammer.

Disclaimer: My blog is my personal opinion and not connected to my employer or employees. Everything I write is wholly my personal experience and opinion that's not been validated or certified by anybody.
If you have concerns or questions regarding this article, please contact Rajesh Patil at pmrajpatil@gmail.com

Meetings are for making decisions not for hangouts

Author: Rajesh Patil (PMI-ACP, CSM, CSPO, MS in Engineering Management and Leadership)

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/pmrajpatil

Email: pmrajpatil@gmail.com


Meetings kill Projects
Meetings kill Time
Meetings kill Budget
Meetings kill People (Not literally)
Meetings kill Companies

If not planned well and if they have no clear purposes, meetings are over-kill.

According to me, meetings are for making decisions and decisions only, they are not for educating, discussing or solving problems.

In one of the organization I consulted before, meetings were burning cash and the project was going no-where.

• Teams from multiple remote locations are jumping on a call one after other just because their calender asked them.
• Every meeting is attended by 40 participants and has no prior clue on what's discussed in these meetings.
• Every participant is multitasking , browsing emails,  chatting, socializing and in-between raising unrelated concerns just to show involvement.
• Participants are not looking for commitments but involvement so they have their name on the project and they feel engaged.
• Decisions are never made but a decision for another meeting is made after every meeting.
• All employees were busy, super engaged and had no capacity left to do real work because they have to attend meetings.
• Productivity was at the lowest and confusion with lack on knowledge about any project was all time high.

Looking at this situation,  my job was to stop this madness and change the way meetings are attended and organized.

To address this problem, I implemented two rules that were immediately effective:

1. All meeting attendees will complete a three questionnaire survey before attending any meeting

-  Do you understand the purpose of this meeting? yes, no
-  Do you agree with the agenda of this meeting? yes, no
-  Can you help solve/improve the discussed problem? yes, no

If the attendee answers "no" for any one question, then its advised to not attend the meeting because he/she  will be wasting his/her and others time

Normally, people who answer "no" are the trouble makers and they constantly put roadblocks to decision making; as mentioned before meetings are for making decision and its better to remove all roadblocks.

2. All organizers should maintain a "Meeting Cost Chart" by calculating an average cost of every meeting they organize, just to make sure that the meeting is really needed and is worth the time and money spend.

This will make the organizer think twice before he/she invites attendees and he/she will understand the value of the meeting.

By just introducing these two simple rules, the company started to see a outstanding positive shift in productivity and big cut-back on unnecessary meetings.

Some of the positive changes in the organization were:
 

- Employee Engagement
- Knowledgeable Staff
- Cost Savings
- Increased Productivity
- Less Gossips
- More Focus
- Quicker Decisions
- Products Faster to Market
- Less Stress

Next time when you attend or organize a meeting, try this and see how a simple changes can make huge positive impact on you.

Disclaimer: My blog is my personal opinion and not connected to my employer or employees. Everything I write is wholly my personal experience and opinion that's not been validated or certified by anybody.
If you have concerns or questions regarding this article, please contact Rajesh Patil at pmrajpatil@gmail.com

A non-Agile train headed towards an unknown destination

Author: Rajesh Patil (PMI-ACP, CSM, CSPO, MS in Engineering Management and Leadership)

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/pmrajpatil

Email: pmrajpatil@gmail.com

After 5 months in a project the whole team and the project manager are gathering in a room at 8:00 AM on a Monday morning to kick-start their re-alignment session for the next 8 hours.

Does it sound painful or familiar?

I am sitting in the same room as an Agile leader to surface the problems and help the executive team understand why I think the project is in RED.

All participants were nervous and eager to know who will be blamed for loosing track and what will happen next. I started the discussion with a short story to set the tone.

"We are a tour company and we just announced an awesome destination , excited tourists board the train and the journey begins. Before the train catches its speed, two concerns are raised:

1. Technicians discovered that the train engine has some mayor glitches that might lead to a train wreck
2. Tour guides discovered that the planned destination is not a real tourist place

While the technicians and tour guides are raising these concerns, the train driver has no clue and is headed towards disaster.

