New Workforce - The Weblog of New Equities

When did Project Management come about?

Being a history buff has always led me to wonder about how things got started.  Being in the Project Management field has driven me to inquire from time to time about just what are the origins of Project Management, the simple questions, when and why? In searching I came across an interesting article on www.1888articles.com written by Carol Meyer that I would like to share with you.

Could the Crusades have been launched and the soldiers armed and fed without effective project management? Could the Great Wall have been built with ingenious natural materials and a team of millions over a span of a thousand years without project management? It is possible to say that the concept pf project management has been around since the beginning of history. It has enabled leaders to plan bold and massive projects and manage funding, materials and labor within a designated time frame. What leaders from the distant past managed to accomplish is amazing and without the project management tools available today.

During the industrial revolution business and industry grew and expanded rapidly across continents. With the coming of automation, everything was done on a larger scale. The ability to manage projects in the way of budgets, supplies and labor at various or secondary locations was crucial and motivated the investigation of new ideas to streamline methods.

The Father of Scientific Management

In the early 1900’s a pioneering scientist named Frederick Taylor tested his theories on worker productivity by creating a methodology for the measuring and performance of certain tasks by workers in steel mills. He was interested in discovering new and better ways for workers to perform a job rather that by simply insisting that they work harder and longer. Taylor died in Philadelphia and the inscription on his tomb stone assures his place in history: "the father of scientific management."

Taylor’s friend, Henry Gantt was the first to design charts and diagrams to document and measure the processes involved in Navy ship building during WWI. By charting and analyzing each step in the ship building process he was able to see the big picture and extract information about the relationships between functions. The Gantt chart became an important tool for project management and has been used for the last 100 years.

Another Milestone

In the 1950’s when the government discovered that the Russians were developing missile technology it became crucial that the “missile gap” be filled. Since the safety of the nation was at stake, the U.S. Navy wanted to build a system of their own immediately. To manage the building program Willard Fazar’s PERT (Program Evaluation and Review Technique) was used. PERT uses critical path methodology to control projects that involve massive tasks and logistics. PERT is still the standard for all Navy projects today.

So, maybe Project Managers are not really an innovation of the modern time! Can you imagine being the Project Manager for the Crusades? What about being the Project Manager for the D-Day Invasion of Europe in World War II!  Talk about “Deliverables”!

Open source Coca Cola?

Or Pepsi, or something very much like it, used to promote the concept of open source software:

If you’ve been to a computer show in recent months you might have seen it: a shiny silver drink can with a ring-pull logo and the words “opencola” on the side. Inside is a fizzy drink that tastes very much like Coca-Cola. Or is it Pepsi?There’s something else written on the can, though, which sets the drink apart. It says “check out the source at opencola.com.” Go to that Web address and you’ll see something that’s not available on Coca-Cola’s website, or Pepsi’s — the recipe for cola. For the first time ever, you can make the real thing in your own home.

OpenCola is a brand of cola unique in that the instructions for making it are freely available and modifiable. Anybody can make the drink, and anyone can modify and improve on the recipe as long as they, too, license their recipe under the GNU General Public License.

The company who devised this promotion has long since exited the scene, but the opencola recipe lives on... (Via Digg.)

Being interviewed by an idiot

And what you can do about it. (Via Recruiting.com)

Previously: When the idiot is the interviewee.

The once and future Google

Sherman, set the Wayback Machine for the year 1997. We're going to pay a visit to a young Stanford University graduate student named Sergey Brin and take a look at his pet project, a new search engine called Google.

Hat tip: Freakonomics and Pajamas Media.

Keeping the lines open to talent

itzBig Blog comments on an age-old conundrum in the relationship between candidates and recruiters: "Why don't you call me anymore?"

Most of us have been there before. You know you’re right for the job, you’ve done the prep work, you’ve communicated with the recruiter every step of the way, and you even hit it off with the hiring manager. Then, as though you’ve become contagious, no one wants anything to do with you anymore.

Understandably, this leaves many candidates feeling baffled. It also goes a long way in furthering the “Us vs. Them” attitude that many candidates take on their searches. They accept the belief that recruiters and hiring managers are simply out to get them.

What happens? The post goes on to explain that it can be due to changes in the hiring company; or that they're just not ready to hire; or, more likely, another candidate walked through the door who was a better fit; or hey, maybe they're just not that into you.

