This paper is on tackling the inertia & collaboration issues commonly found in government organisations. These are being seen as a blockers to building a transformative company that can react to change at the pace required.
A lot of “productivity” seems to be traditionally monitored by work output, which really masks the real focus of productivity which is the actual output to the customer, for example delivering a feature which allows a customer to do a task in half the time, rather than delivering five features of which no tangible customer value can be associated.
While it can seem counter-intuitive, when our primary focus is to manage the way we provide value our workload goes up simply because there’s more “management activity”. When we learn to manage value, our workload and costs reduce because we’re managing the output of our processes, not the processes themselves.
By measuring the output, we inherently manage the workloads as focus and time goes towards providing the correct features are delivered.
The focus of the article here is that formal hierarchies and layers in organisation structure lead to delays and inefficiencies in communication between colleagues who could easily co-ordinate themselves naturally otherwise.
“It is much better to allow project teams to form structure temporarily to suit the group’s needs rather than having automatically invoked predefined structures. People are more than capable of reaching out to collaborating teams without imposition of formal structure. We should create structure when, and only when, it is required. When we have no need for structure, it should not exist as it has no value in and of itself.”
It goes on to mention how collaborations across tiers creates inherent barriers and prevents fluid communication, and that co-location reduces this. This is an interesting point given the rise in cross regional sites, an obvious counter-point to co-location, which probably means companies should be structuring their teams within sites to be localised on particular services and to have the thinkers-builders-improvers-producers setup within each regional site.
Organisations need to focus less on “horizontal collaboration” across their development teams and more on “vertical collaboration” between teams and business customers
The value of using analytics measuring customer value rather than analytics based against reducing cost should be what drives a business, as otherwise the true motive of the business is lost in data which is not entirely meaningful.
Value is recognized when Customers perceive one or more of the following:
- A problem of theirs is solved or minimized
- An opportunity they desire is seized, maximized or enabled
- That they “look good” to significant others
- That they “feel good” about themselves
I.e. using the factors above, a project should be stopped as soon as it is realised that it is not meeting any of the above criteria, rather than only when it is over-running on budget and timelines.
Monolithic programs designed with extraordinary amounts of complexity are inherently bound to fail. Too many systems are built in the ethos of waterfall iterations, which don’t allow for the fast paced evolution of technology and the changes it forces upon projects.