Enterprise Navigator

A Happy Holidays! An Excerpt from 'Taming Change'

Come -- warm yourself by the fire, have a bite to eat and perhaps a glass of wine.

In most regions of the world, we are in a season of high celebration. Even though it may go by different names or be motivated by different reasons, we band together to try and find the best in ourselves and bring joy to others leading up to the new year.

Nice, huh?

One thing we can count on is that each new year will be accompanied by change in some shape, form or fashion. As our book winds its way through the publishing process, I want to share an excerpt from one of the early chapters with you. Sometimes in the excitement of creating something new, we lose sight of the fact that we are effecting change, and any change has human implications. The following is a page from Taming Change with Portfolio Management.

How Change Impacts People

Change, of course, has always existed. Historically, the most successful organizations have not only accommodated change -- they have used it to their advantage. But the amount of change being injected into our business lives is coming at a rate never before seen, and there is no apparent slowdown in sight.

But, how much change are we capable of absorbing at any given time? Just as there are limits that constrain change in the physical world, there are limitations to change in the business world. Examples of such constraints might include our ability to acquire and employ funding, analyze and act upon new data, access specialized competencies, redirect corporate strategy, or leverage scientific discoveries.

The most obvious and difficult constraint to organizational change lies with people themselves. A jet aircraft is an example from the physical world to illustrate the point. The newest generation fighter jets now have the ability to perform maneuvers that exceed the physical endurance of any pilot; the human component rather than the airframe has become the limiting factor. In the much same way, the ability of people to adapt to change may ultimately prove to be the limiting factor in the rate of business evolution.

As individuals, people routinely demonstrate great ability to change. Certainly as individuals we are remarkably resilient, adaptable and flexible -- extreme G-forces notwithstanding. When facing personal adversity, given a promotion, changing employers or embarking on new careers, individuals routinely adapt to new situations in a matter of days or a few weeks, sometimes overcoming seemingly insurmountable challenges.

However, when grouped as an organization, people respond to change in a more complex way. Change in a socialized context takes on a whole new set of dynamics. Why can't an organization collectively change as nimbly as the individuals within it? The short answer is that change applied in an organizational setting often forces the people affected to simultaneously adapt and adopt new methods for how they deal with each other, representing the greatest challenge to the organization. When a single individual is faced with changes in a new situation, there is usually an existing foundation of operational norms and support from others around them. Such is not the case when change impacts the entire organization.

Thus, the ability of an organization to evolve is limited in large part by how well its workforce can adapt by retooling itself to work differently. Portfolio management offers the process framework to communicate changes and re-establish the rules of the new future state. It can offer the workforce the assurance that there is a plan and it is being executed for a purpose.

Have a wonderful holiday season and a very festive New Year, and I look forward to sharing an exciting 2010 with you -- full of positive changes.

Thank You for 20 Amazing Years!

I want to ask you to take a moment and think back to what your life was like in 1989. To help with this, let me jog your memory with some notable artifacts of the era. On TV, the Simpsons, Seinfeld and Baywatch were just getting started; George H. W. Bush took over from Ronald Reagan as the president of the United States. The first GPS Satellites went up into orbit as Nintendo released the Game Boy. The Dow-Jones was at 2600 and the NASDAQ ended the year at 455. We were fascinated as we witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall. Entertainment-wise, Taylor Swift was a born, Rain Man and Driving Miss Daisy took home Oscars, while Milli Vanilli got (and lost) a Grammy and CD sales overtook those of LP albums. The Car and Driver '10 Best' included the Ford Taurus SHO, the Acura Legend and the Saab 9000 Turbo. Technology-wise, Intel released the 486DX processor, Apple introduced the 16 pound Macintosh 'portable' computer and Microsoft had 4,000 employees worldwide.

Me? I was planning refueling outages and overseeing the project portfolio for each one, and writing my first set of best practices, called "A Task Managers Guide to Work Plan Development and Implementation." I was freshly married, skinny, sporting a big bushy Borat mustache, driving a white Corvette and took my fashion cues from Miami Vice- except for the generally uninspiring and over-engineered music, life was pretty good.

Meanwhile, here in Austin, Pat Durbin was busy founding PlanView. The concept was that the software would allow you to plan & schedule your different kinds of work (a.k.a, 'Plans'), and then allow you to analyze them using different portfolio 'Views.' And that's just what it did. It was an old school start-up; no venture capital to be found except what was in his bank account. To that he added a vision, a few good people and a passion to create portfolio management software (long before anyone knew what that was).

I've been fortunate enough to be associated with Planview for most of the last 20 years, but from a few different perspectives. My first involvement with PlanView began as a customer in the mid-90's, when I took over a fresh installation of PlanView version 5.0 (still a client-server platform back then) as part of managing the workload of a few hundred engineering staff. The product was fairly simple -- you get all of your work and resource assignments into a common database so you could see whether or not your work plans were within the capacities of the people assigned. If not, you fixed it. Slowly I began to understand the unique issues associated with managing multi-tasking knowledge workers and appreciate Pat's vision. The idea of efficient resource loading being a primary work management objective was pretty radical back then, but the power and importance of the technique became evident as we steadily became more proactive and increased our production.

Having made some real improvements and fascinated with the challenge of managing knowledge work and workers along the way, it was an easy decision to join the company in 1999 when Pat's son, Jeff suggested the need for a consultant in the Midwest. And here we are a decade later. I know ten years seems like a long time to be with any one organization these days, but we still have several staff around here that predate my arrival; a few from the very beginning.

Perhaps it is this sense of consistency of purpose that best sums up Planview as we celebrate our 20th anniversary. Every new version brings the same exhilaration as it did years ago. In a town that breeds new companies like rabbits, am fond of saying that Planview holds the record as the oldest continuous startup in Austin. Even though the logo has changed, the 'v' is lower case and product is now orders of magnitude beyond its original design, the vision and passion for the products we offer remains remarkably intact, as does our sense of commitment to our customers and each other.

So, as we looked back on two decades and pondered how we should commemorate it, the central theme that emerged was one of gratitude for what we have been given a chance to build and the opportunities that still lie before us. Accordingly, we have decided to mark this milestone with "20 days of Community Giving," running through December 16th. There are other things going as well to celebrate this milestone, but we felt giving back should be a priority.

There you have it -- 20 years of innovation, service and leadership; here's to what we imagine will be many more years to follow.