Results tagged “seattle PI” from Notes from a City CIO

Technology projects scare the hell out of me. And I'm a Chief "Technology" Officer! Tech projects are full of risk - there are two dozen career-ending ways projects can go south.

But how do you measure and control risk?

Bill Schrier's first project management rule is the "P-I Test".

Now, what is "P-I"?  No - it is not "private investigator".   I named the "P-I test" after Seattle's beloved daily newspaper, the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Although I've been using the "P-I test" for years, the real Seattle Post Intelligencer publishes its last paper edition today, March 17, 2009, after 146 years of publishing.

The P-I test is simple: if a particular technology project goes south, where will it show up in the Seattle P-I - front page above the fold? Local section, page 5, beneath a mattress advertisement? Or will the failure (hopefully) be off every reporter's radar, that is, no one cares?

One of the big differences between government technology work and private industry is the P-I test. Only very rarely will a failed technology project from a private company make the newspapers. Private companies care about stock price, shareholder value and "face". So their project failures are buried deeper and darker than the bottom of a coal mine.

But in government, everything is (at least eventually and theoretically), subject to public disclosure. Successful projects (or any good news, for that matter) rarely sell newspapers.

And, in an environment where taxpayer money is at risk and voters give a verdict on government leadership every four years (i.e. by electing a Mayor or City Council members), mitigating the risk of failing the PI test is "job one".

But when projects are successful, no one notices! Indeed, that is possibly the truest measure of a successful tech project - implementation without notoriety.

Determining how newspapers or reporters or the public will determine failure is notoriously hard. I've had relatively trivial projects make headlines, like a simple mistake of sending an e-mail message with all recipients' e-mail addresses in the clear, or having a bit of difficulty getting a Wi-Fi hotspot to work right.

On the other hand, implementation of a new billing system in 2002 for the City of Seattle's electric utility - a project a year late and $10 million over its budget of $28 million - probably played a part in the end of the electric utility superintendent's career.

I have a whole set of "Schrier's project management rules" including (2) "hire somebody who knows what they are doing" and (3) "make sure the butt of someone in the business is on the line". And I'll write about those rules in a future blog entry.

But the real bottom line is that - since I took over as CTO in 2003 - the City of Seattle has not had a single significant information technology project failure. And we've done more than $100 million in projects! Credit for this string of successes belongs, not to me, but rather to Mayor Greg Nickels, who demands accountability from every department director, and to the Project Management Center of Excellence in my department, a dedicated set of four professionals who track and demand accountability on over 30 projects-in-progress.

I'll write more about the other "rules" in Schrier's project management lexicon. In the meantime, I'll be extraordinarily sad about the last paper edition of the Seattle Post Intelligencer, publishing today, and the loss of the namesake of my first and most important project management tool, the "P-I Test".

Print newspapers are dying. The evidence is everywhere and was recently highlighted on a Time Magazine cover.

Local government officials should be ecstatic about this event, right? Daily newspapers are much more likely to have negative coverage of local government's activities. And if they do carry positive news, it is usually buried on page 16 of the "G" section.

David Horsey, wonderful cartoonist and columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, wrote an insightful February 15th column about the National Press Association's recent awards dinner. That dinner was essentially a funeral dirge for newspapers. Note: Horsey himself may very well be out of a job at the end of March when his newspaper ceases printing.

Despite the plethora of negative coverage, I suspect most city and county officials are as quite upset about the difficulties of the daily papers. First, I do believe a lot of the daily newspapers' coverage is negative, and I'll cite some examples:
•   Gil Kerlikowske, Seattle's long-time Police Chief, has been extraordinarily successful as chief. Seattle is adding cops to its force even now, in a serious recession. And our crime rate is at the lowest in memory. Kerlikowske is leaving for a cabinet-level post in the Obama administration. So what do the mainstream media write about when announcing his departure? The Mardi-Gras riots of 2001. An event which lies at the feet of a sleeping Mayor Paul Schell and his deputies.
•   Indeed, "crime" is the poster-child for negative reporting. Newspapers of all stripes regularly report the details of criminal acts and give neighborhood "activists" a forum to blast government about everything from failure to patrol the streets to accusations of racial profiling when such patrols are conducted too aggressively.
•   Streets and transportation are another favorite topic for reporting. Rarely (but sometimes) will you see an article about new sidewalks or bike paths or street paving projects which are finished, usually on time and under budget. Potholes, mistimed traffic lights, traffic delays are frequently highlighted however.
•   Although the City of Seattle invests at least $100 million annually in building and maintaining information technology systems, rarely are successful technology projects mentioned in a daily newspaper. Inaccurate reports about high electricity bills from a new computerized billing system helped Seattle City Light's former superintendent Gary Zarker lose his job. And the one headline I've received in five years as CTO is about a botched e-mailing to 2000 cable television customers (which was, indeed, the fault of my department).

