How to Cut Costs
A January 3 Wall Street Journal article, “Ukraine Has Digitized Its Fighting Forces on a Shoestring”, explained the following (emphasis added):
“Ukraine has achieved a cut-price version of what the Pentagon has spent decades and billions of dollars striving to accomplish: digitally networked fighters, intelligence and weapons.
…
“Ukraine’s success cobbling together a virtual command-and-control system on the fly offers valuable lessons for the West, particularly about the need to experiment and include nonmilitary experts.”
Talk about a pearl of wisdom.
As I have stressed hundreds of times now, in articles and talks, agility does not come from a work process. Agility comes from behavior.
And that means that hugely complex and expensive approaches to agility are wasteful – just like the Pentagon’s approach, which – by the way – claims to be “Agile”.
You can slim things down, and your agility will actually increase!
The ramification is that you can slim things down, and guess what? Your agility will actually increase!
The place to start is – again! – not process. It is with people.
Today there are too many cooks in the kitchen. As you increase the number of people involved, you exponentially increase the number of conversations that need to occur. The thing to do is simplify.
This looks different for different organizations. But one common situation is that there are a lot of different people playing various leadership roles – Agile coaches, team leads, group leads, product owners, architects, and so on.
It is often possible to consolidate many of these roles. But the wrong thing to do is just cut people. You need to start by figuring out what these people are actually contributing. I am not just talking about expertise: I am talking about what kinds of leadership they are providing. Leadership is important – often as or more important than expertise.
For example, is a coach generating a lot of really deep and productive discussions about how the product is made? That’s an important type of leadership. Is the dev lead keeping things moving? That’s really important too.
People can expand the kinds of leadership that they provide, freeing up others to work on new things so that you can avoid hiring.
But it might be that, with suitable training, some of these people could expand the kinds of leadership that they provide. That would free up others to work on new things, so that you can avoid hiring for those things – keeping costs down.
It is essential to understand the dynamics of what is happening among the teams and at a few levels above them. Otherwise, you will make the wrong decisions about who can do what, and what else they might be able to learn.
With one client we conducted a series of workshops to find out what people knew and what kinds of leadership they felt they needed. We did not use those to learn about individuals – that’s really important. In fact, in our data collection, we largely did not record who said what – only what was said. We thereby used the workshops to learn about the workings within and between the teams. That informed the client what kinds of leadership and skills they need.
As a result, the client was able to consolidate some of the roles, and plan for training for existing roles to enable them to step up to additional forms of leadership. We provided a leadership model to help them in doing that.
The key insight is that people are flexible, and can grow new abilities, but they often don’t know what they don’t know, or what training they need. You need to help them to find out: you need to develop them, and that will enable you to apply them more effectively and efficiently. It’s a win-win.