But these explanations all beg the obvious question: what about basic professional courtesy? In our conversations with working consultants who deal with staffing firms, we hear the complaint all too often: "They were really hot on me, then suddenly I heard nothing from them." Recruiters and headhunters often remind candidates that the recruiter is working for the client, not the candidate and attention therefore goes to the client's priorities. If a particular client is hot on a candidate to fill an open requirement, then so is the recruiter. If the client decides to go in a different direction, or wants to pursue a different candidate the recruiter moves on. After all, time is money and who has time to handhold everyone? Nothing personal, just business, right?

It may be business, but it's a dysfunctional way of doing business that assumes the candidate (aka the "talent") has no intrinsinc worth outside of the immediate context of this particular requirement, and can be discarded like an old shoe if things don't work out. Aside from being just bad manners, it's also bad business, as the post in itzBig underscores:

We believe that this situation can be rectified. Instead of taking on the “silent treatment,” it would be effective for both recruiter and candidate to look into the resons why the company went a different way. This enables a candidate to see where they might have been lacking in experience or skills and it gives them the chance to focus on those areas. It also keeps recruiters in touch with candidates that have at least garnered the interest of employers. One missed opportunity shouldn’t bring the candidate/recruiter relationship to a close.

New Equities developed its consultant-centric staffing model precisely because of our philosophical belief that the value we bring to our clients is our relationship with the best talent. Even outstanding candidates are not going to be a fit for every requirement or project, and people who may be rejected in one context may be ideal in another. Why end that relationship prematurely? And why treat a fellow professional like a disposable component that no longer fits and has therefore outlived its usefulmess, when it takes only a few minutes to give some feedback?

As we move from a buyer's market in talent during the first half of this decade into a seller's market for what may well be the next few decades, that talent will simply refuse to do business with companies who treat them as commodities. Their first loyalty will be to themselves and their own professional development, but that loyalty will extend to the people in their network who help them further their careers.  Successful staffing firms will need to start according candidates the same priority and courtesy as they would hiring managers. True, the hiring manager may be the paying customer, but it is the consultant who is actually the "product" that is being paid for and thus cannot be taken for granted. As the Baby Boom retires and the pool of available talent shrinks, organizations who deal in providing access to talent, whether permanent or contract, will find that they ignore that reality at their own peril.

New Equities has organized itself around the concept of  "Talent Communities", targeting the specific skill sets (e.g. project managers, Java developers, business analysts) and industry expertise (banking/insurance, manufactuing, retail) important to our clients in specific geographies. Each Talent Community has a dedicated manager called a "Consultant Agent" who builds and maintain relationships with the consultants in the community and the client managers who hire that talent.

Conducting business within the New Equities framework and philsophy means taking a proactive approach to finding good people, rather than the typically reactive approach of filling a req and moving on. It means keeping community members in the loop through phone calls, emails, newsletters, events, and blogs and online discussions. It means understanding what consultants want -- what kinds of projects they prefer, what skills they want to develop, what kind of work experience they are looking for -- and finding ways to help them advance their career goals. It means working hard on behalf of consultants already on projects, getting ahead of the curve to find the next assignment before the current one winds down.

In short, it means looking at the staffing business as a network of relationships rather than a series of transactions. It is definitely more time-consuming than the traditional approach, but it results in a better fit between each consultant's capabilities and work style and the needs of a particular client or project. Viewed in conventional business terms, this equation is a no-brainer: taking the time to get the product right yields greater customer satisfaction. Ironic that so many in the "people business" seem reluctant to invest the time in getting to know the people who make or break that business. 

Removing all doubt

ResumeHell is a blog devoted to "dumb stuff I read on resumes". From the blogger's profile:

Recruiter, somewhere, innappropriately laughing at resumes. Do I make them up ? Why do I need to. C'mon, you know people like this.

Hopefully none of us are memorialized here, as we have had the good sense to avoid groaners like this:

I have a wide variety of skills and experience, some of which I have taken for granted and cannot readily recall. If considered for employment, I believe I will be an asset to your reputable organisation.

Lots of examples much worse (and funnier) on the site, accompanied by amusing commentary.

Mark Twain is famous for saying: "It is often better to keep one's mouth shut and appear stupid than to open it and remove all doubt." Nowhere is this truer than when writing your resume.

