I spend my life trying to continuously improve (or am I just hypercritical?). So, I was reflecting recently on project delivery and product development and the journey I’ve taken in my career.
I look back with great fondness on the days of the dot.com era and remember what fun we all had building products and delivering enormous projects. The wonderful people I worked with come to mind most easily, primarily because we spent 12, 14, 16 hour days together - working, working, working.
At the time, we were innovative, building cutting-edge digital product but our delivery processes were not. We needed huge, bloated teams, part of siloed business units; who designed and development via massively inefficient processes, swamped in reams of paper-based documentation, shared in meeting after meeting where we discussed points in detail, some of which were obviously (and critically) forgotten or missed. Reflecting back now, the structural inefficiencies were significant and didn’t deliver any organisational benefits. Decision-making, measurement and delivery decisions were short-term based. We engaged customers, on occasion, but only as we were about to launch, once we’d built the entire product, having made most of the investment and where it was too late to make wholesale change. In the marketplace, more nimble competitors were providing a viable view of a different way of delivering for the first time which was both exciting and terrifying, & depending on the organization, elicited a different response.
It would be lovely to think that those days are gone but many modern organisations remain plagued with the problems of old. So how do we change this?
I’m fortunate that for the past 10 years or so, I’ve been able to work in organisations that have either completely moved away from that mode of operation, or are trying to do so.
There’s a growing need for organisations to adapt though because they are moving and changing faster than ever, and being challenged externally. This is generating unprecedented levels of uncertainty.
Some places, like the ones I’ve been working in, have responded by adapting their operating and delivery models in a bid to grow, thrive and survive. (In one case this didn’t happen and the organisation ceased to exist, so there’s a very real consequence of not adapting)
In these types of enterprises, more people-driven processes such as Jurgen Appelo’s Management 3.0 practices, might be used. The influence of Eris Ries, founder of lean start-up, and Ash Maurya who created GOLEAN and the lean canvas to help better focus on customer problems, are likely to be in evidence. Continuous agile and lean start-up delivery methodology forms the delivery toolkit. Enacting this kind of fundamental delivery-based change in an organisation is hard. Critical to sustaining this type of change is the shift in mindset, behaviour and culture change required to allow for success. While there’s a lot to be said about the actual toolkits to be used to deliver (& I can talk for days), increasingly important to me is the thinking processes that are applied to any delivery. When I’m getting set for a new initiative the starting point is ensuring connection and alignment. I undertake a process between the people and the work to enable the connection between the Strategy-Vision-Purpose-Day-to-Day Deliverables – to be understood. The beginning and the end of delivery can be summed up for me – I create a vision so that people come to work with a sense of purpose and leave with a sense of accomplishment. I believe that once I do that, delivering follows naturally (I hope!) I’ll continue talking about the mechanics of using the toolkit next time…
