One of the problems Milestone Planner sets out to address is the traditional bottleneck that happens in project management: Someone ‘owns’ the plan, and every-time there is an update, that person has to be contacted, update the plan and push a new version out. Or, as is more often the case, the owner of the plan is left chasing people for updates. The result is people living with a permanently out of date plan, and chasing each over via phone and email. That’s no way to run a business. Time for one of Jim’s cartoons…
The hub model has the appearance of a safe, controlled, well-managed process. The reality is that it leads to people making decisions on in-accurate information, and at the speed of one bottle neck. Of course, there is a different way to do things.
The mesh model is peer-to-peer. Anyone can interact directly with anyone else. In the case of Milestone Planner, this means that anyone in the project team can go and update their milestone directly, and see the most up to date version of the plan. No trawling through emails or folders trying to find the latest-latest version.
It is a person-to-person form of management and communication (something that Scott Gould of Likeminds is blogging a fair bit about – Becoming P2P), and based on an “adult-adult” communication model, rather than the less productive “adult-child” one that so often accompanies the hub/star model. We’re aiming to make Milestone planner a grown up tool, for grown up people.
Let us know what you think.
Person to person management eh?
Not convinced on this one yet, you only have to look at any successful business and it is based on processes that can be duplicated, alla McDonalds, the “people” are actually irrelevant to a point, but the process they follow and do is paramount. – you get people in who can be moulded into your process, your system. – management is very hands off with appropriate systems.
For me currently P2P is more “happy clappy” round the camp fire than a business reality.
I like your tool though, but not sure if I could use it for a large number of people because the mob rule can be chaos rapidly.
Hey Chris, et al,
People-to-people does not mean the remove of process. What it is is the development and refinement of process in a knowledge-based economy.
McD’s are production workers selling a static product. Comparing them to knowledge workers (like you and I) just doesn’t work here.
The difference here also is management vs leadership, which top consultants agree are two distinct functions required in any company. Management is about static processes (like McD’s staff on the production line) – but Leadership is required in emerging markets where knowledge is dynamic.
If a team who is using a tool in a mesh framework (rather than a hub) is unable to self-moderate and guide themselves, rather than require governance, then they either aren’t a team, or are a poor one that isn’t united, and is unlikely to cut it.
For me, the companies who I’m working on people-to-people with, we are cutting out bureaucracy whilst maintaining accountability and becoming far more effective. Where there is a team, this works.
Thanks for your clarification Scott, was expecting Ben, but that’s neat still, must have been a “tip-off” ;)
I see your theory (is it your theory, or whose?) has benefits in a think-tank capacity (crowd source) but still struggle to see this rolling out in business to be honest, even in knowledge based business. I would argue we work in an information based context also, not knowledge per se’
Building a construction site or building an information based business has very similar outcomes – a product.
I agree “Leadership is required in emerging markets where knowledge is dynamic.” – yes this is what an entrepreneur does, but sooner or later he/she needs to be able to “package” it into systems and processes or services for the mere mortals.
You may be using the term P2P as a fancy way of saying crowd sourcing?
But I’m open minded and will continue to ponder.
Clearly both approaches are valid in the right circumstances.
In the McD model the goal is to produce the same product, to the same standards, globally, over a long period of time. The drivers are uniformity in production (i.e. we want to experience the same Big Mac regardless of where its is made or who made it) and stability in requirements (i.e. we expect to be able to get the same Big Mac next year as we get today). For this model, process is king. By ensuring uniformity of process, management can achieve uniformity in the product. Because the requirements are stable you have the time to optimise the process, make it easily followable, drive out cost etc.
But imagine a world where McD’s didn’t have stable requirements and where the goal was to be unique, not uniform. If I could walk into a McD’s and say that I wanted to eat a goat burger topped with dolcelatte, but tomorrow I might change my mind and have a bowl of soup and maybe the next day I don’t know what I want – but surprise me… Hey McD’s you know the kind of thing I like… don’t you?
In that world process sucks. By the time a process has been introduced, stabilised and optimised the requirements have changed and the process is redundant.
In many ways I agree with Chris. Right now, today, most businesses are built around stability and uniformity. So from that perspective the whole people to people thing can look like ‘happy clappy’.
