Projects

Continuing the series, as part of a large IT transformation that I helped drive, it was necessary for us to hire 20+ talented IT professionals. And add to that around 30 mostly Indian colleagues that were to join us to run the Transition and Transformation (T&T) program. And add to that at least two other large IT teams we wanted to consolidate. And because we had so many people, it was necessary for us to locate and rent a building dedicated to IT. So I had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take off my IT transformation hat and put on my facilities management hat.

This blog series recollects a bit of the journey before too much time passes and I forget some of the more interesting details.

Servant Leadership

If there is a message in this blog post, I don’t want it to remain hidden: it’s all about Servant Leadership. A job needs doing, and you are responsible for getting it done. Sometimes the best approach is to step back, lay the ingredients for success, then rely on motivation and coaching to let things fall into place.

Park your prejudices!

I’ve mentioned in earlier blogs that I had the pleasure of driving this project together with Christian Neuenschwander, the IT Manager’s IT Manager. If you give Christian a paperclip and a battery, he can probably build a network router.

Anyway, while chatting about this challenge I asked Christian what he thought would be our biggest challenge in this whole program. He just laughed at me and said without skipping a beat: putting together the desks and equipping them with the needed IT and power cables.

This is where my prejudices kicked in. I’d never done a project of this type, but surely putting together the desks and stringing them up with cables would be the easy part?  But this is also where my charburned fingertips and painful, bitter experiences came in: I knew Christian – I trusted Christian- and even if what he told me sounded like pure rubbish to my ears – which it did – I still decided to trust him.

Glad I did – Christian was right!

The challenge

Thankfully, we did not need to install the desks ourselves. I think I ordered nearly 75 desks, and they were delivered by a big team. They looked like this when they came in:

(Sadly, we did not have the money for height adjustable desks. That really upset many people, but it would have required a larger investment than we had in our budget.)

The delivery team took a factory line approach, so the assembly work was very structured and organized:

Finally, after assembling all the desks in the right places, the crew departed and it looked like this:

These guys were smart smart smart: although I ordered everything at the same time, the desk chairs were not even delivered until the desks were set up.  Picking the chairs, by the way, was no easy task. If you don’t know about industrial office chairs, believe me, can be much more complicated than you think, the better models even having specific adjustments because men and women tend to sit a bit differently on them, or with special features such as coat hangers built into the back.

Here is one of many snaps I took at the chair store,

Now came what I realized was indeed the hard part, equipping all these 75 desks with the needed IT and electrical infrastructure!

The solution: Use the Mark Twain / Tom Sawyer design pattern – and turn an awful job into team-building fun!

Christian was brilliant. His solution was to hold a do-it-yourself party. Christian and I would arrive early and get everything ready – but each person was responsible to equip the infrastructure for their desk. And not only that, but according to a very strict set of guidelines and finally quality-control: Christian would personally inspect the work before signing it off.

Here’s what it looked at when the gang got into high gear. First, think about the logistics. We had 75 desks, 2 monitors for each desk – and a keyboard – and a mouse – and a docking station – and a power-strip – and the LAN cables – and a bit of plastic that keeps everything together – that is a tremendous number of monitors and boxes and cables:

There was no other approach than just to use some of the conference rooms as temporary dumps:

The beauty of Christian’s approach is that everyone got involved – everyone. Here is my good friend Ann Duffy, the Senior Vice President of IT Business Applications, who we were lucky enough to recruit away from another company to have her come join us. She had very nearly 100 top IT application managers and eight teams in her global organization, yet here she is, crawling under her own desk and plugging in the cables.

This work was a real team-builder!

 

Job well done

Finally, the reward. After a long, long day I think Christian and I ordered nearly 30 huge pizzas for our hard working crew! Oh, and let’s not forget the beer, I think we bought 15 huge cases of beer, and probably 20 huge containers of Coca-Cola:

A final thought: the psychology of Servant Leadership and just plain hard work

Anyone who knows me knows that I love hard work. I’ve had hard jobs throughout my life, from housepainter to cook to forklift truck driver, where you ache and you sweat and you go home with bandages on your arms and splinters in your fingers.

But not everyone does.

And as I expected, this challenging 12-hour event gave people a chance to show their colors. Don’t get me wrong: everyone contributed above and (far) beyond the call of duty. It was hard work – and Christian and I are thankful for how it worked out. In our extended team of 70 people there was not a single person who did not pull his or her own weight.

