Deploying a new role or fixing the "system"?
I had an interesting conversation the other day. The gist of it was the suggestion there should be a (new) role dedicated to filtering options early on, on the business side, so that we in the tech product team can get slightly more curated opportunities, and be able to focus and not be pulled in different directions.
Notice the implication here is an aggravated scenario of a complex organization, with many stakeholders demanding things.. And the often seen challenge is how to filter the noise from the signals that should be reacted against, without risking the infamous "who shout the loudest gets it" sort of thing.
It was a fair suggestion, but have we explored enough the problem space before coming up with a solution? - That was what went through my mind immediately. What is the underlying issue? Isn't what we are observing potentially more a symptom than anything else?
Time for a bit of thought experiment, or multiverse reality check…
Meet Joanna. She has been selected to play that suggested role. She is quite competent and driven, willing to engage with all the complexity of the business and so many good ideas are out there. She has been given a clear mandate too. She can challenge, she can question, and ultimately determine when something should move as a serious option to be pulled and worked on.
Despite doing all of that in a rather polite way, chances are that she is pleasing some more than others - and possibly some stakeholders may be building up some uneasy feeling for being constantly "pushed back". It is just reality when it comes to the digital world - there's an ocean of opportunities (tending to infinite) and possibly just a small lake of capacity to execute. For sure very likely less capacity than demand.
How can Joanna be set for success and not risk having to deal with too occasional disgruntled stakeholders? Could it get so bad that it becomes a matter of organizational politics at some point?
Remember that she is quite competent and driven, and has the mandate. So, eventually she figured something out. That she needed to reframe the conversation with stakeholders, but also have an understanding, together with the tech product team, on what is possible, how much should be committed and executed in a given moment of time.
To cut a long story short (as it might have taken her many months to get to this point), she cuts an agreement and implements few key policies:
In collaboration with the tech product team, there will be a min and max number of how many options can get to the funnel for further assessment - because in the funnel, having enough options is good, but not that many that can't be properly assessed.
That the tech product team would cap how many options they can develop on a given moment of time - put in other words, limit the WIP (work-in-progress) for delivery.
Finally, what gets to the funnel and how it is further assessed is governed by a risk management approach that frames value in multidimensional fashion (more insights on this informal trilogy: What is PRIORITY and VALUE anyway?, PRIORITY and VALUE through what is a stake: RISK - and meaningful conversations and A plot twist on a sad tale…).
Now Joanna is capable of doing her role on a much more effective basis. She has reduced the noise and the emotional charge. She used to sometimes feel like she was swimming in the Luangwa River in Africa, although with a different kind of "Hippos" (Highest Paid Person Opinions). She has used her superpower as a person to provide an alternative direction where most of the problems in organization tend to live - in the "system" (of how things get done).
And by the way, because of that, chances are she is now up to new and bigger challenges in the organization, which in turn has now learned that often deploying (yet) another role can be rather a proxy, not necessarily what was truly needed.
If this ought to be a fully happy sort of fairy tale story, then the organization might as well figure out that in principle any and everyone could be such an agent of improvement, applying their full senses to get better at how work gets done, with management focused on managing flow and work, and coaching and nudging people so that their context enables them to do so.
And for as conceptual, even philosophical as it may sound, it's very practical at the end.