The importance of vision, strategy and clear objectives.
“I’m concerned that we’re not delivering as fast as we should be”.
Over the past few years, and in many businesses of different sizes, this is the concern I’ve heard from CEOs and board members. “It just doesn’t feel like we’re making progress with the things we need to deliver”.
The problem, to these leaders, is often obvious. The team is too big. The team is too small. The technology is ‘wrong’ (but they’re not really sure what the technology is). We’re not in the cloud and should be. We are in the cloud and shouldn’t be. There’s a problem with particular team members.
In all of these cases, there’s something dysfunctional in the team, or with the technology.
And then you spend times with the teams themselves — the ones that are too big or too small or too dysfunctional — and you hear a different side of the story. Again there are common themes, although quite different from the business leaders. The team are constantly asked to deliver features and always skimp on quality. They have made recommendations to improve, but are never given time to implement the improvements. They feel disconnected from the business, and don’t really know what to work on, or why they’re working on the things that they are. Invariably, the sales team are selling features which don’t exist.
I’ve heard these two sides of the conversation too many times for it to be coincidental. On one side, velocity is lacking and the frustration is palpable. On the other side, there’s a lack of direction and a preference for features over quality.
Of course, in every company the solution is different — sometimes the team really is too big, or too small, or the technology is decrepit. Sometimes the business are unfair in prioritising what appear to be valid requests from the technical team. But very often the core issue that drives this tension, that underlies an inability to deliver effectively, is one of clarity, communication and visibility.
Fudge, Inc. — Producer of premium stress balls
As a business scales, different teams are created to take responsibity for specific activities. In the most basic model, there’s a split between sales and delivery. Let’s take an imaginary widget vendor, Fudge Inc.
Fudge Inc makes stress balls for stressed executives, and sells them to businesses through a phone based sales team. The sales team call companies across the country and sell orders of hundred or even thousands of stress balls per order.
Whenever Fudge Inc receives an order, the sales team ring a bell and enter the order into their CRM. The rest of the sales team cheer, celebrating the success of their colleague.
On the other side of the building — the dimly lit side, where the machines crank away churning out stress balls — the stress ball engineers hear the distant bell. Their shoulders tighten and their teeth clench as they know that they’ll be pulling an all-nighter to meet the new customer order.
So, let’s look at this first tension in this deliberately simple business. Where you have sales and delivery functions, you can almost guarantee that you’ll see different (and often conflicting targets). Sales will be tasked with hitting targets for number of orders and average order value. Delivery will be tasked with hitting quality metrics and production targets such as the number of items produced per day.
The tension here is obvious; without a way to communicate supply and demand between the two teams, and a way to sympathetically modify output on both sides at the same time, an inevitable chasm will develop.
Without much consternation, Fudge Inc could appoint two leaders in isolation. A Head of Sales, driving ever forward on his sales pipeline, improving the sales process and training, and incrementally improving the number of units ordered. On the other side, a Head of Delivery, responsible for maintaining quality and incrementally improving the number of units produced by her engineers.
In opposite corners of the business, two dashboards would appear — Sales execs watching a leaderboard of closed won deals, while on the other side the engineers watch an array of numbers which indicate delivery rates and production errors.
Sales Team Dashboard:
In the Delivery Team:
Fortunately, Fudge Inc is led by a wise team. Two leaders are appointed, but both are targeted on the number of units successfully delivered to customers. Instead of separate metrics, they are given a unifying metric for both of their performance and are therefore mutually driven to collaborate.
In addition, the board request a dashboard which makes the sales pipeline and the delivery velocity visible to everyone in the business. Not only does it allow engineers to see how many potential customers are lined up, and what the impact to their demand might be, but it also shows the Sales team any shortfall in capacity that might lead to their customers having to wait for their urgent stress balls.
By aligning targets and making the two stages of work visible across the company, individuals in the team can get a complete sense of how they contribute.
By giving Delivery engineers visibility of the work that Sales are doing with their pipeline, it’s possible to manage production dynamically to suit demand. Additionally, the sales team can start to understand whether their closed won deals will lead to a shortfall in capacity, or even an overproduction which leads to warehouses full of unsold stress balls.
In the next article…
But, what happens when this simple business becomes more complex, and Fudge, Inc needs to start designing more products?
In the next article, we’ll add another layer of complexity to Fudge, Inc. Instead of just ‘business as usual’ operations to produce the same stress balls, we’ll investigate how innovation and improvement need to be managed to keep velocity high.
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