Kitchen Nightmares: Exercises

I realize that some people may not believe that you can teach your managers anything about leadership from a reality television show. I wasn’t convinced either at first. So to prove FOX reality shows can (accidentally) educate leaders, I’ve included the link to two videos. Each one is a 43 minute episode. After watching the video, I created the questions that I thought highlighted the most relevant management points. I then facilitated the discussion with my team. The entire meeting lasted 90 minutes. We had a great time! We had a lot of laughs but the lessons about not having too large a menu and how people lead under pressure were not lost on my team. I hope you find them useful also.

Chef Gordon Ramsay heads to Fair Lawn, NJ, to visit Campania, an Italian restaurant that’s losing more money than it’s making.

Video: Campanias

1. Was Campanias meeting their customer’s expectations in terms of food portions? How does this compare to IT and what are the implications?
2. What was Campanias known for with its customers? What were Joe’s views on this?
3. Was there a turning point when Joe’s team finally took their jobs seriously?
4. Discuss how Ramsay handled “the old bag”. If the customer is always right, why did he insult her?
5. How would you describe the working relationship between Joe and the team? Are there similarities within your company?
   

   
   

Chef Gordon Ramsay visits Secret Garden in Moorpark, CA, to help French chef and owner Michel try to put his restaurant back on the map.

Video: Secret Garden

1. Describe the relationship between the Chef Michel and his employees. Is it based on trust? Do they feel empowered?
2. How does Chef Michel respond to feedback and criticism?
3. How does Chef Michel and the team respond under pressure? What actions does he take and what are the effects on the team?
4. How did Chef Michel deal with the remodeling and new menu in his restaurant?
5. What is the Information technology equivalent of their “menu”? What can we learn from it?
6. What did Chef Michel do when things went wrong with the new menu? Are there examples in business or IT where you have seen a similar response to the introduction of a new process or technology?
7. What was the “cardinal rule” that Chef Michel learned and how does it relate to IT?

Leadership Lessons from Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares

“Restaurants close easily. Especially when the owner isn’t committed 110%” said Gordon Ramsay on a recent episode of BBC’s reality show “Kitchen Nightmares“. My buddy Geoff who is a CIO in the area mentioned this show when we had lunch this week. He told me that this show was a great management training class for IT managers. I was familiar with Gordon Ramsay and his liberal dropping of F-Bombs on other shows but I never really took him seriously as a businessman. After watching two episodes of Kitchen Nightmares, I have changed my opinion of him. He definitely understands how to run a business, which in this case, happens to be restaurants.

For those not familiar with the show, celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay selects a restaurant owner that is about to go out of business and helps them analyze what is causing the failure and helps turn their restaurant around. At least he tries to turn them around. Ultimately, his show is an examination of the leader who runs the business and their failings as a manager. In both episodes I watched this week, the owners had individuals in the kitchen that were disruptive and not taking their jobs seriously. That’s a problem in a restaurant or in an IT department. In both episodes, the manager-employee relationship was skewed. Managers either hired friends or weren’t sure how to manage their staff. Employees didn’t respect their boss and this manifested by tardiness and lack of attention to their job duties. The real losers were the customers.

In the first episode (Ruby Tates), the owner of the business learned from Ramsay how to manage his employees and turned his restaurant around. Sadly, in the second episode (Piccolo Teatro), the other owner didn’t address their own inability to manage the restaurant and the restaurant went out of business. Kitchen Nightmares will not make you cancel your subscription to Harvard Business Review, but it is still a good management tool for watching the effects poor leadership has on a organization. And it’s a lot more entertaining than reading those HBR case studies!

For more information, go to http://www.bbcamerica.com.

Quality Engineering Throughout the SDLC with Gomez

IT Monitoring tools are usually something consumed by techies deep within IT shops and rarely are they discussed within IT and rarer still with the business owners. I’m going to discuss a tool, however, that will change the role monitoring plays in your organization and a tool that will transform your business.

We’ve been using HP/Mercury Business Availability Center for two years at my current company. At AOL, we used everything from OpenView to NetCool to understand our infrastructure. In about ten years of being involved in the evaluation and selection of infrastructure monitoring systems, I’ve never come across a monitoring tool as big a game changer as Gomez’s monitoring software (www.gomez.com).

