Order is important

As I put my little ones to bed every night, I have a lot of free time to let my mind wander over important things in life. Tonight, my random thoughts took me to these two things: "Order Is Important" and "Nomenclature is Important".

Why Order Is Important

Let's look at a few simple math equations to see why order is important. Take the equation "Total = I - I*.15". Without the rules of order the Total would always be 0 (zero, nada, zilch, nothing). This seems insignificant. What if I said this equation, in a rudamentary sense, determines what you get paid each week. "I" stands for Income, .15 for the tax bracket (adjust this exercise to the correct number). All of a sudden your mind changes on that whole order thing. Quickly your mind harkens back to 9th grade algebra and you're screaming, hopefully in your head and not out loud, you have to multiply before you subtract. A simple yet effective example.

Why Nomenclature is Important

Let's say I put you in charge of building my new house. To build my new house we'll need some lumber. I'm no lumber so I wouldn't copy my list and try to build a house of any kind. If you do try to build a house from my list a big bad wolf will come by and blow it down, that much I can promise. To build my house, I give you the following list g with no nomenclature:

House List
50 - 12 x 4 x 8
50 - 12 x 4 x 10
25 - 12 x 6 x 10
25 - 12 x 6 x 8
50 - 12 x 12 x 10
50 - 12 x 12 x 8

Going back to the first part of this discussion, "Order is Important" for those of you not keeping up, these are some pretty simple equations. Kee in mind, since I'm no architect this means that I get to say that you're no builder and don't get what these are. Because of this, I could hand you this list and you could come back with:
-334, -430, -695, -551, -1390, -1102

I don't know about you, but you can't build a house out of negative numbers. For the most part I'm a pretty positive guy, so I'm not just being negative about this.

So I'm missing a few marks relating to feet ('), inches ("), quantity, and separators to make this list easier to read.

Why do I care about this tonight? Well that takes me back to more random thoughts. (note: Sitting in the dark in a rocking chair waiting for a 2 year old to go to sleep is a weird sort of meditation I've discovered.)

1. You can substitue on Oral Thermometer for a Rectal one, but I wouldn't recommend doing that in a the reverse order.
2. To get others to believe in you, you must first believe in yourself (that's a famous quote but I don't remember who from).
3. When you're trying to break a complex problem down into it's subparts, the order of those subparts can sometimes determine how quickly you can find a resolution. Also, some complex problems cannot be solved as 1 giant problem, but only smaller parts of the problem can be solved.
4. When building a team to solve a problem, who do you hire first? The manager to provide the vision and get the team going, or a qualified member of the team to start solving the problem?
5. What happens if you put pieces of the coconut into the lime, can you shake it all up?

I'm sure there are others....

If you were paying attention the reason I care is to find the answers to #3 and #4. I have a job interview tomorrow for a new position. The new position is sort of a career change for me. I'll be managing a team in charge of solving a complex problem, that everybody agrees exists but do not be able to get together to solve. For me, this is what I love to do. I get to biuld a team from scratch and pull together disparate groups to solve a problem everybody agrees exists. In this case it's a very expensive problem that many different groups point the finger at each other for the blame. My goal is to solve parts of this problem, as the whole problem will never go away. To do this, as I've done in the past is to work it in what I call my "Both Ends Parallel Strategy". OK, I don't really call it that but I had to come up with something. This method works for a problem where you have a backlog of issues/widgets/thingies and new arrivals coming in daily. What I like to do is take my team and work them from Both Ends towards the middle. I split the team into as 'equal parts' as I can, slightly skewed and begin to work both ends of the flow. Let's say I have 8 people, I rank them from 1-8. I take #1, #2, #5, #6 and I put them in charge of the new arriving widgets (assuming the incoming rate is high). I then take #3, #4, #7, #8 and I put them in charge of working from the oldest widget to the middle. By splitting my team this way I accomplish a few things, some of them directly related to the problem:

1. I do not fall any further behind because my 'better team' is taking care of the incoming rate as fast as they are coming in.
2. I'm knocking down the backlog oldest (usually the quickest as well since some can be so old they've lost their urgency) to newest.
3. I'm giving my #3 (and potentially #4) person in my group a leadership opportunity.
4. I'm also giving my weaker team members the chance to work directly with some of my stronger team members on a joint problem to solve.
5. If /when the arriving flow becomes slower, I can then peel off my #1 person to look at future problems, thus providing leadership for my #2.
6. By tackling the new and oldest in parallel, this buys me sometime to get to the issues in the middle before they get too old.

The Nomenclature portion of this comes into play when it comes to deciding classifications for 'closing and issue/widget/thingie'. If the whole team agrees on a few fundamental resolutions, it becomes easier to classify the older (and sometimes non-relevant) issues. The newer issues (and future ones) are then positioned to fit the fundamental resolutions. This gives us, as a team, a way to monitor progress and predict where we'll be.

Another benefit of doing this, is I can take the 3-4-7-8 team and give them a weekly goal, from that I can predict how many weeks it will take before we're caught up. Since my 1-2-5-6 team is covering the incoming, my backlog doesn't get any bigger and it's pretty close to the prediction we made for when we'll be done. By setting a weekly goal, I also have a means to reward my whole team if we get done early or exceed a weekly goal. It's amazing how a team will react to something as simple as donuts, a banner, an email from above for doing their jobs.

Keep in mind my "Both Ends Parallel Strategy" the next time you find yourself in a bind. BTW, this is also the same method I used to get myself out of debt many years ago. I transferred all of my debt to one of those low interest cards, started paying cash for new purchases, and outlined a year strategy for paying off the 1 low interest card that remained.

And if you have a new name for my strategy let me know. You see, I have a job interview tomorrow for a pretty important position with growth potential in a field different from what I've been doing for the last 10 years and I need all the help I can get.

I'll probably leave the thermometer example out of my interview, after all I'm not in the medical field, and people in the medical field will tell you that the difference between an oral and a rectal thermometer is taste.

Tastefully yours. Gio