Principles from “to solve” – part 6/8 – short summary and reflections of “to solve” so far

The blog posts so far for “to solve” have given us useful information and knowledge for mapping out the way forward for today’s organisations to efficiently meet the market, and now is the time to make some reflections.

Here is a summary of what we have been through so far:
– To meet the market the employees’ competences need to be broader; T-shaping in all different shapes of “T” in order to do parallel work and uncertain work with iterations.
Project Administration waste tells us that an employee cannot work in too many projects; it generates to much Resource efficiency waste.
– Queueing theory tells us that we must avoid Mean queues, since otherwise we get Activities in Queues waste. If we cannot, we need to have over capacity, to avoid extensive Flow efficiency waste.
– Harder to work with too many part time employees in the projects.
– Specialisation will give us both Resource efficiency and Flow efficiency waste.

All together really shows that specialisation is not the way to go. Of course, we need some specialists as experts, but we do not need specialists as niched people, niched into too narrow competence areas. The employee will of course also; lose the Big picture over time, most probably have a more boring work, get a decrease of proactiveness possibility, etc. The list of chains of symptoms, is very long.

To exemplify specialisation, we make a comparison between a small company and a football team. Both are small, with a fantastic collaboration, an absolutely necessity for their survival. When they grow too big, they need to split into two parts. The football team splits into two teams due to constraints in team size on the field, but the small company split into two silos, because there are no constraints. The splitting of the small company into two silos, would for a football team with no constraints mean to specialise themselves so for example half of them play only with the right foot and half of them play only with the left foot, half time each for every position. Silly and stupid, right. Now the football team cannot do this because they can only be 10 out on the field, but they had hardly done that if it was possible, due to that the coach is both the manager and the project manager. The coach would probably only need to test specialisation a fragment of one training to realize that this was not the way to go. But, this is what is happening when an organisation grows, specialising comes sure as fate, resulting in a collaboration decrease, which effects both the efficiency and effectiveness negatively.

In tomorrow’s blog post we will dig into the connection between Resource and Flow efficiency.