Program and Strategic Life Cycles

 In the last post, we covered the use of the Return Map for a Project, throughout its Life Cycle.

Here, we will augment that with some diagrams for Program Planning.   We use something like this for a Business Plan, to manage a group of three to six projects of similar technology.

The notion here is that the tactical plan 'fits' all of the projects using these strategic choices.  But naturally, time reveals new information, and changes occur.   The next diagram shows how we manage those evolutions

Obviously, the successive Product Plans shown to the right are archived just as was the Project Plan shown in the previous Post.   The post-mortem learnings from studying these iterations later is invaluable

Finally, because a program has multiple threads, there is a concomitant investment strategy for the projgram, showing various specific outcomes, project by project.   This is an old "actual" set of data

The more important investment strategy to focus on, though, is the longer-term one of multiple successive programs, each with relatively new technologies, etc.  These, in today's terminology, are the disruptive successive waves that must be dealt with to stay abreast of dynamic competition.   Note that the stakes get higher with succeeding waves (making an assumption that the company has successfully mastered each round vis-a-vis competitors.  In my experience, many corporate management teams stumble on the third round--"can't we wait until we see if "4Y" is going to happen before we commit to "9X" investment in the third?"   Metaphorically, NOPE.   But many, even most, do.   

So, lots to think about with these two posts.  The intriguing point for me is that this quick succession of six graphs (and the concomitant aperiodic review adjustments) is essentially unknown in Technology Management programs at every college and university.  Their focus is on bullet point-by-bullet point lists for Project management only--dull, uninspired, almost never followed, and certainly not too useful.  To go beyond project management to program or multi-program strategic management is totally absent.

Sigh...  and we wonder why large corporations stall and wither.

Project Life Cycles and the Return Map

 I've enjoyed several meetings with Aidan McCullen now.   He "fell in love" with my semi-memoir PERMISSION DENIED a mere twelve years after it was published.

We have now conducted two in-depth interviews of the book material, with a third one scheduled for nest week.   I'll post some of the material later (these are 90 minute interviews, so they're not a 'quick look').

What has impressed both Aidan and me is that this material feels very relevant today, although some of the exmaples are ancient (1970's era, for crying out loud).   In particular, the segments about Project Life Cycle and the use of the Return Map (Harvard Biz Review only 35 years ago), coupled with what we now know about using multi-display comparative graphics in Situation Rooms (see AstroVirtual THIS YEAR, not 35 years ago), are incredibly powerful techniques.

Importantly, though, the segments about Program and Strategic Life Cycles are novel--he and I agree that this material is NOT KNOWN WIDELY, in fact is hardly known at all, and certainly is not taught in any college or university, nor hardly covered by any business consultant.  Why not?  And would it help?

So, I am toying with doing a 2nd edition.   Here's a snippet from the wrap-up for the current Section IV.

See what you think . . . . 

"The key message is that there is an important inter-relationship between the life cycle of a specific project, where it fits into a larger contemporaneous program, and where that program fits into an overall strategic plan.  Teams that understand this build much stronger long-term success rates for their company

"Some significant points arise regarding the Return Map

1. This sales and profitability forecast is compiled originally AT THE START OF THE PROJECT from input of every business department -- R&D, Marketing, Sales, Manufacturing, and Quality Assurance -- thus helping to build team cohesion

2. The Return Map is redrawn, adjusted in other words, at EVERY checkpoint along the way.  This means checkpoints during development, at product release to manufactuing, and to sales, and KEY, at the 6 month, 1 year, and 2 year sales anniversaries.   

3. Those intervening Maps are KEPT, archived, and put into a multi-display Situation Room for periodic reference and certainly for Post-Mortem assessment.   THIS IS ALMOST NEVER DONE, and this is the most significant team-building learning experience that any group can indulge in, IMHO.

AstroVirtual Inc. has both a White Paper about a major project for which this was done, as well as a White Paper about Situation Rooms and their utilization.   

