Control Freak

All too often I see results of a survey displayed where someone says ’so 66% of people are in favour of this change so we should get on and do it’ and I find myself resisting the urge to jump up and say ‘that’s nonsense, don’t you know about statistical significance?’. This happens so often with information that is used for important management decisions that it scares me. Here’s an explanation of just what I’m on about.

The basics

The best way to find out what a group of people think is to ask everyone and get an answer from everyone. However when only some people answer there is a mathematical way of working out just how reliable any answer is, that is Statistical Significance. This method works out from the sample taken, how many people would say the same thing if you asked everyone and just how likely that answer is to be correct. It cannot give you an exact answer, but it can give you a range within which the actual answer lies and you have to determine whether that range is too big to be of any use.

It can also tell you how many replies you need to get in order to get a significant result. It cannot tell you how many to ask since not everyone will reply and that is down to psychology.

The theory

Statisticians over the centuries have noticed that the answers to surveys (amongst other things) fit into patterns of distribution and that with enough answers you can work out what that distribution pattern would be. The more answers you get the more certain you can be about the distribution pattern.

You can never be 100% certain what everyone thinks but with enough answers you can get close. So most statisticians work on the basis of trying to be 95% certain about an answer. However there are times when you might want to be 90% certain or even 99% certain. This degree of certainty about the answer is called the Confidence Level. For most management statistics a 95% Confidence Level is fine. If you are dealing with things like infection rates you might want to use 99%.

The significance of any answer depends on three things:

• Population. The total number of people that you could ask if you asked everyone.
• Sample. The number of people from whom you actually got a response.
• Percentage. The percentage who gave a particular answer to a particular question.

What you get back is a spread of percentages, which is the measure of statistical significance, known as the Confidence Interval. So for example if you did a survey and 75% answered yes then the calculation might tell you that if you asked everyone the actual number who said yes would be between 35% and 115%. However with a larger sample size it might tell you that if you asked everyone the number who said yes would be between 70% and 80%. As you can see the first result is meaningless but the second is very useful.

There are some interesting points to note about the way this spread changes:

• The larger the sample size the smaller the spread. But it is not linear so calculate it, don’t try to guess it.
• For a larger population then a smaller sample relative to the population is needed to get the same degree of spread.
• The closer the percentage of people who give one answer gets to 50% (above or below) then the wider the spread becomes.
• The spread is the same whether you take a positive or negative answer. So for example if 75% said yes and 25% said no then you would get the same answer which ever way you did the calculation.

Examples

There are actually two ways you can use this calculation. One is after you have the answer and the other is before you send a survey. Both of these assume a Confidence Level of 95%.

Example 1 – “ How significant is this answer?

Assume we have a population of 3000 people and we send a survey to which a sample of 300 reply and out of those replies 225 (percentage 75%) say yes to a particular question.

When we do the calculation we find out that if we were to ask everyone the same question then the percentage who would say yes would be between 71.35% and 79.65%. So we can be certain that the majority agree.

The actual calculation returns a Confidence Interval of 4.65% so the lower limit is given by 75% – 4.65% = 71.35% and the upper limit is given by 75% + 4.65% = 79.65%.

If however we only got replies from 30 and of those 22 (73%) said yes then when we do the calculation we find out that if we asked everyone the same question then the number who said yes would be between 58% and 89%. Still a majority but a much wider spread of possible results.

Example 2 – “ How many do I need to ask?

Assume we have a population of 3,000,000 then we can do the reverse calculation to find out what sample size we need to get answers from to get a spread of just 1% on any answer they give. In this case it is 9573.

As the spread changes depending on the percentage who answer, this calculation assumes the worst case, which is that 50% give one particular answer. If we did get 9573 replies and more or less than 50% gave the same answer then the spread would be shorter.

The calculation

The actual calculation is too complicated to explain (and I’ve forgotten it) but you can visit the web site

http://www.surveysystem.com/sscalc.htm

which will do the calculation for you both ways. You can also save this page and do the calculation offline if you want as the code that performs the calculation is all stored with the page.

jay Leadership

If there is one skill that is a critical requirement for being a senior manager then it is the ability to read people and and understand what they want, what they don’t want and what they feel about the things that are going on around them.  This is very similar to empathy, but in a conscious way.