Many people came – and worked hard – and ate their pizza – and went home. Job well done!

But . . . like Christian and I there were other hard-work-masochists and true servant leaders that really came to the forefront and stood out, such as our talented Head of IT Infrastructure and Operations Susanne, without whose help it would have even been more challenging for Christian and I. By the way, this was just one pile of boxes. We had about 12 more piles just this size. 75 desks x 2 monitors + keyboards + mice + cables + docking stations = one heck of a mess of boxes!

(There were 3 more “superstars” that also helped out – and I will think back on this fondly – but I am quite sure they don’t want the publicity or for me to show their photos.)

It’s a universal truth I’ve witnessed since my days of painting apartments in 45 C = 105 deg F weather in the hot, un-airconditioned Illinois summer sun: you don’t need to look hard for servant leaders, in fact you don’t need to look for them at all. They just magically show up whenever they see someone struggling or what looks like to be a challenge that needs extra help. (BTW: I’ve “parked” this idea. Sometime, someday, somewhere, I will need to find some servant leaders . . . and by running a large collection of people through a very difficult challenge, I am quite sure the real servant leaders will naturally sink to the bottom – where servant leaders belong – best positioned to help everyone else!)

Here’s Pascal, who is a real Facilities Manager and showed me the ropes of the job and helped me out, we really owned a huge debt to Pascal. As I’ve said in my other blog, Facility Manager is a true trade and profession that doesn’t always get the respect it may deserve:

And here’s Susanne and Christian – and one of 13 piles of boxes. The boxes were easy compared to disposing of all the Styrofoam packing.

Yes, that’s a flat screen TV. We ordered 12 of them, one for each conference room, and two on portable trolleys. We installed the trolleys ourselves but needed professional carpenters and the right brackets for the 10 fixed units.

Continuing the series, as part of a large IT transformation that I helped drive, it was necessary for us to hire 20+ talented IT professionals. And add to that around 30 mostly Indian colleagues that were to join us to run the Transition and Transformation (T&T) program. And add to that at least two other large IT teams we wanted to co-locate. And because we had so many people, it was necessary for us to locate and rent a building dedicated to IT. So I had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take off my IT transformation hat and put on my facilities management hat.

This blog series recollects a bit of the journey before too much time passes and I forget some of the more interesting details.

Negotiating the lease agreement

No photos here. The negotiations about rent were a nice learning experience for me. At least in this area of Switzerland the value of the building is tied to the rental price, so the owner was absolutely unwilling to lower the rent. However, that does not mean we could not negotiate: we discussed how many months “rent free” we would get. This included not only the building itself, but the parking spaces adjacent to the building. As well as other topics, such as the needed paint, carpets, small cosmetic repairs, upgrades to the kitchen, and the like.

I also thought the negotiations had a somewhat detached and less emotional character than I had expected. The building was in fact owned by a large company that owns buildings, so the passions that I somehow expected after dealing with normal landlords and rental agencies in Europe were not there. As Michael Corleone said, “Nothing personal, it’s strictly business.”

Finally, the terms and conditions (in German: Allgemeine Geschäftsbedingungen): they were straightforward, and the procurement specialists of my company did not insist upon any changes. Probably the whole contract was no more than 15 or 20 pages, tops. What we key for us, however, were the termination clauses and exit conditions, since my company was considering a general consolidation of all offices in Switzerland into a central location.

What was also part of the contract is how and how often the exterior of the building would be cleaned. Most buildings in Switzerland have windows that are covered with louvers, and these get dirty and need to be periodically cleaned.

One-Time Third Parties

There were two categories of third party providers I was involved with: one-time, and ongoing.

The most important one-time third party was an electrical company that I contracted to finalize all the needed power and LAN cable hook-ups.  The building floor was elevated, so this meant snaking the cables to holes located under what would be the future desks.

Here’s a nice snap that shows one of the holes:

This was an interesting experience for me. It was a true learning moment – and if you are new to this business, maybe you can learn from it too?

Together with Christian (see my last blog series) we contacted three different electrical companies in order to get competitive offers. Each of them sent an extremely experienced person for discussions with us and to collect our requirements. This gave me – still very naive in these areas – a pretty good feeling of confidence.

