Those who know me, know I like to write, they also know I like to use the phrase “operational elegance”. Being elegant is not as easy as it may seem, after all, we are human, and our human nature generally does not allow us to persistently conduct ourselves like Claire Underwood. This is a good thing. As I was thinking about the value of being operational elegant, Claire Underwood popped into my head because let’s face it, she is about as mechanical as it gets, but most human beings can’t rely on themselves to function like Claire Underwood. Generally speaking, manual execution is usually accompanied by mistakes.

Last week I had the opportunity and pleasure to present to our sales team at their national sales meeting, and operational elegance was one of the topics I touched on.

Sometimes this concept can be hard to visualize, luckily while on my way home from Phoenix, I received a Slack message from a project manager on our team which provided the fuel for this musing. Her message was to share some operational elegance, operational elegance that I thought was worth writing about and sharing. In addition to liking to write, disliking brute force solutions and obfuscation, I also value DNA over resume and innovation over imitation. What was great about this Slack message was how it spoke to me about how far we have come, how it is now part of our DNA to innovate and elegantly solve problems. Innovation is happening organically, team members are looking at problems and working to address them elegantly, they are not satisfied with just getting things done, they are incubating new solutions and iterating on them until they achieve elegance. If I were the sort of person to ever claim success, it would be because of changes to the organizational genome that look like this.

We are about a month away from our 2019 team kickoff, last year the theme of our kickoff was #PUSH. The idea was to challenge everything and push our boundaries to become more operationally elegant, accept failure as a means to push ourselves further and faster. The output from last years kickoff was inspirational, many team members who had never written a line of code showed up with impressive projects showcasing innovations that combined their mechanical, electrical, computer and software engineering skills to elegantly solve real-world problems, that were meaningful to them, like how to deliver a treat to your puppy while not at home. Engineering an operational elegant solution that addresses empathy, how do you not love this!

This year for our 2019 kickoff challenge we will have two teams building 1/16th scale autonomous vehicles. This project is about teamwork, creativity, and developing technical skills that extend beyond marchitecture in areas that are driving our industry, like AI/ML/DL, Keras, Tensorflow, etc. Everyone from project managers to engineers has to participate because everyone has the ability and desire to develop skills because they possess the DNA that says the more I know the better I can be; knowledge gives way to perspective, perspective and know-how give way to elegance. This is why DNA reigns supreme over resume. As a team, we have a responsibility to push each other and to help each other grow.

Innovation and operational elegance are not things you do; they are a way of life. Looking at a problem, being frustrated by inefficiencies, brute force tactical solutions, and taking ownership of developing a more elegant solution and continuously improving that solution requires a mindset.

When we think about project management we think about organizing a work effort, managing budget, risk, resourcing, stakeholders, expectations, escalations, communication, etc. But I believe there is room for operational elegance here, where the process becomes automated and measurable. Not only do I believe this, but I also have examples that prove when you have someone with a broader perspective, frustrated by a lack of elegance, with the know-how and freedom to innovate they can quickly convert vision to reality and deliver operational elegance.

This brings me to the latest example of operational elegance and the catalyst for this blog, our very own code loving project manager. Two years ago when I interviewed this individual we had a really good conversation. Having spent most of her career in academia she was a bit frustrated by the politics and ready to move into the private sector and take on new challenges. This person would be working remotely so being self-driven was important, and I certainly got that vibe during our conversations. What I really liked about her was that she was a programmer who moved into project management because she had lost her zest for programming, much of this was due to how so many legacy institutions apply rigid constraints on developers, sucking all the fun out of the creative process. The great news was she possessed the skill, and we possessed the environment to reignite something she once loved. Our culture is one that focuses on outcomes, documentation, reuse, and elegance but polyglots are welcome, even those who chose to speak PHP. 🙂 The focus is always on solving problems, maximizing reuse, removing constraints like solve this complex problem inside these fifty parameters. The world has changed and it favors the innovator over the imitator, to innovate effectively the innovator requires creative freedom. Fast forward to today and this individual is thriving on the freedom to innovate, she is looking at problems, innovating and solving them elegantly on her own. She is detailed, she values the process, she is convicted, she is willing to change and adapt, but not without a battle. 🙂 She will expect you to be as committed as she is.

