Reinventing Communication

How to Design, Lead and Manage High Performing Projects

Mark Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317068433
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industrial Management
• Index: Business

In his ground-breaking book, Reinventing Communication, Mark Phillips shows how even the most mature organization can fail to deliver successful projects - and worse, how this can lead to an organization's demise. With clear examples, Mark reveals the underlying principles at work and introduces a revolutionary new technique for harnessing the power of communication to ensure long term success. For organizations of all sizes, this book changes the way we think about management and leadership. Mark makes his case by looking at teams and individuals that set out to deliver ambitious achievements in complex and challenging environments. We meet the leadership team that built the F-18 Super Hornet fighter jet, one of the US Navy's most successful programs. We discover the untraditional approach to risk used in building a new terminal at London's Heathrow airport. We draw lessons on corporate survival from the cat and mouse fight against IED's in Afghanistan, and are introduced to a website where online video gamers solved a critical piece of the AIDS puzzle using their gaming prowess. Reinventing Communication is about creating the conditions for performance and attaining long term success. Whether a start-up, a global enterprise or a government agency, this book shows us how to deliver ambitious achievements by getting communication right. It is a book that no manager, leader or innovator should be without.

Part I
Why Communication Matters

1
Communication Determines Project Outcomes

Research has shown that there is a direct connection between communication and a project’s outcome. Specifically, a project’s outcome is directly determined by the design of the communication environment of the project.

This theory was proposed by Melvin Conway in 1968 in a Datamation magazine article entitled “How Do Committees Invent?” In it, he put forth an idea that has come to be known as Conway’s Law. It says that “organizations which design systems (in the broad sense used here) are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.”¹ In other words, the solutions that teams come up with mirror the structure of those teams. There is a structure-preserving relationship between the team that works on a project and the project itself. Their shapes match, they mirror each other—or, in technical terms used by Conway, “there is a homomorphism [mirroring] from the linear graph of a system to the linear graph of its design organization.”² What this means is that the design of the project’s communication environment will be mirrored in the project outcome.

For example, a government agency has requirements for a new product. To develop the product, it works with its contracting department and hires a large contractor. The large contractor has two internal development teams and also has relationships with three other subcontractors which it will work with on this project. Conway’s Law suggests that the final product will consist of at least five subsystems, reflecting the two internal development teams and the three subcontractors. Further, the interface between the subsystems and the nature of the final product will reflect the effectiveness and quality of the interpersonal communication between all parties including the subcontractors, the internal development teams, the program manager at the large contractor, the government agency and the contracting department.

The mirroring effect described by Conway is supported by empirical research from a Harvard Business School Working Paper.³ In it, the authors state:

Specifically, products tend to “mirror” the architectures of the organizations in which they are developed. This dynamic occurs because the organization’s governance structures, problem solving routines and communication patterns constrain the space in which it searches for new solutions. Such a relationship is important, given that product architecture has been shown to be an important predictor of product performance, product variety, process flexibility and even the path of industry evolution.

The decisions we make about the communication environment of our teams and the communication processes determine project performance. These decisions are expressed in the communication design. Communication design is how we design the communication environment on our projects. It is the flow of the communication on a project and is the system design of how people communicate and interact. Communication design, as a separate field of study, is based on the awareness that communication is not about reporting on data from a project; rather, it is about shaping reality on a project.

This is a fundamentally different view of communication from that discussed in standard project management texts such as A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide) (4th edn) from the Project Management Institute.⁴ This view is radically different from the traditional definition of the role of communication in project management. The traditional approach to a communication plan views the project as an independent endeavor, working on its own, and ignores the impact of system design. In the traditional view, communication is a necessary fluid that runs through the system to keep the wheels turning. The content of communication is determined by the project. People use whatever tools they like, in whatever way they like, to pass along information when they feel they have to. Rather than being a tool for shaping reality and improving project outcomes, communication becomes a burden. Reluctant project managers and team members ask: what information do I have to send out or pass along now? To me, this explains e-mails forwarded to everyone or a “reply all” with five pages of e-mail back and forth quoted within the e-mail. The sender doesn’t realize the power of communication; they are just concerned with getting another task off their plate. E-mail sent. Communication happened. Check.

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SPOTLIGHT: THE TRADITIONAL VIEW

Let me tell the story of an exchange I had with a sophisticated, well-paid project manager of complex, large-scale projects. It was following a presentation I’d given about the importance of communication. He stood up at the end of the presentation and flatly denied the importance of paying attention to the details of communication on his projects. He was quite loud and adamant. I asked him if he personally paid attention to all the information that came to him every day. Did he read every e-mail, for example, that he received?

“Of course not” he replied. “I have a filter set up on my e-mail that automatically files any e-mail that I’m cc’d or bcc’d on. I only read e-mails that are sent directly to me.”

“Oh” I answered. “And what about the e-mails that you generate? Do you have any rules or guidelines on how you use e-mail to communicate out with others?”

“No! I get to the task of reporting and communication whenever I can. I spend all day on the project! Sometimes I don’t get a chance to write reports or e-mails until 3 am. I then write them and send them out.” He was proud at his dedication and long hours spent on the project.

“Do you think everybody reads the e-mails that you send at 3 am?” I asked.

He looked at me crossly as an answer.

In his mind, it didn’t matter if anyone read them. He had sent out the reports as needed and fulfilled his obligation. (I would further speculate that in his mind he believed that everyone did read the reports since they were sent by him, the project manager.)

