Book Review: Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

I almost feel ashamed that I had missed this book for so long. Peopleware (3rd ed.) from Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister is a book about soft side of product development and creative work overall. It goes through using many studies and examples why it is so important to take good care on people.

Book explains Human Resources, office environment, recruitment, growing productive teams, taking care of people and most importantly having fun at work. It's impossible to highlight all the important things they raise in the book, because there are so many. The main message is that people are the most important asset of many companies and too often people are not given good enough support and office spaces to get all the benefits from them.

I especially liked the office environment part. I've worked and seen so many bad offices where there are too much noise, too little light, too many interruptions and inadequate space and time for getting to the flow state. Most often there are stupid policies that prevent on creating workplaces that would actually suit to the needs of the workers. And then in worst cases there are some guys proud of saving money on small office. That's just sad.

But the book is not only about working environment. It discusses lot about teams and how to form great teams and what are the common ways to ruin good teams. Team development is something I've been interested for a long time, but still they were able to provide good new information and ideas to myself.

I honestly am bit ashamed that I didn't read the book earlier. When reading books, I always mark down parts that I will come back later and this book got most markings ever. It's a great great book and even really easy and fun to read.

This book is a gem and every manager and knowledge worker should read this. It gives lot of ideas and background information for building better teams and workplaces. I highly recommend this book.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Why "how are you" is so difficult to Finns

I've worked almost ten years with UK and US people. I had heard about and experienced the "how are you" -culture few times, but properly I experienced it the first time when I started working with them and traveled there more. In the first years, I actually answered to the "How are you" question properly even to the cashiers and waitresses. I did tell about long travels, difficulties with time difference or what was actually ongoing on my mind. Then at some point I realized that they don't actually give a shit about how I am, but that's just their way of being polite.

In Finland, when someone asks "How are you", they actually mean it. Most of the times people genuinely want to know is everything OK and is there something new ongoing. World is slowly changing even in Finland,, but we've had the mentality to only talk when there's something to say. So the always coming "how are you" questions are quite strange.

I've learned a lot in my trips about the "how are you" culture, but even nowadays I'm confused in when the question comes from someone you know or even consider a friend. I'm not really sure if they actually want to know how I am or is just their way of saying hi.

In my recent London trip I again noticed myself actually answering to the "how are you" question with a proper answer at least twice. They were people who I hadn't seen for a while, but I considered as a work friends, people who might have actually cared about how I was doing. When I was answering to the question, I did notice from their body language that they were not actually expecting me to answer.

The whole "how are you" thing is just too difficult for Finns. I would encourage anyone working with Finns to skip the "How are you" part, if you don't actually mean it. We will not get offended, because we don't realize that's something one should do. Next time you meet a Finn, just say Hi.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Communication is really important and really hard

Often putting information available or sending an email is the thing people think to be enough communication in organizations. For me, communication is never about making information available, but about getting people to understand the message. Too often communication is seen to be broadcasting information to all and not caring if anyone is receiving the message or not. I see this as both inefficient and unnecessary communication.

People receive messages differently so there needs to be many different ways the message can be received. This is the part that it is so easy to underestimate. It is easy to get communication out of the way by publishing information to be available. I've never seen this to really work. Only the cases where ones work continuation is in question, as larger layoffs, publishing information might be enough. For any other communication, there are always too many distractions to lose the message to all the other noise.

It's not only about the noise, that prevents communication going through. People also receive the messages differently. Some people need to see the big picture in order to understand the message, others need to get the details for understanding. For some people it is important to know the reasoning behind something, for others goal might be the most important thing. This needs to be kept in mind when communication is planned.

Communication is one of the hardest topics in organizations. The value of the communication is hard to measure, but fails in communication are easy to point out. Often improving efficiency in communication, could increase many things in the organization. Better communication would need to be done so that it won't take much time out from people other tasks and still makes sure people receive the message.

The rule, using more time in the planning, will save time at the end, suits communication really well. The better person or small team plans communication and uses time to prepare it, the more time will be saved from everybody else. The bigger the organization, the larger the savings.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Mystery of Subway success

You all know Subway. They make good tasting quite healthy sandwiches. It's the most popular franchise in the world according CNN study from 2010. There is more than 37000 restaurants all over the world.  They are growing by thousand of restaurants per year. And still, I don't understand why people like go there.