Here's an incipient Return Map:

And here is the Updated one, at the next Checkpoint

 

Whoops, profitability is eroding.  Why?   First of all, R&D is late by 7 months.  And Sales are now predicted to slow dramatically, from 50,000 units total in 24 moths to 8,000 units in 17 months.  Profits? this activity will break-even at 41 months after sales release instead of 22 months originally estimated, and total profit at 42 months will be only $300K instead of $2M.   

Such a graph will generate lots of discussion, along with some finger-pointing and jousting.  But what it might also do is generate action on a possible new sales strategy or a cost-saving approach, or ???.  In other words, all departments might be able to help, instead of just blaming R&D for a bad schedule.

Done over the life of a project, these maps provide ample areas of debate and tuning of estimates, and in my experience, garnering a much more cohesive 'team' approach to the difficult question of project management and success.

Thoughts?

The Global Innovation Show synopsis

 I have reported a version of this post in the InnovaScapes Institute blog   https://innovascapes.blogspot.com/ so I will try not to be repetitive here, but just get the word out.

The big news is that a long-running show, The Global Innovation Show by Ailan McCullen, based in Ireland, and aired around the world, does focus on Innovation topics, and they got interested in material in our book Permission Denied (Lulu, 2013), a book still available from Lulu Press, Goodreads, Amazon, and Bookshops.org (an organization of independent bookstores).  

Amazon's posting has three reviews, one great, one terrible, and one with (at the time) a very legitimate complaint).   The first is by Miles Kehoe, a noted innovation consultant in Silicon Valley.  He got the essence of the book!  The seoncd is a review by a youngster who thought the book to be a commissioned flak piece for HP, who treated it as an autobiography of an uninteresting product family written in mediocre style.  He instead recommends David Packard's autobiography (which by the way includes several paragraphs about me).  The third one is from a maligned industry colleague, who was mis-identified, to my surprise at the time.   I apologized to him at the time, tried to remove all references to the situation from both online versions and the printed copy, and have had no further feedback in more than a decade.  Unfortunate--yes.   Fact-checking is a great concept, but as all authors know, it is really more difficult than you might expect.   I lamented the early death of a XeroxPARC colleague once (in the HP Phenomenon book), and a guest at a dinner party said sweetly, "I had dinner with him last week".  I called the person the next day, apologized for the error, and he blithely intoned, "Glad it wasn't true."

Long intro, sorry.    The point is that this next Friday, Nov. 7, will be an interview about the book and about Intrapreneuring Innovation.  So I had to re-read the book, to see what I said, and indeed what I thought some years back.   

I then penned the following to McCullen:

So, we'll see where the interview goes.   But what impressed me, upon re-reading, is that (A) I liked what I read (even thinking that I'd have a hard time expressing it better now), and (B) the rules and the stories seem as relevant, maybe even more so, for the events and experiences we've had at AstroVirtual over the past two or three years than they did in those long-ago anecdotes when I was a mere stripling youth.

Maybe there should be a second edition or updating???  We have, after all, delivered several thousand books against an old theme.  WHAT HAVE YOU DONE LATELY?

Intrapreneuring--not always the safe route?

 I mentioned in last week's post that Intel is struggling, having just announced layoffs for 2,400 at their four Intel facilities, plus another 1,600 at other US plants, and a few overseas.   The idea for many, nay most, engineers is that it is safer to work for a large corporation rather than do your own start-up.  And why not pick a company which sells Billions of dollars annually, what can go wrong?   

Intel, to pick one, was one of America's most profitable companies for decades, and had a virtual monopoly with micro-computer chips for Personal Computers.  They were routinely ranked #1 in the world for chip manufacture. 

But then, something happened on the way to the bank.  TSMC got good at chip manufacture.  AMD got better at designs.  ARM chips fueled the SmartPhone revolution, not Intel's chips.  Today, sadly, Intel is reported to have fallen out of the Top Ten semiconductor companies, even with 110,000 employees.  What?

Below is more detail.

UPDATE: July 14, 2025: Intel Corp. is laying off more than 4,000 employees across four states, according to updated Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filings. More than half of the cuts are now taking place in or near Hillsboro, Oregon.

In a revised letter to Oregon officials, Intel increased its initial layoff estimates from 529 employees to a total of 2,392. The first separations are set to occur over a two-week period beginning July 15.

