Scott Johnson | AtTask Blog

About Scott Johnson

Scott Johnson, Chairman and Founder of AtTask is recognized as a business leader who challenges traditional management mentalities and applies out-of-the-box thinking to solve the important business problems faced by organizations today. “What I really care about is helping organizations understand and organize the work that is most important to business success,” says Johnson. “Business leaders who are able to clearly communicate objectives and efficiently organize the workplace empower their employees to maximize the value of their efforts. This concept guides everything we do at AtTask.” A true adrenaline junky, Scott hasn’t found a sport that involves going fast with something strapped to his feet he doesn’t like. The same passion for pushing limits to achieve excellence in extreme sports helped make AtTask a fast growing company that has been instrumental in helping thousands of business leaders empower their workforce, streamline processes, and transform their businesses. Johnson is a graduate of Brigham Young University and an acknowledged expert in project management. An engaging speaker and consultant, Johnson has been featured in such publications as CIO Magazine, Business Management Magazine, PM Network, and Business Week.

Creative is the Job Word

14 December 2011 - POSTED by Scott Johnson

LinkedIn has just published it’s top ten words most frequently used by professionals to describe themselves.

http://blog.linkedin.com/2011/12/13/buzzwords-redux/

This year’s number one word is ‘creative’. ‘Creative’ took the number one spot in many countries across the world and wasn’t even on the list last year.

What is changing? We’ve been talking about that change for a long time at AtTask. What is driving it is a shift in workplace dynamics. The Facebook generation enters the workforce with different expectations and ambitions than previous generations. Those expectations are leading to a realization that the only competitive edge anybody can have in this day and age is the ability to be creative.

Possessing this ability is both individual and organization. Individuals cannot be creative if that creativity is stifled by management or by organizational rigidity. Hence, creativity is equally important in leadership and executional levels.

Today’s workforce comes to work for different reasons than in the past. They are ready to go all-in for organizations that let them solve problems creatively and collaboratively. They are equally ready to bail from organizations that can’t grasp this dynamic.

Today, more than ever, well-established companies are having to compete with startups for top talent and it’s precisely for this reason. People value their ability to make a difference through creative expression more than ever. To me, the LinkedIn numbers are just a validation of the importance of this dynamic.

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The Consumer-driven Enterprise

20 October 2011 - POSTED by Scott Johnson

I just finished reading an article by Dion Hinchcliffe covering five IT trends for the next five years. I was happy to note that ‘Consumerization of IT’, or CoIT was one of the five.

Consumerization is all about bottom-up consumption from within the enterprise. True consumers are free to purchase or use applications that make their lives better. They are free to not use applications that suck. Consumer technology vendors have the luxury of interacting directly with the users and the result is technology that is timely, relevant, and effective. The goal of consumerization is end-user driven software consumption.

The inhibitors to this trend lie in how enterprise software is purchased and controlled by enterprise IT.

In the enterprise, the buying process is centrally controlled and software requirements are dictated by the smart people who conceive of every possible feature, algorithm, and security nuance that might ever impact any edge case in the organization. This drives bad design, promotes clunkiness, and does not deliver what matters to the people who will be using the software. It also pushes software vendors into the kind of practices that have given enterprise software such a bad reputation in the first place. IT’s answer to force software on people is not the right approach. The goal needs to be to seek to deploy software that will readily increase productivity rather than seek to deploy software that will do IT a favor. There are many methods that can be employed to arrive at this goal. Dion summarized by saying, “longer term, companies will imbue their IT service design, solution acquisition, and delivery with user experience and design approaches and fresh ideas from the consumer world. This will drive more worker productivity, less user support, and higher innovation in IT solutions.”

Secondly, software needs to be consumable by pockets of the organization first, and then able to spread at will to others. Top-down mandates are seldom successful. There is a long-held belief that software either needs to be simple, or it needs to be enterprise worthy, but can’t be both. I believe it can be both. The five-year trend enterprise software developers should be paying attention to is how to deliver enterprise-worthy software that is consumable by ordinary people. I’m happy that AtTask is already two years into this trend and proving that this tall order can be filled.

See the full article here

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Thumbunication and Work Management

23 March 2011 - POSTED by Scott Johnson

thumbs Does it seem funny to you to see two co-workers sitting side by side communicating with each other through the network? Chances are, if you were born before 1980, this may seem funny. This behavior is a generation thing. If you don’t get it now, you may never get it, but at least you will be able to crack jokes about your younger counterparts having cyber friends, and talking through their thumbs.

