Values to guide in Project Leadership

In the past two decades of professional employment in the software industry, I had learnt a lot from working on various projects (mostly software projects in teams). I  hold three values and continued to invest in these: Innovation, Collaboration, and Execution. Besides the project related values, I also hold high regard for some personal values: Integrity, Honesty, and Initiative. Finally, I like people values of: Trust, Respect, and Appreciation. Today I will discuss just the values related to projects.

Briefly the project values are:

•  Innovation - bringing new ideas to life - both on problem solving and process engineering to create product value. Innovation does not mean just a big bang effort like creating the next big electronic gadget or building the next big software development tool, though those are the things that I help with. Also there are numerous occasions where small innovations are very useful as well. 
•  Collaboration - working with people cross boundaries and cross-teams to solve problems. Bringing ideas to life is a big task. Attempting to doing it alone is not easy and sometimes can be just plain boring. Instead working with teams can be fun and rewarding experience. And for this collaboration to work, it is important to listen, communicate, clarify, and engage in joint sessions to solve problems.
•  Execution - is the art and science of completing the project on time and on budget. No idea has value unless it has been shaped and delivered for users to experience it. Execution includes rigorous focus on nuts and bolts details to ensure all parts of the project progress well. The 99% perspiration happens here: budget and tracking schedules, fixing bugs iterations, testing, etc.

Most times, I value the Innovation, Collaboration, and Execution on an even keel. On occasions, I modify the order in which I want to exercise these values depending on the type of project I am working on. Most times it is clarifying the teams I work with. Though some people may find it hard to adjust when we change the project and accordingly I update the values. In those occasions I resort to repeat education within the team about the rationale.

For instance, over the past year, I was doing a startup project to develop a novel set of ideas to market that had the potential to change our business moving forward. The effort required a lot of focus on shaping the new ideas and refining it deeply. For this project the order I used was: Innovation, Collaboration, and Execution. Accordingly, we spent the first part of project schedule prototyping and defining the architecture. I formed teams and updated the teams 4 months later once we learnt more. I also found parts that I can borrow and reuse from elsewhere - hence I applied the collaboration aspects to discuss and leverage others solutions. The team also produced parts that are to be used by others; we delivered collaboratively to others. About half way thru the project I started emphasizing the Execution aspects more. Accordingly I focused the team on reduced times to deploy and test our software, improve customer feedback, fix bugs and reach zero bug bounce, etc. Net-net, the values did not change, the order helped us focus the efforts.

Three years back, I was asked to develop Windows Phone Application Store. There were several app stores in the market by 2010. So novelty was not high, but getting the store services out was definitely very important. And there was strong possibility to create small innovations along the way. The order I used was: Execution, Collaboration, and Innovation. Focusing on execution to build up a high quality app store with rapid progress to get the store for windows phones was critical. Certainly there were many teams to work with to reuse technology from. The team adopted collaboration as next step. Finally we found new ways to do things and new features (ex: build on Windows Azure, optimize app package for faster load, Personalized search for apps, etc.) with our focus on innovation. Net-net, I led three versions of the app store development using the same value priorities and helped us get the app store up and running well.

I had learnt that having a few values that I repeatedly use helps me focus in my work and lead the teams. I appreciate the guidance I received from many leaders I worked with for guiding me to develop and refine my values.