Intel also increased its layoff estimates from 172 in Chandler, Arizona, to 696.

July 11: Intel Corp. is laying off approximately 1,666 employees across four states this month as part of a company-wide restructuring effort to reduce costs and simplify operations.

“We are taking steps to become a leaner, faster and more efficient company,” Intel said in an email July 9. “Removing organizational complexity and empowering our engineers will enable us to better serve the needs of our customers and strengthen our execution.”

The job cuts, which begin to take effect July 11, will affect hundreds that work at or report to Intel in California, Oregon, Texas and Arizona, according to recent Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification filings.

About half of those affected — roughly 855 — are based out of Intel’s offices and facilities in Santa Clara and Folsom, California. The company is also cutting 529 employees across its four campuses in or near Hillsboro, Oregon, considered to be the heart of the company’s research and development operations.

Additionally, Intel has given recent layoff notices to 172 workers in Chandler, Arizona and 110 in Austin, Texas, according to WARN filings as of July 11.

A spokesperson declined to elaborate on which departments or segments of the company will be affected. In late June, Intel said it will “wind down” its automotive business within its client computing group.

The chipmaker has also started sending layoff notices to hundreds of workers in Israel, where Intel employs roughly 4,000 at its Kiryat Gat campus, Israel-based news outlet Ynet reported.

One of CEO Lip-Bu Tan’s priorities since taking over in March has been to refocus Intel’s core products for a new era of computing shaped by artificial intelligence and reasoning models.

Some things never change

 The recent uptick in readership for this long-running, but decidedly episodic blog prompted me to go back and review some of the 'gems' and other blatherings that are included.

One that particularly caught my eye today was the May 23, 2013 blog about "Hijacking the Summit."

The meaningful paragraph went something like this: "But at the conference, to which several hundred people had been flown in for several days, we (a newly-met Intel colleague from Israel, Nathan Zeldes, and me, from Park City, Utah) were disbarred from having a session, or even a speaking gig.   Protocol meant that 'the important people' had agenda time; the troops were to listen and salute.  We poked this beast several times and got nowhere."

How many of you have shared some experience like this?   We were incensed, and the story goes on to say that we found a way around it at the time, and it resulted in some interesting, if not fully lucrative, collaboration inventions and breakthroughs for its time.

Of late, I have been concerned once again about improving the Collaboration Experience for companies, partially because we (in our new company, AstroVirtual Inc.  https://www.astrovirtual.com/) have created some very much improved capability tor teams to work together (including using some of those ideas we first had for the Intel IT conference where they didn't want to hear them).

One of the key technologies we've augmented is Collaborative War-rooms, rooms with multiple displays of pertinent corporate data and videos of key folk, etc.   And WOW, what we get in feedback is almost astonishing.   

We had a senior VP for a major corporation (a good friend of a great friend, who had a VERY responsible position for years at his company) tell us that our "solution" would probably scare most C-level managers, and certainy most CEO's he knows.  His point: "No high-level manager wants to be 2nd-guessed by his team, so he/she will never allow them to see all the data you guys propose to share widely amongst all the team members."

Another key commentator, again a long-term C-level executive for one of the top ten high-tech companies of the past thirty years, said: "You are proposing to allow junior members of the team to see a lot of data that they usually don't see, and in particular, when the leader is talking, he/she will want them to pay attention to him/her rather than prowl around in the data on their own.  How do you control them, and how do you get them to listen to 'the boss'?"

Meanwhile, we are collecting user perspectives about War-rooms and their value, and I was struck by this advice from a key team at BMC Software (which I always found to be a respected 2nd-tier software vendor in the database / repository space): Engage a variety of perspectives.  Even if you're working on an IT problem, you may be surprised ate the unique perspectives that some seemingly distant employees--sales, finance, marketing--may bring to the problem (This also breaks down silos common to most companies). (https://www.bmc.com/blogs/it-war-room/

Let me give a concrete example.   I, with my corporate engineering team, and several IT folk built a worldwide satellite-based communication network for HP in the mid-eighties--7 uplinks and 300 downlinks.  We built it so that the engineering teams at 91 disparate labs in 26 states and nations could communicate more fully (visually as well as written and aural).   Any HP engineer anywhere in the world could get to a downlink within two hours by car or plane; uplinks were judiciously placed so that every major lab had access.   And Tony Fanning and a couple of others did sociology studies for who adopted this novel capability (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/637069.637109).   Yes, a number of engineers did indeed use it, and offer numerous suggestions for improvement.   But the surprise--this is circa 1985--was that the accounting teams and the quality assurance teams were the real users.  Corporate Engineering was not in the business of producing products for HP--our goal was Engineering Effectiveness within the corporation, not sales outside.