Last year we took on a project that required us to build a process and systems to support a customer with 300 sites in 52 countries in 41 different languages. We had never done anything like this, we identified a call center partner and began to build a process, but the year was filled with challenges, the provider was not executing very well and worse they could not provide is detailed metrics so we could identify where the failures were occurring, this really put us in a bad position. Our approach was to be transparent with our customer, we started a search for a new provider, once we decided on a new provider we worked on a transition plan and focused on addressing some of the issues we could identify using our year of experience. We developed and introduced IVR (Interactive Voice Response) to reduce call abandonment, we focused on CDRs (Call Detail Records) so we could provide detailed reporting to the customer, see where we were having issues with hold times, call abandonment, etc. While our delivery in 2018 was less than stellar due to third-party provider constraints and failures our transparency and desire to invest in building a better service for the customer is what makes us a good partner and created the opportunity for us to improve our quality of service and grow our business 2019. We are not solving problems that have been solved thousands of times before, we are innovating solutions for our customers that provide a competitive advantage; innovation requires a partnership where we plan for failure, where we take the necessary precautions to limit the blast radius, where we iterate and incrementally improve our execution.

So today we have entirely rebuilt the delivery process, we have detailed metrics being provided by our third-party call center and language translation provider, but it doesn’t stop there, we want to ensure that the path to transparency is efficient, automated, consistent, auditable, and elegant. We should not be downloading data, pulling it into Excel, manipulating it, and emailing weekly reports to our customers because that is inefficient and suspect AF! APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to the rescue! The automation of collection, aggregation, and presentation of information with the right skills and perspective is easy, the line between inefficient and suspect AF, and elegant and transparent AF depends on DNA that compels people to recognize that there has to be a better way to do something, the knowledge to possess this perspective, the desire to challenge yourself and execute, and the wisdom to recognize that Charles Babbage built the difference engine to automate a repetitive task.

We should strive to deliver EaC (Everything as Code), because elegance is rooted in our ability to remove humans from executing repetitive tasks, allowing the human mind to focus on reasoning through complex problems which are not binary and highly repetitive.

The heavy lifting might look something like this:

And deliver an elegant outcome like this:

Bravo to this individual for innovating, even if code is PHP. 🙂 But freedom is the fuel for innovation so great work and keep pushing!

As I sit here this Tuesday before Thanksgiving, in seat 9C on a United flight flying west to east, I am crowded and agitated by the individual sitting in seat 8C who has been trying to get their seat to lay horizontal for the last two hours (hey buddy it’s a limited recline), but thankful for the time I am afforded to ponder what was, what is and what will be. Fueled by thoughts from a meeting I am returning from, some other recent conversations and encounters I’ve had over the past few weeks. This blog post is a digest of some of my thoughts and their genesis. I should note that there are a few thoughts conveyed on various topics in this post which I tweaked over a one-month period. I apologize in advance for anything that may seem incoherent or disconnected.

With a National Sales Meeting (NSM) approaching and a short presentation slot to fill, I have been thinking about the best way to convey my thoughts, my vision, and a call to action. I’ve started to crystallize my ideas over the last few weeks, as I have been critically thinking through the business, what once was, what is, what will be, why, and most importantly, my reasoning. I am also thinking about some of the thoughts conveyed in a book I recently read entitled “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.”  In the book, the author (Brad Stone) discusses how Amazon (specifically Jeff Bezos) replaced the use of Powerpoint to convey ideas, instituting what has become known as the six-pager, a four-to-six-page memo/narrative. The reasoning is that Powerpoint-style presentations somehow provide permission to gloss over ideas, flatten out any sense of relative importance, and ignore the interconnectedness of ideas. I am a “narrative” sort of person, I enjoy thinking deeply and conveying not only my ideas but my reasoning, my inspirations, my thoughts on potential outcomes, etc… I enjoy context, and I believe context is a critical component when trying to convey intangibles like belief, passion, and motivation. I like and respect how Amazon forces people to think deeply, far too often, we assume people will not read memos, emails, etc… We live in a world where we seem to believe cognition is assisted by attempting to get our point across using pictures and captions of 140 characters or less (lousy spelling and grammar, with the all too familiar excuse of favoring velocity of response over coherency, are a bonus). What a sad state of affairs! I am both insulted and frightened by the trend, and I expect more, much more. The big question is, are these the people you want to consider leaders within your organization? We need to expect more! The six-pager represents, demands and tests everything that we should expect of leadership. My presentation at this year’s NSM will be delivered via a Jupyter Notebook and will highlight innovation and try to force people to think deeply about what is possible, to take the examples provided, and visualize what could be rather than what is. I hope this will be an interactive 30 mins, and my goal is to challenge and test the audience’s cognitive skills.

With all of the above said, let’s move on. I believe that it is undeniable that the market is shifting in such a way that cognition may be the most critical skill for success. The ability to carry knowledge forward is diminishing; the market is moving too fast. Our ability to convert knowledge to wisdom which aids cognition, is the difference maker. We all sell a widget of some sort; the key is how we will differentiate our widget, I believe more than ever that differentiation requires relevant intellectual property, something you possess that no one else possesses. This intellectual property needs to be translated into a dialect our customers can understand. The ability to articulate how our unique value adds value to our customer’s business is critical. We all operate against objectives, and within constraints, this next set of thoughts will focus on my perspective on services and required decision-making.