In the next five to ten years, generation thumb is going to comprise an increasing share of our of business leaders and executives. Many of them are already founders of forward-thinking fast-growing technology companies that are showing us a road ahead with their out-of-the-box irreverent ideas. It’s important that we understand their expectations of how to manage work and the tools to use to get the job done.

Take my son as an example. When he wants to get together with his real-world friends does he call them? Does he plan ahead? Does he have any ideas about what would make a fun Friday night? No way. He gets on his facebook group, talks about hanging out, and soon the text messages start flying around. The result is that in a couple of hours, a wandering band of teenagers shows up looking for food and a good game. I guess that’s cooler than calling people. In any case, the same behavior is being manifest more and more in the workplace.

What should we know about it? Here are two ideas for understanding this crowd and embracing their ways in the workforce:

* Don’t make me plan - this kind of flies in the face of everything corporate. What this really means is that sometimes the best results and the best creativity flow from you just doing your thing the way you want. This includes talking to the people you want to talk to and using the resources you want to use. This group is OK with looking at results. They are not OK with a highly structured routine that controls how to get to those results. They are not interested in coming to work for you; they are interested in coming to work for themselves. Find ways to make work ‘theirs’ and they’re all in.

* Keep me out of meetings - what’s the point of having a face-to-face meeting when you can text someone? Texting is far less intrusive and more polite – people can answer on their own terms (see "Don’t make me plan"). As such, the expectation for communicating about work is that it will be digital, it will be out there for everyone to see, and it won’t be overly structured. Management’s job in this is to consume what I have to say, to figure out how to clear obstacles, and provide recognition. That’s it.

I believe that we’re headed toward a time of dramtically increased creativity and innovation as a result of the dynamics of the new workforce and their seemingly odd behaviors.

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Find the 18th Camel

15 January 2011 - POSTED by Scott Johnson

There is a story about a villager who left his inheritance to his three sons. To the first he left one-half of his belongings. To the second, he left one-third of his belongings. To the third, he left one-ninth of his belongings.

Given that the man had 17 camels, tempers started to flare among the sons. 17 is not divisible by 2, by 3, or by 9. How could the sons come to an agreement?

They turned to a wise woman who told them, "I don’t know that I can help you, but you can have my camel if you wish". Perfect. The first son got his nine camels, the second son got his six, and the third son got his two and they were all happy. That totalled 17 camels and so they gave the extra one back to the woman.

When I heard this story, I couldn’t help but think about how effective leaders get the most out of their workers not by telling them what to do, but by figuratively finding that 18th camel… by finding ways to help their people think creatively and find solutions that were not obvious before.

Often times people in the workplace are limited mainly by their own assumptions about their limitations. As an employer, I love it when people challenge the status quo or their own percieved resource constraints to bring about a great plan.

If you have any 18th camel examples of how you have done this in your organization, please share.

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Questions About Work Management

31 December 2010 - POSTED by Scott Johnson

Happy New Year! (almost) and with it comes a chance to think about the way we are going to work in the upcoming year.

Work Management is driving a new way to think about managing projects and helping people contribute maximum value to their organizations.

I would like to ask you which of the following concepts resonates with you and why:

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Project work should be democratized
Workers need more time to be creative
Workers should have more opportunity to be self-directed
Management will be more effective by receiving bottom up projections and commitments than by following traditional approaches of telling people what to do and when
People at work aren’t numbers to be put in bit buckets, they are valuable resources that should be viewed as front-line experts of the work they do
Management’s job is to look forward and remove obstacles to success
People in any organization should be able to know what the top priorities are for any executive, manager, or individual throughout the organization
People should be recognized for their wins and contributions to the organization
Companies should stop wasting their people through inefficient processes, through lack of organized collaboration, and through misdirected effort resulting from lack of visibility into company priorities

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The difference between done and DONE!

7 September 2010 - POSTED by Scott Johnson

The success of a project or initiative is as dependent upon good execution as it is dependent upon a good definition of success.

I am a huge fan of getting things done the right way. It is better to complete a small number of things in such a way that they truly affect the organization than it is to complete a whole load of things in a way that never yields fruit.