It's our job to halt the train and put our heads together to decide whether we fix the problem and continue our journey or board the tourist on a different train or just announce the failed journey early in the game.

After my small story a "blame game" begins, blame it on "no communication", "no collaboration", "no process", "no skills", "no control", "no command","no detailed project plan", " no ownership" but the traditional teams would not think on why the project is in this situation and how could we have prevented being here. The traditional teams next action was to replace "yes" to all "no's" listed above.


As a Agile leader I just wished we were using Agile from the beginning. Agile is not a silver bullet for every problem, but the basic principles of Agile are built to prevent this type of situation.

My strong belief in Agile principles and methodologies forced me out of this project originally, since the believers of traditional project management had taken over the control of this project.

I am not comparing one project management method with another and not saying which one is better,  instead I am saying that we have to make smart choices. If a project has many unknowns it's a perfect candidate for using Agile methodology.

The concept of showing a progress of a project with a working software is very powerful, it does not give any opportunities to assumptions and imaginations on the progress of the projects; it will sow the status in black and white to all stakeholders, true status of the project will be revealed in just 2 weeks.

User stories, story points, and burn down charts will show scope and risks early in the project.

Daily standup's will clear all confusions everyday instead of waiting for a meeting next week.

Continuous Risk Management method in Agile reduces long-term risks and increases confidence in the project as we progress.

In today's constantly changing environment traditional way of doing things does not do a great job because of  long cycles and its command and controlled style. Problems are hidden until they become too big to handle.

After all my "Agile talk" and 4 successful projects, the team took a step back and discussed to add more processes in-place as a solution to solve the problem and hopped back on the same train which I feel is headed towards disaster.

Agile adoption is difficult until the organization believes in it and executives fully supports it, otherwise an Agile teams are always seen as a no-process, no-documentation, and a chaotic team; but in reality it's opposite.
Agile teams are self-organized, well-documented wherever needed, and follows a strict process that's monitored very closely on a daily basis.

My quest to bring Agile in every organization continues by educating and exploring other ways of bringing visibility to the proven concept of Agile in a traditional organization.



Disclaimer: My blog is my personal opinion and not connected to my employer or employees. Everything I write is wholly my personal experience and opinion that's not been validated or certified by anybody.
If you have concerns or questions regarding this article, please contact Rajesh Patil at pmrajpatil@gmail.com

Bending Traditional Rules to be Successful with Gen-Y @ Credit Unions

Author: Rajesh Patil (PMI-ACP, CSM, CSPO, MS in Engineering Management and Leadership)

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/pmrajpatil

Email: pmrajpatil@gmail.com

Younger generations are earning good salaries, opening bank accounts, saving for future, buying cool cars, and even buying homes and they are looking for banks that can serve them well with their needs. It's time for the community banks to bend their traditional rules and meet the expectations of this niche market. Serving this generation is not easy because they expect more and they are the vocal generations on social media. Good or bad they say-it-loud on their Facebook walls and their voice can reach out to hundreds and thousands of people in seconds.

Credit Unions can grow their assets and loyal membership count by fulfilling some basic needs of this younger generations like Mobile Banking, Protection from identity threats and frauds and Easy and fast banking on-the-go. 

 .

Serving this generation is challenging, Credit Unions have to either step-up their act or step- aside for BIG BANKS to win this business opportunity. To benefit Credit Unions have to bend  their much rigid rules to become a "Bank of Choice" for future generations.

Traditionally, credit unions are focused on other areas of financial management and they tend to ignore technology, but with the growing tech-savvy population it's time to shift their strategy and invest in technology to simplifying the financial management experience for members.

At my credit union, I have started to see similar trends; our new goal is to "FRIEND" this younger and tech-savvy generation by offering them a compelling banking experience along with the products that  match their personal needs. 

As I always said credit unions remain tight on budget for innovation, because of their basic business model. The best approach for credit unions to  maintain this balance between innovation and  investments is to "GO AGILE". 

Agile is new to my credit union but many other credit unions have adopted agile since long; they have been very successful in developing an Agile culture in the organization and they have even transformed their work-place to accommodate Agile way of doing things.

