The 16 Rules of DMAIC

07/17/2022:

This multi-part article is the third in a series of five serialized parts that explores why all businesses, all

organizations, and all enterprises should consider daily standups as an integral part of their overall

project and operational communication planning.

Despite the adoption of the Agile framework globally, having a daily standup seems to have been thrown

to the side as a waste of everyone’s time. This article asserts the contrary, that maintaining a disciplined

daily standup regimen is absolutely necessary from a communication and conflict resolution perspective.

It explores eleven common reasons why projects - and by extension, daily operations - fail, and how daily

stand-ups are a necessary first step to achieving overall outcome success.

Go to Previous Part 2

Eleven Good Reasons for Daily Standups - Part 3

Communication

There is no lack of opinions as to why and how organizations should communicate internally. Some (Second

Rise LLC, 2022) have proposed communication models based on content. This strikes me as being an

unwieldy approach; communication content comes in hundreds -- if not thousands -- of varieties and formats.

RingCentral (2022) has proposed a communication model based upon outcome purpose, rather than

content. From a model building perspective, categories should be kept as simple as possible. Four of the

Ring Central categories make sense to me: 1) Decision meetings, 2).Discussion meetings, 3). Information-

sharing meetings, and 4). Check-in meetings.

The fifth identified meeting type, “in-the-moment-meetings”, seems to miss the mark by a long way. While a

substantial amount of important information is communicated informally and “in-the-moment”, it does not

meet the standard of outcome purpose. Conceivably, an “in-the-moment” meeting could meet the

requirements of, making a decision or discussing an issue, sharing information, or a status check; whether

these take place in a hallway, over a video conference or telephone line, or in a formal conference room

makes little difference to its ultimate purpose.

A more fitting category would be “collaborative work meeting”, where a group of individuals work together --

exchanging information and mutually solving related task issues and problems -- for the purpose of

achieving a common, specified short-term goal or output.

These collaborative work meetings may either be formal or informal. They may have an agenda or no

agenda. They ordinarily produce some sort of artifact: a record or summary of the work effort’s progress,

and any action items its members have agreed to perform in the future. These artifacts are normal business

standards of operations, conducted -- if for no reason -- than to justify work progress, establish a historical

record, or just to validate in writing that everyone involved is in agreement. They comprise the vast majority

of all business activities. They require cooperation, and they require clear, concise two-way communication.

This, in fact, is where the real work gets done every day. It is these collaborative activities -- when done

correctly -- that actually produce value. They include both facilitated and non-facilitated discussions: quality

assurance activities, action planning sessions, brainstorming, group reviews, Joint documentation activities,

and any other business activities that require individuals to actively cooperate with one another.

Efficient and effective communication -- having the cognitive and physical ability to clearly, accurately, and

succinctly get your ideas, facts, and concepts across to your audience, and your own cognitive ability to

listen, understand, and take action on what other people may communicate back to you in response -- is

universally acknowledged to be the most important factor in the success or failure of virtually every social

human endeavor.

Project and Operational Failure

A brief exercise in how a lack of efficient and effective communication might underpin the eleven

contributing factors to project and -- by extension -- operational failure seems to be a worthwhile discussion

to consider:

Incomplete Requirements can occur when key stakeholders are excluded or conversely when the

wrong stakeholders are included. It can also occur when too many stakeholders are included. I once had

a prospective customer propose that 40 individuals would participate in a single, one-hour requirement

gathering session. As gently as I could, I proposed the possibility that perhaps the project’s scope might

need to be focused much more narrowly.

Similarly, by misidentifying key stakeholders, accurate communication is obviously affected:

requirements are ambiguous, incomplete, conflicting, infeasible, or worse unverifiable. Project

assumptions are easy to miss, precisely because they are assumptions: easy to go undocumented,

adequately validated, or remediated.

Lack of user involvement dovetails nicely with the issue of incomplete requirements. In addition to

someone who should be included in the project being left out -- either deliberately or by oversight -- quite

frequently individuals just refused to cooperate. For whatever reason, the project is not at the top of their

priority list.