Depending on where you are on the three stages of the monitoring evolutionary scale, this tool may be more advanced than your company is ready for. I’ll discuss the three types of IT monitoring and then spend the remainder of the article describing synthetic transactions and why I think Gomez is a unique tool to help your entire company not just the IT department.

Three Types of IT Monitoring

1. Link State: This is the most basic form of monitoring. The monitoring system sends a packet every five minutes or so to determine if a physical device is still running. If the device responds to the request, the monitoring systems assume that everything is ok and does not report a fault state for that device. If a device, however, does not respond to the ICMP request, the monitoring system assumes that there is a problem and sends an alert to the administrator that a system or network device is unavailable. The problem with link state monitoring is that it does not attempt to understand if the operating system and services that are running are working properly. The next level of monitoring addresses this deficiency.
2. Process & Services: The next level of monitoring builds upon the link state monitoring capability and provides the IT department a more robust tool for service support. Anybody who has told a customer “the server is up but we’re not sure why the application isn’t responding” knows the value of process and services monitoring. Link state is great for telling IT people that a server is up. Too bad that is pretty worthless for understanding if applications are available. What employees and customers care about is the application that is running on the server that they are trying to reach. Applications running on Unix/Linux use an operating system component called a process. Applications that run on Microsoft Windows servers use a component called a service. Functionally there is no difference between the two. If an employee is attempting to use Microsoft Exchange and it isn’t responding, the MS Exchange service is probably not running or has hung. Process & Services Monitoring looks at these OS components and sends an alert to the administrator when they fail to run properly. In our example, if we are monitoring the Exchange process, we will know immediately when the server has a problem delivering email.
3. Synthetic Transaction: The previous two monitoring states are important and form the foundation of reactive monitoring in IT infrastructure. They are great in helping IT NOCs and engineers respond quickly to support issues but fail to help IT and the business proactively look for tends and potential problems before they arise. Synthetic monitoring actually helps IT and the business come to a common understand of how well the end to end transaction is working. Synthetic transactions simulate actual transactions such as reading a database, retrieving a webpage or authenticating a user session. Each transaction mirrors a real user transaction. Because you can use technology to simulate these transactions, you can now perform them 24×7x365 and use the data to understand when you are having problems. We can look at critical information that was previously unavailable such as average webpage load time, time to pull a record or other customer transactions. If the baseline for a webpage load is normally four seconds and it increases to eight seconds, you know that something has happened in your environment that has doubled the time it takes to load a page. That’s a very bad thing. The IT team can start looking at recent code or infrastructure changes that may have introduced latency into the environment.

Synthetic Monitoring Evolution

Now that we understand the three monitoring stages that IT organizations go through, we have to look at some of the vendors in the synthetic monitoring space and understand how they differ. I have implemented various tools that performed these functions. HP Mercury Business Availability Center is the most recent tool that I have used to baseline our applications and infrastructure. BAC is an excellent tool and provides important insight into how apps and the underlying infrastructure are doing. With BAC you can baseline your apps and look at trends over time to determine the affect of technology and webpage decisions have on site performance. But the fundamental problem with BAC is that it is dependent on the IT team that manages the tool to collect and distribute information about performance as shown in figure 1.

Figure 1: IT Infrastructure creates and distributes reports of limited value

At my current company, our organization has implemented the BAC tool and is also the team responsible for collecting and presenting the information to out stakeholders. We become the gatekeeper and the bottleneck for getting information to people that need to make technical and business decisions. Another problem with this tool is that the development and QA organizations cannot make decisions based on the information they receive. Any actions that arise from the tool are based on inferences from data compiled and disseminated by the infrastructure team. An additional problem pointed is that any requests or changes to the information generated must go through the IT infrastructure team. The Dev, Business Intelligence and Marketing departments have to wait for their requests to be prioritized. This can lead to unnecessary delays that may translate into lost revenue opportunities or poor website performance.

