Why I never ran a program without a Project Charter

Lessons on large-scale delivery program management ...

I continue to dig into my past artefacts to showcase my work portfolio. I'm using a multi-pronged approach here: 1\ Showcase my work to prospective employers; 2\ Openly share my work so that others (people I coach, my colleagues and boss, etc.) can benefit; and 3\ Act as my own living knowledge repository.  

I spent a decade climbing up the project management ladder, in the same way I climbed up the software engineering ladder (from junior engineer to principal engineer) - I first started project managing small software product development (2-4 teams with 10 services), then scaled up to large middleware services (20+ teams, 50+ services) as lead delivery owner, then up to full stack systems integration (full stack of all major components: kernel, middleware, integration layers, applications), then program managed a full go-to-market product launch scaling out to including Tech, Business (Finance, Marketing, Supply Chain) & Operations (Customer Care, Retention, Content, Legal, Regulatory) - as senior program manager. I also owned the full plan of starting a business from scratch to launch (a video streaming company) in 8 months. I did a stint in management consulting, running the top 5 business projects for a $3 billion run-rate business, which some companies might call Tier 0/1 initiatives - where I co-ordinated these large-scale programs, as Chief Program Director - delivering through multiple business lines, multiple project management offices and multiple product and engineering teams. In a sense, I served as the CxO program manager, advisor and delivery owner.  

It is with this experience and knowledge, that I dare to share about my work experiences - and I'm not making these things up - you can check my LinkedIn recommendations page for proof.

During my tenure as the lead program director mentioned above, I often found myself picking up and repairing distressed programs - and along the way, I'd help improve team processes and coach the management teams as well. I also ran new business & technology initiatives from scratch, start-to-finish-then-handover. So with this diverse experience, I developed a simple method that helped me navigate both types of program scenarios: either resetting or starting from scratch, the simple, powerful mechanism of a Project Charter document. To this day, I'm surprised to see many program & project managers failing to use the Project Charter in the way it was meant to be used (clarifying the essence), and often find less-experienced, newly minted PMP/Prince2 certified professionals, doing it "by the book". My approach to project charters went much deeper than that...

So what do I mean by using the Project Charter in "clarifying the essence" then?

A seasoned, experienced project leader, chief program director, end-to-end project manager, senior technical program manager, etc - call the roles what you like - in my view, is not about just putting a plan together, working backwards from a deadline or target completion date. No, I believe as senior program leaders must apply their minds to appreciate the bigger picture and create a program structure that becomes the north star in guiding and leading multiple delivery teams. I never started a program without first establishing my project charter, which at the top level, focuses on the following:

• Start by understanding the why. Why is this program needed? Why is it important?
• Move on to understanding the who. Who are the sponsors, stakeholders and teams impacted? Who will be working on the program? "First who, then what"
• A program manager must be sufficiently well-versed with all the roles expected from the program, and work hard to secure the roles needed. Yes, this means the program manager must escalate to get the people needed for the program (on the bus, as well as off the bus). A responsible program manager would raise all these risks & concerns up-front, before officially kicking off the program.
• Clarify the what, including calling out what's missing - Set up the mental model for the program. What is this program about? What is it not about? What's in scope? What's not in scope? What workstreams make up the program? How do all pieces come together?
• Agree, Align, Action - The 3 As of project execution involve agreement on the deliverable, alignment of all parties involved which includes acceptance of their workstreams and ultimately agreeing on the action plan to execute.

Project charters don't necessarily have to be communicated in a written document, a slide deck is more than adequate to communicate the essence. Depending on the business environment and culture (for example, some business cultures prefer slide decks over detailed documents to save reading time, whilst others like Amazon, insist on detailed text narratives). So a seasoned project leader must adapt their style to suit the particular business need & culture of the teams.

In this post, I'm sharing a version of a Project Charter as a slide deck. In a future post, I will share a detailed 50+ page document project charter that involved the launch of a consumer electronics device, the program covered a mix of engineering, business and operations workstreams.

Example Program: Transform Digital Self-Service of a $3 billion run-rate business

I was called in to help reset and kickstart an overarching cross-cutting program to improve a selection of key metrics that would result in increased usage of digital self-service channels, improving customer satisfaction and overall reducing operational costs. This program covered the full value chain delivering the service: 3rd party technology vendors developing phone "mobi" apps using USSD, iOS/Android self-service app, Website, Payments, a hardware kiosk station, set-top box interactive application, integration with internal & 3rd party CRM/Billing systems - and resulting business workflows: finance, customer care & banking channels. Technology teams were spread between the CTO/CIO lines (3 IT pillars), and business teams reported separately to the CEO. The program also served the needs of Group Strategy, Risk & Regulatory. Bringing all these things together requires a steady hand, a tactful negotiator, a strategic and business mindset as well as a strong technology leader. This is why I enjoyed such challenges as these programs were never boring, limited to only tech/engineering.

