Free Article By Paul Glen of C2
Consulting
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Killing Zombies
Does your department host a congregation of the
undead? Every so often, I find zombies lurking in the conference rooms and
kitchens of IT departments, harassing managers and staff. The undead are
remarkably resilient. They are the bane of the managers they haunt, but they are
often of the managers' own making.
Let me explain. One of my clients, the CEO of a
midsize software company, recently asked me what she should do with a bizarre
set of recommendations that she had received from a committee of employees. The
group had presented her with a hodgepodge of proposals (read: demands) ranging
from suggestions about product strategy to requests for enhancements to the
employee benefits packages and ideas about completely reorganizing the company.
As she talked about the document, I could see
that she was more than just mildly frustrated by the incoherence of the ideas.
She talked on and on about how much it would cost to implement the suggestions,
how little they would benefit the company and how they contradicted one another.
She seemed to be taking the list as a personal assault.
"Do you know what prompted them to make these
proposals?" I asked.
"No. It's not what they are there for," she
replied.
I finally asked her to tell me about the
committee that had submitted the recommendations.
The group had been assembled to implement a
merger of two support operations. Over the period of a year, they had studied,
made recommendations about and overseen the combination of the two groups.
Apparently, they had done an excellent job of fulfilling their original mandate.
"So how did they get from that mandate to those
recommendations?" I asked.
"I don't know," she replied.
"So why do they still exist?" I asked her.
"I don't know." She responded through gritted
teeth.
There it was. She had an undead committee, an
assembled group of energetic, talented and well-meaning people roaming the
building looking for a purpose. Once they had gone to all the trouble of
learning to work together as a cross-functional team, they apparently decided to
move on and tackle bigger and better things.
This kind of problem isn't restricted to small
groups.
In the U.S. government, there's a classic
example. The Rural Electrification Administration (REA) was formed in 1935 with
the purpose of bringing electricity to the populations of remote agricultural
areas. The program was a tremendous success, and within 15 years, more than 90%
of farms had power, up from only 10% when the program began.
But did the REA gracefully close its doors
after its core mission was accomplished in the 1950s? Of course not. In the
1980s, it still existed, having found new things to do. Unable to kill it, the
government eventually merged it into another agency.
The undead live on.
Do you have one of those undead groups in your
department?
They are relatively easy to spot. Here's how:
For every assemblage of people in your organization, ask a few key questions:
• What are their three most important goals?
• Has this group outlived its original mission?
• If it has outlived its original mission, has
management assigned it a new mission?
If any group lacks clearly articulated goals
supported by senior management, you may have a pack of zombies on your hands.
You can do one of two things:
• Throw a party. Congratulate the group on its
initial success and then disband it.
• Give the group a new purpose. Find an
appropriate and useful new job for the group and monitor the scope of its work,
just as you would any project.
If neither of those solutions works, move on to
more drastic action:
• Ensure that the key players in the group have
so much other high-priority work to do that they simply can't devote time to the
haunting.
• Fire some people -- but only as a last
resort.
So back to my client. "What did you do to
disband the group after its work was done?" I asked her.
"Nothing," she said, with a look of
realization. "I assumed that they would just stop meeting." She suddenly
understood that she had a zombie problem and that it was one of her own making.
© Copyright 2005 by Computerworld Inc., One
Speen Street, Framingham, MA, 01701. Reprinted by permission of
Computerworld. All Rights Reserved.