Quality Engineering throughout the SDLC

I once had a client who complained that the environment we managed for them had lower availability than our Mercury BAC tools were telling us. They were using Gomez. Since “the customer is always right”, we worked with them to understand what Gomez was telling them and how it differed from our tools. We successfully addressed a number of internal issues that made our client very happy. In the process, we discovered that their tool was significantly better than ours. There are many tools that provide baselining and benchmarking of your applications. What is different with Gomez is that it looks at the collection of objects on the page and determines which objects are causing the delay in load time. Whereas Mercury BAC did a great job of proving our overall transaction time and availability, it didn’t decompose each object, each call, and each jpg, in a way that would tell us which calls were hampering the customer experience. Gomez measures the transaction times for each step in the sequence so we know where to look immediately for performance improvements.

How would you like to know more about your competitors’ webpage than they do? As part of the benchmarking capabilities, you can compare your website performance to theirs and see if they are more efficient in their page caching or object calling methodologies. Does your business think that site speed is affecting revenue? Find out by baselining your site against your competitors. If you’re faster than your competition, maybe throwing money at website performance won’t solve your problem. Maybe you have design issues that focus groups can help you uncover.

Most synthetic monitoring tools have nodes in data centers throughout the world that reside on the internet backbone. These nodes poll your sites and report response times through their synthetic monitoring. Gomez does this but it does a lot more. In addition to backbone measurements, they have more than 40,000 desktops throughout the world at various internet speeds that also perform monitoring of your site.

In this example, the traditional backbone monitoring would lead you to believe that your site is performing reasonably. It takes 9.7 seconds to load a webpage with an availability of 98.05%. But this is high speed backbone performance (>100mbs throughput) that few people in the world will actually experience. When you look at the traditional DSL customer who is defined as low broadband, we see that the response time more is twice as slow. And if you hope that you can sell to that person still on dial up, they will have to wait over a minute for your page to download. Developers can now work with the business on defining how graphics intensive they want the website to be based on actual load times. You no longer have to guess how your website will perform because Gomez tells you by bandwidth, geography, browser and OS.

Dev and QA can use the BrowserCam feature to select the operating, browser, and screen resolution that they would like to review before they release a new website or page into the production environment. Want to know how customers will view your page running on Windows XP with IE 7 in Los Angeles? No problem. That information and an actual screen rendering are only a few clicks away. Your IT department has the information it needs to know exactly what the finished product will look like when it is delivered to the business owner. And the business owner knows exactly what it will look like when it is released to their customers.

To say that Gomez has the potential to better align the business and IT would be an understatement. In a company that uses Gomez, the consumption model changes from the IT Infrastructure team acting as the gatekeeper and potential bottleneck of information to the many departments being able to directly access the information. Now everyone can access a tool for the purposes unique to their organizational needs. Infrastructure teams can still use it for SLAs and alerting like they always have. But now the QA and Dev teams can use it to develop and test code before it gets to the business or the customer. They will have a wide variety of test tools available to look at how their code will work on various operating systems and browsers. They will be able to test their applications and see how geography affects performance. They will be able to see how bandwidth affects their app also. Marketing and Sales can work with their Business Intelligence or Data Warehouse teams to match the marketing campaigns to a specific geographic market and the most popular browser. Are most of the users in your target market dial up users? If so, you can select to view only performance data based on those users. Dev and the business can work together to design a lightweight website that targets low bandwidth users. There isn’t any guesswork as to what it will look like or how long it will take those pages to load. Gomez tells you exactly what it will look like.

Nice!

A Disruptive Technology

I’ve only touched the surface of the power of Gomez. But the truth is that technology is only one component in successful IT alignment with the business. The other two parts of successful IT alignment with the business are people and processes. This is what potential customers will have to evaluate when the look at Gomez. It is much easier to embrace the past and consume reports from systems like Mercury BAC because it doesn’t require a change in your company’s culture or business processes. Gomez changes everything. Used effectively, people in departments from marketing, business analytics to QA an Dev can now learn how to do their jobs better because of the wealth of information Gomez provides.