So much of what we say is unsaid, if you see what I mean.  There are lots of reasons for this: some people (more than I can ever quite believe) are very cautious about what they say; sometimes the stakes are high and people don’t want to give things away; and some people are just not very good at saying what they want.

Now I’m not saying that the ability to read people is needed to gain a competitive edge, as though it were some form of mind reading.  Though that is definitely a skill that all good salespeople have.  What I mean is that many of us are only looking at the world with one eye open, if that, so having both eyes open allows you to spot the other people that have both eyes open – and they generally turn out to be the most senior people in the room.

Don’t make the mistake of equating good awareness with good communication skills.  Many people can be great at empathy but rubbish communicators.  The two are not related.

Reading people does not come naturally to many, it has to be learnt as a skill.  I only know one way of learning this skill:

When I’m in a meeting I try to take a step back and examine the other people.  I try to read their expressions and their body language; work out if they are comfortable with what is being said or uncomfortable; try to work out what they want; are they straining to say something; are they bored; and so on.  This means getting inside their heads and learning to think like them, understanding what drives them and therefore what their motives are in specific circumstances.  Over time this becomes second nature.

Just remember I’m not talking about any kind of intuitive feelings.  This is detached observation.  When I forget this and try to rely on intuition alone (if there is such a thing) then I generally mess up.

jay Leadership

There seems to be an increasing trend for people building systems to ensure they meet current needs but then take that even further with customising them to fit just so. Or sometimes it is expressed as a refusal to consider future needs unless those are clearly expressed and the need for them is well established. Maybe this is an old trend from mainframe days that is going through a resurgence.

Here are some examples of what I mean:

• In software just writing code that does what is needed now without the hooks for what might come later.
• In hardware just configuring the capacity that is needed now without planning for future growth. (As an aside, the thing I find most irritating here is cutting cables to exactly the right length).

To me, almost everything I design must have an virtually obsessive degree of future-proofing built into it. Over the years I’ve built up a whole set of techniques to minimise the impact of this need, so that I get the future proofing I want, but without hassle.

Maybe some people just don’t know how to do that and so they avoid building in the future proofing as they can only see it adding complexity and cost?

I’m fairly convinced that my approach has two significant benefits:

• The first and most obvious is that it enables later change to happen much quicker and with much less difficulty than otherwise. Of course that relies on the nature of the future proofing work that was done originally, but then that is the skill that needs to be learnt.
• The second and potentially more contestable is that designing with future in mind actually produces better design now. It forces me down the road of making things generic, designing distinct interfaces or protocols and, most importantly, building the whole design around a conceptual framework.

This last point about the conceptual framework is critical to the understanding of any system. So long as you understand that everything fits in a conceptual framework and know what that is then you can far easier extrapolate your understanding to areas of detail that you don’t know, than otherwise. In other words, it is so much easier to take a sensible guess. It is also so much easier to understand how you would extend it.

The counter-argument to my whole proposition here is that modern technology and modern methodology make changing systems so much easier than before. For example, with virtualisation tools a server or disk volume can be moved and resized with a single click. Or, with modern IDEs, software can be re-factored with a single command.

However, both of those would be even faster, or perhaps even unnecessary if the design was done right in the first place.

jay Technology

Imagine I am holding my hands out in front of me, two feet apart and imagine that represents all the work an average technical team does. Then think about just how much your customers actually get to see. For me I think that is about the last two inches. So we have all that effort, all the brilliance, all the achievement and yet apart from those in the technical team, nobody ever gets to hear about it.

My answer to this is a strategy for exposing this wealth of hidden experience and expertise. For me this means doing the following two things, running a technical blog and getting people onto the presentation circuit. In this article I am only going to cover the former – the power of the technical blog.

First of all let me get the basics out of the way. Blog software that a whole team can use is easy to come by, we use WordPress and hosting server should be easy for a technical team, but if not then go to a cheap hosting company and it can be yours for a fiver a month. There should be no practical barrier to doing it.

The purpose of the blog is for my team to document the technical things they do that nobody would normally find out about. So that ranges from:

• Documenting that great OS bug they found that required a special patch from the manufacturer
• Describing the correct configuration for that obscure piece of software that they had to struggle to find out
• Recording the results of some testing they did on a new piece of kit
• Sharing the things the things they learnt on a technical conference
• Promoting that great technical idea they have that manufacturers should all be adopting

and so on. I’m repeating myself, but basically anything that is technical and would otherwise not be seen, goes.