Hence, the concept of done versus DONE!. It is important to understand what you are really looking for before you get agreement that an initiative will be done.

Let’s look at a fictitious example of a salesforce trying to improve their ability to learn more about the business impact of the solution they sell, and how it impacts their customer’s business.

The initiative assigned to the sales operations leader might read, "Increase sales’ knowledge about the business impact of our solution with prospects."

If you are a proponent of SMART goals, you may agree that ‘S’ (Specific) has just been defined. For ‘M’ (Measurable), you may say something like, "Business Impact field in CRM system is filled out for 100% of prospects after October 1." We’ll say that this initiative will check in with results on 11/30, three months from now.

This initiative is set up for potential failure. While it can be ‘done’ by meeting what is outlined in the objective, it’s impact on the organization is not defined. As such, at the end of the quarter, when you sit down with that sales operations leader to review results, you may be having an awkward conversation.

We can easily change ‘M’ and start down the path of getting results. Our previous example was measurable, but meaningless. What we want is data in the CRM system that demonstrates that the sales force has been up-skilled in the area of discovery. Better understanding of prospects’ needs on the team’s part should result in two things: non-opportunities being identified earlier and real opportunities being won more consistently – or with a higher average sales price. We could add both of those to the measure, so that it now reads:

Shorten time to loss of opportunities created after 10/1 by X%
Increase win rate of opportunities created after 10/1 by X%)

This setup is better, but not perfect because it may be too difficult to predict how having better skills will impact win rates and, if this starts to go off the rails, we need to course correct before it’s too late and we have to throw the initiative overboard. We need some interim check-ins over the next three months.

Our second iteration of ‘M’ could be:

Develop discovery training for current and future sales reps by Sept 15
Certify every sales rep on discovery by Oct 1 through role plays, coaching, and monitoring
Capture baseline loss time and win rates on Oct 1
Demonstrate that discovery data is influencing the sales and consulting conversation by 10/15
Demonstrate an increased win rate for opportunities created after 10/1
Demonstrate a shortened time to loss for opportunities created after 10/1

This set of measurements will give us time to verify that the initiative is on track while still giving us 60 days to capture the results we really need.

What we’ve just done is a project management best practice. We’ve split an initiative into milestones to give ourselves some early indication about progress and we have been very clear about what constitutes success. As an executive, a few minutes up front defining success surrounding the initiatives we own will drive better results and produce fewer awkward MBO conversations.

I’d love to hear your experiences with (or not with) this approach in your ‘fictitious’ examples.

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There is no Line Between Strategy and Execution

1 September 2010 - POSTED by Scott Johnson

I was reading "The Execution Trap" by Roger Martin

He cites a commonly used misleading phrase, "A mediocre strategy well executed is better than a great strategy poorly executed" If a strategy delivers poor results, how are we to say it was brilliant? Roger goes on to explain how the idea that strategy and execution are somehow two separate ideas is deeply flawed.

Traditionally, strategy is the purview of senior managers and consultants who then hand it off to the rest of the organization for execution. Strategy is choosing, execution is doing.

Examples of front-line individuals developing ideas and procedures outside of a strategic role are many. All too often, organizations are not able to benefit from those developments due to preconceived notions about who are the thinkers and who are the doers.

Roger’s point is that if there is no line above which strategy happens, then why make a distinction?

How are we to avoid falling into the same trap? I would suggest a couple of ways:

1. Open lines of communication. Some managers jealously guard their resources. They want to make sure that everyone plays by rules in the interest of ‘efficiency’ or in the interest of ‘focusing on getting the job done’. Efficiency and accomplishment are good. However, organizations start to go sideways when people who want to share ideas are not allowed to. A good approach is to foster idea sharing and communication. Hold brainstorming sessions and invite all who care.

2. Strategy is Action. Remember that strategy is action and that results are inextricably tied to that action. When implementing a strategy, you will never be able to hand off the plan to someone else to get those results. Consultants are a slippery bunch sometimes. They show up with intellectually solid plans, but seem to end their engagements with enough lead time to have a good excuse if the results don’t come in.

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Management Needs a Stamp of Freshness

28 June 2010 - POSTED by Scott Johnson

How do you understand what is happening in your organization?

I recently observed a sales organization take deal data from their CRM system and put it into an excel document to share with the leadership team.