Later, as Intel tried to sell dedicated collaboration tools, notably ProShare and Team Station, I joined Intel via the Dialogic acquisition.  And in fact the "Hijacking" referenced above was done to pursue better tools for collaboration.   My first comeuppance was a 1999 interview to meet with Pat Gelsinger, the program manager for these products.  I explained why their shortcomings were disastrous; he promptly ended the interview and sent me to Intel IT instead of Intel Labs.  Ironically, four years later, Intel set up the Intel Collaboratory, and I was selected as its first director.  We built an experimental program termed Miramar, got a set of patent claims awarded, which later became a significant portion of the underlying technology we now have incorporated into AstroVirtual's tools (and have gotten another 35 patent claims allowed to date).

If the story ended there, it would be a fun anecdote, but it doesn't.   HP had come out with HP Halo, and Cisco had answered with Cisco Telepresence during this interval while I directed the Intel Collaboratory. Naturally, we did studies on their systems, and in fact became a quasi-partner for each.  It was almost laughable.  Carly Fiorina had commissioned Halo because HP was supporting Disney, who wanted much better collaboration between their California design labs and the nascent Disneyworld team in Tokyo.  Halo was an elegant solution, with camera pairings done correctly (by contrast with Cisco's), and high-definition video and audio.   But it was expensive, and HP sales teams largely ignored it.

Cisco built their equally expensive system so that JohnChambers, a noted dyslexic, could have 'face-to-face' meetings with CEOs and political potentates around the globe without having to go there.   He basically banned the use of side monitors able to display PowerPoint slides or their equivalent, because he wanted the emphasis to be on 'the people experience' (and because he had trouble reading slides, but that went unsaid).  He also commanded that the camera set-up focus on the experience for the single person at the head of the table rather than the several ancillary attendees in the room.  They were all "in on the meeting" but they were distorted and off-center if they tried to 'take the stage' whereas HP's system allowed, nay even encouraged, the perspective for all attendees to 'feel equally included.'

Cisco's system got built in much larger quantities--300 systems within the company reputedly, and nearly 1,000 at other companies--despite the extraordinary costs (ostensibly $300,000 per site for the IT network and cameras, never mine the room dedication, with an annual operating cost of at least one-third of that).   

I used both systems extensively, courtesy of HP and Cisco, and we did several in-depth proprietary evaluations, as you might imagine.   I even lobbied at one point for Intel to buy and install a dozen Cisco Telepresence sites, despite the obvious cost and usage issues.  Intel declined the idea.  HP didn't want to bid Halo for Intel, and I was never sure why, but those talks never progressed.

I could also insert here some stories along the way, but they basically will bog down the basic point that I am about to make.   Suffice to say that the reason I was equipped to challenge Gelsinger was that I'd done extensive work at Dialogic on collaboration tools and their usage. including the first installation of Webex in the world.

Gelsinger, by the way, is one of the most tech-savvy CEO's {he was then CTO}, never mind that the Intel Board tossed him out as CEO last autumn and brought in the current bozo, who doubtless won't last long.  But for collaboration, he had not studied the usage models, just the technical achievements.

Here is the point.   I built the first system at HP for the engineers to work collaboratively, at our far-flung disparate divisions, a business architecture shared by few companies then or now.   Intel also built its system for engineers, viewing the opportunity to be individual sales to designers rather than to a company to overcome a strategic design issue.  HP built their Halo system for one specific group of designers, who (when finished) didn't need it much anymore, and there were no equivalent high-profile clients like Disney.  