Adding agility is a significant undertake for a credit union of our size, but transformation in five basic stages might help us achieve our Agile goal with  minimum effort:

Stage 1: Develop Agile Thinking

Like other credit unions, our employees come from bigger organizations and they still prefer the hierarchy structure, even though their previous companies have transformed in the last 10 years but unfortunately they were not part of that transformation. Developing Agile thinking is the basic responsibility of our leaders in the organization, Agile thinking should not be limited to projects but can be adopted in day to day tasks and this can be done by simply understanding the 12 principles of Agile and trying to apply them wherever, whenever possible.

Stage 2: Continue delivering projects with Agile

Agile is no longer a niche approach for software development. It is becoming a standard for organizations to help them achieve success  across their project portfolios. Both big and small companies are seeing huge benefits of going Agile, even the most regulated organizations like Government and Defense apply Agile (See the GOA Report published in July 2012). Credit union  leaders should understand and continue to encourage Agile by  giving their full support to Agile Managers, so they can continue to add more projects to their Agile portfolio.

Stage 3: Introduce new Agile tools and reports

Even though tools don't promote Agile thinking but they can support it; tools can make it easy to stay Agile for longer term. There are hundreds of Agile supporting productivity tools, some are from big names like Oracle and Microsoft; Microsoft calls there TFS 2012 a "Modern App Lifecycle Management Tool" and it can help manage complete Agile project life cycle; Other tools like Versionone, Jama Software, Altassian, Rally, etc have better project management and reporting capabilities. It doesn't matter whether we use a tool or use the basic MS Word and MS Excel documents to track stories and tasks, it's more important to have the Agile reporting and Agile tracking for better visibility and control.

Stage 4: Educate Management and PMO

This is the most important task for Agile to sustain, if Management and PMO believes in Agile and are willing to support, it won't take us long to transform and be more productive and flexible. PM Office will resist the change if they are not educated, many project managers still think Agile as an adhoc way of project execution with no documentation, no project plan and no control; but in reality it's the opposite

- Agile projects have better and current documentation but the only difference is they are short, easy to understand, more visual when compared to  extensive 50 page documentation that will never be read. 

- Agile projects provides an easy to understand project plan in a different format, instead of complex Gantt Charts. Agile uses Burn-down and Burn-up charts to show the amount of WORK NOT DONE. We all know that updating the traditional project plans is a nightmare when change occurs,but in Agile;  the world can change outside the current sprint and it's easy to manage change with less dependencies.

- Agile projects give double the control on the project, since we can monitor the project much closely and watch the project progress on daily basis and we can identify issues before they negatively impact our  project. In traditional project management individuals and empowered but in Agile the team is empowered and converted in to a self-organized team,  which is better for both project and organization.

Stage 5: Building Multiple Agile Teams

Traditionally we are used to build one huge project team when a project is initiated, the cost of the project is estimated based on how big the team is and how long the project will take. Large project teams some times lead to communication and managing nightmares and if the teams are globally distributed the challenges doubled.

Agile works differently, we create multiple Agile teams with good combination of skills in each team and these teams are waiting  to take on any project. Agile recommends to limit each Agile team to +/- 7 people to help better manage the project.

Moving to Agile is not a choice anymore, it's becoming the normal or much aspired way of executing projects. To be an Agile Organization you don't have to follow the Agile process that's published in a book but instead focus on developing an Agile thinking in the organization; you can achieve this by selecting a list of Agile principles that will work for your organization and use them as your Agile Ethos. 

Bending credit union rules to support Agile will make the credit union more compelling to younger and tech-savvy members and this might be a positive change to thrive.

Disclaimer: My blog is my personal opinion and not connected to my employer or employees. Everything I write is wholly my personal experience and opinion that's not been validated or certified by anybody.
If you have concerns or questions regarding this article, please contact Rajesh Patil at pmrajpatil@gmail.com

Beginning of Agile @ a Credit Union

Author: Rajesh Patil (PMI-ACP, CSM, CSPO, MS in Engineering Management and Leadership)

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/pmrajpatil

Email: pmrajpatil@gmail.com

Credit Unions are unique, they not only have to comply with strict financial regulations; but also compete with BIG BANKS with potentially better products and better banking solutions. To survive and thrive through this competition, they have to constantly innovate and stay ahead by providing the best banking experience for their members without compromising security or compliance to grow and retain their membership (customers are referred as members in Credit Unions).