But . . . after we made our selection and the installation crew showed up, it was an entirely different situation!  First, we weren’t sure exactly which language the crew spoke, but it was neither German nor Swiss German nor English nor any other languages we knew!  This is not an exaggeration by any means – we were completely unable to communicate with the crew except by using hand signals. Thankfully, our hand signals for “what the f–k are you doing???” and “get the f–k out of our building” are international in nature and gladly, were immediately understood and acted upon.

Second, even after breaking through the communication barrier, we realized we’d get the best results if we managed them quite closely. Much, much more closely than I wanted to do – but I thought back to the inputs that a real building renovation project manager gave me sometime earlier, and this seemed to confirm to me a close approach was the right one!  If my efforts here would have been greater, than I would have escalated back to the company itself – but when the end is in sight sometimes the direct approach is ultimately the easiest.

Finally, the topic that Americans refer to as “sweat equity,” or saving a lot of money by doing some jobs yourself. We determined we could save an enormous amount of costs by doing a significant chunk of the work ourselves. For it was necessary to snake LAN cables to each of the holes under what would be the desks, and this requires an incredible effort to label the cables. It’s not an effort that requires the experience and training of an electrician, so by doing this ourselves we saved four figures of cost!

Paint and carpet

I did not have any big efforts here, as the painting, minor bugfixing, and carpet installation was contracted by the building owners.

Here you can see a snap after the carpet was laid and the walls were painted:

I did have a bad experience, however, and I hope other people can learn from my mistake. It turns out that whatever combination of carpet, carpet glue, and paint were used, it left an intense smell in the building. Fortunately, the planned move in date was nearly six weeks after this work went done, so I simply opened all the windows and vented the building 24×7, which removed the problem nicely. Nevertheless, after opening, there were a few colleagues that suspected we had a case of “sick building syndrome.” Sadly, it was never easy to verify this claim, since the building itself was located just a few dozen meters from a chemical factory.

Pretty tame so far, but just wait for future blog posts when I tell of the amazing adventures that were in store for me!

 

 

As part of a large IT transformation that I helped drive, it was necessary for us to hire 20+ talented IT professionals. And add to that around 30 mostly Indian colleagues that were to join us to run the Transition and Transformation (T&T) program. And add to that at least two other large IT teams we wanted to consolidate. And because we had nearly 150 mostly IT staff, it was necessary for us to locate and rent a building dedicated to IT.

So I had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and priviledge to take off my IT transformation hat and put on my facilities management hat.

This blog series recollects a bit of the journey before too much time passes and I forget some of the more interesting details.

What not to do

I’ll begin at the beginning with this message: if you are planning to move your staff to a new business location, there are consulting companies that are specialized in helping you move. Sadly, we had no funds to use such a service. But it is something I highly recommend. During my tenure as facilities manager there were many, many, many instances where – purely because of sheer luck – we somehow avoided pitfalls with enormously high costs. The only way to avoid these costs in a planned, risk-managed fashion is to get professional help.

Picking a building

I looked at a few different properties. They were all empty when I saw them, so you really have to use your imagination about what it would look like if your organization was located there. I also relied on architectural blueprints of the floor layout that we transferred to Microsoft Visio and super-imposed with desks and furniture.

Electricity (enough power in the right locations) and IT (the needed IT infrastructure, such as LAN cables) and telephony are also important considerations. Fortunately, I had my good friend and colleague Christian Neuenschwander involved. He is not just a hobbiest in these areas, but in fact he has a professional-level of experience in these topics, as well as being a certified electrican. Had I not had someone of his caliber involved, I would have insisted on using a professional consultant. Why? In Switzerland there is a law which says you can take over any existing electrical infrastructure, no matter what status it’s in. But . . . if you need to make improvements, then you need to bring the entire area up to the most modern version of the building codes. That is a huge financial risk that could easily by six-digits of cost!

This is the location I finally recommended to the team – but I took great pains to ensure buy-in from everyone. At the end, it absolutely needed to be a  team decision.

The building was very light and airy, there were almost two dozen glass-walled conference rooms, there was a air cooling system, and the whole place was located about 50 m from a convenient stop on a public transportation tram line. We had two-and-a-half cafeterias, plenty of power in the right places, a raised floor in which power and network cables ran below, and two network closets. Four restrooms (2 male, 2 female) and a shower. Ample number of parking spaces. And the building was situated around 50 meters from a tram stop frequented every 5 minutes by trams.

The only thing we were a bit worried about what that a selected area of the building had CAT-3 wiring instead of CAT-6, but we felt it was a risk we could take.

We could not have found a better spot!