The following attempts to outline my thoughts on service engagement types, markets,  challenges, and required decisions.

Above the line

• Large-scale enterprises where professional services workflow is programmatic and sustained. These engagements, by default, fall into the as-a-service model. Thes accounts understand the cost of program management; they understand opportunity cost, they value quality, velocity, and on-time delivery in areas of their business that typically they would classify as context.

The potential sweet spot

• Customers who have enterprise needs, but unlike large-scale enterprises who organize areas of the business as core and context, the sweet spot customer often classifies all areas of the business as core, but there are core areas of the business which are underfunded and underserved. The challenges in this space are as follows:

1. Massive market segment.
2. Lots of work to segment the market into those who understand that we run a “Professional Services Practice” and NOT “Professional Services Perfection.”
   • Those who grasp a professional services practice, understand and accept failure with the understanding that improvement is continuous and iterative.
   • Those who expect perfection will be disappointed. For this segment, happiness only exists due to obfuscation and being blissfully unaware. Obfuscation is not a good strategy for developing an equitable business relationship and fostering iterative continuous improvement. The goal should always be continuous improvement, right?
3. An incredible struggle to align ability with needs, desires, and expectations.

Success is measured by how quickly an engagement sitting in the “potential sweet spot” queue can be assessed and either pushed above or below the line. Engagements that are pushed above the line are often the most successful and value-added engagements.

Below the line

• Pretty self-explanatory. Our job is to determine if there is a way to move above the line. If not today, maybe tomorrow, but given objectives and constraints, playing below the line is not an option.

Those who know me know that I like anecdotal stories. Simple stories (narratives) which dramatize a situation with the goal of creating a compelling reason to think deeply. So in this post, I will share a story that is compelling enough to have me think deeply about the idea of Everything-as-a-Service. What I will share in this post is all real, real information, real data, real anecdotes which I have used, and most importantly, a real market shift.

First, let me start by outlining some business objectives:

1. Linear growth
   • Not all that exciting because 1+1=2, which means there is not much efficiency or elegance being injected into the business.
2. Exponential growth
   • A desirable outcome that is more interesting and likely more efficient, but not the objective.
3. Combinatorial growth
   • This is where we want to be. A focus on efficiency and elegance in our approach creates the ability to do far more with far less.

While exponential growth is an acceptable trajectory, combinatorial growth remains the objective. Our desire for combinatorial growth is what will allow exponential growth to persist.

A few weeks ago (update: a couple of months ago), I was engaged in an opportunity. I was asked by an account executive to have a call with a prospect to talk about a fairly complex consulting engagement. After spending about an hour on the phone with the prospect, explaining our approach, answering questions, etc… the feedback was positive, and the customer was considering moving forward with us on this consulting engagement. As always, my next step was to begin to think about execution, how would we execute? Realizing that placing myself on the project is not possible, I crafted an engagement model, identified the resources, engagement cadence, timeframe, etc… and started the wheels in motion to align these things to reduce risk and increase the probability of a successful engagement. This engagement had a finite scope, a reasonably clear set of requirements, a finite timeframe, etc… Fast forward a few weeks (update: a couple of months), and we are many revisions of a proposal later, and it has become a deal which is questionable, distracting and probably not worth doing. Why?

1. Unbalanced engagement model.
   • The carrot is being oversold.
   • While future opportunities should be considered, an engagement needs to stand on its own merits. If not, the probability of success is dramatically lowered, and the quid pro quo is easily escaped due to lack of quality delivery, all the while, this was the system that was created from the onset.
2. Scope creep.
   • What starts as a well-defined and finite scope begins to shift to a Maytag repairman model with what is essentially an open-ended T&M scope.
3. The facade of a commitment and an expectation is created.
   • A purchase order creates an implied commitment, but in reality, there’s no commitment by any of the parties involved.
4. Misalignment of expectations becoming increasingly apparent.
   • A feeling of ownership rather than partnership permeates the air.

I believe Everything-as-a-Service (XaaS) has become the trend. When I say trend, I’m implying trending towards the standard, if not already there.

Let me share some anecdotes across a variety of markets (outside tech) that I believe support my belief:

Landscape professionals.  My lawn care company shows up for a mow and leaf cleanup every Friday. They require a contract, they require that the contract is for the entire season, and they are rigid on the day of the week they provide (e.g. – I get a coveted Friday mow which took me years to get). If I want something different, there are no hard feelings; my landscaper is just the wrong guy.

