Philippe Paquet

One of the major problems organizations have is accountability. Nothing gets done and nobody is accountable for that. Accountability can be a problem of it’s own when there is no enforcement but it’s usually the symptom of a deeper and more serious problem: responsibility. Time and time again, I’ve seen both the quasi paralysis and the damages caused by unclear or, even worse, undefined responsibilities. Responsibilities are to be clearly defined. By clearly defined, here is what I mean:

• There’s one and only one person responsible for an area. This is very important as the sentiment of responsibility is inversely proportional to the number of people that are responsible. When everyone is responsible, no one is responsible.

• The boundaries of an area of responsibility are well defined. It’s very easy to give an area of responsibility to someone but unless there is a clear and agreed definition of the boundaries you’re going to have gaps. If you have ever heard things like “I thought that marketing was covering that.” or “Isn’t that responsibility of production?” then you know what I’m talking about.

• The person responsible for an area knows what they are responsible for. I know that sounds obvious but very often it is a problem. Responsibilities need to be clearly communicated. You can’t just assume that someone knows what they are responsible for, you have to tell them.

• The person responsible for an area agree to be responsible for it. Whether you impose responsibilities from a position of authority or you broker an agreement between peers or with your superior doesn’t matter. If you don’t have an agreement, you’re wasting your time.

• Everybody needs to know what people are responsible for. Knowing who is responsible for what will help people to direct information to the right person. Additionally, peer pressure will help to improve overall performance. When everybody knows what you supposed to do, everybody can see if you’re doing it or not.

Only after responsibilities have been clearly defined will you be able to efficiently take care of accountability problems and manage performance. Save yourself time, money and headaches by making sure responsibilities are clearly defined before starting any kind of project.

(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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ROT13 or rotation by 13 place is a simple substitution cipher used in online forums and newsgroup to hide spoilers, punchlines, puzzle solutions, and “offensive” materials. It’s not used very widely but if you want to use it, decode something you found or just have some fun encoding / decoding, have a look at the ROT13 Decoder: www.rot13decoder.com.

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I would like to speculate a bit about the future of mobile phones and take an educated guess on what is going to happen.

Up to June last year, mobile phones were closed platforms. You had to have the permission of both the network operators and the phone manufacturers to develop an application. Then, you had to go through the network operators to distribute that application. A long process that only large companies could afford to go through. On June 29, 2007, when Apple introduced the iPhone, everything changed. Small independent developers were not only given the opportunity to develop applications for the iPhone but were given distribution independently of the network operators.

Let’s speculate about what is going to happen. After being exposed to the iPhone, I believe that consumers are going to require from their network operators to get phones that offers the same features, including the same diversity of applications. Pretty obvious, isn’t it? The problem is that, because of the differences between phones, you have to develop a specific version of your applications for every different phone. If you want to provide broad support, you have to produce hundreds of versions of your application. Small independent developers can’t afford to do that.

So, here is my guess: To solve that problem, network operators are going to require from phone manufacturers unified, open platforms. And the only way that phone manufacturers can achieve that will be through 3rd party operating systems. I believe that in the next two years, every mobile phone except maybe the very low end models, will be running one of following operating system: Windows CE, Android or MacOS (The iPhone runs a cut down version of MacOS).

Now, what is going to be very interesting is to see what network operators are going to try not to be transformed in dumb pipes and keep their control on the content market.

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There’s an excuse for everything and they will help you find it. If you’re running out of excuses, go to this website and get some ideas. You’ll find thousands of excuses on why you didn’t go to school, why you didn’t do your homework, why you have been speeding on the highway and many many more sensible subjects. Have a look, it’s totally hilarious: www.RandomExcuseGenerator.com.

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One the company I was working for regulary held large high level meetings. We would take an afternoon and review a good part of the product portfolio. In addition of the peoples responsibles for the products, all the executives, vice presidents and most of the directors were present. The CEO will arrive in the meeting room, look around and quietly comment “very expensive meeting”. Of course, he was right. If we were to add the hourly rate of all the peoples present, I have no doubt that we would be far from a $5000 meeting. Now, did we get any value for spending $5000 on a meeting. Sometimes we did and sometimes we didn’t.

A very common problem is ownership. Very often, peoples expect the highest ranking person in the room to run the meeting. Why not? He’s the highest ranking after all. Well, that’s wrong. If you call it, you own it. If you call a meeting, it is your responsability to run it and by that I mean the following: It is your responsability to keep discipline in the meeting. It is your responsability to keep everyone focused and more importantly, it is your responsability to get an outcome. Who’s going to do what? If that is not clear for everyone, you wasted time and money.

Another common problem is the 5000 people meeting. Let’s invite everybody, just in case of. Maybe they need to know what we’re going to discuss about? Maybe I would get a promotion if the executives see me solving problems? Again, that’s wrong. You don’t want to waste people’s time and company money. You should only invite people that are necessary to get an outcome. First of all, make sure that your meeting invitation clearly state what you are going to talk about and what you are expecting as outcome of that discussion. That way, not only you will give the people you invite a chance to decide if their presence is required or not but you will have attendees that are prepared for the discussion to come. Then, instead of inviting people that won’t have an involvment in getting an outcome, consider sending them meeting minutes. You keep meeting minutes, don’t you?

So, save your company some money and save your co-workers some time by doing the following:

1. Only invite peoples that are required to get an outcome.
2. Make your meeting invitation clear, specifying what you are going to talk about and what outcome you expect.
3. Own the meetings you call by keeping discipline, keeping focus and making sure that you get an outcome.
4. Send minutes to the people that need to know about it.

(1 votes, average: 3 out of 5)

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Fairy tales for sleepy children. You will find on this website all the classic fairy tales to read online or to download in the form of ebooks (free and easy to print). They have a different fairy tale on the front page every day. They just added a wallpaper section and started to add illustrations made by some of my favorite artists: Gustave Dore, Arthur Rackham, etc… Have a look, it’s a beautiful website: www.TonightsBedtimeStory.com.

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I was talking with one of my friends recently and he was telling me about a problem he was having. He is trying to recruit a very talented programmer for his team and, while the position was approved and everybody gave that candidate a thumb up during the interview process, he still has to fight with the human resource department to get this hire approved.

The proposed compensation wasn’t outrageous, market level at best but that was the first problem for the human resource department. The second one was the title: the candidate didn’t fit snugly in one of their standard categories.

That strikes me as a classic example of a company where business goals are not aligned. On one side, we have a production team that has for mission to deliver exceptional products and, on the other side, we have human resource team that has for mission to keep employee cost as low as possible.

While both goals are valid and make sense individually, in the software business they are not aligned and therefor are preventing the company to reach an overall goal of maximizing profits. To maximize profits, the company needs to deliver exceptional products as those products sell a magnitude more than average products.

To deliver exceptional products in such a competitive environment as the software business, you have to attract talent. Talented programmers are rare and the contribution programmers make function of their talent is not a linear progression: It is a geometrical progression. A superstar programmer may earn 1.5 time more than a normal programmer but is not 1.5 time more productive. He usually is 4, 6 and sometimes 10 times more productive.

Talent needs to be compensated. If you only offers below market compensation, you depriving your company from the talent and productivity needed to deliver exceptional products and maximize your profit. The business goals of your different department need to be aligned. If your production team goal is to deliver exceptional products, your human resource team goal should be to find exceptional peoples.

(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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