1 - 9/19/01 6:53:58 AM - barry: Good morning, everybody! I hope you are all ok. I'll start putting in and answering some of your most frequent questions about Theory W and EasyWinWin.
2 - 9/19/01 6:56:43 AM - barry: Q> In Theory W, should you treat all stakeholders as equally important?
3 - 9/19/01 6:58:52 AM - barry: 2 Not in all cases. There can be degrees of stakeholder success-criticality. Realistically, satisfying higher-level managers' high-priority win conditions is more success-critical than satisfying middle-managers' win conditions.
4 - 9/19/01 6:59:18 AM - barry: Q Does Theory W work in all cultures or situations?
5 - 9/19/01 7:00:50 AM - barry: 4 It works less well in cultures where obedience to superiors is essential. Even here, though, it is worthwhile to suggest to the superiors that it's worth finding out and considering their subordinates' win conditions.
. - 9/19/01 7:01:24 AM - edwin has entered the room
6 - 9/19/01 7:01:38 AM - barry: Q. What do you do if there is no win-win solution among the stakeholders?
7 - 9/19/01 7:03:12 AM - edwin: Hi professor
8 - 9/19/01 7:03:12 AM - edwin: Hi professor
9 - 9/19/01 7:04:46 AM - barry: 6 Try proposing to cancel the project and see if any of the stakeholders becomes more flexible or suggests another option. If not, summarize the situation for higher management, and suggest that the project is unlikely to succeed and should be cancelled.
10 - 9/19/01 7:04:54 AM - edwin: you've just posted the question I wanted to ask.... I'm looking forward to knowing the answer to that question.
11 - 9/19/01 7:05:22 AM - barry: Q. Should you always just cancel failing projects?
12 - 9/19/01 7:06:27 AM - edwin: Thanks. I didn't think of handling the situation that way. 
13 - 9/19/01 7:09:31 AM - barry: 11 Not always. Consider the prospects of a rescue and the risks of not having the capability, and summarize the situation for higher management to determine what best to do. If you are "higher management," share the situation with the management of the other stakeholders and see if a new approach with different people, ideas, or priorities might work.
14 - 9/19/01 7:10:32 AM - barry: 12 Good. Hopefully the answer to question 11 helps too.
15 - 9/19/01 7:14:06 AM - edwin: Professor, I have a question about determining the success-critical factor. 1) Is there a common practice for quantifying the success-criticality of the stakeholders? 2) what if some of the win-conditions are sort of personal and the stakeholders that have personal win-conditions are unlikely to "put them on the table"?
. - 9/19/01 7:14:52 AM - temp1 has entered the room
16 - 9/19/01 7:15:08 AM - barry: Q. In a small project or organization, there are fewer opportunities to expand the option space and create win-win solutions. What should we do in such situations?
. - 9/19/01 7:16:09 AM - temp1 has left the room.
17 - 9/19/01 7:18:02 AM - barry: 16 Sometimes, the best you can do is to offer future rewards to people who have to do the less attractive tasks: bonuses, vacations, training and preparation for future career options. Again, learning how each person wants to win is important.
18 - 9/19/01 7:20:35 AM - barry: Q. In a small project or organization, how realistic is it to split a job across two people for different parts of the project?
. - 9/19/01 7:25:45 AM - Hongmin has entered the room
. - 9/19/01 7:25:51 AM - Anna has entered the room
19 - 9/19/01 7:27:12 AM - barry: 18 This is indeed less realistic on many small projects (and even some large projects), where preserving customer relations, task experience, or critical skills may be critical. But sometimes it will work well for small or large projects: for example, having a good but perhaps less thorough concepts person leading the beginning of the project, and having a more thorough closure person leading the end of the project.
20 - 9/19/01 7:29:56 AM - Anna: Win Win theory works well in organic type of the organizations. What is your experience in establishing organic (theory Y) work culture in large, well established companies.
21 - 9/19/01 7:33:52 AM - Hongmin: Professor, I have heard that you had a lecture on Sept. 17, Monday. But there was an announcement on canceling Sept. 17's lecture. I missed it. Had that lecture been recorded so we can view it?