Retro PC dreams

Remember Atari and Commodore? The Apple II and the original IBM PC (and its hapless successor, the PS/2)? Now, you can relive the TV commercials that sold us all on the dream of owning our own personal computer, thanks to the folks at Downloadsquad, who have meticulosly compiled them in one nostalgic post, "The history of the personal computer in TV commercials".

It's all here, including Apple's famous "1984" superbowl ad introducing the Mac, and the early IBM campaigns incongruously featuring a Chaplin lookalike. Plus, classic Microsoft ads ranging from the Rolling Stones to a bizarre performance by Microsoft's own Steve Ballmer hawking Windows 1.0. Not to be missed!

Hat tip: Pajamas Media and James Hudnall

Whither Microsoft post-Vista?

On his blog at Information Week, Alexander Wolfe muses that, with the release of Visa, Microsoft may have reached its upper limit:

In software terms, there are two interesting trends, which underscore Vista's probable place as Microsoft's high OS watermark. First, Vista has essentially -- and at long last -- brought most of the features of Apple's Mac OS X to the Wintel platform. (Widgets/Gadgets, anyone?)

Secondly, Linux has effectively disintermediated expensive software vendors like Microsoft (much like bloggers have in some sense cut the rug out from under not quite as well compensated journalists such as myself, though I'm running hard to catch up :).

For Microsoft, it seems to me that the only real question going forward is, will the company's fate mirror more closely that of DEC (Digital Equipment Corp., to readers under 40), or of IBM?

Funny, people were making the same kinds of assessments about Apple a few years ago.

UPDATE: CNET's "Vista for the Masses" is a veritable Vista-palooza for anyone interested.

Is Web 2.0 dead?

No, says Steve Rubel, the market is just thinning the herd.

Yeah, what he said!

Over at CharlotteRecruiting.com, Jim Durbin says some very nice things about New Equities and this blog (and yes, our ears are burning):

Who is our favorite recruiting blog?  Why, it was and always has been the New Equities Weblog.  While the rest of us were chatting through the Recruiting.com community about theory and practice and goofiness, New Equities was learning how to use their blog to hire people in their local community.

The whole reason I chose Charlotte as one of my local sites (I also write StlRecruiting, KCRecruiting, and SeattleRecruiting) is because of New Equities.

Their model is based on community, the building and sustaining of them as candidate pools for New Equities clients.  In a world where everyone is decrying the lack of quality consultants, New Equities is the only company I've seen take the step to doing so.

Jim was formerly a top recruiter for kforce and now works as a consultant specializing in online media and employment branding, so it's especially high praise coming from him. He has been a reader and fan of New Workforce for some time, in fact in 2005 he nominated us for Recruiting.com's Best Blog Awards (Taleo's blog won in our category, but it was still quite an honor to be in the company of heavy-hitter blogs from Google, Microsoft, SimplyHired and Indeed.com).

Anyway, thanks to Jim for his kind words and enthusiasm for our model. We definitely want "community" to be something more than the buzzword du jour, and that means making connections with our members offline as well as online. If you're a New Equities consultant, or a member of our larger community, let us know how we're doing and (more importantly) what we should be doing.

UPDATE: Another workforce blogger, Jim Kissane, also sends out props: "New Equities is a progressive collection of thinkers that always challenge and inspire me." Again, we're blushing. (But you still included the comment. - Ed.  Well, yeah...)

They all scream for iPhone

Lots of buzz at MacWorld over Apple's new iPhone though somewhat less at CES. The general consensus is that it's pretty damn cool, even as some question whether it's ready for enterprise use.

Meanwhile, Cisco is suing Apple for copyright infringement over its use of the iPhone name.

Google's quest for the elusive talent algorithm

The folks at Google are working to craft an algorithm that helps them predict which prospective employees will thrive in the company's often-chaotic corporate culture:

Google has always wanted to hire people with straight-A report cards and double 800s on their SATs. Now, like an Ivy League school, it is starting to look for more well-rounded candidates, like those who have published books or started their own clubs.

Desperate to hire more engineers and sales representatives to staff its rapidly growing search and advertising business, Google — in typical eccentric fashion — has created an automated way to search for talent among the more than 100,000 job applications it receives each month. It is starting to ask job applicants to fill out an elaborate online survey that explores their attitudes, behavior, personality and biographical details going back to high school.

