Opportunity at the Interface Part 3 - Applying Leadership to Management of Interfaces
I’m going to pick up where we left off in the last newsletter and keep chewing on this bone about interfaces starting with a question: Why do some organizations use external consultants for services they could arguably do in house if they built up those capabilities? There are a bunch of reasons:
not carrying the overhead when the type of consultant is no longer needed,
incentivization for performance on the part of the consultants,
the consultant having exposure to other organizations and bringing in better ideas,
and more
Why not do it? One reason is that it is another interface to manage. If the organization is not skilled at managing external interfaces they will be tend to “in-house” as much as possible. Are these organizations going to be as competitive as their peers that do externally source some services? Certainly, there is a balance, and the success of externalizing services relies on the ability of both the client organization and the service or product provider to lead the management of their side of the interface.
The more subject to change, the more complex the interface, the greater the need for skilled leadership on both sides of the interface to yield value from the interface. If we start making multi-dimensional interfaces with three or more parties we have just increased the complexity considerably.
If an interface is established and routinizable (like roads as discussed in part 2) it should be defined, and over time improved. Otherwise, the wheel will keep on being reinvented. Process ownership and process mapping anyone?
What are some of the characteristics we need in the leaders who are accountable for the interfaces? They can be specialists, but must first and foremost must be generalists. They need to be able to understand what is going on inside their organization, which to the outsider will be a bit of a black box with inputs and almost magical outputs. That leader also needs to be able to peer into the other interfacing black box and get some understanding of what is going on there, and be able to speak the same language as the leaders from those other organizations.
In the consulting world that I came from, the project manager is the quintessential interface leader. They are managing multiple interfaces from their project team to other project teams from the client, various disciplines, contractors, possibly permitting agencies etc. This is part of why I think the development of capable project managers must incorporate their development as leaders. There will be trouble at the interfaces. It takes a number of leadership skills to anticipate, even intuit, where trouble is brewing and then to deal with it. Emotional intelligence, communication (especially listening), adaptability, being organized, resilience and more are needed to manage the interface when there is a problem.
This brings us to what got me going down this rabbit hole in the first place: the humble and classic project manager’s RACI matrix (Responsibility, Accountability, Consulted, Informed). I was working on one and got to thinking that what the RACI matrix is really about: defining an interface. More complicated ones may define multiple interfaces. In larger projects or organizations there will be multiple intersecting RACI matrices, whether they are actually documented or not.
Another interface related to management that I think is often done quite poorly is the employment agreement, most often called a job description. The employment agreement should ideally serve to define the interface between an employee and their organization where mutual:
· accountabilities
· expectations
· and intentions
are aligned. The same goes for proposals from vendors to their customers.
When I consider all the effort in the software world that is put into interfaces and thinking about all of the above, I come to an inescapable conclusion: we don’t spend nearly enough time in organizational development on the defining, streamlining and leadership of interfaces. Will the tools used be the same everywhere? Heck no. It will depend on a whole lot of things specific to each scenario. There will sure be some tools that are common to particular scenarios but they may have limitations based on scale with some working well at small scale and poorly at large scale, or vice versa…definitely vice versa. This is where leadership comes in; applying discernment and judgement to determine what is the right approach to making the interface work.
There will be at least one more part in this series, and I’ll leave you this closing thought: What are some of the formal tools you are using to define your interfaces and how can they be improved and/or right-sized? Are they flexible enough? What aspects of your leadership framework are evident in your organizational unit’s interfaces?
With gratitude for your readership and thoughts,
Nik