Subway has a clear concept of letting people choose everything about their sandwiches themselves. First person chooses their sandwich, then the main theme of the sandwich  meaning the main ingredients. After that person selects the fresh ingredients inside the sandwich and at the end the sauce and other spices.

I hate this selection process. I truly really hate it. I hate it so much, that I only go there if I don't have any other viable choice anywhere near. It always makes me feel uncomfortable. I don't want to choose all the things inside my sandwich, I just want a sandwich.

I'm wondering that am I the only one feeling this way? Subway is such a popular that people must like something about it. This bothers me. I've always thought that limiting choices is the way for better results. There's even many studies to proof for it. Here is for example one of those studies stating that reducing available choices will get people to buy more. For some reason this rule does not seem to apply with Subway.

I do know that people are irrational. Purchase decisions are not made rationally, but more with feelings. Brand building is exactly about feelings. Could the reason then be that Subway have been able to build such a good image to peoples' head about them being the healthy cool choice for a meal, that people go there even they hate the selection process. Or then they don't hate the selection process as much as I do.

It's always hard to accept the facts that are against your own point of view. Subway is one of these good learning lessons for myself. Even though I really hate eating at Subway, it's one of the most popular dining places in the world. They must have figured out the receipt for success. It's better to try to learn from them than to ignore them.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

No one is irreplaceable because of their knowledge

There are people in organizations that seem irreplaceable. Of course no one is really irreplaceable, but they can be important for organization to keep running efficiently. The fun thing is that often it is thought that these irreplaceable people are so knowledgeable about some subjects that it makes them so important. But that's not the case.

In information age, knowledge is available for everyone. Information about basically any subject is only few googles away. The same is true with organizations, information is available for most who are eager enough to find it.

The true value of the people is how they use and process the information they receive. Mapping information together and ignoring irrelevant information are highly necessary skills of todays organizations. Reacting to correct information and knowing how and with whom to process the information is the key what makes some people so effective.

People should concentrate more on putting information and sources of information to the context than trying to gain information to themselves whenever they can. I bet everyone knows these people who try to be involved in everything, but they don't actually give any valuable input to anything. Then at the same time, there can be people who are not involved in many things, but once asked they somehow always seem to give valuable input.

Information about where and how to find information, is more important than knowing yourself. That's what irreplaceable people are made of.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Don't listen to your customer, watch them

One of the best advices, for creating great products and services, I've heard is: "Don't listen to your customers, watch them". Asking people what they want or would prefer often gives irrelevant answers. When watching how people behave, there can be noticed patterns, that will tell how they would like things to work. Their verbal answers might tell a different story.

Watching people's behavior will guide to the sources of what people really are missing. It's quite common to say different things than actually do. People try to be smarter than they really are and try to give creative answers to the question about how would they like things to work. Watching the behavior, is for that reason, more important than just listening.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Learning from others

There's something to learn from everyone. Everyone have some skill or practice that they are good at and also some habit or practice that they could do much better. There's learnings in good and bad.

Learning is often in the beginning mimicking others. We first do as others do in same situations. Then some get to the next level on understanding why things are done as they are. For most of the things learning is always mimicking the behavior of others.

It's important not to be stuck with learning only from those who you admire. There's something in every person that should be learned. It's important to keep your senses open. Otherwise you lose many potential learnings.  

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Learnings and tips from crowdsourcing project within company

Couple weeks ago I was asked to start up a crowdsourcing type of project inside the company. I was given sponsorship from our management, but I had to recruit the people myself and organize the actual work myself. I really liked the challenge and got up to speed quickly. I had only couple of weeks to finish this and I knew I had to get couple hundred people working on this on voluntary basis.

Now that the project has turned out quite well, I wanted to share my learning's from this journey to you and to analyze and learn from those myself also better. I at least analyze better written than only in my head.

Get it up and running
The first thing was to decide how much preparations I would do before really starting the project. I had basically two alternatives, (1) create proper web or tool based mechanism to divide the the work and create reporting tool or then (2) use good old excel and email based mechanism. Due to limited timeline, I selected the latter one. Within one day from announcing the project, I already had tens of people working on the actual work items.

This was a tough choice and I believe in some cases more elegant systems would help on coordinating the work and results. Of course I had a good plan also, just the tools were ancient. I juts believed that in this situation the best thing was to but the wheels running fast. That' was the way to get more time for our volunteers and fast feedback on my methods. So off I went.