I don’t authorise the articles in advance, or even know about them until they are published. If fact, I only have two rules that I ask of people:

1. It must be about a technical subject
2. It must not be too rude

The next step is marketing the blog. Now, provided you are sticking to the purpose above and you don’t want to use it for product marketing, you can simply brand it as a peek into the work of the technical team. Then, link to a relevant article wherever the opportunity arises. In fact it is generally preferable not to repeat too much of an article in another context as people might not follow the link.  I tend to check the referrer stats to see just how much traffic has been generated by the placement of a link.

The trickier element is ensuring that the titles of the articles, the way they are written and the categorisation given, meet with search engine requirements to ensure that our articles appear at the top on focussed searches. But so long as people stick to the plan and write one article at a time then this should get better over time.

Once the initial internal promotion to a sceptical technical team is out of the way I find myself left with very little work to do. I have to remind people, when they are near to completing an important piece, that now is the best time to blog it. I have to check categorisation and add or change categories as needed to cope with the changing nature of the articles. I check the web stats to see what groups are reading it. Finally I avidly check it every day to see if there is something new.

The power of a technical blog is that it makes the work of the team transparent, it establishes credibility for the team, it gives them the recognition they deserve and it builds a community. It also makes great reading. Priceless.

jay Leadership, Technology

This is a trap I often fall into and I’m always embarrassed when I do.

Sometimes someone presents a point of view to me and I listen but disagree.  Then later someone else says the same thing and I listen a bit more.  Finally a third person says it and I change my mind.  Terrible to admit it but what I’ve done in this situation is decide that I carry two votes and so it takes three people to out-vote me.  When really my decision making should have nothing to do with the number of people who tell me.

One important attribute that sets apart real leaders is their willingness to switch track when presented with the ‘right’ idea, no matter how much they have invested in the current track.  This is what makes an agile leader and in turn an agile organisation.

But for some managers, quite unknowingly, their ego is simply too big to change after a suggestion from just one person.  Or maybe they are just worried that they will be seen as flighty if they change quickly.  Whatever the reason, these are the people who need to validate the change by ensuring there is sufficient weight behind it.  There are even some managers who assign varying levels of votes to different people.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean to suggest that we should drop everything we are doing the moment someone shows us a better way.  Some things are like oil tankers and take a long time to turn around.  But what we should do is clearly acknowledge that our view has changed and, most critically, start to plan from the new viewpoint.

Hopefully I’ll learn to get better at spotting when I’m counting votes instead of listening to the arguments.

jay Leadership

A brief observation, but one that took me a long time to spot.

There is an effect that I call “management amplification” that takes place when a manager talks to a member of staff about their work. This is irrespective of whether the manager is just explaining their concerns with their work or just asking questions. That effect is to amplify the words of the manager to make them sound much stronger than they intend.

There is nothing I can do to stop this amplification, but if I’m not aware of it then this can cause all sorts of problems. To give you some examples, if I say:

I’m a little disappointed by that

then management amplification makes it sound like:

That’s very poor and really could have been done so much better

and if I say:

That’s very poor and really could have been done so much better

then management amplification makes it sound like:

That’s absolutely terrible, I can’t believe you’ve messed it up so badly

and so on.

So what can I do about this – obvious really, I just always have to say things at one stop lower than I would have done otherwise. The one oddity is what to do when I want to say “I’m a little bit disappointed” but I don’t want the amplification. In that case I discuss it without showing my concerns and ask questions like “If you had to do it again would you do it the same way?”.

Now to be fair management amplification doesn’t happen all the time. Sometimes people get to know their managers well enough that they either take them at face value or know how to translate what they say.  In some cases, especially where a manager is over the top in shouting criticism then some people just learn to switch off an ignore them.  However, even when ignored or understood this management amplification is still there, but not that many managers explicitly recognise it.

jay Leadership

Some years ago now, I got an inkling that there might be a better way to deal with people wanting different jobs in the same team, avoiding job drift and which has everyone winning, not just staff or management. This way ends up with everyone doing the job they want to do and those people being the right people for those jobs.

How does this miracle happen?