In contrast, coverage in community newspapers and in the trade press (e.g. for me, Government Technology Magazine, Network World, Computerworld) is considerably more positive. Perhaps that's because those media outlets have small staffs who rely more on government for press releases and interviews to create their content. Perhaps they have a readership and advertising base which desires and reads news which is more informative, less "sensational".

Given this, am I happy about the decline and impending death of many newspapers? Absolutely not. The investigative reporting which newspapers have funded has not only improved government, but also highlighted issues with private companies such as John Thain's infamous $1.3 million office remodel while running his company Merrill Lynch into the ground. Newspapers have changed the direction of the nation from high-profile issues such as the Watergate Investigation and the botched war in Iraq to exposes such as toxic medicines and failed cancer drug trials. Just have a look at the past 20 years of Pulitzer prizes for more examples.

Is there a business model which will allow the local daily newspaper to survive? Time's Walter Isaacson suggests a possibility in his February 5th article - essentially having readers pay for content on the web just as they pay for content today by subscription or at the newsstand. I agree with Isaacson that the "advertising" model is flawed. Not only does relying solely on advertising lead to ethical conflicts, but it also drives the need for sensational and negative reporting I mentioned above. I'm not sure that a micropayment model will work, and I have no other bright ideas to offer.

But I do hope newspaper reporters continue to be there to call me - and other local officials - even if they are writing a negative story!

I'm saddened today, to hear of the potential demise of the Post-Intelligencer, one of the two daily dead-tree newspapers here in Seattle, and a paper which first published in 1863, six years before Seattle incorporated as a City.  Hearst Corporation plans to put it up for sale. If it is not sold, Hearst can - and will - close it down under terms of a joint operating agreement between the PI and the Times.

I've blogged in the past about how neighborhood blogs like our own West Seattle Blog may very well displace dead-tree papers simply because they have a massive reporter and photographer base - virtually anyone, anywhere with a cell phone, digital camera and Internet connection - and can report news and events in an "up front" rapid way unmatched by the traditional media.

I enjoy blogging and twittering (see http://twitter.com/billschrier) and social networking via Facebook. I'm helping to drive the City of Seattle to use such new technologies into making City government more efficient and effective - see our latest deployment, a vastly revamped version of "My Neighborhood Map", just unveiled today.

But I mourn the end of old-style newsprint papers such as the PI.

Maybe it's because I'm a bit older than the median age of a Seattlite (although still younger than the AARP median age). Maybe it is a "generation thing", and "younger folks" get their news and information from Twitter and RSS and the Internet. I don't think that's true - there are many twenty-somethings vastly more conservative and less tech saavy than I.

Maybe it's because I've always longed to be a journalist, hence my interest in writing this blog. That might stem from my college English professor, Father Daniel Rogers of Loras College, who said "I think you might be a writer someday".

I've often told my wife, I'd love to own a small-town newspaper and attend/report upon/photograph events in a close-knit small City. She - an award-winning journalism teacher - laughs at that, knowing small-town newspapers are 80 hour weeks for a pittance of salary. And I, in my brain (not my heart), know that "beat reporting" such as the City Hall beat or the Boeing beat is probably a thing of the past.

And I also fear that true investigative reporting may end. Perhaps this sounds odd, coming from a government official. I'm proud of Seattle's City government and I'm proud of public service. But I know there are the Richard Nixons and Dick Cheneys of government. We owe a lot to newspapers and reporters who dug deep inside issues and stories to expose Watergate, for example, as well as hundreds of other serious issues - just look at the Pulitzer Prize finalists/winners for great examples of such reporting.

Without newspapers to fund and support such long-term, labor-intensive investigative journalism, who will do it?

Pardon me, but I'm heading down to the Pike Place Market to get a copy of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. I hope I can continue to do that ... that copies of the P-I will continue to be there ...