Their managers know nothing about anything, which is why they hire
consultants like me -- people who know everything about everything.
Or at least know how
to create that impression.
Smaller companies
rely, for the most part, on generalists. Their
receptionists figure out InDesign and use it to create brochures. IT
doesn't just code their websites -- IT also organizes them and writes a
lot of their copy, too.
Meanwhile, Fred in
Accounting closes the books, sends out the
invoices, pays the bills, and manages cash flow too.
And the owner
variously serves as the top sales rep, lead product
designer, head of customer service, and janitor, depending on what most
needs doing and who called in sick that day.
Smaller companies
have been populated by generalists since the days
when the closest thing there was to a specialist was someone who was
particularly good at chipping flint arrowheads, trading them for some
mastodon steaks.
Bigger companies have
relied on specialization at least since the
dawn of the industrial revolution, when the invention of the factory
resulted in jobs limited to a single task performed over and over again.
Employees' sense of
alienation and dehumanization, customers' sense
of being trapped in a bureaucracy, and management's nostalgia for the
days when business was fun ... these accoutrements of excessive
specialization are, I'm sure, just as old.
Why exactly do we do
this to ourselves, when we all hate it so much?
One answer, I think,
is being trapped in the mental habit of mass
production.
Start with the difference
between
processes and practices. Processes are recipes: Follow the steps
exactly and good results must follow. While practices also involve a
series of steps, following them exactly leads to failure. Practitioners
must apply their knowledge, experience and judgment in executing each
step.
Great art is a
practice. Turn it into a process and the result is a
paint-by-numbers system. Being the carnelian specialist is unrewarding;
the result is a parody of art.
Those who practice a
craft take pride in the uniqueness of each item
they produce. Their customers value uniqueness and are willing to pay
more to get it.
Large manufacturing
companies take pride in the opposite of
uniqueness. They deliver enormous numbers of products as nearly
identical as possible, built out of identical, interchangeable parts.
Assembled, of course,
by fully fungible employees.
This industrial
system works well at supporting the twin goals of
throughput (high volume) and quality (adherence to specifications).
But business
theorists extrapolated, applying the mass production
model of increased specialization, organized sequencing, and
interchangeability to business practices as well.
Which is how IT ended
up practicing waterfall methodologies,
convinced that if we just managed to become good enough at them, they'd
suddenly start producing useful results.
No such luck.
In IT we've finally
figured out that waterfall's problems aren't the
result of a failure to perfect the process -- they're intrinsic to our
having misapplied the mass-production model. Its specialization of roles
adds overhead, impairs communication, delays delivery (it increases
cycle time), and limits flexibility and richness of function (it reduces
excellence).
We call the
alternative "Agile." It relies on generalists, who:
When it comes to
developing software, we've found that a collection
of generalists, each of whom is competent in the whole craft,
outperforms a team of specialists who segment responsibilities into a
structured workflow.
The time has come for
us to evangelize our discovery. Because
elsewhere in the enterprise are managers who have been trying manfully
(and sometimes womanfully) to force the square peg of factory-style
organization into the round hole of the fast, creative, non-repetitive
outcomes they're responsible for.
Most managers, in
fact, because very little of the work in a modern
corporation looks like mass production unless your gaze is cockeyed.
When the work is more
practice-like than process-like, mass
production's large number of hand-offs from one specialist to the next
leads to results everyone hates -- customers and managers just as much
as employees.
I have an easy
solution.
Let's stop doing
this.