Enough said, let the slides talk and let me know what you think in the comments!

Pearls of Umar ibn Al-Khattab (3)

“Go easy on yourself, for the outcome of all affairs is determined by Allah’s decree. If something is meant to go elsewhere, it will never come your way, but if it is yours by destiny, from you it cannot flee.”

“Sit with those who have sinned and repented for they have the softest of hearts.” 

“Learn dignity and tranquility.”

“No amount of guilt can change the past and no amount of worrying can change the future.”

“Sometimes the people with the worst past, create the best future."

-- Umar ibn Al-Khattab

ChatGPT - Tetris

How to play:

• Arrow Up: Rotate Tetromino
• Arrow Down: Move Tetromino down
• Arrow Left: Move Tetromino left
• Arrow Right: Move Tetromino right

The game will end after 5 minutes.

This game was developed using ChatGPT as my co-pilot.
Thank you, ChatGPT 23/05/08

How I scaled engineering ops excellence to ±10X with Mission Control

Continuing with me sharing my experiences as CTO, in this post I share the actions I took to help improve an engineering organisation's operational health in our journey of scaling an online video streaming platform from 1X to 10X, from May 2017 to October 2020. To get to 10X improvement takes a journey, which I achieved in under 3 years, and after reaching the goal, I decided I'd learnt enough of the CTO experience and exited, after having set up a strong succession leadership pipeline in place. 

To get an idea of some of the major themes that I tackled during this time, as a leader I had to lead from the front, back, left, right setting the direction of my managers to follow (as all of these interventions were new to them), whilst doing my best to respect what came before:

• Establishing the team despite constant re-orgs going on at parent company - getting the right people in the right roles at the right time
• Transforming a rag-tag undisciplined team to a disciplined, clear-headed, focused organised unit 
• Introducing laser focus on product engineering by unbundling non-core video apps to other businesses
• Being critical on the technology platform by establishing a baseline of the architecture, using third party auditors to rate the scalability of the platform
  
• Improving physical infrastructure: networking, compute, storage and data centres. Move away from self-hosted and self managed data centres to partnering, shutting down data centres as needed.
• Build an industrial grade networking stack and leveraging modern peering facilities and overhauling the server infrastructure
• Setting the roadmap for cloud by transitioning first from single region data centres, to multiple data centre deployments, to running multiple stacks simultaneously, introducing containers and microservices then finally getting ready for cloud and leaping first into serverless paradigms
• Embracing cloud partnerships with big players: Akamai, Microsoft, AWS, etc.
• Improving product and engineering delivery by revamping and overhauling the agile work processes and backlog management.
• Introducing communications mechanisms that helped remove doubt and earned trust across the many different business units and teams (we were known as the online pirates doing their own thing)
• Improving risk, governance and security - bringing it to the top, raising awareness
• Creating strategic partnerships internally and externally to leverage skills and expertise I couldn't get in-house or afford to build or manage ourselves
• 
  Introduced technical operations controls - Mission Control, more active management of operations daily, 24/7 with increased focus, planning and prep for peak times, like weekends and major events planning.
• Aggressively reducing costs on key platform components whilst capitalising on gains through economy of scale

In this post, I'm going to share some of the early context and interventions I introduced in my first 3 months on the job, that remain effective to this day, more than five years later: Mission Control Ops.

The dreaded 403 We're sorry, something went wrong

I took over a team that weren't prepared for the intense discipline needed to run and operate a highly available 24/7/365 platform. There were many reasons for this which I might touch on in another most. I recall coining the term "Bloody May" as the month of so many outages, that I wondered: 1\ What on earth have I taken on? 2\ Is my life going to be consumed by work from now on? 3\ Is there any hope for this platform? 4\ How am I going to turn this platform around? 5\ How much is the job worth to me?

