March 31, 2008

I’ve been out of commission for awhile but happy to be back.  I feel like writing about getting medical treatment in China but that’s a different story.  Well, we are now pretty much past the annual planning season for Chinese companies which revolves around the Chinese New Year.  I’ve been on a two year quest (since I joined the Chinese company that I work for) to transform our organization into a more customer focused, project and program oriented organization.  Seems easy enough.  When I arrived here the software outsourcing organization was organized around “competency centers” – collections of Java programmers, or test engineers, or .Net programmers, or project managers for that matter.  The leaders of these competency centers did the hiring, firing, reviews, etc.  Projects were formed and disbanded as they materialized with weak coordination and feedback with the Competency Center leaders.  Finding the customer focus in this organization was quite difficult.

During year one we took some baby steps and by the end of the year we were ready, with some not insubstantial resistance, to put in place a program and project organization with the programs largely focused on a single customer or a vertical industry.  One thing I have discovered is that adopting this kind of focus is hard, never ending work with lots of regressive thinking.  Training and indoctrination is an on-going, continuous process.  I don’t know why but it’s the case.  I’ve been struggling to come up with a “Chinese culture” angle on that one, and it’s an easy response when I complain about it to my Chinese Manager here. 

So the new organization at the end of Year One had some holdover components in the form of a test center group that was largely a place to stash people in training or out of coverage and a “greenhouse” for nurturing new projects but likewise was mostly a resource pool of out of coverage software engineers.  But I was primed for success when we gathered to agree on the 2008 organization.  From my perspective I could see the benefits of the increased focus on the customer, a strengthening of projects in the form or more management attention and increased sensitivity to satisfying contract requirements.  One of the things that puzzled me in the beginning was the lack of awareness and focus on deliverables whereas my experience in the USA was a professional life that essentially revolved around deliverables.

Well, the wailing and weeping came back as we prepared for 2008.  I heard senior managers complaining that they didn’t know what a Program Manager was.  There were seemingly endless sessions of arguing both sides of the same argument by the same people.  This is another prevalent characteristic  of my daily life that I’m more and more convinced is something Chinese. 

But when the dust settled our customer oriented organization was stronger than before with responsibility and authority pushed down to even lower levels.  The green houses are nowhere to be seen.  I see people at middle management levels agonizing over how they can make commitments and pushing back when pushed from above.  So all in all I’m pleased, not happy, but pleased.  I also keep looking over my shoulder for the inevitable regression.

In the run up to the Olympics, the importance of which to the Chinese people cannot be overstated, I realized that I first came to China in 2001 and spent the summer in Nanjing studying Chinese.  I remember very clearly the pandemonium and sheer joy that erupted at the announcement that China would host the Olympics in 2008 - China's coming out party.  I recently went back to Nanjing for the first time since 2001 and was very struck by the dramatic change 6 plus years has brought.  I’m going on 5 years in Hangzhou and have worked across the river in a district called Binjiang for the past two years.  There are now at least four 4-star hotels within walking distance where two years ago there were none.  So why is it so hard to change an org chart?