Cisco built their system for their CEO to romance Queen Elizabeth and other dignitaries as much as to build a network-centric business.  Chambers himself thought in 2008 that it would be a $1 Billion business for Cisco by 2009. (see https://www.nojitter.com/customer-experience/chambers-and-telepresence).  

But here's the rub:"The wrong people are using the system."  I was told this at Cisco multiple times, and at HP several times.   The intent was to save executive travel time, and allow executives to be 'more places with 'presence' more often, more effectively.   But the rooms were 90% booked by non-executives, so much so that executives, when they did want to use them, found them "full of the wrong people."

And that led Cisco to buy Webex, for the rest of us.  Whereupon Cisco modified Webex to fit it into the corporate network rendering it harder to use by simpletons but easier to use with Cisco equipment to collect archival materials, to embed the Webex experience with other Cisco products and so forth.

And Eric Yuan, who was CTO at Webex at acquisition, labored for a bit, chafing at Cisco's help, and then launched Zoom in 2011, with financial support from Dan Scheinman, Cisco's chief legal officer (who resigned to back Yuan.   Dan sent his cousin Jim Scheinman to Yuan.  Jim named the company Zoom, and brought the first 'real money' to the table.

I started using Zoom in 2013, and found it to be phenomenal, focused on 'the wrong people' as much as the preferred purchasers.   I was a heavy user for major high-tech interviews long before the COVID pandemic 'launched the company.   Zoom went from 10 million use-cases per month in January 2020 to 300 million per month in March that year.  Voilà!!!   ZOOM, as in Collaboration tools nowis a NOUN, not just a VERB.

What we'd found at Intel circa 2005 still fit.  "The wrong people" told us, for example, that executives had no trouble getting travel expense money, and that they LOVED the trips, never mind what they said.  They were not about to give up traveling and its perks to sit in front of a computer screen.  But these folk, in supporting departments, never got travel money, or if they begged for it, had to demonstrate huge value and need for them to travel.   With Cisco Telepresence, they could meet with colleagues anywhere, and in fact, GET THINGS DONE.  What a concept!  But, they also noted, that the Cisco sites were optimized for 'big meetings' and not the day-to-day meetings that most of them craved.   And they found fault with a hundred details about the system, but there was nowhere for their imput to be gathered.  Sigh.

Food for thought?

Blog readership--is there any?

 Authors often wonder--does anyone read this stuff?    Page-view counters on each of my blogs give some indication, and generally they are pretty slow-moving tickers.  Yes, there was a time when I fingered Mark Hurd and shared the nickname he'd been given by HP employees (not very charitably), and someone back East picked it up, and I got 40,000 page views for my HP blog within ten days.   But that kind of thing is rare unless you are a Tik-Tok influencer (and God help me to avoid that).

But this blog was started back when Gifford Pinchot's book, Intrapreneuring, experienced a bit of resurgence.  So there was a swarm--some 27 posts--in 2013, partially inspired by a Stanford Graduate Business school gig, and then a joint Harvard/HP gig,    Good stuff, I thought at the time, and I briefly entertained the thought of doing a book, and then wisdom (or ennui) overtook me.

I did follow up with ten more posts over the next two years, and then kept still until we had another new company underway, and it seemed fair to post a few more (8 in 2024).   And then one paltry effort this year to date.   So, 46 posts in thirteen years, not exactly a trove.   The interesting thing for me is that readership was equally modest for twelve years, and then in the past fifteen months (really in the past three months) someone must have found this stuff and is reading it.  At least that's what the numbers say.

There were 6,560 page-views from inception through the end of March 2024, about 500 per year.   And in the past fifteen months, another 3,281 page-views, which ups the readership by 500%.  And this past month has recorded 1,300 views.  Don't know who, but someone is reading it.  Maybe they're writing the book I once intended?

Here's a graph of several blogs I maintain.

A classic intrapreneur?

 Steven's GeoData is an interesting experiment in broadcasting geospatial information, a topic near and dear to my heart.   It would appear that Steve is actually an entrepreneur, and a good one at that.  But his messages are resonant for folk in corporations, so I am going to 'sneak' it in here.

The specific image that appealed to me today, sent to me by our high school class co-ordinator, is below:

Very instructive image, don't you think?