Recruiting people
Like said, this was a company internal project and it has it's own challenges on recruiting people to join. I had to get sponsorship from our management (my manager did this for me, thanks for that), but I had to convince line managers around to give this a go and then convince the actual people to join to help a common goal.

Only tip I can say about this phase is, that be honest and transparent. Tell exactly how much of a time it might take from volunteer, what's the timeline and when results are expected. Also be clear what are the prerequisites people have to fulfill to join. And remember to tell the goal of the exercise clearly and understandably. Keys to get people to join are that they understand what they work for and what they exactly need to do.

Walk trough the whole chain
Before you roll up your sleeves and put the ball running; walk the whole chain trough once. What I do first, how do I instruct people, how do I get the results back, what do I do with the results, how the results are shown, who are the key people to know about the results, when this thing will finished and so forth.

Make an easy walk trough of the most important steps you expect you will face during the project. It won't take more than 15-30 minutes for this exercise, but it will definitely help you to see whole.

Test your instructions
This is the part I learned a lot. I made the perfect instructions at first. I looked the subject from many directions, answered all the questions in advance, made pictures with explanations on those and walked through the chain with my instructions. Then I asked few of my colleagues to check those. They found some minor tweaks to those, but after those, the instructions we ready to rock. Or so I thought.

I still decided to take one more cautious step before rolling the instructions to everyone. I decided to use target group for verifying those. When the first voluntaries arrived, I gave the instructions for the first tens of people and paused the roll out for a while. I asked my target group to immediately report any misunderstanding and clarification needs from my instructions. What happened was, that within the first day, I did four major updates to my thought to be perfect instructions. I congratulated myself for using this focus group approach. It turned out I really needed it.

Do not assume
In the first set of instructions I made two assumptions, that (1) some things are common knowledge and  (2) that it is obvious that I expected people to communicate back to me with certain way. Both of those turned out to be false ones.

I learned that I should never assume, that things are commonly known, because me and my close colleagues are familiar with the subject in advance. I had to make updates to my instructions about these really basic issues. I had actually explained the harder parts really well, but then the easy ones I had failed to explain well enough.

Biggest mistake of this whole project was, that I didn't specify the way people should communicate back to me. I assumed everyone would get the idea from my instructions, but it turned out to be quite the opposite. I got contacted with so many different ways and so many different formats, that I had to use lot of time on standardizing the results together. This is where the more advanced reporting tools would have become handy. I made conscious decision to stick with simple tools and get it running faster. It would have easily taken 2-3 days of my project to develop those tools, so I still think I made the right call with excel and email. Next time I just must use more time to explain how I want the results to be communicated to me.

Emphasize possibility to ask for more information
This was a learning from past similar projects. Some people need to be encouraged to ask for more info. Some people are naturally shy and they try to find information from sources they are familiar with. This easily leads to false information due to uncertainties and misunderstandings. So I encourage to put an extra emphasis on ways and possibilities to ask for clarifying questions. Tools like email and IM chat's work well for naturally shyer people.

Friends are the worst ones
I've done these type of projects couple of times in smaller scale and based of those and the project in question, I can tell that friends are the worst ones. Those people who you now quite well and who you do have a relationship with, easily don't obey the deadlines and read the instructions nearly as well enough as the ones you don't know in advance. Somehow the friendship status makes people to be more careless and they don't use the attention needed to successfully complete the tasks given. Of course there are exceptions to this and some friends can be even used for help. Overall I still think that friends are the worst ones in this type of projects. 

Have a realistic schedule
Before making a target schedule for your project, think about the scale. If there's 100 people involved, completing a project in 2 days is a big challenge. From 100 persons, there's easily ten  who come up with something more urgent to deal with and it might be hard to get replacement for so many in such short notice. I don't have any rule of thumb here, but just think of how long the task might take, double it and then give still some buffer. People always works in different ways and different situations.

When you give people a deadline, don't put it to the last day you want it to complete. Have it at least 1 or 2 days in advance and this gives you the possibility to be flexible, when people come to you to ask for more time. They are happy and you will still get your results on time.

