Coordination chaos

Coordination Chaos

�1 www.gosei.fi Attribution-ShareAlike

Ari Tikka 19.11.2013 [email protected] +358 400 308 304

www.gosei.fi Attribution-ShareAlike

“Hey, We have business! And it is growing!”

“People find their roles by themselves.”

“The specialists are effective and irreplaceable. We need to optimize their individual performance.”

In the beginning

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“It starts to get messy. We need someone to look after things.” “Lets hire a coordination specialist - the project manager.”

Growing the natural way

�3


“The project managers really do their job.”“Obviously it is best to give responsibilities to the specialized people.”

Growth continues

�4


“Do You understand what is really going on?”“Blessed the are project managers. They get something out of this mess.”

The coordinators become the heroes

�5


“We are slow and expensive. Why are projects no more productive?”

“People Resources are either idling or overloaded.”

“The portfolio does not obey. Dependencies and maintenance dominate.”

But… too much to be coordinated

�6

?


SymptomsWaiting. Scatter. Handovers. Loss of knowledge. Hunting for resources. Bad quality. Quick fix. Distress. Cost management. Reorgs. Gaps between roles. Nonproductive feedback. Misleading measures. Unclarity. Competition between projects. Knowledge and power is always elsewhere. Bad atmosphere.

�7

?


“We still need to have parallel projects to keep the over-specialized people working .”

“We still need to keep the specialists doing their own work so that we get something done.”

No change in thinking

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Last hope

�9

COSTVALUE

“We still have the customers. And the middle layer coordinates the value flow.”

“The development is too expensive and is difficult to manage.”

“But we can outsource the difficulty to an affordable provider, which we then can control through the agreement.


“Let people work in teams and share workload, knowledge and leadership. Then the coordination cost becomes investment in learning.”

“Lets limit Work In Progress so that the value creating network does not congest. Actually the end-to-end throughput will improve.”

Or fundamental change in thinking

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Flow vs resource efficiency Re

sour

ce e

ffici

ency

Flow efficiency�11

Impossible



sour

ce e

ffici

ency

Flow efficiency

Optimize learning and end-to-end Flow of value

�11

Impossible



sour

ce e

ffici

ency

Flow efficiency


Optimize cost andresource utilization

�11

Coor

dina

tion

Chao

s

Impossible


Flow vs resource efficiency Resource efficiency

Optimal with simple tasks in stable environment

Specialization is locally economical, but makes the whole system fragile

Flow efficiency

Better for all knowledge work

Optimizes the whole

Reso

urce

effi

cien

cy

Flow efficiency


Optimize cost andresource utilization

�11

Coor

dina

tion

Chao

s

Impossible

Business

Coordination chaos