Lets stop having Projects

When large companies look at innovative small companies they see much to envy; new ideas, motivated teams, and a relentless focus on customers. To try and capture some of these traits in our development teams we have seen the rise of Agile, DevOps, and other methodologies, with mixed success. Why? Well maybe we are looking at it in the wrong way.

What is the effect of these traits in a smaller company? Why do we want to copy them? Sure having teams excitedly collaborating on new features and having 1000 releases in a year is great, but why?

The advantage in being a startup is not that they have better ideas – anyone who has listened to early stage investment pitches can tell you that. I see two main attributes; a Darwinian affect – there are lots of them so some are bound to succeed, and the startups ability to “pivot”.

Most successful startup companies have the ability to quickly admit something isn’t working, reexamine and refocus. In affect to continuously improve. Ironically this the thing large German companies are supposed to be famous for so why are isn’t it working for them now?

I think it is because the pace has changed. The older slow and steady iterations were something management could plan for and execute – being able to admit a mistake 3 days after going live and saying we need to redesign the solution is not something senior managers can easily live with.

As we more along in our own Digital Transformation journey I see a possible solution to this, but I also see it will also be one of the hardest changes we will have to go through. Currently we structure our work in projects. Projects are planned, budgeted , executed and reviewed. That’s how we work, the whole company is setup to think and run this way. But project teams cant fail quickly, they cant spend the budget on another idea, they cant decide the project didn’t work and just not do it – so what do we do?

The answer maybe in restructuring the organization to work in a Product methodology. Instead of working on a Claims App a team is dedicated to the Claim area. They can build an App or invest in better call center processes – whatever they decide. They can try one and if the data is bad then drop it and try another – the key being they can do it without asking for a new project approval, new budget or having an executive explain their ‘failure’.

Large organizations have already tried the components of this idea: from failure nights to tribes somewhere in Allianz has tried it. I feel though the Product methodology is a fragile one – you need to do it all for it to work. If a tribe needs to apply for budget for a new idea – are they really self-empowered? (I am uncomfortably aware I sound like a Scrum purist when I say this).

Doing it completely though requires not only cultural changes (do we need middle managers anymore?) but structural (how do we plan how to spend our investments?, legally can we do an RFP for something then decide to do something else?).  It think the appetite is growing for the former but I am not sure if awareness of the latter is there.