Hoping that someone's doing their job (or even knows which part is their job) is rolling the dice with everyone's jobs.
Disproof
A verifiably transparent workflow that progresses without reliance on human memory
Consequences
Hoping the team will correctly de-risk (checking with stakeholders, compliance, etc)
- Itâs just a matter of time before someone forgets or judges that itâs ok to not
- Something blows up, costing the org money or reputation (i.e. the ability to get money)
- If that happens enough, we donât have jobs anymore
- Hopefully, itâll be minor enough for you to learn and then stop relying on trust
Hoping specialists all perfectly communicate the readiness of dependencies for other specialists to then pick up (test writing, documentation, localistion, marketing plan etc)
- Asynchronous parallel workflows become synchronous series
- Time wastes, money burns. If that happens enough, we donât have jobs anymore
- Hopefully, delays will be minor but annoying enough for you to then do something about it
In the case where nothing is even being tracked manually, the only way to get a complete picture of whatâs happening is literally going around asking everyone every day. Hilarity ensues at scale as armies of people get hired to go around with clipboards.
Causes
âEveryone is an adult professional that has the teamâs interests at heart and will ensure no ball is droppedâ. Wrong:
- Stress, workload, switching costs, trying to do too many things at once cause people to act rashly or forget to act
- People also are perfectly entitled to work their allotted hours and not do anything not explicitly asked of them
- Unfortunately, making sure that everything is done across the board lies very much in the extra mile. Generally youâre not going to be paying people enough or doing something important enough to go it.
Typically though itâs just because you blinked and grew past the scale where everyone can fit in one room and keep everything in mind at the same time.
- Tends to happen after a funding round when youâre encouraged to âdeploy capitalâ and âscale resourcesâ
Most organisations also lack anyone skilled at org arch or process analytics
Approaches
Continuous integration has come a long way. Multidisciplinary work has not.
Instead of relying on someone remembering what to do or even following a checklist, automate the checklist.
Automate alerting when the checklist isnât followed.
Automate telling people theyâve got new work to do
If youâre afraid that nobody will listen to the automated checklist, do two things:
Design an actually decent process that solves the specific problems of your product org.
Crib from best practice but by god if you use scrum with a bunch of greybeards youâll just piss people off
Acquaint them with what happens when a fuck-up occurs due to an ignored checklist