With our newfound understanding of the role communication plays, how do you think it makes team members feel when they only hear from their manager in the middle of the night? Do you think they believe he is interested in engaging with them or hearing from them? What do you think a project sponsor’s perception is on the status of the project when the manager is sending a report at 3 am? Do you think this gives the impression that things are moving smoothly? With every e-mail and every report, with every communication we have, we have the chance to positively influence the outcome of the project.

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Realizing that there is a communication design recognizes that people are responsible for projects and that they are influenced by the information they receive. They use this information to make decisions about the project and how they should act. Whether we are aware of the specific design of our Project Environment or not, as Conway’s Law tells us, it directly impacts upon project performance. Here are two case studies showing Conway’s Law at work in two major government projects.

Communication Design: A Success Story—The F/A-18 E/F

The F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet program was a $3.3 billion project to develop the upgrade to the F/A-18 fighter jet between 1993 and 2003. It involved a large number of contractors, personnel, stakeholders, managers, etc. There were a lot of moving parts to coordinate and many milestones to reach. The stakeholders were a diverse group that ranged from corporate leadership at large contractors and leadership in the US Navy to elected representatives in the US Congress and the President of the United States. An effort of this size and complexity can be fraught with failure, miscues, waste and distrust.

Instead, the F/A-18 E/F Super Hornet program is considered to be a definitive success.⁵ It came in on budget, on time and even over-delivered on technical performance metrics (the plane was 400 lbs lighter than anticipated). It also has an impressive record from a process implementation standpoint. The initial estimates about cost and schedule that were made at the beginning of the project using Earned Value Management (EVM) were proven to be a valuable management tool 10 years later. This speaks volumes of the strengths of performance management done right and the skill of the program management team.

I had the chance to learn more about the secret to the program’s success at a workshop with a panel of key program leaders.⁶ Each of the panelists echoed the same theme: trust, which was named the single biggest contributor to the success of the program. There was trust among and between the stakeholders, the team members, industry, the military and the government. To paraphrase Vice Admiral Dyer, the program manager, “we got the big things right, up front” and that was: creating trust. This trust started in the planning phase of the project and continued throughout the program for over 10 years.

But trust doesn’t happen by itself, particularly in a massive, complex, politically approved project. This trust is built and maintained through communication design. (The communication was so effective, joked the Vice Admiral, that it held up his receiving of his first star because his communication strategy was the subject of an internal security investigation.) Leadership designed the environment by setting the rules for communication and modeling behavior. They set a tone for truth in communication and sharing that truth with everyone involved. The members of the team were all playing in the same ballpark with the same reality. And the rules were clear, consistent and applied to everyone.

They adopted the rule that project information would be conveyed using EVM data. Therefore, the data had to be accurate and reliable. Next, they made sure to look at the data and then they distributed it to keep everyone on the same page. The EVM data was looked at on a weekly basis, reviewed with the program team on a weekly basis and shared with key stakeholders. Decisions were made based on that data and the reasons behind decisions were clearly understood by everyone because of this. Decisions could be reasonably predicted because everyone had the same data and the same goal. This created an atmosphere of trust and transparency in communications. Personal agendas, politics and biases played second fiddle to the importance of the performance management data which reflected the reality of the project’s movement toward achieving the technical, budgetary and schedule goals of the project.

Following Conway’s Law, this design had several implications. First, the team members and stakeholders could focus on advancing the projects goals in a way that would be reflected in the performance management data. Whatever they did had to move the needle, as it were, of the EVM data. Second, the team members and stakeholders could focus solely on advancing the project’s goals. Leadership provided the necessary cover and political protection to allow them to concentrate on their work as long as it was in the service of the overall project. This had the further effect of facilitating open dialogue among team members and stakeholders since everyone was evaluated based on the overall progress of the project. Leadership successfully integrated and unified the motivation and efforts of disparate groups toward the achievement of the project’s goals. The solution that was developed and delivered did the same thing. It is a complex piece of equipment, with numerous disparate parts and systems that are all successfully integrated into a single fighter jet that effectively meets its goals.⁷

Communication Design: A Failure—the Mars Climate Orbiter

The $193 million Mars Climate Orbiter disintegrated upon entering the Martian atmosphere on 23 September 1999 because of poor communication design.

The onboard flight system software for the Orbiter in the Martian atmosphere generated data in imperial units. The software on the ground, back on earth, was written to utilize and send instructions in metric units.⁸ There was a lack of a common language between the systems and no integration effort ahead of time that could have caught this error. The preliminary report on the cause of the problem acknowledges the role played by the design of the process in how the disparate systems were developed, integrated and deployed.⁹ “People sometimes make errors” said Dr Edward Weiler, NASA’s Associate Administrator for Space Science. “The problem here was not the error, it was the failure of NASA’s systems engineering, and the checks and balances in our processes [emphasis added] to detect the error. That’s why we lost the spacecraft.” “Our inability to recognize and correct this simple error has had major implications” said Dr Edward Stone, Director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

The scientists involved were all capable of recognizing and correcting the error had there been an opportunity to do so in the Project Environment. The design of the Project Environment did the opposite; it allowed a simple error to be hidden and therefore uncorrected, with disastrous consequences for the project.

What it Means for Us

Conway’s Law has significant implications. It means that the solution that our teams come up with depends on how we structure the communications on the team. It means that part of our role involves designing the communication environment on a project. We are communication designers. As managers, the way we design and create the communication environment directly impacts the project. To quote Conway: “We have found a criterion for the structuring of design organizations: a design effort should be organized according to the need for communication.”¹⁰ We can optimize the Project Environment to meet the project’s goals by changing the communication environment of the project.

Even in case...