Have a good plan of follow-up
As Stephen Covey advised in his book 7 Habits of highly effective people: "Habit 2 - Start with the end in mind", and so you should do here also. Always keep in mind what is the purpose of this all. Is the way people are working the important thing or do you care only about the results. Or are the results actually just a side note and the purpose of this all is to come up with actions from the results. Or are actually the meaning of all this to fix some underlying problem and you are just the step towards it.

So think carefully why it is done and what are the things you need to care for most. There's going to be problems in the way that something doesn't go as planned, or some results might not be as accurate as you would like those to be. Just try to reflect those to the purpose of your exercise. Like life in general, you can't win all the fights, instead try to win the war.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Stop pointless arguying and try to understand the opposite side also. It's refreshing.

I've been in many discussions with people I think are really smart, but still I've seen them to make totally incorrect conclusions based on facts we both share. And to be fair, I've thought those are totally incorrect conclusions, it could be that I'm making the totally incorrect conclusions.

People reflect anything they see based on their own history with the subject. Everyone have some precausions about all the subjects in the world. Even not knowing anything is a history with the subject, which makes person even more unsecure with the facts they are given. Still in almost all situations, people match the data they receive to their own value map, history of experiences with similar issues.

This all causes disagreements and makes people get angry to each other because of they are not seeing the things the same way they do. Funny thing is that people most often do have valid reasons why they disagree with someone or understand differently things that they do. Most often they are not stupid or just being mean, but they are interpreting thing based on their experience and understanding, and that makes them see things differently.

Here's an example, look at these two photos in this blog post? How do you see those? Where do you think those are from and what actually happening in those photos?

I bet some of you might already have really good guesses about those or you could even actually know what's happening in those? Others might not have any glue and could guess totally wrong. Even though these aren't something to argue about, I hope it still proves my point that your own experience always affects on how you interpret situations.

Once in a while it's really refreshing to really try to understand why someone is seeing things totally differently than you are. Try sometime to go to the other side, and try openmindly understand the reasoning why somebody else is seeing the same thing so other way than you are. If you try this couple of times, I promise it opens you a new world. It helps you to understand much more about people. But it is also really hard, I at least easily get the temptation to start correcting the facts I think are not correct without really trying to understand. Being open minded will give you lot of experience for the future to communicate with people who you want to influence.

In case you are still wondering, the upper picture is from Lahti, from ski jumping tower, where in summers there is outdoor swimming lanes in landing area of the ski jumping hill. The second photo is from WRC rally Finland, where someone left video camera on to the road to get close ups from soon coming WRC rally car. Did you get those right at the first time?

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen

Social media is making people specialists

People in internet are quite often stuck in subjects. People are either being serious or being funny, talking about business or about environment, politics or sports and so on. That's not the case in real life. In real life some of the most professional guys can be the most funny ones and politically aware people can be really into sports.

Blogs are often focused on certain subjects by nature so maybe those are not the best way to evaluate this situation. Twitter proves my point much better. Twitter is personalized and it is concentrated on the actual person and he's or she's tweets. There are companies also, but mainly it's still actual users. Most of the Twitter users I follow are sticking with quite limited area of subjects. Some of them have taken the role of sharing high tech news, others tweet about social media, some about sports and so forth. Really rarely you see these really mixed.

I'm wondering why is that. In the real life, almost all people I know are willing to discuss, are interested and knowledgeable in multiple different subjects. At least in much wider range of subjects than common Twitter user is (according to my limited experience). Are the tools that make people being stick with subjects they feel most close or is it because the audience?

Maybe it's those combined. Way internet is currently used, creates niches and specialists. People tend to find information from services and places which are specialized in one area and then other information come from another source. Then the same logic also applies to Twitter. I've noticed when I have tweeted about books I've read, I'll get some followers who unfollow me after couple of days when I'm tweeting about something else. I'm not sure if that is a pattern, but I've noticed that to happen often with book blog posts.

Will internet change people so that they will be focused on fewer subjects or will internet actually adjust to meet the needs of generalists also? I think I'm one of the latter ones and that's why I care about this. There's so much interesting stuff all around the world, that I'm not willing to enjoy only a part of it. I know I will lose followers and readers because of that, but social media isn't my job in any means and I prefer being myself than attracting followers with something else.

I find this subject interesting. I just can't believe that people would be that focused really on certain subjects, but maybe they are just using different means and tools for different subjects. That just sounds bit boring, I'm waiting internet to fix it for me.

Written by +Henri Hämäläinen