Pool service.  I have a pool service, they provide chemicals, clean my pool weekly, etc… The pool service requires a contract for the season, they visit each week, and often the pool is clean, but the billing remains the same.

OK, let’s move up the stack a bit:

About ten years ago, I had pneumonia, I was walking around with it for a year or so, and it was pretty bad, in both my lungs. I was hit so hard that I passed out in Penn Station, made it home on the train, and landed in the hospital for over a week while they figured out what was wrong with me. The internal medicine doctor who finally diagnosed me was an excellent doctor and remained my primary care physician for the following three or four years. One day I get a letter that they are shifting the practice to a membership-required practice. For $2,500 a year (that was then), I could buy into the practice, if I did not want to pay the $2,500 a year, that was OK, and they would wish me luck in my search for a new primary care physician. With managed healthcare erosion impacting service quality, this doctor wanted patients that valued high-quality care, and he was not afraid to put faith in his value, to expose what was occurring in the industry and the constraints he needed to work within, he went as far as to hold seminars for patients so they could understand the why.  Sure he lost some patients, but in the end, he moved upstream to service patients (customers) with a higher quality of service.

Let’s look at another medical example. My wife needed Mohs surgery years ago; she went to a doctor who took no insurance, who was very expensive, who was backlogged for months, yet this doctor is thriving.

Let’s look at a so-called T&M business model. How about the auto repair industry?

Anyone who knows how this industry works will know that auto mechanics use what are called Chilton rates to quote jobs. E.g. – Front breaks on a 1979 Pinto is four hours of labor at N rate. What’s important here is that the average mechanic can perform these jobs in 1/4th the time.

I went a step further, racking my brain to think about the time and material (T&M) business that is viable.

Some might say that software developers work on a T&M basis. I would say the T&M, in this case, protects the developer from scope creep and the reality that in an Agile model, the scope will change. The scope and timeframe are understood and defined, dollars are allocated to each sprint/milestone, and yes, this maps back to complexity (story points) and/or required level-of-effort, but the goal is to execute against the milestone and track burndown against the estimations.

As a parent, babysitting popped into my head.

Even my babysitter metrics opportunity cost and maintains an expectation of an equitable supplier and buyer relationship. What sort of person rounds down to the nearest hour when paying their babysitter?

Now, how about that Maytag repairman? They are not even T&M any longer. The Maytag repairman is associated with appliance repair. Let’s look at how people do appliance repair:

1. Manufacturer Warranty
   • Fixed cost baked into the price of the new purchase for some period. Highly predictable model.
2. Extended warranty services, like an American Home Shield (AHS).
   • Large-scale break-fix operations that require an insurance plan with a premium, and a deductible for each service incident.

My point here is you can’t even get the Maytag repairman in the Maytag repairman model anymore.

Finally, let’s explore an anecdote about implied commitment and expectations:

I live and work in the New York metro area; there is a common practice of street vendors who sell umbrellas when it rains at exponentially higher prices, simple supply and demand economics. Imagine that the cost of these cheap umbrellas on a sunny day is $2, but when it rains, New Yorkers are willing to pay $10. Now imagine me walking out to the street vendor with an IOU for $100 bucks and telling the vendor that I am committed to them. In this case, I am providing nothing more than an IOU with an expectation that my intent to buy an umbrella from them in the future (at the height of demand, BTW) entitles me to be able to buy the umbrella for $2 (50 umbrellas @ $2). In return, my carrot is, I will tell my friends that this vendor has quality umbrellas. What response do you think I would receive? Probably very similar to my response to many deals I look at: “WTF are you talking about?”

None of these services model or anecdotes should be challenging to grasp. To deliver quality services, predictability is required, costs are predictable thus, revenue streams need to be predictable. To provide quality service delivery, you have to staff using a predictable revenue stream, you have to harden schedules, resource allocation, etc… If you can’t; service delivery problems, unhappy customers, etc… are a foregone conclusion. Accommodation is not a strategy for quality delivery or survival.

Everything-as-a-Service is real and powered by Humans-as-a-Service (HuaaS).  Given the finite nature of the human species, we’ve begun leveraging automation (call it ML/DL/AI or just old-fashioned automation) to create value beyond viewing HuaaS as just another widget.  To accomplish value creation, finite resources need to be applied to high-yield investments.  This will always mean that decisions will continuously need to be made on where to focus, and these decisions may differ from day to day as conditions change.  Doing things faster, with greater accuracy, with less risk, etc… requires intellect.  The shift from a 100:1 time to value (TtV) ratio to a 1:100 TtV ratio is at the heart of the knowledge economy.  The economic principles of an industrial economy cannot be applied to a knowledge economy.