Art of Succession Planning

Delhi, Wednesday, July 03, 2013

Art of succession planning

There used to be an era when succession planning was a reserved term for Human resources department only and even today when someone talks about this it is wrongly misinterpreted as an approach for paving stone for a layoff and there is also a big misconception that this practice is observed at CEO, CFO, CXO CFO levels which is not the fact.

Today for you to be respected as a successful leader and to build a strong organization, it’s must   to excel in learning this sensitive art.

So what actually is Succession planning?

Well although the term has been derived from the word “Successor” which means – “a person who succeeds another in an office, position, or the like” but when it actually comes to use this in an office, process or project, some people communicate the intention in totally wrong way that it seems that someone is talking about throwing you out of company.

The concept zeroes down to the fact that people are also categorized as an important asset in a company and over the years, they do carry knowledge, become experienced and become critical for the continual success of company and any organization that has weak succession planning is always at a very high risk.

To put it in another way, Succession planning in any company is an effort to secure rapport, future growth, fame and business continuity by ensuring that all its critical resources have a successor and In case of any unfortunate or unavoidable incident, there is very little or no risk involved at all.

Army is good candidate to draw an analogy here. All defense forces have the successors identified at critical positions and say in case of an event of death of chief of forces, country is not put at a stake and there are well identified persons to take charge immediately who have demonstrated the same intellect, same skill sets to take over if need arises and secure nation of its interests

How is this done, are there any fixed rules?

Well although this comes under the umbrella of human resources department. In case your organization runs this practice, chances are that you may have found lots of forms, ratings to be completed, which at times makes this exercise more frustrating and makes us believe that it’s a futile exercise

But you can have your own custom process and trust me it pays you off in long run, if you exercise this in your team

My three step program

1)      Identify, Plan and Execution-   We always have critical people in organization including ourselves which are very important to business continuity. All such people should be identified and I normally practice two successors for a single critical position. All critical resources are covered under this.
There is no fuss involved. Plan could be as good as a word document or excel sheet enlisting major duties, key accounts, projects handled by a person. Identified successor(s) and date of completion of succession but one must ensure that planning is converted into action and is yielding results. Most of us end up making too many plans but no actions and I am one of them at least in case of reducing my weight, every year I make up plan, document it but no tracking and no actions

2)      Delegate and take risks-   Delegation is basic entity of succession. Identified successor should be delegated critical tasks and supervised over a period of time followed by accreditation to ensure process is completed and deadline should be defined and adhered to complete this process.

Take some risks also by betting on people who seem promising and eligible for succession but may have couple of levels / hierarchy in between them and default successor. You would be amazed with results and would automatically create deep root succession

3)      But you never told me today is my exam- Over the year(s) I have seen that we wait for crisis to happen and then we check that are we well equipped to handle the situation.  Once succession is completed, we should regularly audit and check our response.

 I have my teams spread geographically and each location has a point of contact and in his or her absence, successor is supposed to ensure continued services to client. I usually wait for opportunity when my point of contact is on leave and I become a mock client and check that is out of office is set?  Is someone picking voip/phone or call forwarding of is in place?

 I intentionally set the challenges for that location to see the response and then identify corrective measures for any lapses and improvement areas, trust me this work wonders and assures me and my organization of business continuity. So surprise checks are the key to validate how prepared you are?

Bounty:

a)      Today my team mates never complaint that they cannot go on vacation or take an off

b)      I ensure 24X7 support to clients and achieve good customer satisfaction

c)       Projects are not people dependent and this ensures that a particular profile does not become indispensable to organization including myself

d)      Team members are happy as when they complete the succession accreditation that means they are eligible for promotions and this process make them  demonstrate their capability much ahead of actual promotion

RAJEEV KOUL   Rajeev Koul is Engineering Manager & Department Head-Asia Pacific at Innodata  , he has over  13 years of experience in Program/Project Management for software application Development and Implementation . He is currently heading software development team for APAC and India region

                                                                                                                                                                     

Michelle learns to win

In case you have not read the read the part-1 of this post, please do so now. visit http://rajeev-projectmanagementsimplified.blogspot.in/2013/01/what-went-wrong-wish-we-had-tarot-cards.html

As mentioned in my last post,  now  I would be playing a role similar to a role of air crash investigator who examines facts and comes up with remedial advisory and ensures that such type of risks are mitigated by reaching to root cause and ensure that future projects would not face same fate

Was it Leader? On examination about credentials and knowledge of Michele, it seems everything was ok and decision and her acting as Project Manager was not bad at all and  like for any pilot good number of flying hours is really critical for flying, similarly she had handled at least 2 such major projects  in past

Was it Team? Team had all eligible members with more than 4+ years of experience and had been part of Michelle team in past and was her choice only, so why would Michelle chose bad team?

 Mother Nature? May be it was easy to say that Mother Nature had played a critical role in this and it was unavoidable. But just because it was a natural calamity, nothing could have been done, so should we conclude that we should stop flying planes as lightening can strike?  Stop working in Japan as its earthquake prone?  Stop doing business with companies who transport materials in ships  via Arabian sea as pirates are highly active there ?

Then what went wrong?