However, in my mind there are two questions…
– is the speed at which customers demand new things increasing or decreasing?
– are customers moving towards wanting a homogenous experience or are people increasingly expecting a personalised experience?
If the answers to those questions are ‘more rapidly changing demand’ and ‘less uniformity’, then People to People / Team and Transparency over Command and Control / Mesh not Hub etc. are all pointers for the direction these new businesses need to be heading in.
(Disclosure – I’m a founder of SocialOptic…. so I’m betting that there is a trend towards P2P)
Thanks Jim, nice to meet you here, just hit your twitter feed too.
Just wanted to pick this up:
“are customers moving towards wanting a homogenous experience or are people increasingly expecting a personalised experience?” – possibly yes, possibly no, but I would argue that if yes, this can only be achieved through process and customer relationship management (another process/system), otherwise one day you’d be very satisfied and the next you’d be very disappointed.
I like the tool, by the way, just to state it again, couldn’t project manage an operating system build-out with it – but for small groups and simple dependencies works well.
Thanks for the conversation too.
Enjoying the disucssion.
I’d say people-to-people is more than crowd-sourcing, which has a very one-way connotation to it. People-to-people is not a way to out-source, it is a way to in-source without discrimination to the source.
I didn’t invent people-to-people – I’m sure it’s been around for a long time – that’s just the name I’ve given to what I’m noticing more.
And yes, business requires process and management. No argument at all. But for this new wave of company – companies like Google, Facebook, etc – the organisational structure is a p2p one as it provides incredible flexibility and scaleability in their innovative and ground-breaking areas.
Thanks for clarifying Scott it’s pretty much nothing new at all, what you describe as P2P takes place in most (probably all) creative agencies, “SMALL” teams working on creative ideas, and has done for decades.
So yes, it has its place in a creative output context. I call it crowd-sourcing, you call it in-sourcing, it’s the same.
However, this doesn’t cut it with traditional business process, like finance, legal and marketing, especially for large organisations like Google and Facebook as you can hear clearly in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1qoDY-gjKY
Hope that helps.
Cheers
Great discussion! So many threads to tease out here:
– Command and control versus collaboration
– Process execution versus process innovation
– Management versus leadership
Apologies for not joining in sooner, I was caught up at Online Information 09. Interestingly, much of the day was about process and communication flows, and the benefits and limitations of traditional structures. Each one of the items mentioned here is a full post in its own right, and I’ve left out the crowd-sourcing piece, as that is a whole different kettle of fish.
What the world looks like depends on where you are – what kind of business and where in that business you sit. I know McD’s reasonably well, so let me start with that. In the stores, they are very much about a repeatable (and consistent) experience – as a side note, from the top down, they look to achieve that through principles, rather than processes. Another topic in its own right. More centrally in the franchise they are all about innovation – exploring new product lines and ways of improving their logistics, increasing market share and so on. In Cisco, the general rule was that any repeatable, non-improvable, process should be outsourced. I’ll come back to that in a moment. For now look at it this way: The traditional management science model talks about people, processes and systems – the Toyota model being the oft-cited poster child. Huge amounts of attention and effort have been focused on things like Kaizen and 5S. Process can be repeated, honed and improved. The key being repeatability.
Through the 80’s and 90’s, certainly in the technology industry, the trend was to outsource the repeatable processes, initially manufacturing, but later even aspects of HR and accounting. As they did so, people and systems became more important, and so systems-solutions providers did rather nicely out of the deal. The businesses were less about processes and more about process-innovation. Regardless, every business requires both process and process innovation to be sustainable – even academic institutions need new courses and new ways of delivering courses, just as McD’s need new types of burger and more efficient delivery.
So, on to management versus leadership, and command and control versus collaboration. Google use processes in their financial management, but elsewhere it is quite a different story. Their engineering teams famously have 20% of their time for unassigned projects. Andy Grove was our business mentor at Juniper Networks, and had a beautifully nuanced view of the balance between process and innovation, leadership and management – particularly interesting given Intel’s model and constraints. They all co-exist. The question is are they balanced within a business, and how that balance changes with the market and the stage of the business.
