Ideas

This page is intended as a means to share my thoughts on a few subjects that may be of interest to you.  It includes a few downloadable files of whitepapers and presentations.                                                                                                                                           

Observations on Project Management

I question the assumption that any project manager can manage any engagement.  I have seen it lead to pitfalls, usually due to a lack of sound sense of the business issues and business problems the project was supposed to be addressing.  I would classify projects into three categories:

Administered projects - Those where all the administrative steps were followed, all the paper work done and checked off, problems were reacted to in a timely way, people are encouraged to stay on task and on schedule, the client's issues were resolved -- but no value was added, people were not developed, client relationships were not built, and no follow-on work was identified and sold.  

Managed projects - Beyond administration, good communication existed, problems were anticipated as well as reacted to, people's development was addressed, the value identified in the business case was considered in all design decisions, and the client felt they got what they paid for.  As a result, we may get additional work on similar projects in the future.

Led projects - Leading goes beyond managing.  A leader has a vision and communicates it to the project team and to the client.  Visions have power to excite people and provide a common basis for all design decisions.  In a led project, value beyond the initial business case is identified in the course of the project and either baked into the effort or noted and set aside as a follow-up project.  People are encouraged to think about potential value as they go about their assigned tasks and to identify new issues and ideas at any point in time.  Led projects almost always pay for themselves and lead to more work.

My friend John McBride has two great project management resources on his web site:

- Code of team behaviors http://johnmcbride.com/teamcode.htm

- Seven rules for team success http://johnmcbride.com/webteams.htm

Identity Issues - 6 R's and what a bank can learn from a casino

When a “whale” (a.k.a. Private Banking customer) walks into a casino they are recognized, greeted at the door, and shown to their free suite and their favorite VIP gaming tables. When a "shark" (cheat, fraudster) shows his face he too is greeted, but with an entirely different response.

Can your bank do this?

Probably not. But banks have several reasons to be looking to advanced technologies to address identity issues and the casinos are where such technology has been pioneered. Those reasons include: 

Know your customer regulations – There is a difference between knowing a customer and knowing an account holder. A customer may have multiple accounts and their pattern of activity overall may be deemed suspicious even if no individual account looks suspicious on its own.

Fraud reduction potential – No one is committing fraud today using their own name, address, and Social Security Number. Frauds involve creating or stealing identities, taking over real customers' accounts, and using real customers' identity tokens (codes, checks, cards, passwords, personal data) to steal from the customers' accounts.

Customer management – It is just good business to know who your customers are, who they are related to, what their total product mix is, and then use that information for marketing and in the daily decision-making processes of the bank. Do you really want to cancel the credit card of the daughter of the CEO of your largest Corporate Trust customer?

A Key Payments Issue

I think that the biggest issue in payments today is the movement of checks from physical clearing and returns to electronic clearing and returns.  Way back in 1991 I was part of a study to answer a single question:  "What one change in the US payments systems would have the largest payback?"  After considering many alternatives and running projections, the project team's answer was, electronic check returns.  Fraud was part of the economics.  But there were downsides too.  The following paper discusses some of the issues.

Big ideas

In response to a request for "Big Ideas" a while back, I wrote the following for consideration:

1. My kids' generation is really about speed, instantaneousness.  Michael Hammer put it into a formula: VT/ET (value time over elapsed time).   People no longer wait in lines, as they did when I was a kid.  Why should 4 hours' work approving a mortgage take 30 elapsed days (a ratio of .001)?  We should be helping our clients think in such terms and approaching a ratio of 1.0   Our internal processes could be designed with that in mind too. 

2. "Lead people, manage numbers, never confuse the two."   Sometimes we are led by numbers and we try to manage people.  It doesn't work very well that way.  Can we articulate among ourselves the differences between managing and leading?  Can we help our consulting clients implement the concept (or avoid implementing its opposite)?

3. "Courage is the most underrated characteristic of effective executives".  This doesn't get taught in MBA school or written about in the latest management guru's best selling book.  It takes courage to lead rather than manage.  It takes courage to speak what you know people need to hear (in a way they can hear it) rather than what you know they want to hear.  It takes courage to keep commitments rather than find easy outs.  It takes courage to report a bad quarter rather and bookkeep your way to more comfortable numbers (or do anything else that is right in the long-run with a short-term cost).  It takes courage to develop a vision then share it with your whole organization, believing that the competition can read about that vision but has no hope of getting there first.  Do we recognize and reward courageous decisions or just sales and billings dollars? 

But the really big ideas are about life.  I wrote some down in 1991 so I would not forget them.  At the time I lay in an isolation "bubble" with no immune system, too weak to do anything but think for 44 days.  I came up with three ideas (probably none particularly original, but newly meaningful to me at the time).  By the way, I not only survived but was completely cured (and the doc now has the Nobel Prize for Medicine).

4.  Never die with accrued vacation.  Enjoy life.

5. If you would change your life if someone were to tell you that you have a short time to live you just might want to make those changes any way.  The death rate is still 100%, we all die.

6.  If you look back on your life and you cannot think of many times when it made a difference that you were in the room (versus whoever would have been there in your place) then maybe you would like to change that in the future.  Make a difference.

I really believe all six things and believe they have practical day-to-day value.  They don't guarantee that everything will go well, but do point in some useful directions.