The Players’ Game

A Case for Empowering the Product Teams

by Jeff Himmelright

First published on 20 July 2017

“To manage is to control.”

Take a look at an American football team sideline. How many coaches can you count? You can usually pick out the coaches easily; they are wearing communication headsets (though not always).

In his book The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization, Peter M. Senge critiques modern organizations for their nature to over control. Mr. Senge wrote this book in 1990. Yet three decades later, the “modern” organization has changed little in this regard. Just to put this into perspective, in 1990, very few people used E-mail regularly.

When did so much control become necessary and unquestioned? At one point in my career, while working as a Business Analyst for a rather large firm, I had to enter my hours in three different time-tracking systems every Friday. One system tracked my time on each project, another system tracked my time in the office, and another system tracked my time producing tasks (deliverables).

What is it about projects that require so much control and management? Is predictability really the end game? What about delivering stuff that matters? What about quality? What has happened to the idea of allowing a highly motivated team to self-organize and trusting them to deliver VALUE?

Speaking of teams, please indulge me as I continue this sports analogy. I will attempt to demonstrate how managing to control and managing outcomes has totally permeated our culture, not just in organizations, but also in professional and collegiate sports, which obviously is a business as well.

Besides the coaches on the sidelines, there are even more viewing the action from a booth high above the field of play.

Notice the coaches in the booth wear headsets too. This is so they can communicate their observations and play-call suggestions to the coaches back down on the field, based on their superior vantage point.

Not only can the booth coaches communicate to coaches on the field, they can also talk directly to the Quarterback of the offensive unit.

This is the famous quarterback Peyton Manning. He is using his hands to cover his ear holes in order to block out the noise of the crowd so he can hear the coach’s advice better.

How does that work? By rule in the NFL, one offensive player and one defensive player on the field are each allowed to have a communication system in their helmet, but no more than one on each side - offensive and defense - (as of now).

This special helmet has a radio transmitter in it. It also needs to be clearly marked with a green dot on the back, so that the game officials (referees) know who the player is that has the ability to communicate with the coaches while on the field.

The communication system is apparently very important, because although they did not have this technology back in the good old days of college and professional football, they now have so many complicated plays to run, it is impossible for a quarterback to remember them all.

Even the coaches need a color-coded playbook cheat sheet.

An added benefit is that players on the sidelines can eavesdrop on sideline communication, if desired.

What about another sport, such as basketball? College and professional basketball is loaded with action and pauses. Each team has so many timeouts to use, they literally make the final four minutes of the game last 20 minutes or longer. During close games, some plays last less than a second as the teams closely monitor the fractions of each second ticking down. This is called clock management.

Here is a team bench. Note that there are as many coaches pictured here as there are players from each team allowed to play on the court at a time – five! (Actually there may be more not pictured.)

That’s the famous Coach K sitting front and center looking you dead straight in the eyes.

Here is another photo showing one of those timeouts referred to previously. The coach sitting in the center definitely has a plan all baked and ready for his team to follow, so the team need not collaborate their own plan.

What about baseball, a sport very near and dear to my heart. When I was a kid, I loved playing baseball. The coaches used hand signals to tell us to bunt the ball or steal a base. But this game, too, has evolved so much.

You see these catchers below who are staring intently off to the side? They are obviously not looking directly ahead at the pitcher.

As a matter of fact, each catcher is looking back into his dugout for the signals that their coach gives them. These signals tell them which type of pitch to have the pitcher throw next.

Major League Baseball has become so reliant upon statistics that the coaches are armed with multitudes of data, breaking down every batter they face regarding their weaknesses (e.g., this guy can’t hit a curve ball, and that guy usually swings and misses on high fastballs when he has two strikes on him).

Baseball, too, has a lot of coaches. First there is the manager, then the bench coach (sort of like the consigliere), then there is the pitching coach, a hitting coach, a bullpen coach, and two coaches who are allowed to stand on the field: the first-base coach and the third-base coach.

Judging by their age, these guys pictured here are not players.

Baseball is the only sport I know where the manager and coaches wear the same uniforms as the players. This may look odd to people not familiar with the oldest American pastime, but it is rooted in tradition, based on the fact that in the early days of baseball, the manager was also a player. But back then, they were a self-organizing team with one guy picked out to serve and lead.

So what does all of this have to do with project management and product delivery?

Actually, it has more to do with how we, as a society, have learned to accept controlling forces over our own thinking and creativity, which plays directly into our modern organizational structural thinking. It has more to do with how we now take for granted that there will always be someone calling the shots for us, while deferring accountability. We have yielded our autonomy for being controlled. We have submitted our intuitiveness for constant direction. We have surrendered our diversity for uniformity. We have given up our motivational drive for the goal of pleasing the supervisors.

If sport is a microcosm of our society, then rest assured, so is the business of project management. We may be a team working together toward a common goal, but every decision, no matter how small, most often must be approved by a higher authority.

And what happens when that higher authority makes too many mistakes in his or her decision making? Well, as a team player, we have also traded in our accountability for security.

In professional and collegiate sports, we see many coaches getting fired every year. Coaching is basically a revolving door. No coach truly has their name engraved on their mahogany office door. They are fully accountable to produce and they are compensated generously to produce. On the flip-side, they are rapidly and very publicly shown the exit when the results are not favorable.

But where does accountability begin and end with the team? The unfortunate answer: Accountability for team members (whatever your role may be) is assessed in one’s ability to follow directions. When a team member veers from this directive, then he or she is accountable for not following orders and, in true irony, for not being a team player.