My old boss explains the need for a shift in emphasis more eloquently than I can. This is a video of John Chambers (CEO, Cisco Systems) talking about why he is moving Cisco from Command and Control model to a collaborative model – explaining why they became the most valuable business on the planet and why they aren’t now:
In business, as in most other transactions in the world, incentives are inextricably linked to structures and processes. Incentives are pretty clear, and easy to define and deliver in the “hub” model. The “mesh” model will require far deeper thinking to redefine and then more complex implementation of incentive structures. What is your view on this? Thanks.
Thanks Ben,
Yes, seen the Chambers video before, all good stuff.
Yes Google love the concept of 20% of resources for play, didn’t adsense come from that? – but it’s not just the finance that is traditionally structured at Google it is far far more than that, they just don’t like to admit it so freely, although the dude does in that video above. Why wouldn’t they sing happily about the 20% sitting on fluffy balls and getting creative, it’s a great utopian image for the company.
“Regardless, every business requires both process and process innovation to be sustainable – even academic institutions need new courses and new ways of delivering courses, just as McD’s need new types of burger and more efficient delivery.”
Couldn’t agree more.
My reaction to your post is “isn’t that what happens already?” It depends where you are working.
Think of an air traffic control screen. It is infinitely updateable in close to real time. The air traffic controller acts as signal points. It is not their personal project but we follow their signals to avoid a collision. We don’t take off from Johannesburg knowing exactly where we will land at Heathrow (or at exactly what time). They are expecting us through the flight planning system. What happens in practice is that we are handed over from one tower to another (locally) and when we arrive we get into a queue. We can even be told to buzz off (diverted). The air traffic controller knows roughly what to expect when s/he comes on shift but his/her job is dealing with variation in real time.
The choices businesses have made in the past come from understanding the external conditions that they operate in and the availability/choice of command-and-control technology. The whole bang shoot of Japanese variations are c&c technologies. The west haven’t picked them up (amazing) and perhaps couldn’t because so few of the workforce, including managers, have the basic grasp of statistics which you need to use them.
Web2.0 technologies give us more c&c choices
– asynchronous updating of plan
– local modularization (local changes that don’t affect overall operation or v.v.)
– redundant links so that if one fails, the plan simply self heals (already been done with emergency communication systems – same as tracking zebras with something like wimax or the USD150 laptops)
– ability to refocus the plan to capture serendipitous value and not disrupt local activities
To me, the issue is that management is conflated with doing. Managers want to tell people what to do yet not do it themselves. That’s not their job. That’s like air traffic controllers thinking they are flying the planes. Managers have a different task – coordination between doers – air traffic control. Rent seeking in our business models is confused wtih c&c. Two different issues!
Back to web2.0, automation reduces the cost of coordination but doesn’t replace coordination. Or if it does you get this situation: Air traffic control. “Hello. Who is in my space? I can see you on my screen”. “Well, jolly good for you. Why should I reply? If I am silent, you cannot bill me. You will have to send up a squadron to find out who I am and it will bankrupt you.” At Heathrow, I will reply, because I want to land and because I need help navigating though the swarm. The point is the social and physical need comes first. First we have the interaction. What is it that we are trying to coordinate and under what conditions? The reason that some pilots ignore ground control is because they can see everyone else up there on their own radar and they don’t need ground control. When we get to Heathrow, we need help because of the overload.
Your milestone planner is a simple kanban. Make the job so everyone can see what needs to be done next! If there is too much information for that, then we need a traffic controller. If there is a need to spot changing value in formation, then we need a person to “chair” and bring out that value.
One of the aims of Milestone Planner is exactly that – to let people see what needs to be done, with just the right amount of information. @Jo I like your analogy for management versus doing. It becomes a very challenging divide in knowledge-based businesses, as management skills and domain knowledge seem to get conflated. I shall go and read your post!
I wasn’t sure whether you are following Jim Benson’s (@ourfounder) work on Personal Kanban’s. You are dealing with small teams and projects, so there is a slight difference.
How much do scrums, sprints and agile techniques interplay with what you are doing?
I want toconfessyour entire articles are of great helpsince they bestowwonderful guidances.Accept my good wishes for your future articles and expect them also to help me like this one.