The first thing is when I talk to people about they’re looking for, I have to get into the details of what they actually want to do, not what job they want. I’ve lost count of the number of times I ask someone why they want to be a manager and they reply that they want to do project management, but when pushed don’t actually want the rest of the work that comes with management. I’m then able to suggest they focus on a different role, one that actually gives them what they want.

Remember, no job drift under any circumstances. There must be a clear and transparent process as to how people get jobs:

• New or vacant jobs must be clearly defined and people can only do them once they are appointed
• Vacancies are advertised, people are interviewed and appointed. There are exceptions but I’ll cover those another time.
• The post that is vacated must then be filled and filled as quickly as possible.

With that in mind, here’s my best effort at describing a win-win plan:

• Keep in mind the goal of a win-win solution. That way more options come to mind than otherwise.
• Don’t have a preconception of what the end result will be like. Quite often it takes a lot of flexibility all round to get to the win-win and preconceptions prevent this.
• Think in terms of whole sets of jobs moves not just individual ones. If this person gets this job then this creates a vacancy here and so on. I keep these steps to myself, it is definitely not for sharing because if I do then it just comes across as either making a commitment or playing impersonal games with people’s lives.
• Avoid making any sort of promise and above all don’t let the job drift, for all the reasons detailed previously.
• Be open, honest and explain the various options and possibiliies. The more people understand about a situation the more they will accept it.
• Help people prepare for the interview for the new role. I explain to them what I am looking for, what skills I need them to have, and what qualities I want to see. This may sound like coaching someone for the role, but actually it is educating them to be in the right mindset. It gives them clues on what to learn and how to prepare themselves for the role, as much as it does for the interview.
• Finally, always remember to think about how a job that is currently being done is going to continue to be done. The last thing I want to do is create myself another problem without good reason.

Of course, there are any number of potential pitfalls with this that require special treatment:

Two or more people want the same job

This can’t always be dealt with, but it is possible. The most important tip is to discuss the job in real depth with those interested. The more people know the more likely they will self-select. At the very least, they turn around after failing to be appointed and comment on how they understand why they didn’t get it.

The second thing to consider is whether one job can be made into two – in some cases there is the scope and the budget can be made to fit.

The job someone wants doesn’t exist

I generally give this proper consideration. Often, It doesn’t really matter what the different roles are so long as all the work is covered by the right number of people. Yes there needs to be some internal consistency, so it is unlikely someone will be able to create exactly the role they want, but I might well be able to do part of it.

The person has an unrealistic view of what they are capable of

The number of times I’ve thought this and been completely wrong are too numerous to count. If they pass the interview test then they get the job. Anyway, that’s what the probationary period is for.

The gap between what someone knows and what the job requires is too wide

Simple, I just help them to learn what they are missing (or get someone else to do it). This might mean them reading books in the evening or even going on courses at their own expense, but then if they want the job they have to put some effort into it.

There are no vacancies

The main way to deal with this is patience. I have never worked in an organisation that has stayed still for more than a couple of years and so change will always come. When I get an inkling that this change is coming the first thing I think of is how to fit it into this plan.

In the end, I have to admit, this isn’t going to work for everyone, Some people are just in the wrong job, the right job is not going to come up for them here and they need to move on. But that should only happen when this process has been exhausted.

jay Leadership

Whenever I take over a new team I try to find out exactly what the people in it want, how they want their job to work, what issues they have and then the fundamental issue of whether they really want to be doing something else. I nearly always find a few people who want to be doing a different job, though in the same team and are just waiting for the opportunity.

Of these, very few are people who want to be managers, which is what managers tend to assume that everyone else wants. Mostly it is someone who has tried a particular role, decided it is not for them and can see others doing a different role that they think they would be suited to.

Now, when I first came across this desire to do a different job, I have to admit it annoyed me. There were several reasons for this:

• I interpreted it as meaning that I had someone who was not going to be fully productive because their mind was elsewhere
• I didn’t want to be pressured to move someone into a role that they might not be the best person for, or even very good at
• Even if I could overcome that worry, I could rarely see the opportunity they wanted arising and so the situation seemed intractable

I’ve worked with plenty of managers who, when in the same situation, make unrealistic commitments to their staff about how their role can drift towards the one they want. Unfortunately, whilst well intentioned, this is generally a complete disaster. The manager will normally have tried to introduce it in a gentle way, limiting the introduction to prevent the current work being undermined. But all too often the person affected thinks they’ve been given license to just stop doing what they currently do and start doing something else.