Investigations:
As an investigator  or rather Project Manager,  looking at the needs of business globally, we cannot suggest to avoid business because of environmental  factors /risks  as they are part and parcel of our life. We can be better be prepared to handle crisis based out of learning’s from past and also have enough backup plans to ensure that we should not fail

Are you suggesting business continuity planning (BCP)? Well not exactly because in case of Michelle, it is quite clear that to some extent she had BCP in place and code was always checked out and checked in to source code configuration server (TFS), which means, she always had whole source code in New York server

Final Report

As an investigator, I was able to find few gaps which should have been part of risk response and planning to avoid this.  I can come up with following advisory to Michelle to avoid such failures in future:

Lack of audit: While we always have BCP in most of projects and companies have secondary site and defined SLA(service line agreement) to make secondary site functional in few hours but it is as simple that  we should not wait until disaster happens and we should regularly check our preparedness in advance with respect to  Crisis. Had Michelle even put a thought to invoke BCP check by mocking even an earthquake scenario, given the fact Japan is highly prone to earthquake, she would have got an answer that how bad situation was, as documentation was not complete,  there  was  issues with partial code available in TFS, SME knowledge was mostly in Japan. Percentage completion in project may not always tell truth. Audits/checks are must

Global operations but with caution: If you are dealing with global teams, it becomes more important to categorization of risks and the response. All historical risks should be gathered at the time of project planning and responses should be ready with you. For example we have seen last year that whole Atlantic was shut down for flights because of ash smoke erupting from volcano

A similar risk should have been documented by Airlines that what would be alternate routes of operations  in case of  war erupting  in Atlantic Ocean region because people will not stop travelling and that would have taken care of Volcanic ash situation automatically, while new risks would have been added to risk history

Off lately Terrorism is latest to add to definition of global risks and companies should plan well in advance when working in locations prone to terrorist threats.

So Michelle was briefed about all these precautions that she should take in upcoming projects to ensure great leaders like her and the work of the best team does not go in vain

Bottom line is that always checks your preparedness for disasters regularly and notifies any issues and corrective action. Periodically conduct such exercise but it should be surprise for team and not an informed activity

Until next time

Cheers,
Rajeev Koul

What went wrong? - Wish, we had Tarot Cards for Projects

This Monday, Michelle was quite excited as she had been put on a very critical project of managing a multimillion dollar project which would run for 2 man year(s). Michelle had to her credit a success of handling a role of leading a technical team of more than 10 projects having international clients, her communication skills were awesome and her clients had appreciated her well in past. This was her third such  assignment as Project Manager and like last 2 times, she chose to have brilliant team based out of Japan to execute this critical project .

There were strict payment and penalty clauses for this project but based on the success she had in past, she was full of confidence and so was Management and all was set in for a good roll out.Her company had following terms for payment to be received from client -:

• Phase-1 : 20% payment on completion of  25%  of project  on or before 6 months and  10% penalty per month in case of delay beyond  6 months
• Phase-2:  Next 30% payment on completion of  50% of project on or before 1 year and  10% penalty per month in case of delay beyond  12 months
• Phase-3: Next 30% payment on completion of  75% of project on or before 18 months  and  15% penalty per month in case of delay beyond  18 months
• Phase-4: Balance 20% payment on completion of  100% of project on or before 24 months  and  15% penalty per month in case of delay beyond  24 months

As she had thought and planned, things were exceeding her expectations and within 5 months, she had completed 30% of project with signoff and got first payment released and post 10 months team had already completed 45% of project and all was set for second payment and this time she was travelling to London to meet her client and finish up upcoming 5% and get the second payment released

On her way to Kennedy International airport, she switches to FM to enjoy music and to her horror she learns that Tsunami had affected several places in Japan and she immediately calls her office in Japan but she is not able to get through and before she dials again, she gets call from her boss who tells her that their office has been washed away with Tsunami and no one is reachable

After couple of days in London, she learns good news that her team has survived but badly injured and admitted in Hospital, Michelle breaks up in tears with just 2 months and at 5% work left, she feels helpless. Soon more bad news follows that it would take at least 4-5 months for most of team members to get in a shape and Join back to work

Michelle gets into deep shock and wakes up in ER at hospital with her husband at her bed side, after recovering from hospital in one week, she flies back to NY and joins back office after one week of rest. She gets all her code retrieved from TFS server in her office in New York and starts to build new team and by this time, she has only 1.5 months to complete the next “5%”. After review meet with the new team she learns that:

• Documentation of three important module(s) is not there
• Most of the code is not well documented and developers are not able to understand the code
• A Critical hardware lock which was must to be plugged in to one of development machine was destroyed back in Japan and although its cost was almost 1 million dollar but to get its shipped from Moscow it would take at least 5 day(s) because of festive season holidays in Russia

Suddenly everything was going wrong for Michelle. Still not giving up she  tries to give her best and achieves phase-II  at least 3 day(s) ahead of time but in UAT client raises so many issues as most of the functionalities were missing and all major bugs were introduced due to missing modules from server which was not having latest version available on NY server

Finally Michelle was not able to deliver Phase-II by said schedule and also attracted 10 % penalty and was due for another 10% penalty in next 30 day(s)

Most of us would collapse in this situation or think this cannot happen to me and this looks more of script of some movie but we know that disaster strikes to anyone and any time and this makes me recall important lines from a famous show in Discovery Channel, “ Disaster just don’t happen they are chain of critical events”

Had Michelle thought in this direction, maybe she could have avoided this disaster and just as after every air plane crash (NTSB) appoints an investigator and in the end, investigator comes up with the cause and remedial action to avoid such disaster to happen in future

In my next post, I would act as investigator and touch base on steps Michelle could have taken to avoid such disaster to happen

Till then,

Sincerely,

Rajeev Koul

Read Part-II, click on the here