The magic of knowing who is doing what

Knowing who is doing what is a prerequisite to implement change.

Organisations will always try to evolve their business by enhancing, improving or widening their line of products, services and channels, by redesigning their processes or by starting completely new lines of business or partnerships. The way to implement those changes is to execute projects.

Projects are the vehicle to implement desired change. The theoretical process in which this plays out is actually quite simple: management agrees and defines a desired future scenario for the company and launches a project to get there.

So far so good, but of course reality differs a bit.

First of all, not all projects are started from the desire to improve the business. Many projects are executed to fulfil new legal requirements and regulatory demands.

Secondly, projects seem to be social animals. They seem to love having many of their kind around 🙂

Usually management teams agree on a lot of things and there are a lot of legal demands. Thus companies end up with a huge zoo of projects running in parallel. The portfolio looks impressive on slides. In reality, it often looks more like a traffic jam.

What always made me wonder is the easiness with which new things are started. Adding one more project into the pipeline seems to be not much of a deal. A new idea appears, a sponsor is found, a steering committee is set up and off we go.

Failures

Everyone who has ever worked in project management knows that by far not all projects end in time and with the expected result. Actually it is totally the opposite. A frequent study from the Standish Group shows that only around 30% of all projects are completed with a satisfying result.

How come?
Are all project managers idiots and simply unable to get their job done?
I do not think so.

In my experience, one of the biggest mistakes organisations make is trying to do too many things in parallel. Unclear priorities and an overwhelming number of activities running at the same time is, with absolute certainty, the most typical mistake of all.

From a distance this looks productive. The portfolio is full, everyone is busy, there are many meetings and many slides. From close up, you see something else: constant context switches, half-finished work, delays at every dependency and people who are permanently overloaded.

Modern agile language would call this too much work in progress, too many items in flight for the real capacity of the system. If you start more work than your teams can realistically finish, you do not get results faster. You simply create a bigger queue and more frustration.

So how to get around this problem?

I think the answer is two-fold:

• More focus, related to good goal-setting muscles and a clear understanding of what really matters.
• Knowing who is doing what, because not knowing the real human capacity of your organisation is a recipe for disaster.

Why transparency of work is so hard

On paper it sounds easy. Just write down who is working on which project and you are done.

In reality, most organisations do not have a clear picture of this. There are several reasons:

• Invisible work: A lot of effort goes into “business as usual” tasks, small fixes, urgent requests and firefighting that never appear in any official project list.
• Multiple roles: The same person is product owner here, subject matter expert there, and informal problem solver everywhere else.
• Matrix structures: People report to one manager but work for three others in projects and initiatives.
• Lack of ownership: Nobody really owns the complete view of who is doing what across the whole organisation.

The result is a perfect illusion. On slides, capacity looks available. In reality, key people are already fully booked long before the new project even starts.

Senior management wisdom

Some time ago I had the opportunity to meet senior executive people from a financial institution we were partnering with. This organisation was on a big transformation. They were on the road to becoming an agile organisation.

But the key insight which I took from that meeting was not related to agility. It was much simpler.

In that session we had a conversation on how they approached organisational change, how they planned and implemented their new organisational model and what lessons learned they experienced. We talked about mistakes, wrong assumptions and the really difficult things they faced while tackling their change.

In the middle of a modest, not-that-surprising dialogue, one of the senior C-suite managers pointed out something which really hit me:

“Being honest, we as the management team of our company always said YES to new projects. We nearly never said NO.

One more project, why not 🙂 Let us just give it a go. We always relied on our organisation to find a way to do it.

Now this is different. Since we changed, we know exactly who is in which team and which team is doing what. If a new idea comes up, we need to decide what to stop or we simply need to hire a new additional team.

No more blind YES.

Understanding who is precisely doing what in your organisation is the key. We needed to know which teams were involved in which projects and who was doing all the BAU work. THIS was by far the hardest part of all the work. You need to understand this to the last micro level of detail to be able to take the right decisions.”

Knowing who is doing what is a fundamental prerequisite to implement any change. Once you see clearly which teams are doing which work, you suddenly see that every new initiative has a price. If you say yes to something new, you must say no to something else. If you avoid that decision, you do not increase output, you just spread the same people thinner.

Human bottlenecks

Many organisations have no clear idea who exactly is contributing to which project. As a result, organisations often completely overload their teams, and especially their key persons.

Typically organisations contain very special employees who, by their expertise or influence, are required in nearly every project. These employees, even being absolute top performers, end up being involved in 70 to 80 percent of all projects the organisation is running at a time.

Of course some of these VIPs might be managers who can delegate some of their project tasks within their own teams, but in any case each project involvement will absorb part of their time and focus. Every extra project adds more meetings, more decisions and more context switching.

From a leadership perspective, this is dangerous. You turn your best people into permanent bottlenecks. Everything important flows through the same two or three brains. The whole organisation waits for their decisions, feedback and sign off. When they slow down, the whole system slows down.

The world of 2-speed projects

A colleague of mine, a senior IT manager, always referred to this situation as the world of normal and fake speed projects.

There are ongoing projects in which real activity and progress is happening (normal speed) and there are projects where, due to lack of resources, nothing – or more precisely nearly nothing – is happening (fake speed). Nearly nothing means that no real progress is made, but teams are faking progress artificially to make it look like things are under control.

Everyone who has worked in a large organisation knows the symptoms:

• Steering committees with nice green status lights but no tangible outcomes.
• Slides being updated every two weeks although nothing substantial has changed.
• Teams preparing material and “next steps” for projects that clearly do not have the people to move forward.

This behaviour, although completely insane at first view, is totally human. If nobody is willing to stop or cancel a project, teams will try to keep it alive at minimum energy level. They protect themselves from conflict by pretending that things are still moving.

Without a strong manager backing the team and stopping this nonsense by confronting upper management, there is no way out.

These situations cause tremendous stress in all teams involved and, even worse, they strengthen management belief that their teams just magically find a way to get projects moving. Thus they feel reinforced to push even more projects into the organisation.

Organising around teams instead of individual heroics

You do not necessarily need to be agile in a formal sense to solve this. What you need is a clear view of your real delivery units and the work they are doing.

• Organise work by stable teams, not by random collections of individuals.
• Give each team a clear mission and the skills it needs to deliver end to end.
• Limit the number of projects and initiatives each team is working on at the same time.

Once you see teams as your basic building blocks, decisions become clearer. If a new project appears, you ask a different question: which team will own this, and what will they stop doing to create capacity for it?

A simple way to start: make work visible

You do not need a complex tool to get started. A spreadsheet or a whiteboard can already be painful enough in a good way.

Try this:

1. Get a list of all your projects and major initiatives.
2. List everyone involved from IT, Sales, Product Management, Legal and all other functions.
3. Mark your key people and count in how many projects they appear.
4. Then repeat the same exercise by teams instead of individuals.
5. Ask yourself where you want to reduce work in progress and where you need to say no.

You will be surprised. Resource bottlenecks will become tremendously obvious. The picture is rarely comfortable, but it is extremely useful.

Or even better, organise by teams from the beginning. Teams are much easier to allocate. And constant teams are anyway much more successful. Having a team with very little dependency to the outside and having all it needs to get the job done will be a real success machine.

Your promise to me

Please make me a promise. If you become a senior manager someday, please recall this post the next time you and your senior fellows might be on the edge of deciding another “Yes, great project, let us give it a go, they will find a way”.

Before you say yes, ask one simple question: Who exactly is going to do this, and what will they stop doing instead?