Adding Agility in a highly regulated environment is always challenging, it’s even more challenging in Credit Unions because they have zero-tolerance for errors with high member visibility. Credit Unions tend to keep their expenses low so they can pass on the savings to their members through better rates and products.

When I joined a Credit Union, I realized that they were in a sweet-spot of being Agile for two reasons:

 

1. Their membership demographics:  90% of  members are tech savvy. They come from fortune 500 technology companies located in Silicon Valley and Silicon Forest, they understand the need of being Agile to innovate.       

2. Their size: This Credit Union is the right sized financial institute; not very big with huge bureaucratic organization structure and not too small with chaotic structure.

  During 2010-11 timeframe, This Credit Union was going through the biggest merger in the history of Credit Unions;  and the migration project was driven by an external project management firm with a traditional project management method. Adding any kind of Agility in this process was impossible due to the fact that the project had already started and any introduction of change could disrupt the project.    

When the merger was completed, a new project was initiated with a short and fixed delivery date and I realized that this project was a perfect candidate for introducing Agile to the organization.

At first when I introduced “True Agile or Scrum” way of delivering a project, in just one week I realized that the team was opposing this change and were not ready for pure Agile transformation; so I decided to step-back and think of a different approach to add some Agility in the process without creating a sense of change.    

Instead of using pure Agile/Scrum processes, I started with Agile principles and came-up with two very generic principles that blend both Agile and Credit Union principles.

I adopted two key goals:

1. High Project Visibility

2. The Highest Business Value in the Shortest Period of Time

Behind the scenes I was following Scrum, instead of forcing this change on the team.

To gain  high project visibility, I defined clear project roles like Product Sponsor, Product Owner and Team (Development + QA + Analyst) and I made sure that every team member knew what stage the project was in and who was working on which tasks at all times.

To gain the highest business value in shortest amount of time, I introduced incremental project development with the Product Owner prioritized list of features. This allowed us to follow two week sprints that delivered a potentially shippable product in short increments that delivered the highest priority features first.

Following this process gave us multiple successes with high management visibility and recognition in the organization.

·         Management started to realize the value of Agile principles and provided their support to continue being Agile.

·         Development teams were happy with constant wins and a steady paced delivery of projects, thus increasing productivity.

·         QA teams were very happy with high project visibility and high quality products that eliminated stress during releases.

·         Members were excited to see new features on a regular basis and felt that they were being listened too.

In a Credit Union it is important to develop a hybrid model of project delivery method, that includes standard  SDLC processes with Agile thinking. My goal was to "Educate by Example," and not through training sessions so I decided to execute projects with Agile first and then speak about the Agile approach later.

Initially the team thought that the success of these projects was by luck, but when the same team saw continuous victories they realized that this success came from a well-planned effort of self-organized teams that utilized Agile to their best advantage.

Management has now agreed to integrate Agile as part of their PM Office process and has recommended executing all future development projects using Agile methodology.        

My future goal at  my Credit Union is to deliver projects with  "Higher Business Value in the Shortest Amount of Time with High Project Visibility" and continue to use Agile methods as much as possible for all future projects including Enterprise and even Non-Technical projects.

It might take some time for me to gain full support from Management and teams to build a real Agile culture, but we have already seen the benefits of being Agile;  “Our Credit Union was able to deliver more innovative products to their members in the shortest time frame”

Thanks to our Management for supporting Agile thinking in this organization, this initiative will make it easy for all Agile supporters to promote the Agile way of doing things going forward.

Being Agile in a traditional environment can be challenging but it’s not impossible if it's approached intelligently and customized the right way to fit the organization and its culture.

 

Disclaimer: My Credit Union management or employees are not responsible for anything mentioned in this article, its wholly a personal experience and opinion that's not been validated or certified by anybody.
If you have concerns or questions regarding this article, please contact Rajesh Patil at pmrajpatil@gmail.com