What Can We Do as a Client?

I haven't been posting to the blog lately because I have been on the road; hopefully bringing in new business along with expressing appreciation for existing business. But in any case, I have been in conversations with our clients. This is always valuable. Sitting in an office and listening to people that work in your own organization is easy, but deadly to our effectiveness as a project organization. If I don't get out, I soon start believing that everyone at ForeRunner grew up in Lake Woebegon.

One of our clients asked me a question that left me without much of an answer. The question was, "What can we do as a client to make our projects turn out better?" Talk about the opportunity to trot out the cliches! A masterful cliche user such as myself could have gone on for hours without really saying anything. And it is the safest course to not say anything to such a question, because we are of course treading on very dangerous ground. It is a question akin to one's wife asking if a certain dress makes her look fat. Those of us on both sides of the great divide know that an honest answer is neither wanted nor expected.

But being an engineer, I as well as my fellows, laugh at social norms and try to make an honest answer. That my wife is still with me after some 33 years is testimony to the essential grace of her character. However, clients are a different matter entirely. My answer to the client was that the client's culture dictated how projects were done in their own organization. Some client cultures lend themselves to doing projects more effectively than other client cultures. But the client culture is what the client culture is. Suggestions made by myself, or any other outsider, were of little use unless they were compatible with that client culture.

That is true enough, but not very helpful. ForeRunner is good at doing projects. If we are not, we wouldn't be in business, because that is what we do. If a client asks for advice about how to do projects, we should be able to offer more help. In that spirit, I would like to offer some of my perspective on how clients can be more effective at doing projects.

My answer to this client was true as far as it went. The client culture is all pervasive and immensely powerful. It is the environment within which projects will be done. Methodologies for improving project metrics will not work unless they are implemented in such a manner to mesh with that culture. But that is also the largest single opportunity for the client to improve their ability to effectively do projects.

Any outsider such as ForeRunner is necessarily outside that client culture and will consistently engage in actions that, while well intended, result in blunders when viewed from within that culture. In other words, we will consistently belch at the dinner table, simply because we do not realize that it is bad manners.

My experience of projects is that they are not graceful eagles flying majestically through their sky, but instead resemble wounded ducks. The competing requirements of the different client stakeholders make most projects awkward creatures even at their beginning. And after that beginning, the project's life is a long chain of compromise brought on by changes and discovery of unknown obstacles.

From my viewpoint, what many projects suffer from is the lack of a broader perspective from which to view the decisions that must be made in the course of a project. Projects with poor outcomes generally suffer from poor decision making rather than poor engineering or design. But the people making those decisions, both on our part and the clients, are smart and experienced people. We wouldn't expect them to make very many poor decisions. What project decisions on the ground generally lack is not good decision makers, but information and perspective.

Projects are done to advance business goals, not technical goals. Project decisions need to be made on the basis of sound technical thinking, but the judgement calls and strategy of project execution need to be driven by business goals. Only the client can provide the business perspective into the project execution mix. I would invite our clients to do so, with the sure expectation of better and sounder project execution to be a result.

Figure Skating or Hockey

I have often made the statement, "ForeRunner is not an engineering company". Most people then ask, "Well, what is ForeRunner then?". I respond by saying that we are a company that does projects. Often the conversation moves on from there with people shaking their heads about small differences.

There is an old line that describes most peoples approach to the world. It goes something like this, "If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck". Since we look like an engineering company and quack like an engineering company, the outside world thinks we probably are an engineering company. After all, we don't sell a product or operate any facilities, what else can we be? But still we try to draw a distinction, where much of the world sees no meaningful distinction. Why keep pushing a point that seems of so little moment?

Other than stubbornness, I feel there is an important point to be made. To be sure, it is a subtle point. But I feel it is one that is valuable and needs to be made. However let there be no mistake, we are a company of engineers, as well of other highly specialized technical people. And we make no apology for that, we are proud of who we are and what we are. We did not gain our skills and qualifications easily or with no price attached. We worked hard to become what we are.

But if a company of engineers (and other technical types) doesn't want to be known as an engineering company, what does that mean? What are we trying to say? It isn't original with me, but I like the ice skating analogy. The technical abilities and knowledge that we bring to the market are skills.

Ice skating is a skill as well. Highly skilled ice skaters can use their skill to compete in the world, just as skilled engineers compete to bring value to themselves and their world. Ice skaters bring their skill to the world in different ways. Ice skaters compete in Figure Skating competitions, going all the way to the Olympics if they are successful. Or ice skaters compete by playing hockey, reaching the NHL and the Stanley Cup if they are successful. In either case they can achieve great success as a result of the practice of their skill.

But they practice their skills in different manners. In figure skating, the ice skating is valued as an art form. The ice skating is an end in itself. Form is valued over function, with the quality of the form valued by subjective judges. Each judge of the art brings different subjective criteria. Some judges value precision and perfection of form as the highest expression of the skill. Other judges give the highest marks to those who exhibit creativity and purity of expression. But who is to argue with a judge? Figure skating is an art form and art is subjective. Judging art is only opinion, perhaps informed opinion, but still only opinion. And my experience is that whoever pays for the art has the ultimate opinion.

The skill of ice skating finds a different expression in the game of hockey. In hockey, ice skating is a means rather than an end. The hockey players must be very good skaters, but their skating is functional rather than an art form. Skating style is valuable only as it contributes to a winning team, rather than as an art form.

My concern about calling ForeRunner an engineering company goes to the nature of how we use our technical skills. In my experience, many, if not most, engineering companies tend to regard themselves as in the practice of figure skating. In those organizations, engineering is an art form with arbitrary standards. After all, an engineering company's product is engineering. The quality and value of engineering, unless used in the service of building something, is subjective.

In saying that ForeRunner is a company that does projects, I am attempting to make the case for playing hockey. We have great engineers and other technical people here, but I want us to take pride in the things we cause to be built rather than in the paper we produce.

Part of what we have always striven to do at ForeRunner is to bring the right people into the company. Not necessarily the most well educated, or the smartest or the most experienced people, but the right people. Who are the right people? People that can bring a high level of skill, that can play on a team and that can focus on an objective goal. People do not focus on perfecting our art, but in using our art to make the world a better place.