Day: 26 April 2019
Own It!
Hertz wants a new website. They do a deal with Accenture to produce one for $25 million. It all goes horribly wrong. And it ends up in court, which is the only reason anybody else gets to know about it. Nobody is particularly surprised.
That’s the point from which this post starts, rapidly homing in on the question of the expertise Hertz should have had, but didn’t have, on the client side, and the delusion of outsourcing the product owner role to the supplier. That’s not really about the contractual relationship (and so is just as important when outsourcing is not at issue), it’s about the nature of the product owner role, which this post captures beautifully.
One thing which comes out particularly clearly is that treating product ownership as an ‘agile’ role, rather than as an organisational role can contribute to the misjudgement at the heart of the Hertz/Accenture dispute. That confusion can be seen in other contexts too – in the UK government, for example, treating product ownership (or in their language, service ownership) as one of the digital professions risks introducing a version of precisely that skew (which doesn’t, of course, mean that it necessarily does in practice) and so makes it even more important to focus on the core attributes of the role, without their being submerged by the process – important though that is for other reasons.
Transactions v Interactions
Transactions are bounded, manageable and measurable, which makes it makes them appear easy to improve and easy to tell whether some forms of improvement have been achieved. The temptation which results is to focus on improving transactions and, more subtly, on making more things more like transactions. There are some advantages in doing that, which is why it is so often done. But the more things are transactions, discarding the rich messiness of human variability, the less they are interactions.
That’s the starting point for a post which turns out to be about something rather different: how do organisations best support collaboration and effective team working. The connection is that while transactions are readily scalable – that’s almost the point of them – interactions aren’t. So in a world where organisational change tries to make things more transactional in contexts where interaction is vital, working out how to scale and systematise interaction without killing it off in the process becomes particularly important.