Once you get your people committed to the tool, you have to look at your internal processes. If you are a developer or QA manager, you just can’t do things the same once this tool is deployed. You have to embrace it and change your existing SDLC. This will require a reevaluation of your software development lifecycle, your quality assurance processes and your release management function. You’ll be able to deliver with better quality and faster if you do. But you have to change. You just can’t ignore the information that Gomez presents or you are failing to do your job. And that’s why ultimately this is a disruptive technology.

People will have to embrace working tougher differently than they did in the past. People will have to look at their processes and see how they can leverage the tool. If you are the type of person that doesn’t want change your existing way of doing business, or if you think your corporate culture won’t accept reengineering how you design, develop and manage your infrastructure, you probably should pass on this tool. A successful Gomez deployment requires strong leadership from your IT and business executives because it will change the way your company does business.

And for most companies, that’s a very good thing.

More information on Gomez can be found on their website at www.gomez.com

Always Hire People Smarter Than You

I am surprised how frequently I see managers at every level including vice presidents surrounding themselves with people that are less technically competent than themselves. We all were once great technical individual contributors. That’s probably how most of us got our first shot at management. But to develop as a leader, you first have to let go of being a subject matter expert. You must hire people or develop existing staff to take that role. If you insist on being the smartest guy in the room, you will never learn how to grow as a people manager. You will be so busy trying to hold onto your technical expertise that you will stifle the very people who you need to develop so you can be a better leader. This will lead to great frustration within your organization because you will be so busy wearing an old hat that you don’t focus on setting the strategic direction of your department. And by stifling the people on your team, you will lose talented people who don’t see career growth and that causes you to take more control of the technical situation which then leads to greater and greater attrition. This is the true definition of a vicious cycle.

Assess your organization. If you are the leader and the subject matter expert, you are setting up your department for failure.

Your Moral Compass

As a leader or future leader of people, we have to remember a simple fact which is our character is always on display. Last week’s revelation about New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is a prime example of that. There are probably two schools on this issue. One would offer that it was a victimless crime and while illegal, shouldn’t tarnish the works that he has done bringing criminals to justice. The argument would offer that in most situations, he acted beyond reproach. “Why should this incident force him to step down?” people would ask.

The other school, to which I am a student, would offer that a person’s character is shown when people are not looking. In this case, he thought that he was getting away with something. Because he deviated away from leading a moral life, his public career is now over. And let’s not even contemplate what his wife is saying to him right now. She has been publicly humiliated as well. This is caused by what I call situational ethics. Situational ethics is when people believe that morality is relative. They espouse that they can act according to a set of principals in certain business situations, but at other times, it’s ok to bend the truth, mislead people, or act in ways that if revealed would be embarrassing to them.

How do you treat your waitress?

Someone a long time ago told me something that I think about every day. They said that you can tell the character of a person by how they treat their waitress. The point is that people’s true character is exposed when you don’t have to be nice. Everyone has to be nice to their boss. In the corporate world, people are nice to others because they believe they can gain something politically. You don’t have to be nice to your waitress. He or she has no power over you and cannot influence your life. And that’s exactly why people’s character comes out. If you go to lunch with a group of coworkers and you see one of them being rude or abusive to your waiter or waitress, you know all you need to about how that person treats people who don’t have political power to challenge him.

Golf and Ethics

I love golf. I love being out there with friends as well as with coworkers and vendors. It’s a great game and it provides a lot of great experiences. But it is also useful for understanding your character as well as the people playing in your party. Everyone who plays golf knows the old adage, “you learn more about a person in four hours of golf than you do in a year of working side by side with them.” This is an adage that has never failed me when trying to understand the true character of the people I interact with in the corporate world. For those of you who have never thought about the insight you can gain, consider the following next time you are playing with someone for the first time. When they shank the ball into the woods, or if they hit the ball in deep rough, how do they respond? Do they curse and slam their club into the ground? Do they blame the wind, rain, sun, height of the grass, condition of the course, distractions from animals or other external events? Or do they look at what has happened and acknowledge that they were the cause of the poor shot and accept the fate that their swing delivered to them? When they get to their ball and they see that it is a terrible lie, or behind a tree, or out of bounds, do they take their club and give themselves a “foot wedge” by moving the ball into a more favorable spot? I played with a former executive who I knew for a number of years. When I played golf with him, I gained an insight into why other people considered him untrustworthy. On the course, he consistently tried to improve the lie of his ball without regard to the rules of the game. Many times he probably thought that I wasn’t looking. Sometimes he probably didn’t care feeling that he had his own set of rules that he played by regardless of what the overall rules stated about improving your lie. After watching him play golf, I never looked at him the same way again. I also understood the political dynamics at work better thanks to observing him on the golf course.

