He was hired as an artist to bring some unconventional solutions to something that has been broken for a long time: IT.
Probably much more is wrong, but things that are broken often become visible at the moment it gets translated in procedures, systems and programs.
And so Art would actually like to understand how the IT supplier works, and what makes that they do not always deliver quality.
And quality is an overrated word actually, and Art Burshy does not understand why people get so confused about it.
Delivering quality is just about meeting expectations, isn't it.
There are people and companies that feel that they only need to deliver 'what-has-been-formally-agreed' but they just forget that this will lead in the end to a frustrated customer; a customer that will leave once he has an opportunity to escape. Managing expectations is therefore as important as delivering what formally has been agreed.
And often - in the experience of Art Burshy - there are somewhere contracts and in some cases even advanced Service Level Agreements that intend to define in the tiniest detail the actual 'quality' to be delivered, but where after all negotiations the "L" part of the SLA has been forgotten. SLA's then become a set of worthless descriptions of how things should work. And nobody will bother to read them after the contracts have been signed.
For this meeting today Art did some pre-work and listed some of the issues that his teams experience, many of which Art has seen before when working with IT suppliers:
- it seems they do planning and monitoring by the famous Advanced Stack Management mechanism; whatever comes in last they start working on, forgetting all about the less sexy existing projects that were on the stack before. And then you need to frequently call to get things from all below in the stack to be moved on top.
- There is also something like a basic minimum size for any change: even the smallest change takes months to be studied and in the end cost a massive amount of money and time to be delivered.
- they often think they know better how the business works than the business people themselves. This often results in solutions that have a very strange impact on the client and users. Worst is when they tell you that they have taken priority decisions on your behalf, especially when the impact can not be undone.
- they do not understand the topic, you spend lots of time explaining and every time it turns out this leads to "new functionality", requiring more time and containing a nice gift called "budget overspend".
These IT teams are often busy 'improving', trying to better serve the business, and so they create a magic innovative concept called "the account manager", which is the guy that Art is now talking to.
Key elements of the account manager:
- basically he has no power nor information to commit to anything
- when he can blame someone else he is happy to do so, as long as he himself is not in any danger and it distracts the discussion from tough topics
- he presents failures as consequence of other companies or teams, agreeing 'it is ridiculous' but very carefully avoiding taking any ownership of the subject
- successes however are the direct fruit of his intervention, and are harvested multiple times during meetings while leaning back in their chair with a satisfied grin on their face.
In addition such Account Managers often first try to deny the issue or tend to explain why the business sponsor has the incorrect view. This time it is the same again, where the account manager provides a fuzzy answer as part of the conversation tactics called: if-you-cant-convince-them-just-confuse-them.
But Art Burshy has prepared and then shows him:
- a list of all the issues, supported by mails confirming they should have been caused and should be solved by IT
- charts showing the average time it took IT to come back on issues and requests
- average overspend compared to original plans
- many more charts, some just made up by Art Burshy in an effort to get through the denial phase.
When confronted with all this the account manager initially starts to bring up objections, but after Art provides more and more information showing the ultimate disaster the account manager turns silent. His head becomes more and more red and at a point he opens his mouth, ready to raise his voice to tell Art Burshy that this is all so unfair.
At that point Art lifts his finger and warns him not to raise his voice.
Art Burshy has observed this habit of people; they think that by raising their voice they actually can add more power to the impact of their statement. Art feels it is often more a sense of weakness and the covering up of low self confidence.
In the end they go to the real topic; identifying how they will follow up, and what the next steps are to start working on the key improvements.
When Art Burshy came back from this meeting I asked him why he had approached the meeting this way. It does not seem constructive to so heavily attack the account manager, does it? Especially using fake statistics seems a bit unfair.
He shared with me his 'interesting' view:
- statistics are always a limited interpretation of reality, often oversimplifying how a complex situation should be seen. So presenting wrong statistics or wrongly interpreted statistics is only as bad as using real statistics.
- people only learn when they are in pain, or at least heavily frustrated. He tried before on a peaceful way, but this leads to the regular behaviour of denial, complaining and finger pointing.
- these account managers are often not really appreciated by their own teams. IT people that do the actual work are much more motivated when talking to the client, rather than receiving interpreted information from an account manager.
- often the account managers are the ideal source of misunderstandings; they do not understand IT and they do not understand business and so it is good to get them out of the way or at least get connected to the people that do the actual work.
Art just left while I finished making my notes, leaving me a bit puzzled. It is funny how he looks at it with such brutal simplicity, making many assumptions. And yet, I can't seem to find where his approach will fail. Guess time will tell.
