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Why doing less gets you more done.
Are you experiencing projects where management has limited transparency on real and tangible progress, there is a lack of alignment between various delivery teams, delivery quality is a constant issue, and there is a feeling that nobody seems accountable for the entire end-to-end delivery?
Although without bad intentions, companies struggle with these significant values that should be prioritized over aged corporate structures and their own interests.
Transparency on value added
Alignment across all involved teams
Build high-quality solutions
Flow during program execution
Graphic 1: Values of lean management
Why doing less?
A standard practice in today’s business world is to fix problems by doing more of what we have always done. Why not focus time and energy on the goals we plan to achieve as well as on the four values listed above, stop all other activities, and measure success purely on the value / output created?
Symptoms of a legacy management approach A standard practice in project management is to add additional roles being responsible to glue crucial elements together by facilitating working groups, providing reporting, addressing impediments, and managing risk and dependencies. These roles become accountable for deliverables they cannot influence directly. Nevertheless, they often push deliverables in an ad-hoc manner, leading to “over managed” and distracted situations where focus on tangible results becomes overruled by ad-hoc interactions. The reason senior management appreciates these “glue roles” is mainly to address the above listed deficiencies: transparency, alignment, quality, and accountability. But by doing more, it often becomes even worse. |
What prevents us from getting more done?
Classical organizations face five major project delivery challenges that are often deeply ingrained in corporate culture. We detail each of them below and highlight what really matters.
1. Project phase-gate reporting
Progress tracking is often done with a project phase-gate approach, while added-value, for obvious reasons, does not correlate with these artificial milestones (e.g., ‘Analysis & Design completed’ does not yet create business value).
What matters: plan incremental product enhancements (new features) and iterative improvements in short cycles. Establish structural transparency on deliverables and added value that is realized to support subsequent decision-making.
2. Organizational silos
Deliverables often span across multiple hierarchical silos, segregating accountability and limiting the delivery organization to handling critical decisions quickly (e.g., budget, staffing, priorities, etc.). This leads to over-managing, over-reporting, and often slow progress because of dependencies.
What matters: focus on the delivery of prioritized and committed product increments as part of the program execution across all involved teams (value stream). Foster alignment and transparency to deal with dependencies and impediments by nominated governance roles @ scale / on a program level (e.g., RTE / scrum of scrum master).
3. Project cost accounting
Budgets are too often assigned to individual projects or streams for long periods with many uncertainties and limited specific commitments on expected product increments and release dates. A sub-optimal balancing of capacities can stretch the project timeline and significantly increase project management overhead costs. This is especially true when multiple projects rely on the same development teams to deliver solutions without proper demand management across all project initiatives (worst case, leaving the development team to parallelize work efforts and satisfy all stakeholders at the same time).
What matters: a company should invest in the most valuable product enhancements based on a prioritized backlog on all levels and preserve flexibility over the product lifecycle by committing to small batches per product increment (PI) cycles. It should also reduce friction at team level by establishing a governance structure, funding, and capacity allocation at portfolio and program level with respective roles @ scale.
4. Annual budgeting cycle
A major challenge for executives is the annual budgeting cycle when, several months ahead of the new business year, a detailed cost and delivery plan must be established, leaving often minimal flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances.
What matters: a company should preserve flexibility in planning its various time horizons so that customer feedback and realized business value can be incorporated and priorities can be amended before planning the next PI cycle. Only then should budget be allocated to prioritized product increments or iterative improvements.
5. Perpetual overload of demand vs. capacity
Delivery teams are constantly overloaded with requirements instead of having a clear focus based on confirmed priorities with a commitment to deliver working software by the end of a PI cycle. This overload usually leads to lower quality and slower progress because of parallel work and ad-hoc distractions. Inevitably, coordination overhead increases not only for the product team but for all levels, including management.
What matters: product teams should focus on a small set of high-priority deliverables, thus reducing work in progress, and deliver small batches of high-quality work. Keep the product team focused on generating added value rather than coordination, escalation, and other management activities. Achieve this by managing demand top down from a transparent and prioritized portfolio backlog to program and team level using clearly formulated and well-understood acceptance criteria on all levels.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change"
Charles Darwin
Conclusion
In summary, the five obstacles we have discussed that are so widely evident in today’s business world lead to significant cost increases, slower time-to-market, and limited customer involvement due to missing flexibility, transparency, and alignment of delivery organizations. Instead, increase awareness about what matters and continuously address deficiencies by fostering the solution approaches discussed.
Graphic 2: Five solution approaches
Why doing less gets you more done
Maximum value can be attained when every team member can invest time and energy in the next valuable deliverable. This can be achieved if every person (group) can focus on exactly one authority role [1] and all authority roles are occupied at team, program, and portfolio level.
Governance (e.g., Scrum Master)
Business content (e.g., Product Owner)
Solution design (e.g., Development Team)
Furthermore, remove all “glue roles” that are not appointed to exactly one authority role. The authority roles then must address the four initially presented values, starting at portfolio level.
Build governance around the value stream
Fund products and product increments
Periodically adjust budget allocation
Own demand management from top down
Enhance products in small incremental steps
Spark Mind has the knowledge, skills, and tools to support you in establishing an understanding of your organization’s situation and providing a gap analysis on how a transition can be successfully approached to a setup as discussed in this paper.
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