As leaders, we are always being watched. Everything we do and say is observed by our team, and our company. This extends to happy hours, and other social events as well. You’re always on the clock. Never forget that. Eliot Spitzer thought he was off of the clock when he was secretly wiring tens of thousands of dollars to prostitution rings. He thought he was off the clock when he paid for services while holding the highest office in the state of New York. My former colleague thought he was off the clock when we would routinely cheat at golf.

They were wrong. As leaders and future leaders, we shouldn’t forget these lesson and the importance of being grounded in a moral sense of right and wrong.

Emerging Leaders Series

Several people have asked me to lead a series at work on how I analyze and look at technical and business problems from a leadership perspective. I shyed away from it because I thought it was the hight of hubris to think that I have corned the market on what it takes to be a good or great leader.

But when I thought about a couple of emerging managers/leaders in my department, I decided that it would be helpful to write down some thoughts that I could share with them. This is by no means an exhaustive formula for how to lead people but it will hopefully be food for thought for people who want to eventually take leadership roles. It will hopefully also explain to some managers what the difference is between managing and leading.
Here’s the outline so far. I have not ordered the topics yet. That will come next week:

1. Moral Compass: There’s no such thing as situational ethics.
2. Trust and Alignment. You’re not a leader if nobody is following you! (Source: Steven Covey’s principal centered leadership)
3. Good to Great: Getting the right people on the bus. (Source: Jim Collins)
4. Good to Great: Confronting the brutal truth. (Source: Jim Collins)
5. Jon Luc Picard on Leadership: Decisiveness in times of crisis (Source: Star Trek, The Next Generation)
6. The game of Risk or how to clean your own house before you go into someone else’s.
7. Ducks and Bunnies: Know your audience before you start speaking.
8. Bears and Sharks: Understand your opponents strengths and weaknesses before you go into battle.
9. WIIFM: Selling your ideas means understanding what other people need to be successful.
10. Play your position. Know your team and your strengths.
11. Situational Leadership: What motives you may not motivate me.(Source: Jim Blanchard)
12. Problem identification and definition: Can you express it mathematically? (Source: Six Sigma)
13. Developing a wholestic strategy through the Balanced Scorecard. (Source: Kaplan/Norton)
14. Fancy titles and $3 buys a latte at Starbucks.
15. The three IT levers you can pull to solve business problems. (Source: UVA MSMIT)
16. Creating a climate of change through GAP analysis (Source: UVA Darden School of Business)

John Maxwell Meets Pete Carroll

During the dark days of USC football in the 90s, we had a string of knucklehead coaches. Ted Tollner, John Robinson’s second stint, and to borrow from Harry Potter, “he-who-must-not-be-named” (Paul Hackett) all held the reigns of the USC football program. Our talent was always amazing but we could never even sniff a Pac10 championship, much less a national championship because something was missing. It was the team’s coach.

It was leadership.

In Pete Carroll’s first season, the team started off 1-5. He then got everyone focused and the team finished 5-1 for a six and six record. In 2002, the team finished #4 in the nation. In 2003 and 2004 they won national championships. They have finished no lower than fourth every year since 2002.

Last year in Urban Myer’s second season as coach, Florida won the national championship.

John Maxwell has written a number of books on leadership. One of my favorite books is “The 17 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership.” He comments “People don’t buy into a vision until they buy in to the leader. Once they believe in the leader, they will believe in the vision.”

People have to believe that tomorrow is going to be better than today or why bother? In IT, we often are in reactive mode because we are responding to the demands of the business and the marketplace. Leaders are required to help guide people through the dark days and evenings by offering them a hope that it will get better.

IT is a great career but it is filled with frustrations and challenges. Leaders have to make the right investments in people, processes, and technology to ensure that their teams win in the workplace. Leaders get the right players playing the right positions and then develop a game plan to use the talent on the field.

