A Lesson In Getting Organized

Someone I know recently took over a housing community board by getting organized against the old board and running an effective campaign. The strategies used to do this can apply in many areas of life. Here’s how they told me they did it.

*Know What You Want To Accomplish*
The old board was being run by 5 residents of the community and they had contracted with a management company that wasn’t doing an effective job. On top of ineffective management, the board was illegally charging landlords an extra fee for being non-residents. This was strike one for this person and was the whole reason that a group of people decided that the board needed to be replaced. This single goal united 3 people to run for the board.

*Make Sure You Are In The Right*
In cases of legal judgement, it is best to get a lawyer’s advice. The more specific the lawyer’s experience, the better. In this case, one of the landlords was a lawyer and confirmed that the fees were illegal and even sent letters to the board requesting that they discontinue the fee and refund the landlords in the form of a credit on their association dues. When the board ignored the letters, this was further cause for action. Strike two.

*Plan Your Campaign*
Now that there was no choice but to take over the board to effect change, the leader of the 3 did some research on past elections to the board and found that the largest vote count for any one member was around 90 votes. Each resident gets 5 votes, so each of the 3 needed to get around 20 people to vote for them and they would pretty much be guaranteed a seat on the board.

*Know Your Audience*
The people that were being affected by the extra fee were non-residents, so the 3 needed a strategy to communicate with them and explain what needed to be done. The 3 printed up fliers about the problem and mailed them to all of the landlords of the units in the community. They also went around to each of the units and knocked on doors telling people about the problem and to come and vote on the day of the election.

*Stand Your Ground*
On the night of the election, the ballot box was filled with a large percentage of the votes going to the 3 wanting to take over the board. The old board members had set a deadline of 6pm for all of the ballots to be in. They decided to change their minds and open the ballots to anyone who was at the meeting. The old board members went around the community and asked people to vote on the issue. This nearly doubled the amount of votes cast in the election. The 3 were still confident that they would be able to get a majority on the board. Strike three for the old board.

*Move Quickly*
Once all of the ballots were counted, the results were read and the winners announced. The 3 were on the top of the vote count and each got a seat. One of the old board members and a newcomer got the other two seats. Immediately, the management company, seeing the writing on the wall, resigned. The new board members immediately put the extra fees to a vote and the fees were immediately reversed and all past payments were credited back on the association fees.

*Plan Ahead*
Knowing that they would win, the leader of the 3 had already gotten bids several weeks before from several management companies to replace the one that had just left. In my state, you’re required to have a new management company within 30 days. Having these bids in place would speed up the process and allow the board more decision time to choose the best management company.

*Don’t Burn Bridges*
The 2 board members left on the board were upset that they no longer had a majority and couldn’t make decisions the way that they wanted anymore. Being gracious, the 3 board members included them in the process of managing the community, but made it clear that any illegal activity would not be tolerated and that they would need to decide on issues as a board. The 3 knew that it was important not to alienate the community and make sure to listen to their concerns and manage fairly.

*Recap*
So the lessons I took away from this are that in order to get something done, you need to have a clear goal, a flexible plan for getting there, research to back up your claims, and organization to pull it all together. Once you’ve gotten what you want, it’s important to make sure that you make good on your stated goals quickly and work with the former group to keep things running smoothly in the future.

July 30, 2007 | Filed Under Life | Leave a Comment 

On Agile And Backend Integration Projects

Another consultant recently told me that she doesn’t believe Agile works for backend-type projects. She said that Agile just introduces too much change and she can’t keep up with the process. She also mentioned that there were studies emerging that said as much, but when pressed, she couldn’t find any.

Now, I’m all for Agile taking criticism. It’s about People over Process, so if there’s some process hurting people in that equation, then it needs to be examined and possibly fixed. I also believe that building working code iteratively is vastly better than talking about it for months and then sitting down to write code.

Our client, like all clients, likes to change their mind about what features they want in the application we are building. This other consultant and I are on two different teams within the project and she’s doing legacy integration work and we’re doing essentially greenfield development that will have to hook into her systems. As our client changes their mind, it’s pretty easy for us to keep up while she struggles to make changes to database models, ETL processes, and other bits of code in her work.

Thinking about what’s going on, I think I’ve come to the reason why it’s hard for her to change and easy for us. We’re using tools and processes that allow us to change rapidly. Her tools are hindering her from making rapid and iterative change and her processes might be too rigid.

Notice that I’m not telling what tools each of us is using. I don’t want to get into a debate about what tool is better, only the type of tool that allows people to be empowered to change at a moment’s notice and then change their minds back again. My hypothesis is that her tools are hindering her from keeping up with our clients. She’s certainly capable of doing the work, but I feel like processes that her tools make her go through are getting in her way.

What advice can I give to someone in that position? I’ve mentioned stronger scope control to her, greater communication between our teams, and getting another analyst to help with the workload of deciphering the legacy systems she has to integrate with. These are all people processes because I’ve seen other consultants use the same tools in my Agile projects and fit in with the process relatively comfortably.

Agile may not work for all types of projects, but I believe it can work here. It may just be that we need better tools.

July 29, 2007 | Filed Under Work | Leave a Comment 

Marc Andreessen on Innovation

I’ve been reading Marc Andreessen since I heard about his blog from Fred Wilson. There was a great post about retaining good people a few weeks ago that has stuck in my mind ever since.

Things not to do when trying to retain great people:

Now we’re getting into personal opinion, but for what it’s worth…

Don’t create a new group or organization within your company whose job is “innovation”. This takes various forms, but it happens reasonably often when a big company gets into product trouble, and it’s hugely damaging.

Here’s why:

First, you send the terrible message to the rest of the organization that they’re not supposed to innovate.

Second, you send the terrible message to the rest of the organization that you think they’re the B team.

That’s a one-two punch that will seriously screw things up.

Instead, focus on boosting the innovation culture of the entire company.

There are a ton of other tips in there, some of which we used to tell our client companies at NeoTactix. It’s always nice to be reminded of great advice, particularly about what to do with great people that want to make the move to a startup.

July 21, 2007 | Filed Under Work | Leave a Comment