I have become aware of some misconceptions, false dichotomies and just plain wrong thinking about management. Out of a sense of obligation to share my knowledge, I offer some things here as well as a link at the end whereby you can register for a course if what I have written resonates with you and if you are so inclined.
First of all, work needs to be managed. The nature of enterprise is to take certain risks in order to achieve certain rewards. Managing is the taking responsibility for and making such decisions for a particular enterprise. Doing this by committee can be painful. There are very good reasons why ships have captains and sports teams have coaches and managers. In business, we have customers and we serve their needs. What is the customer interface? Who talks to customers? Who takes their orders? Who makes promises to them? Who is responsible for making sure they get what they need when they need it, and as promised?
Managing work is very different from managing people. If I am a manager responsible for taking customer orders, making promises and ensuring on time, on budget and on scope delivery then the last thing I want to do is manage the people doing the work. Any kind of people management is micro-management. And micro-management distracts from the macro which is the customer commitment and delivering on that commitment. Instead, I want to make sure that the customer needs are clear and explicit to the people doing the work of converting needs from unfulfilled to fulfilled. And then I want to trust them and get out of their way.
The identification of customer needs and the constraints around the process of converting needs to fulfilled needs explicit requires a well-modelled work management system. In other words, systems are required for converting customer needs into fulfilled needs. The policies of such systems serve as decision filters for making triage decisions along the way. Effective modelling of such systems enable managers to improve them using the scientific method.
Systems that manage the process of transforming unfilled customer needs into fulfilled customer needs can be described as services. Projects, products, whatever you want to call the deliverable packages being processed by this system are all work items of services. A project is merely a large batch of deliverables. Waterfall is the commitment of large batches of deliverables and the processing of such batches through stages or gates.
Agile management methods (& frameworks) attempt to break down such batches into slices of functionality that can be delivered in time-boxed iterations of mini-projects, with such mini-deliverables incrementally building up to something that actually fulfills a customer need. But the problem with Agile approaches, at least in medium to large size organizations, is that the slices of functionality are sliced by teams who are given chunks of larger deliverables that have already been committed to by the organization and require multiple teams, groups and subject matter experts to contribute in different ways at different times in the life-cycle of the project or program. In other words, Agile tends to create, at best, local optimization.
All Agile transformations are disruptive, costly and risky. Agile scaling methods, in an attempt to quell the chaos created by reorganizing into cross-functional teams merely involve more people and are more encompassing in terms of changes and disruptions to the organization.
None of this is necessary. All that is required is a reorientation of management to services. No reorgs or transformations are required to improve your business. All that needs to be done is for managers to sharpen their focus on customer needs and expectations and orient themselves to services. With the service lens and the understanding of services as delivery systems, we then begin to see our organizations as ecosystems of interdependent services, complex adaptive systems. We can then apply systems thinking beyond the fitness of individual services and expand our thinking and actions as contributors to the fitness of the ecosystem as a whole. When we are able to do this in our organizations, we make them fitter for the purposes of our customers, fitter for survival.
Customer focus and service orientation of management balances customer demand to service delivery capability and leads to the emergence of pull systems. Pull systems are relieved from overburdening caused by pushing more work into the system than the capability of the system can handle safely and effectively. Balance and pull improves the flow of customer value through the system and creates healthier work environments for people.
You don’t need to change anything about how people doing the work are organized and how they operate. You don’t need to reorganize them into pseudo or at best quasi-cross functional teams of 7–9 people and force them to commit to delivering demonstrable packets of work every 2 weeks. You don’t need Release Trains, Value Streams, Squads, Pods, Tribes and Guilds. All you need is managers who are focused on customer needs and orientated to balancing demand to capability of services and managing the flow of work with explicit flow policies.
And for heaven’s sake, let the workers self-organize! If they want to self-organize into teams, squads, pods, flocks or gaggles, then let them. But what they will actually, almost certainly do is self-organize in such ways that enable them to get the work done in the best way possible given the existing organizational constraints and the most rational and realistic ways of working within such constraints.
There’s a lot more to being a great manager but the above is a good start. If you want to learn more about how to pragmatically go about adopting the management approach described in this piece, then you might consider Kanban training, coaching and consulting. Kanban is the management method that enables the effective application of systems thinking to the improvement of professional services enterprises. Among other offerings, I’ve got some courses coming up and you can check them out via the link below.
Best of luck and be well,
Travis