Why, I thought, would this organization with significant discipline and sponsorship of centralized data take a single step down the path of decentralized data?

In this case, the significant reason was that Excel captured the qualitative information – that is, the conversational information with a stamp of freshness attached.

I would like to make a few comments about the importance of qualitative information. I would also like to know if anyone else has felt the urge to put data into Excel for similar purposes.

Whether it be sales opportunity information or project status information, we want quick status updates that are meaningful. What this Excel document had that the CRM solution did not was a fresh conversational status field containing about 8-10 words summarizing where the deal was (BTW – there is a case for the 140 character Twitter limit – no stories please, just the thoughtful facts). In other words, this document, sent around on a daily basis, represented the latest in MBWA data.

It is important to note that the CRM system mentioned could generate reports on stages, probabilities, days in the current stage, expected deal close date, and a thousand other variant ways of slicing and dicing data. The one thing it couldn’t do was express what the sales rep was thinking about that deal right now today. This fault was enough to cause someone to look elsewhere for ‘good’ data. What is the definition of ‘good’ data? Aren’t the probabilities, stages, histories, amounts, & etc. good?

Yes and no. They are good in that if they were accurate, you could make great decisions. They are not good in that people don’t trust them. By the way, we have seen this same behavior with project management systems too. People have a lot of data; green yellow and red dots; projections, plans, variances, costs, potential revenues, efficiency metrics, trends, & etc. When it comes to executive review, one piece of data seems to decide whether a project or sales opportunity, a project manager, or a sales manager gets additional executive attention – that piece of data is the conversational status and it’s freshness.

Here is an example illustrating the point. Suppose green means that the project is on schedule and yellow means that it’s running behind…

Sample Project Status Report
Name	Condition	Status
Project1	Green	PM says, "This project is in perfect shape" -2 months ago
Project2	Green	PM says, "This project is in perfect shape" -2 hours ago
Project3	Yellow	PM says, "One of our developers got sick, but a replacement will have caught up by tomorrow" -2 hours ago

As an executive, which project do you want to drill in on? You can see how easy it is for qualitative, information to guide decision making.

At AtTask, we recently commissioned an independent survey through Forrester about about Social Project Management and the use of social tools in management practices. One finding we derived from the survey was that the #1 most recognized factor (by a wide margin) for improving data accuracy in project and task reporting is the capturing of qualitative information.

By way of definition, qualitative information needs to have a ‘stamp of freshness’ attached or it becomes worthless. I would suggest this holds true of all management and reporting systems. Social tools as simple as the update with visible freshness will dramatically increase the trust given to any data by an executive.

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Change is afoot

12 May 2010 - POSTED by Scott Johnson

Today I want to talk about change. Specifically, change in the project management industry. I want to explain what is leading AtTask to drive some fundamental changes in this industry and why we believe they are necessary.

We’ve recently seen big changes happening around us. Just as the Internet itself revolutionized much of the way we communicate and do business, it has enabled a new paradigm of communicating and doing business that has been previously impossible.

We’ve seen the advent of social media. Social media is really just a term for decentralized communication. We’ve seen social change our expectations for the speed with which news is delivered and the extent to which individuals can contribute to widespread movements and initiatives.

The world of social is teaching us that self-direction is superior to command and control in nearly all situations. We believe these changes apply to the discipline of project management as well.

As far as project management software is concerned, social will drive change that challenges the fundamentals of PPM. PMO’s, Project Managers, and Resource managers have been taught that the way to get the most value out of people is to quantify them, put them in skills and roles buckets, develop utilization algorithms, and show on grids and gantts that they’ve come up a with perfectly organized plan.

We’ve seen how project managers struggle to keep up with change and struggle to get good information to executives. We’ve seen how resource managers struggle under the assumption that their job is to produce wonderfully optimized resource plans. We’ve also seen front-line workers who struggle with complex systems and really just want more respect and more control over their day. Sadly, after 50 years of this discipline, PPM still suffers from less-than-stellar results.

The concepts that social has brought to the mainstream will affect project management in three areas:

Empowering the front-line
Recognizing people
Getting the real story

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Control is moving downward in organizations. The world is moving too fast for centralized control. Decisions need to be made at ever more autonomous points and the need is becoming greater for more self-directed teams.