It turned out there was going to be many more "Bloody Mays"in 2017 whilst my team set about improving stability. In 2017, the platform experienced outages that racked up about 20 days of downtime in one year. This equates to ± 95% availability, which is unacceptable for a video streaming platform. When I left the team in Oct 2020, we had turned around the platform to reaching 99.5% availability trending higher. Today, 5 years on, I'm told the availability is much higher but their usage profile has drastically changed (reduced the number of concurrent streams to one device only, also reduced their devices supported, moved most of the services to AWS). 

ChatGPT - Stoicism and Islam - common principles?

Yesterday, I had a good conversation with ChatGPT exploring Islam Inc. as a way to explain Islam from the perspective of a Silicon Valley company. As part of this chat, we explored the leadership principles of the people from Islam who were instrumental in making Islam Inc. endure over centuries.

As a long time reader of the modern books of Stoic philosophy, I acknowledged most of Stoic principles from the lens of Islamic principles. A large part, IMHO overlaps and so I don't have any issues promoting Stoicism - although I do advise one doesn't have to look outside the leaders of Islam to find what they're looking for.

I wanted to inspect my opinion so I asked ChatGPT - turns out, I am right... :-) I like the way ChatGPT empathises and also respectfully put PBUH (Peace Be Upon Him) when referring to the prophet Muhammad (PBUH).

I wonder if the source of ChatGPT's response came from here? It would be great to see how the machine reasons and cites references that seeded its response.

When viewed from Stoic philosophy lens, would you say Islam Inc's leaders embodied Stoicism or exceeded it?

Stoicism is a school of philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early 3rd century BCE. It teaches that the path to happiness and virtue is found in accepting the present moment and focusing on what one can control, rather than being disturbed by external events or emotions. Stoicism emphasizes rational thinking, self-discipline, and emotional resilience.

When examining the leadership of Islam Inc. through the lens of Stoic philosophy, there are certainly some parallels and overlapping principles. Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and the successive leaders of Islam Inc. exhibited traits such as self-discipline, patience, perseverance, and emotional resilience, which align with Stoic ideals.

However, it is important to recognize that Islam is a distinct belief system with its own set of values and teachings, which are not identical to Stoic philosophy. For example, Islam places a strong emphasis on the belief in God, the importance of prayer, and submission to the will of God. These concepts are not central to Stoic thought, which is more focused on the individual's control over their own reactions and emotions.

It would be an oversimplification to say that the leaders of Islam Inc. either embodied Stoicism or exceeded it. Instead, it is more accurate to acknowledge that there are areas of overlap and shared values between the two belief systems, while also recognizing their distinct philosophical and theological foundations.

Yes, agreed. Let's focus on the areas of overlap. What are they?

There are several areas of overlap between Stoicism and the teachings of Islam Inc. when considering the leadership traits of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and the successive leaders. Some of these shared principles include:

1. Self-discipline: Both Stoicism and Islam emphasize the importance of self-discipline and self-control. In Islam, self-discipline is practiced through prayer, fasting, and adherence to moral guidelines. Stoicism encourages self-discipline to maintain rational thinking and emotional resilience in the face of external events or emotions.

2. Patience and perseverance: In both belief systems, patience and perseverance are regarded as essential virtues. Stoicism teaches that individuals should accept the present moment and focus on what they can control, while Islam emphasizes patience in the face of adversity and maintaining faith in God's plan.

3. Emotional resilience: Stoicism and Islam both encourage emotional resilience and the ability to maintain inner peace and tranquility, regardless of external circumstances. Stoicism emphasizes the power of rational thought and self-control to manage emotions, while Islam teaches that reliance on God and spiritual practices can bring peace and contentment.

4. Gratitude and contentment: Both Stoicism and Islam encourage gratitude and contentment with one's circumstances. Stoicism teaches that individuals should appreciate what they have and avoid excessive desires, while Islam encourages gratitude for God's blessings and discourages envy or greed.

5. Compassion and empathy: Both belief systems value compassion and empathy toward others. Stoicism teaches that humans are all part of a larger community and should support one another, while Islam emphasizes the importance of compassion, charity, and helping those in need.

6. Focus on virtue and moral character: Stoicism and Islam both stress the importance of developing strong moral character and living according to ethical principles. Stoicism teaches that virtue is the ultimate good and that individuals should strive to act with wisdom, courage, justice, and moderation. In Islam, moral character is essential in following God's guidance and becoming a righteous believer.

While these areas of overlap exist, it is important to remember that Stoicism and Islam are distinct belief systems with their own unique philosophical and theological foundations. The overlaps can provide an interesting point of comparison but should not be taken as a complete equivalence between the two systems.