No More Projects
Photo by Todd Trapani
Most organizations find themselves in an endless, frustrating game of technology whack-a-mole.
You have an idea for a system that can truly change your work. Or some pain point gets so extreme that you finally decide it can no longer be ignored. So you gather up the mandate, find the budget, and find a partner to help you build or fix something.
Your idea has become a Project.
Hopefully that project works out to some extent. Except. Various complexities reveal themselves once you’re in the midst of it. Tough choices have to be made given budgets and timelines. Plus you knew the issue was actually bigger and more complex, but you only had budget for this one project, so you’re taking it one step at a time. Hopefully once you’re done you can pull together the budget and political will for the next project after this.
Sadly, in terms of their ultimate impact, these projects usually end up just fiddling around the edges. They reliably come up short of the impact you hoped for, or the reason you wanted to do the thing in the first place.
And fiddling around the edges is no way to run an effective organization or business.
So why do we keep doing this? Because it’s pretty much the way the technology consulting industry is constructed — the way expert assistance is purchased.
To break this cycle we have to stop thinking about technology in terms of projects and start thinking in terms of capacity. Sustained, sophisticated capacity.
If your organization is reasonably sophisticated (which it is), then your needs are far too complex to be served by a sequence of projects with start and end dates. You have too many moving parts, too many complexities, too many systems, and too many people with overlapping and intersecting needs.
If you’re honest with yourself, it’s probably intuitive that you need a bunch of smart, highly skilled people focused on your entire complex technology landscape, at all times. People whose job it is to understand needs and opportunities, prioritize in a sophisticated way, allocate effort and resources, execute on those priorities, and make sure all of the relevant human beings are trained, supported, and brought along. That’s how you get to a technology platforms ecosystem that’s actually helping everyone in your organization do their work ever stronger and ever better.
And. that. work. never. ends. Not if you want this stuff to work well enough to truly move the needle on people’s work.
To be clear, there should be smaller “projects” happening within your complex ecosystem of work. Probably multiple overlapping projects. That’s great, as long as you trust the strategic understanding and direction of whoever is leading the effort, at a level of sophistication needed to drive your complex organization.
Do you?
If you’ve gotten skeptical about technology projects over the years, it’s probably for good reason. You might try shifting to thinking about how things would change if you had skilled, sustained, trusted, technology capacity leading the effort full time, and up to the sophistication of the road ahead. How might that change your thinking about what should happen next?