Today’s knowledge worker has no patience for systems or activities from which he or she derives no value. For project management to be a successful collaborative effort, all individuals must find value from participating. The best way to achieve this is through recognition, or social proofs directed at participants.

Finally, executives have come to expect more than computational data. They want access to conversational information. In project management settings, what they want is to know what people close to the action are saying and they want to know that what they are looking at is fresh.

We have been focused on the solution that will solve these problems. We’ve spent time in the field talking with and observing customers and non-customers. We have conducted research and have discussed these issues at length with analysts.

Today, we are announcing @task Stream, the world’s first social project management platform. Stream empowers teams and individuals by giving them ownership over their own commitments and facilitating recognition for accomplishments. Stream delivers conversational information and allows commitments to flow upward in organizations. The goal of Stream is to combine the power of social with the structure of project management to provide an enterprise-class PPM solution that fosters participation and embraces free flow of information.

I invite you to learn more about Steam at: http://www.attask.com/stream and to comment about what you find.

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Three Keys to Successful Software Implementations

19 April 2010 - POSTED by Scott Johnson

Someone recently asked me, "What is the best way to implement your software?" Although this question was related to project management software, the principles apply to any type of software implementation or development for that matter.

I’d like to propose three keys that will help project managers avoid common pitfalls when bringing about change in their organizations:

Expect Incremental Improvement
Override the ‘Smart Guy’ in the room
Communicate, Commit & Club

Expect Incremental Improvement
Everyone has heard the analogy about how to boil a frog. There is even a Wiki entry for it. This principle holds true when bringing about change in your organization. All software implementation or software development projects are bringing about change – they are solving problems, and ultimately will require some change in behavior.

Be patient. If you try to go straight from A to Z in one well-designed initiative, you will probably fail. If you impose the end-goal on a team who is just coming to grips with the concept that they need a better solution, you will probably fail.

This does not mean you shouldn’t think ahead. Go crazy with your vision of what this solution should ultimately do. Build your big RFP covering the all potential functionality known to man. But then, and this is the important part, prepare to throw 95% of your good ideas overboard and ask yourself this question, "What is the simplest way to get to the minimum acceptable improvement needed right now?" Once you have an answer to this question name it "Phase 1" and lock onto it with laser-like focus. You are going to need that focus as your whole organization tries to derail the initiative.

Override the smart guy in the room
This may sound like a recipe for failure. It’s not. The smart guy in the room is the person who, while you are trying to get something done, will dream up all manner of complicated scenarios that he or she perceives will be ‘absolutely essential’ for any successful system to have. This is an easy trap to fall into. The arguments made for ever more complexity will be intelligent and reasonable. The motivation for this behavior is complex and varied. Let’s just say that your smart guy is either really smart, or good at promoting the status-quo while appearing to be on board with change.

To override the ‘smart guy’, you must deliver these messages over and over and over:

Phase 1 is the minimum acceptable improvement. Phase 1 is the beginning, not the end.
Phase 1 is the proof of concept – we have to prove that we can do something simple before we can do something complex.
We are designing for the masses, not for the exceptions.

When objectiions or needs outside of the scope of Phase 1 are presented, ask questions like, "what percentage of time does that particular circumstance occur right now?" or "how are we handling that right now?" There are times when a real need must be addressed through added complexity. However, if exceptions occur less than 5% of the time, affect less than 5% of the people, or worse… have never happened, throw them out or put them in a subsequent iteration. Remember, the goal is to bring about change in simple digestable chunks.

Communicate, Commit, and Club
With your developed plan for what Phase 1 success looks like, you need to remind your team why this project is happening in the first place, what the problems are that need to be solved, and how this solution will ultimately address them. You need to be very clear that even though there is a big vision ahead, you’re not attempting to address every need at once.

Commit the team to proving incremental success with Phase 1. Explain clearly what the expectations are for all people affected by this implementation. Remind them again that everybody agreed to solving a problem a certain way and now change is required to start down the path of solving that problem.

You still need someone with enough clout to impose the change on all involved parties. This may come in the form of rewards, pleasant reminders, or an assurance that an executive is looking at the new system on a regular basis. Eventually you need to be prepared to reject anything that falls outside of the new process (this is the club).

With @task, I see the most successful organizations closely following these principles as they implement our project management software. Does this work for you? I invite you to sound in on your observations of successful software rollouts.

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