The questions range from the age when applicants first got excited about computers to whether they have ever tutored or ever established a nonprofit organization.

The answers are fed into a series of formulas created by Google’s mathematicians that calculate a score — from zero to 100 — meant to predict how well a person will fit into its chaotic and competitive culture.

Google is very serious about cracking the code as to what prefigures a successful employee. And it's finding there is more than one answer. For example, the company has traditionally looked for candidates with high academic achievement, but is now finding there are other factors:

“Sometimes too much schooling will be a detriment to you in your job,” Dr. Carlisle said, adding that not all of the more than 600 people with doctorates at Google are equally well suited to their current assignments.

Indeed, there was no single factor that seemed to find the top workers for every single job title. (And pet ownership did not seem to be a useful predictor of anything.) But Dr. Carlisle was able to create several surveys that he believed would help find candidates in several areas — engineering, sales, finance, and human resources. Currently about 15 percent of applicants take the survey; it will be used for all applicants starting this month.

It will be interesting to see whether Google can completely automate the selection process to the point where the candidate interview becomes a mere formality. That might be efficient, especially given volume of applicants Google must weed through (a nice problem to have!), but it seems rather impersonal for a company that prides itself on its corporate culture and values.

At New Equities, our philosophy is to build a strong relationship with the consultants in our talent communties, on the basis that we expect to work with them long-term over multiple assignments. To that end, we spend a lot of time up front in the qualification process so that we are sure we understand each person's unique abilities, career goals and work preferences. After all, if someone prefers 3-month assignments, it makes no sense to pressure that individual to accept a yearlong engagement. Or, if someone has been a successful Business Analyst but is now looking to work as a Project Manager, we will bring those kinds of opportunities to their attention, or look for hybrid BA/PM roles that are in line with that individual's stated career goals.

Obviously, technology plays a role in finding the right talent for a particular need, but there is no subsitute for knowing what people are good at and what they want to do professionally. Metrics and algorithms are useful predictors, but in the long run, relationships may matter more.

(Hat tip: Pajamas Media)

And a Happy New Year!

2006 is heading for the finish line -- hope it's been a good year for all of you. To all our readers, thanks for your continued support and interest. And especially to the consultants who make up our talent communities, our special thanks for making it a great year.

Happy New Year and best wishes for further success in 2007 from New Equities and Analysts International.

The shape of things to come

Wired Magazine boldly gives its predictions for 2007.

Coming in 2007: the VR internet

In his now-classic 1981 short story True Names, author Vernor Vinge imagined a worlldwide virtual reality network in which users could assume alter egos and manipulate data with techniques similar to wizardry and magic. Many computer users, particularly gamers, embraced those concepts wholeheartedly, as attested to by the success of Second Life and other online environments (including World of Warcraft and similar MMORPGs). Now a non-profit group is building a new type of internet specifically for VR games and applications:

Neuronet, which is separate from the Internet, "will evolve into the world's first public network capable of meeting the data transmission requirements of emerging cinematic and immersive virtual-reality technologies," according to a Wednesday announcement from the Vancouver-based International Association of Virtual Reality Technologies.

The first-generation Neuronet is scheduled to go live in 2007, the group said. Consumer applications are expected as early as 2009.

Virtual reality generally refers to environments with visual and audio information that makes a person feel immersed in a computer-generated realm. The growth of environments such as Second Life has spotlighted such efforts, and IBM believes that virtual worlds will open new doors to e-commerce as well.

The group promises that Neuronet will have high-speed communication, a key constraint for virtual reality, which requires transmission of large quantities of graphics and other data, as well as fast responses to give users a better illusion of realism.

Although the full impact is still years off, it's not much of a stretch to imagine the impact of such a VR network on project management and collaboration among remote team members. Online meetings and webinars, once a novelty, are now a staple in the business world. In 10 years, will it be commonplace for project teams to collaborate in simulated meeting rooms, solving problems by manipulating shared data models in 3D? IBM's endorsement of Second Life, and now Neuronet, is an indication that it may be.

