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Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

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Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#61

Post by ecshafer »

My goto example of a dysfunctional and bureaucratic organization is an example I saw in a finance company I worked for.

I was a on team that we were doing a major project. We basically ran Kanban but had to run "sprints" so we chose 4 week sprints to get it out of the way and we put everything on the board we had to get done that month to stay on track. Our pipeline was setup in such a way that you were required to have a jira ticket to push a commit. We were really crushing our timeline, doing 2x the work we were expected, a really great team honestly. But we opened up bugs and additional features in the middle of our sprints to track our work as we did it.

What this amounted to was maybe us saying we have to do 40 tickets this month, and wed be closing like 80. Everyone should have been thrilled by this development! Well we had a sprint review where some "Senior Project Manager" That wasn't really affiliated with our project but was some manager higher up was mad that us opening up new tickets mid sprint and closing them was ruining the org level burn down charts and expected delivery. They wouldn't give up on this, and said it was our fault for not estimating better (which sure, but we were beating expectations!). So we did the reasonable thing and improved our estimates! No of course not, we doubled our number of tickets and filled in "placeholder" on half of them, and used them as needed then closed everything out at the end of the sprint, where we were congratulated by everyone for our phenomonal estimation.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#62

Post by p_j_w »

laidoffamazon wrote: post #52
tredigi wrote: post #14

I agree to the overall tone, but there are also counter points. One of them is the Google example. To get promoted beyond a certain level, you must have brought some new product over the finish line. Result? They have so many new things happening all the time, all of them suck, and then just move on to the next. Eg how many chat products do they need to invent before they settle on one and let it mature?

The promotion thing seems severely overstated. At the higher levels for IC and management this is basically how all tech companies that build products are run. But you don't see this said about Microsoft or Amazon, even though they also have hundreds of new features and discrete new products per year. My theory for why Google is different remains unpopular, however.

>My theory for why Google is different remains unpopular, however.

May we hear it?

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#63

Post by profsummergig »

> Their organizations hemorrhage the very people they need to help them compete against aggressive adversaries or competitors who have them in their sights.

Govt is a monopoly. So it can't be bothered.

(The org. in charge of preventing monopolies is a monopoly.)

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#64

Post by jmull »

Jun8 wrote: post #13

This a million times! I’ve been in the position of the “innovation hero” but also was unfortunate enough to work on “innovation pipeline” implementations within a large company. These never work because: 1. (99% of) employees don’t care. They have their own job to do and working on other things is an eyebrow raise from their manager (see 3). And what’s the e benefit? Mostly it’s a pat on the back or some “points” in…

Mostly agree, but this

> aging manager suffering from Peter Principle, partly it’s the fear of negative pushback from senior leadership

is not typically the reason, in my experience. I've seen a lack of full comprehension on the part of the team pushing the innovation as to the actual benefit and cost of the innovation to all the affected teams. And as a result, the lack of a plan to address those issues...

I've seen a lot of incomplete innovations, where the benefit is real and useful, but the plan leaves various concerns of different teams unaddressed -- no doubt due to the innovation team being unaware. Strangely, the innovation team often wants to push forward anyway, which is not good since the plan is basically unworkable with critical issues unresolved (I can tell they kind of think the issues aren't critical but only because they don't understand them -- leading with ignorance when the processes and products actually have to work at the end is always doomed to fail.)

The most common way plans are incomplete that I've seen is when they don't account for the schedule. The plan will take X time away from other work to implement, but the schedule for delivery of that other work isn't moved back X, nor are there other compensating measures. That's an unworkable plan, and any half-decent manager will push back on it.

(Schedule impact is usually a tough one... at least at larger places, in my experience, the high-level delivery schedule is negotiated at a high level, and it hard to change for political reasons. That means time for any innovation plans has to be included from the start. Yet slack in any schedule tends to get gobbled up at the team level or below, addressing their concerns -- who doesn't have tons of technical debt they are dying to resolve? There's a way to handle this, but it has to be planned for and done at a high level, and done correctly. The fruits of any innovation team that doesn't have this are gong to be minimal.)

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#65

Post by adrianmonk »

btbuildem wrote: post #33

Not sure that you can fix a calcified bureaucracy with "doctrine". I sort of get the angle, I think -- if the org operates within a rigid rule framework, you need to speak their language to get anywhere -- so, doctrine is best, because everyone is used to being told what to do? I feel like that approach is counter to the spirit of innovation, that's akin to being forced to have fun; nothing truly innovative will come…

> so, doctrine is best, because everyone is used to being told what to do?

