Beating those sweaty palms

It is funny how quickly things can change. One moment you are interviewing others for the job doing the best at sorting the wheat from chaff, assess the skill, personality and both immediate and longer term potential of various people. The next moment tables turn and you are the interviewing for your next project or role, trying to give the people you speak with the best reasons for hiring you.



After a year and a half of great time working in France, I am now getting used to being in the second position, interviewing for a role back home. At a risk that someone, whom I will be talking to, will read this, below are several points I liked in the recent series of posts by Nick Morgan.

Preparation

• Get to know your opposite party as well as possible


• Know what you are going to say.


• What problems that the organization has can you help solve?  What skills that you have is the organization in need of?  How can your vision and dreams complement those of the organization?


• Think about what are the half-dozen or so (no more) key points you want to make.


• The goal is to imagine yourself already at work in that organization, making a difference, having a blast, and doing well.  What does that look like?  What are the crucial elements of success?  What are you doing that’s remarkable? (Part 2)


• Always told them to imagine the interview in as much detail as possible – beginning with the room, the people in it, and their body language (Part 3)

Interview

• The first step in the choreography of your body language is to get an ‘offstage beat’ or emotional attitude toward the upcoming interview BEFORE you meet anyone.


• You should make reasonable eye contact, and of course your handshake should be somewhere in the middle of the scale between bone crusher and dead fish. It’s the rest of the body that creates the impression, and it’s with the rest of the body that you don’t want to send the wrong message.


• Either think to yourself, I really, really want to be open to this person; I feel comfortable and relaxed, like I’m talking to a close friend I’m very glad to see, or pay close attention to your torso and make sure that is pointed in the right direction. (Part 4)


• As the interview goes on, you should think of your non-verbal conversation as an opportunity to build trust and credibility.  Trust is primarily built with open body language, focusing on the torso.  Credibility is primarily created with an authoritative voice and body language that is emotionally consistent with the role for which you’re applying.


• Figure out what the emotion is and then work on evincing it.


• Prepare your insightful questions and creative ideas.


• Pace and lead (Part 5)


• Keep a close eye on the interviewer, for signs of interest and boredom, affinity and disagreement, attention and disengagement.


• Focus more on the other person than yourself.  That goes back to your state of mind going in to the interview.  If you want the job too badly, you won’t be able to get out of that frame of mind easily to become a cool observer of the body language in the room. (Part 6)

Now just putting it to practice.

Note 1: This post loosely fits into the IT architects' soft skills series.

Note 2: No it's not me in the picture. It is actually a guy named Ian Warner, whose picture I found on Flickr and used here under the CC licence.

Delivery excellence v. fancy graphics

I am still working through lean book & blog shelf, trying to sieve sense from non-sense (or more practical from less practical ideas). One of the pages I recently came across recentlyt is this talk on the Role of Leadership in Software Development by Mary Poppendieck, one of the original proponents of the lean IT idea.

The video is a great example showing both Poppendieck's story telling skills as well as her point of view that is still new and fresh. If you can make some time, seriously, go and watch it. If not, here is a summary of the talk's killer story for you.

Polaris, a hugely successful 1960s US weapons programme, was one the defining moments in the history of project management. The programme inveted the PERT planning technique, at that time hailed as one of the key contributors to the programme success, allegdely shaving off 2 years off the expected nine years worth of effort. Strangely enough, despite all the hype that it created and the generations of project managers that had to learn it, PERT was only a minor contributor to the project success. So what was it that this huge programme actually did that made the difference? That's actually something that cought my eye, because it formulates some of the experiences i had on large programmes:

• Quality of leadership: The programme technical leadership directed all key decisions and the programme identified its own success criteria;


• Focus on deployment: The programme did not care about anything else than getting results operational as quick possible. They used timeboxed iterations of a technical solution to achieve this.


• Use of decentralised competitive organisation: Polaris had had to invent most of the technologies they wanted to use. They managed the risk by using a kind of a parallel development - three competing vendors working on the same solution at the same time, with the target solution being the one that came out as the best one;


• Reliability: Very harsh quality control with 'excessive testing' and redundancy designed in to cater for virtually any kind of failure;


• Esprit de corps - The top brass encouraged and rewarded teamwork and commitment.

So what about fancy PM techniques? Poppendieck mentions that purpose PERT was actually used for was to to keep sponsors at bay preventing them from interfering! Or in other words:

Polaris had a gimmick, PERT.[...] PERT was less effective than advertised but more so than rain dancing. As such it served its purpose. [...]

The Polaris project enjoyed top quality graphics - crisp, clear, full color, visually very attractive and impressive. They were very successful in persuading Congress.

Which shows that good delivery gets you so far and that there is always a space for good marketing.