"This is Unix, It's Easy"

Usability guru Jakob Nielsen offers an amusing take on the movie industry's 10 most egregious UI bloopers. You've seen them in film after film: the hero walks up to a completely strange (or even alien) computer console and, after guessing the password in 3 tries (the screen flashes "Access Granted" in overlarge characters), masters a complex user interface within seconds. In particular, Nielsen singles out one of the all-time great LOL moments for techies:

In the film Jurassic Park, a 12-year-old girl has to use the park's security system to keep everyone from being eaten by dinosaurs. She walks up to the control terminal and utters the immortal words, "This is a Unix system. I know this." And proceeds to (temporarily) save the day.

He also observes:

Films are littered with so many other unrealistic plot details: you'd imagine, for example, that the ability to shoot straight might actually be a primary job requirement of Imperial Stormtroopers.

Yes, it's just entertainment, Nielsen should just lighten up, etc. etc. But his actual point is how unrealistic depiction of technology in TV and films creates expecatations on the part of end-users, and whets the public's appetite for user interfaces that look dramatic and cool, but are not all that practical.

The wild, wild Web

Read/WriteWeb weighs in with predictions of the important Web technologies and trends of 2007. Topics include, Microsoft vs. Google, enterprise collaboration, the proliferation of Amazon-like Web services and the rise of rich internet and mobile apps.

Great expectations

Information Week looks ahead to the 2007 IT job market.

Survey: IT pros are "job flirts"

A recent UK survey found that a large percentage of IT professionals are constantly on the lookout for the next opportunity:

The "Work in Progress: Jobseekers survey", carried out by polling firm Loudhouse Research, surveyed over 1,000 UK workers across the UK and found that nearly half (48 per cent) of workers in IT have applied for a job or registered with a recruitment agency in the past 12 months. Despite this, over two-thirds (68 per cent) reckon they will still be in the same job 12 months from now.

According to the study, IT employees are knowledgeable about what they look for in a new job and are intent on finding companies that can offer the best deal. However, money was not necessarily the main priority for job seekers.

Top factors that attract job seekers to a new company or role are interesting or challenging work (89 per cent) and friendly environment (84 per cent).

This is consistent with our own findings at New Equities, based on surveys and roundtable discussions with consultants (both those who work for us and those who don't). Getting the "best deal" is important, but the intangibles such as job satisfaction and cultural fit are also key. And - being listened to was something consultants highly valued and sought in their work environment. Not surprising, but apparently a much rarer occurrence than most of us would think.

All of this points to the looming challenges of 21st century workforce management: how to find the best talent, and how to retain that talent (and the knowledge of those workers). These are actually age-old questions, but they take on a new urgency in the IT industry, as the qualified pool of talent ages and the next generation of potential IT workers, spooked by fresh memories of the recent tech recesssion, opts for other career paths.

Company loyalty is not entirely a thing of the past, but it has to be constantly earned and the bar is set much higher than it was a decade ago. For firms that hire consultants on an ongoing basis, it means adopting a more "consultant-centric" outlook that works from a starting point of trying to understand what consultants want out of their careers and making an honest effort to deliver value in those areas.

Humanity 2.0

Technology futurist and author Ray Kurzweil offers a thought-provoking vision of the not-so-distant-future:

Kurzweil told a keynote audience at last week's SCO6 supercomputing conference that nanobots will roam our blood streams fixing diseased or aging organs, while computers will back up our human memories and rejuvenate our bodies by keeping us young in appearance and health.

The author of the book The Singularity Is Near, Kurzweil says within a quarter of a century, non-biological intelligence will match the range and subtlety of human intelligence. He predicts that it will then soar past human ability because of the continuing acceleration of information-based technologies, as well as the ability of machines to instantly share their knowledge.

In an interview with InformationWeek, Kurzweil said people and computers will intermix with nanobots, blood cell-sized robots, that will be integrated into everything from our clothing to our bodies and brains. People simply need to live long enough—another 15 to 30 years—to live forever. Think of it as replacing everyone's "human body version 1.0" with nanotechnology that will repair or replace ailing or aging tissue, he says. Parts will become easily replaceable.

"A $1,000 worth of computation in the 2020s will be 1,000 times more powerful than the human brain," says Kurzweil, adding that in 25 years we'll have multiplied our computational power by a billion. "Fifteen years from now, it'll be a very different world. We'll have cured cancer and heart disease, or at least rendered them to manageable chronic conditions that aren't life threatening. We'll get to the point where we can stop the aging process and stave off death."

Kurzweil even goes out on a limb and predicts that nanotechnology will  yield a cure for the common cold.