Harry Hunter

Week Notes S0E4 Why is team ownership of ‘Why’ critical to effective delivery?

Originally published on Medium on June 5, 2018.

Traditional ‘Delivery’ roles are swiftly changing as Millennial cultural expectations and the competitive landscape force organisations to deliver more capabilities at faster pace, which meet the expectations of ‘Digital Natives’.

The responsibilities of delivery are broken down as:

  1. Why? — Why is this problem worth solving?
  2. What? — What is the solution to the problem?
  3. How? — How do we deliver the solution ?
  4. When? — When does each component of the solution need to be delivered?

In a traditional delivery org, we’d see responsibilities along the lines of:

  1. Why? — ‘The Business’/Technical authority
  2. What? — Solution Architect/Business Analyst/Data Analyst
  3. How? — Solution Architect/Business Analyst/Project Manager
  4. When? — Business Analyst/Project Manager

The outcome of such structures lead to the people actually delivering the work such as Designers and Engineers being left with executing the plans enforced from above. Poor for motivation, poor for culture and often absolutely fails at meeting user expectations, let alone exceeding them.

In a modern organisation this is reversed however, with a structure such as:

  1. Why? — Product Manager
  2. What? — Data Scientist/UX Designer/Engineer/Product Manager (Aka The team)
  3. How? — Engineer/UX Designer
  4. When? — Product Manager (With Team input naturally)

The key change is that a member of the team becomes responsible for the Why and it becomes a collective effort of the delivery team to answer the What and How. This instantly provides the Team with the agency to take on the problem space without enforced and often unproven assumptions from above.

Such agency by its nature leads to far higher motivation, improved culture (far easier to ‘get sh*t done’) and better alignment to user needs (closer relationship between team & users).

In the world of government, such a fundamental change in delivery is a massive challenge given entrenched interests and analysis paralysis culture driven by the political nature of such organisations. However there are spring shoots of change appearing with a massive opportunity space if this can be scaled throughout the public sector.