Pete Carroll, Urban Myers, Jim Tressell, and Bob Stoops are all premier college coaches because they practice John Maxwell’s lesson on being the leader that people want to follow.

Getting the Wrong People Off Of Your Bus

One of my directors on my team created this parody of the usual motivational posters hanging in many offices today. It’s a great parody of Jim Collin’s comment in “Good to Great” about getting the right people on the bus and the wrong people off of the bus.

I’ve used Jim Collins thoughts on identifying talent as a tenant of my leadership style. The person on my team created this graphic and I printed it and hung it on my whiteboard. It’s funny in a twisted way but it really does speak to the harsh reality we face as leaders. Sometimes, the only way to improve the organization is to stop the bus and kick some people off.

I gave a speech at my April All Hands that discussed the tenants of “Good to Great.” Here is an abridged version of some of the key themes that I discussed.

• Level 5 Leadership:
  Modest & Willful, Humble & Fearless - More Plow Horse, than Show Horse — a workmanlike diligence. –
  Modest / Humble - a compelling modesty, self effacing, and understated, whereas two thirds of comparison companies (losers), had leaders with huge personal egos that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company.
  
• First Who … Then What: We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats–and then they figured out where to drive it. The old adage “People are your most important asset” turns out to be wrong. People are not your most important asset. The right people are.
  
• Confront the Brutal Facts (yet never lose faith): Every good-to-great company embraced what we came to call the Stockdale Paradox: You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties AND at the same time have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
  

One of the disappointing aspects of leadership is the acknowledgement that not everyone is going to buy into your vision. You can’t implement your vision when you have people in your organization who are smiling in your face and stabbing you behind your back. Having an idea of the talent and commitment you have and making painful but necessary “bus stops” is the only way to ensure you have a team focused on aligning around your strategy.

Using MS SharePoint and ITIL Service Catalogs

I’ve been trying to find the time to do an IT Service Catalog for about a month now. An IT Service Catalog is a definition of what your IT department does and how to engage them. There is a description of what you do, whom to contact when you need to escalate, and service level agreements for each specific service.So here’s the idea.

The idea is to create a self service intranet portal where people will check there first before they call IT for common questions. This would drive down costs within IT as well as improve customer satisfaction. New hires don’t know who to contact for things IT takes for granted. They are an easy source for questions to populate a FAQ site is new hires both inside and outside of IT that have started in the past month. Their frustration level is high because so much of what we do in IT is undocumented. People who just started want to become productive fast and provided FAQs on an intranet site can increase their productivity. These questions are the same frequently asked questions that every new, and some existing, employees have every day. What IT can do is categorize them by functional area in the IT Service Catalog and then have members of IT answer them online. Version two would be to use a wiki so everyone in the company had the ability to ask questions as well as contribute to the knowledge of information.

We plan to use Microsoft’s Sharepoint Services to post the content on our department’s portal. I’ll let you know how it goes in about thirty days.

Two Great Quotes on IT Measurement

I’m getting ready to send out our August Balanced Scorecard Operational Review deck to our IT organization today. It got me to thinking about a couple of my favorite quotes that I wish other parts of the organization would use to manage their teams. The first quote is on the first page of every monthly scorecard. If I could force people to sleep with this quote under their pillow at night I would.

“Trying to improve something when you don’t have a means of measurement and performance standards is like setting out on a cross-country trip in a car without a fuel gauge. You can make calculated guesses and assumptions based on experience and observations, but without hard data, conclusions are based on insufficient evidence.”

Mikel Harry, an author of a good book on “Six Sigma.”

We can definitely debate the impact Six Sigma has had on corporations but the quote is fantastic. His book is the origin of my phrase “we are a facts based, math based organization” that I try to instill into the team. His second quote that I love states that “you don’t truly understand a problem until you can express it mathematically.” Both good quotes and I definitely agree with them. Without facts, my nine year old daughter expressed it best when she said “Opinions are like armpits. Everyone has them and sometimes they are smelly.”As she gets older she will change the wording slightly but the message and its meaning will still stay the same.