This is one of the endemic snafus in the public sector, people doing a job they don’t want to do ending up doing something else and the work they should be doing not getting done.

Not only can job drift end up being a problem, but making a vague promise about things changing in the future can cause just as much chaos:

• For a start, as far as jobs are concerned, they are just too important for vague promises. People either hear ‘yes’ or ‘no’, they very rarely hear ‘maybe’.
• Making people promises about jobs may well not be in a manager’s power to do. They may need finance approval or their boss to sign it off.
• The manager may not get a chance to fulfil the promise in any reasonable timetable, or even at all, in which case the person concerned ends up feeling frustrated and possibly betrayed.
• Finally, and most importantly, the process of advertising a job and interviewing candidates is normaly too important to skip.

So, in contrast to either letting a job drift or making vague promises I used to try to sell those people the role they were already doing in the hope of persuading them to sit it out, whilst doing what I could to prevent job drift. Not a very popular decision.

I’ve since discovered a much better way to resolve this, where everyone wins, but more on that later.

jay Leadership

Whilst there are plenty of people who mistakenly follow a technical religion, there are actually some very good technical reasons for minimising your use of Microsoft Windows. The main one of these is the horror of the Windows Registry.

At the heart of Windows lies a group of binary files that store almost all the configuration information for both the operation sytem itself and the installed applications, collectively called the Windows registry. Other operating systems have individual configuration files, sometimes binary and sometimes text.

The registry has lots of problems:

• It can’t be edited by hand with a text editor, a specialist tool is needed. I realise this applies to other configuration systems (like OSX plist) and I would make the same comment about them.
• Spurious entries and corruption in the registry can cause slowness and operational problems. It’s for this reason that a great market has grown up in registry cleaning software.
• Corruption is non-obvious to spot. This is caused partly by the binary format and partly by the cross-linking between various parts of the registry. This is another reason why registry cleaning software is needed.
• The configuration information for a particular application appears all over the place, not just one place in the registry, so you can’t easily see all the information you need at once.
• It is not easy to just swap between two configuration sets for an application without considerable hassle. With config files it is of course easy enough to just keep various copies and move them around as needed.
• De-installation of applications is a nightmare so normally only the installing application can do it since the bits can be all over the place. Of course if you don’t have the installing application, or it does not have a good de-installer then we need a registry cleaner, again.
• The registry is a single point of failure. If you lose one of these files (say the software one) then you lose all the configuration information for all applications.

Therefore, the impact of the registry compared to separate config files is:

• It takes a lot more time to get anything done.
• It takes much more effort to learn.
• The routes open to a sysadmin to test and debug are much more limited compared to other OSs.
• When it goes wrong, it take much longer to fix.
• It ends up costing a lot more money to support.
• Systems are less stable.

All very good reasons for just sticking with separate configuration files, as other operatings systems do, preferrably in text format.

jay Technology

This is one of the most difficult problems to deal with – when people get religion – in other words when people get extremely strong views on technology because that’s what the entrails of the chicken told them.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not equating strong views with a belief in voodoo, it is actually much more complicated than that.  There are plenty of people with strong views who have detailed reasoning for those views.  The issue is those views that are more religion than science.

For example, there are plenty of Windows avoiders out there.  But there is a real difference between those that avoid Windows because they see them as the evil empire and those that avoid them because they understand just what a disaster the Windows registry is.

So whenever I encounter any strong views I have to dig down to see if there is reasoning behind it to separate it from religion.  On the surface the distinction is not obvious.  Occasionally I find that the strong views are based on an intuitive understanding of the issues that can’t easily be put into words.  In these cases the process of digging down can sometimes lead to a switch from religion to science (a deconversion?).

The reason this bothers me so much is because I generally find that those for whom this is religion, can unpredictably change their views and worst of all, I don’t think they really understand technology.

At the same time I’m slightly concerned when I meet people who have been working in IT for several years and yet don’t have strong views.  We all come across so much rubbish that anyone who fails to be polarised by it is probably not paying attention.

jay Leadership, Technology