Working on Vacation

I switched on my laptop to check on my holiday resort reservation and a message popped on my screen, an accusing one at that: “What are you doing online on vacation ? Checking email or responding to some crisis that requires your intervention ? Or just that you cannot get work out of your veins ?”. I tried to justify to her that I was not checking mails, nor facing anxiety or withdrawal symptom disconnected from my mail. I was just checking on my bookings and that’s that. “Then why is your corporate IM on ?” she chided.

It’s that time of the year when everyone, well almost everyone (travel and hospitality industries excluded) is on vacation. Whichever part of the world you look at, across cultures, companies, industries, everyone is on vacation as evidenced by their “Out Of Office” messages. It’s like the entire world shuts down for a period of 2-3 weeks going out on trips, spending time together with family and/or friends, enjoying snow or the sun, and to that extent business for most comes to grinding slow motion if not fully shut.

Over the years OOO (Out of office) messages have increased during festive seasons and less frequent for rest of the year. Immediate conclusion would be that people are working harder through the year and then taking a good long well deserved vacation. It could also imply that irrespective of travel, vacation, weekend or time of the day, everyone gets their hands on their mobile devices and feel gratification giving attention to whatever came in or responding to mail, or just checking out or updating social status.

Our need to constantly check our smartphones has resulted in a situation that we compulsively want to stay connected all the time. It is now psychological and nothing to do with work or life or the balance that was a discussion in the past. To check my hypothesis I sent messages to about 600+ people in my list; CEOs, Head of business, friends, relatives, and loads of business acquaintances. I received about 200 odd out of office messages telling me that they were on vacation and not likely to respond to messages.

The subject line clearly indicated “Seasons’ Greeting” and thus was not urgent, important, a crisis or life threatening to merit immediate attention or response. Despite this, within 24 hours I received about 70 responses to my messages from those who had set OOO status ! Most messages carried a “Sent from a …..” footer. Was it an acknowledgement of the greeting or my hypothesis that we have become slaves to technology ? I now know which smartphones they use or service provider they have subscribed to.

There was a time when I would respond to every message that needed a response or I had a view on as soon as it landed in my inbox. Everyone loved it and commended my quick response; I was on 24 hour clock, not that it helped my life at home, I was thumb happy. Is it more to do with the way the stimulus response is changing rather than just work or life ? Are there any remedies available beyond old and simple willpower ? Is there a way out for the corporate bonded labourers armed with technology that keeps them in chains ?

Reality is that this is self-imposed nemesis of time, energy and expectations; if anything indeed merits response, do it, in most cases the urgent or critical will not land in your inbox, people will call you. Messages with scores in “To” or “cc”, rarely require critical review or immediate attention. A 24 hour cooling period is equally good in most cases and works well enough. Exceptions could be individually marked messages that may come to you from your Boss or a peer CXO for information or action.

Driving back from a vacation with the family comprising two teenaged kids, I noticed that both were constantly glued onto the small screen with rapid thumb movements and fleeting expressions as they deftly switched from screen to screen and application to application. There was little communication between us as I manoeuvred the traffic and they sent updates ad infinitum. I wonder how the new generation would behave during their vacations or work; would it be in anyway separable for them ?

Enterprise projects versus Government projects

“Did you know that the government is the largest adopter of cloud computing ?” asked a cloud service provider trying to provoke the group into a discussion on why enterprises are not embracing his solution. One amongst the group of CIOs retorted back, “Do they know what they are doing ? And with no budget pressures or ROI to demonstrate, how do you equate their reality with ours ?”. Before it became a slugfest between the vendor and the CIOs, the convener intervened; but that had me thinking about context really being different ?

Over the years I had the fortune to meet many people from many countries who headed government projects. Some of them were qualified bureaucrats, some with backgrounds similar to current CIOs or project managers, and a few with no formal IT backgrounds. Their responsibilities were comparable to the enterprise equivalents and the only differentiator in most cases was the scale of operation. The projects they worked on were in many ways similar and quite different at the same time.

G projects especially that revolve around governance are humungous by nature as they impact a very large population (number of users); the complexity varies depending on the process or function. You could draw parallel with large enterprise CRM projects or for that matter self-service application deployed by Banks or telecom service providers. On the other hand there are also conventional automation projects akin to what every CIO and enterprise does as a routine with a view to create operational efficiency.

Enterprise IT drivers and critical success factors comprise on-time, within budget, business functionality and/or benefit and nowadays usability across platforms; corporate project governance keeps everyone on their toes. I am sure that G projects too have somewhat similar drivers and accountability to internal stakeholders. Circumstantial evidence would however point to the fact that the percentage of G projects meeting the success criteria is far lower than corporate. To the taxpayer who funds these, there is limited visibility.

One project lead narrated an incident where the ministers kept changing through the project leading to significant change in scope and timelines. The said project finally went live with 100% time overrun; he did not divulge the budgetary impact. Many years later it is cited as one of the major success stories though it still remains challenged for the masses that use it. Change management is more complex with multiple stakeholders who are required to sign-off and by the time they do, a new set of stakeholders emerges.

Some may argue that an IT project is an IT project and requires the same level of discipline of execution irrespective of where it is done. It is public knowledge that almost all G projects undergo severe review and the bidding process favours the most economical; at least for the initial bid, change requests is another matter. The corporate world is unkind to this flexibility though price war is getting messy for everyone. With different contexts then is it then fair to compare an apple to a pineapple ?

Multi-year projects are passé now though most G projects are that way; maybe they now factor in their unique reality and thus allow for higher latitude than available to a CIO. Project governance, reporting and transparency is not common to all; not too long ago a high profile G CIO was shunted out as he was making many uncomfortable with his open to all reports. He took a leaf from acceptable good practices but the plans, ideas and governance were not acceptable to the well-entrenched way of working.

While we acknowledge the differences in context and realities, I believe that the comparisons are unfair to both. Corporate business entities will always be more aggressive in their approach to capture the first mover advantage or adapt technology for sustenance and survival. They seek market share, profitability, growth and much more. Most Government projects on the other hand do not have a timeline that is critical and therein lays the difference. I wonder if G projects were to be run like corporate projects what would happen !