The rationale for non-cooperation is often framed as either a lack of time or continuing competing

priorities that preclude participation. While there are obvious instances where this might be true on a

short-term situational basis, generally I adhere to my father’s enjoiner to pay attention to what others do,

not to what they say.

When non-cooperators are forced to participate, their contribution is often half-hearted, resulting in

mediocre contributions to the overall effort.

Sometimes noncooperation is just a matter of misunderstood priorities. Sometimes, it is in reaction to

being the “loser” in some internal power struggle, or a deep disagreement about either policy,

substance, or method. Where non-cooperation is active and deliberately obstructive, escalation to a

higher authority is invariably required. Remediation -- if it actually occurs -- always takes time and often

involves some sort of conflict resolution or project scope correction.

Lack of resources is the proverbial and convenient excuse to explain away the failure to do some

action or achieve some goal.

In an odd twist, when we have plenty of everything, most of us tend to waste what we have. Unlimited

budgets are the stuff of fiction. There is almost always some lack of resources that needs to be dealt

with. Yet, there are some who always find a way to maximize what they have. Somehow, they find a way

to get acceptable results.

One of my favorite quotes on leadership comes from Colin Powell’s (2003) Leadership Lecture entitled,

“Why Leadership Matters in the Department of State”:

“My own personal definition is that leadership is the art of getting people to do more than the

science of management says is possible. There are lots of variations and corollaries on that. Good

leadership is getting people to do a lot more than the science of management says. If the science

of management says that the capacity of this organization is at 100 percent, good leaders take it to

110 percent.”

Despite differences in leadership style, true leaders -- and in my book that includes frontline workers and

other “non-supervisors” -- almost always find some way to get the job done, or to successfully reframe the

problem to their leadership so that what they believe should be done becomes obvious.

Unrealistic expectations are pandemic in work environments where no disagreement is allowed, and

contrarily where few professional standards are maintained.

We are talking, here, about employment: the hiring of a person to produce a good or service in exchange

for compensated payment.

Excluding Montana and military service, in the United States employment relationships are governed by

the “Employment-at-will Doctrine”, as interpreted and governed by the laws of each of the individual

states. But generally, employment is defined as a fiduciary relationship that spans an indefinite period of

time that can be terminated by either party without notice.

Individuals -- unless they believe that they have few good options -- will be attracted to a job because of

its compensation, but they will not stay long in a work environment where they do not look forward to

some aspect of their daily routine. And if they do stay, they will do everything in their power to cut corners,

shift blame, and generally be as unproductive as possible.

To get work accomplished, even on a small scale, requires leadership.

As already noted, leadership is a nuanced, highly individualistic skill set. While management by terror or

bullying may serve a manager well over the short-term, sooner or later there will be the inevitable

reckoning. Alternatively, providing no bounds or expectations of deportment, productivity, or quality

standards is not leadership at all, but rather a laissez-faire abdication of responsibility.

The World War Two, the US Army Chief of Staff, and later Secretary of State, George C. Marshall

believed that disagreement, not enforced concord, is essential to the final phase of decision-making.

In his biography of Omar Bradley (2008, p. 66), Alan Axelrod notes that Marshall believed that, a

commander did not solicit the advice of others in order to formulate his own decision, but rather used

their advice to test a decision already made. He quotes Marshall saying:

‘Unless I hear all the arguments for or against an action I am about to take, I don't know whether or

not I'm right. If I hear all the arguments against some action and still find in favor of it, I'm sure I'm

right.”

When managers, customers, and leaders demand absolute silence or agreement from their

subordinates or vendors, they shirk the responsibility of leadership. It is difficult to challenge authority

without -- at the very least -- the implicit permission to do so. The verdicts of those who hold authority

over each of us can affect our education, our careers, and ultimately who and what we judge ourselves to

be.

On the other hand, when unrealistic expectations are allowed to waterfall downward through the

organization unchallenged, all who failed to present contrary views in opposition are culpable. Of course,

contrary views require truth to power.

(Continue to Part 4)

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