22 - 9/19/01 7:35:02 AM - barry: 15 It's hard to quantify staskeholdrs' relative success-criticality. One approach for assessing this is to consider worst-case scenarios of what might happen if a particular stakeholder becomes unsupportive or antagonistic, and subjectively order or rate on a scale of 10 the size and probability of loss to the project if this happens and order the relative risk exposures. 
23 - 9/19/01 7:36:46 AM - barry: 15 It is indeed difficult to expose and deal with very personal win conditions. This is why EasyWinWin keeps the brainstorming and prioritization anonymous for as long as possible.
. - 9/19/01 7:37:31 AM - temp1 has entered the room
. - 9/19/01 7:39:22 AM - Hongmin has timed out.
. - 9/19/01 7:39:56 AM - Hongmin has entered the room
24 - 9/19/01 7:40:28 AM - barry: 20 It's very hard to try to do it all at once in big organizations. It's best to look for early adopters and hopefully generate some success stories that others will want to emulate. This is helping us get it applied in big hierarchical organizations like the U.S. Army, but it will take a long time to get it widely adopted there.
25 - 9/19/01 7:50:13 AM - barry: 21 Yes, I was able to get back to LA earlier, and used the Sept 17 time slot to prerecord the Sept 24 lecture on part I of the COCOMO II Suite, along with a discussion of the rescheduling that I sent out in the cs510 email. It should be available as the Sept 24 lecture. I've also prerecorded the Sept 26 lecture, Part II of the COCOMO II Suite, and will prerecord the Sept 28 COCOMO II lecture today.
26 - 9/19/01 7:51:17 AM - barry: Q. Can't you alienate some people if they see you looking after someone else's win conditions?
27 - 9/19/01 7:54:10 AM - barry: 26 Yes. You need to clearly communicate to everybody that satisfying other people's win conditions may be important to themselves too, and clarify that you're trying to avoid win-lose situations that will turn into lose-lose for everybody.
28 - 9/19/01 7:54:58 AM - barry: Q. How does Theory W scale up if you have hundreds or thousands of stakeholders?
. - 9/19/01 7:55:20 AM - Hongmin has left the room.
29 - 9/19/01 7:58:54 AM - barry: 28 It doesn't scale up very well if you try to individually match very many win conditions to very many stakeholders. In such cases, the best things you can do are to try to find community-representative stakeholders, or to use polls or surveys to determine which stakeholder-community win conditions are most important.
30 - 9/19/01 8:00:36 AM - barry: Q. It seems like competitive bidding situations are necessarily win-lose, since only one organization can win the bid. Is there anything you can do to make this less of a win-lose?
31 - 9/19/01 8:05:09 AM - barry: 30 Yes; sometimes you can award "consolation prizes" to qualified but not the best-qualified bidders. A good example was the Ada programming language competition, where Honeywell-Bull got the main contract, but the three losers got contracts to do compiler validation, tool support, and (as I recall) education and training functions.
32 - 9/19/01 8:06:39 AM - barry: Q. What can you do about people changing their win conditions after you've negotiated a set of win-win agreements?
33 - 9/19/01 8:12:00 AM - barry: 32 Some change is unavoidable. Try to anticipate and accommodate it, or do things like concurrent prototyping to make sure people are being as realistic as possible about their win conditions. But people should have a good rationale for why changing their win condition will help the other stakeholders (by avoiding a clear failure mode or generating more or quicker benefits). If not, it's probably better to defer the change and avoid destabilizing the project.
34 - 9/19/01 8:12:28 AM - barry: Q. What do you do if win-win starts turning into win-lose?
35 - 9/19/01 8:14:57 AM - barry: 34 Try to assess the source of the problem and options for surmounting it. There are many possibilities to consider: rebaselining the plans and requirements, reprioritizing the features, reassigning incompatibile people, etc.
36 - 9/19/01 8:16:41 AM - barry: Offsite students: Not many of you are participating in the chat sessions. Please send me email about what might be done to them to make it more likely that you could or would participate.
37 - 9/19/01 8:17:29 AM - barry: We're running out of time, so I'll sign off. Any last questions or comments?
38 - 9/19/01 8:21:08 AM - barry: Bye. Remember that your questions on reading the Peopleware book are due at noon PDT today, and that I'll do a chat session on them Friday morning.