I think they mean doctrine as in military doctrine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_doctrine), which is a somewhat different idea than, say, religious doctrine. Religious doctrine can easily get rigid and legalistic, and compliance with it can become an end unto itself. Military doctrine is something a military would use in order to make the organization effective at a certain kind of task or endeavor.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#66

Post by tokyolights2 »

ecshafer wrote: post #61

My goto example of a dysfunctional and bureaucratic organization is an example I saw in a finance company I worked for. I was a on team that we were doing a major project. We basically ran Kanban but had to run "sprints" so we chose 4 week sprints to get it out of the way and we put everything on the board we had to get done that month to stay on track. Our pipeline was setup in such a way that you were required to h…

I have seen this multiple times before. Management chastising good work because some externality of that work shows up on a graph that they have to talk about at some weekly meeting. It doesn't even have to make the graph look bad, just stick out.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#67

Post by justin_oaks »

treflop wrote: post #37

I honestly don't know where innovation exists that doesn't require "fighting the system" to some degree. There are a lot of bad ideas out there and the "system" is there to weed out the bad ideas. However, you can have too much system where it will defeat even the good ideas too, so there's a sweet spot. IMO it's comes down to how much leftover budget (time or money) the organization has. You don't need processes or…

> There are a lot of bad ideas out there and the "system" is there to weed out the bad ideas. However, you can have too much system where it will defeat even the good ideas too, so there's a sweet spot.

Innovation means figuring out which are good and which are bad. It's hard to tell which is which from the beginning. Failure is inevitable. It's just whether there's a net benefit to the company instead of a net cost.

The problem is that the people and processes resist ANY failure, which necessarily throws out any innovation along with it.

> you need people with enough leftover money and time who can "screw around" a little

And this is about right. There needs to be enough slack to not strangle ANY idea that can possibly fail. The author just went so far as to say that the "leftover" needed to be part of the budget.

> Also a place where everyone is not grumpy.

Quite right. We need a place where some people are optimistic about new ideas instead of rejecting everything.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#68

Post by drewcoo »

wonderwonder wrote: post #56

A long time ago I burned out and took a few years of leave from tech and instead took a document processing / generation job at a very large non tech travel / leisure focused company. Company used an archaic document generation system that had to have templates built by hand. then there was a significant amount of manual work moving data from microsoft excel to word. All Manual. My group consisted of myself, 4 other…

> What I found fascinating though was the group of existing document specialists were not suddenly capable of doing 2 - 3x the work. They just appeared to move slower. It was like pulling blood from a stone. They had no interest in learning new work which they were now free to do, they just wanted to clock in, turn their mind off for 8 hours, click the button and clock out.

The ability to barely function and slowly grind was what made them good at the job. Either they were hired for those "aptitudes" or they developed them on the job. what did you expect?

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#69

Post by throwawayqqq11 »

profsummergig wrote: post #63

> Their organizations hemorrhage the very people they need to help them compete against aggressive adversaries or competitors who have them in their sights. Govt is a monopoly. So it can't be bothered. (The org. in charge of preventing monopolies is a monopoly.)

You are comparing companies and states. Sure, there might be similar machanics in both middle management at play but upper management is very different, at least in a democracy.

Re: Innovation heroes are a sign of a dysfunctional organization

#70

Post by FireBeyond »

ecshafer wrote: post #61

My goto example of a dysfunctional and bureaucratic organization is an example I saw in a finance company I worked for. I was a on team that we were doing a major project. We basically ran Kanban but had to run "sprints" so we chose 4 week sprints to get it out of the way and we put everything on the board we had to get done that month to stay on track. Our pipeline was setup in such a way that you were required to h…

I am dealing with this as a Senior Product Manager, explaining to execs, and defending my engineers when they started introducing metrics, and one of the keys was "Planned points delivered".

My team gets and triages all the escalated bugs.

It's not accurate, not fair, and demoralizing for that team to be "red" because the metrics look like: "Story Points Planned: 30. Planned points delivered: 5." when they delivered bug fixes on what amounted to 20-30 unplanned points.

"If they have to do that work, they need to get credit for it, planned or not. You can't have work that is required but counts for nothing in KPIs".

The issue of HOW MUCH unplanned work is being required is a separate and valid discussion, but not in the realm of "engineering cadence/velocity".

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