On the upside, we have definitely created a need for better communication technology.

We, as a society, have also come to understand that following the directions of a superior (supervisor, manager, director, insert title here) is what makes us a team player. The true qualities of a team player, such as collaboration, being a servant-leader, helping others overcome obstacles, identifying areas to improve, creative thinking, adapting complex systems and processes to better serve our needs – these qualities, which we call intangibles (and this is by no means a comprehensive list) – are no longer sought or respected in our modern organizations (including sports). Thus, the result is the suppression of creativity and innovation.

In what has become an all too common epilogue to our “agile” successes, the organizational management folks who initially embraced team autonomy, then decided to try to replicate the success by scaling it too fast and throwing a bunch of managers and consultants on the project rosters to micro manage every aspect.

Frequently when I attend town halls and team huddles, I hear senior management talk about the need to be more innovative, the need to think outside of the box, the importance of staying one-step ahead of the competition, and the dangers of falling into the trap of complacency. And so these managers put together elaborate, illustrative presentations with examples of innovation and creativity with the hope that these words will inspire their employees to step up their game and drive innovation. They sometimes hire outside consultants to review their current organizational structure, which leads to these outside consultants re-interviewing the employees about their roles, performing strength and weakness analyses, and printing lots and lots of graphs and charts.

If only senior management really understood that the impediments hindering their workforce are right before their eyes and often self-imposed by the organizational constraints. The firm has an untapped reservoir of talent and creativity, who are telling them (sometimes screaming) their impediments. If only they would learn to trust their employees to think and act in the best interests of the organization.

Often, the challenge for middle management is the fear of giving up control, which is obviously more significant in the deeply hierarchical organizational structures, where it is seen as a loss of influence or status. “What does a flat organizational structure do to my current position as a manager?” Additionally, many non-managerial team members, who have become very accustomed to taking directions during the majority of their work lives, will be very slow to break out of this mold. In fact, many of them will sit idly doing nothing until given direction, because a self-directional work model is so blatantly foreign to them. Over many years, they have been stripped of their autonomy.

I remember as a kid on the playgrounds of elementary school, we would self-organize a game of capture the flag or football, choosing teams, calling plays, and officiating our own games. True, occasionally an upset player would leave and take his ball with him, but we were kids! The point is we have yielded these qualities of self-direction and self-organization, which are so intrinsic to our nature.

Overcoming these objections requires more than revising roles and titles, citing data, or drawing new organizational charts. It also requires solid examples of how some firms have taken up the experiment of empowering their teams, removing the physical and psychological silos, and re-telling the stories of those case studies, such as the scaling with tribes and squads at Spotify or the instilling of Joy in the workplace at Menlo Innovations. There are real examples out there of those not afraid to fail.

Personally, I have had the pleasure (on at least three occasions) to be part of a true co-located team, working with an incredibly diverse and talented group of people who were highly motivated because we had autonomy and a vision. In each case, we delivered value, within the expected time frame and budget. Unfortunately, this situation is the exception rather than the norm. In what has become an all too common epilogue to our “agile” successes, the organizational management folks who initially embraced team autonomy, then decided to try to replicate the success by scaling it too fast and throwing a bunch of managers and consultants on the project rosters to micro manage every aspect.

The anti-patterns that result from scaling too fast and command-control-management include:

• Product backlogs that were once prioritized by value are now prioritized by resource availability.
• A single Product Owner is replaced by multiple stakeholders with conflicting priorities.
• The time spent on planning and creating is burdened by further tracking of project hours for every member to the granularity of each project phase on a weekly basis (ever heard of Planview?)
• Estimating work item complexity size in order to improve work intake is replaced by estimating tasks in hours; furthermore, comparing team velocities and providing incentives on delivering more points!
• Trusting team members with a vision is replaced by hiring consultants to come in and monitor their actions in order to improve their processes. (Nothing conveys “I don’t trust you” more than re-interviewing a team member about his/her responsibilities.)
• Work progress applications are no longer seen as tools to help the team align their work items, but rather as tools to track their status and forecast their ability to meet “strict” deadlines.
• Teams no longer self-organize, but rather are formed and aligned by multiple matrixed managers who divide their time over multiple projects in percentages (always a terrible idea!).
• Fail fast and early is replaced by failure means the team is obviously doing it wrong, so we need to fix it for them — bring in consultants!
• Viewing the upcoming new sprint as a commitment to deliver functionality transforms into a sprint as a man-made time box to drive deadlines – leading the team members to the common knowledge that there is always the next sprint.
• Feedback at every iteration being crucial becomes stakeholder attendance is optional.

Nevertheless, despite the frequent regressions that organizational anti-pattern decisions are apt to make, I have seen autonomous teams flourish. I know it works from first-hand experience. When executives and managers talk about inspiring their employees to innovate, I say to them, experiment with an autonomous team. Give them a vision. Give them a dedicated Product Owner who has time to create and maintain a backlog prioritized on value. Give them a Scrum Master who can motivate and remove blockers. Instill a sense of urgency in the stakeholders. Provide the team with the support they need when they report technical or other external impediments, such as server outages, integration issues, hardware needs, and nightly build breaks. Invest in technical excellence practices such as automated testing and continuous integration/deployment. And finally, engage your employees in cross-functional training and networking.

As one of the 12 principles behind the Agile Manifesto states:

Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.

To truly be a coach is to teach, inspire, and provide guidance during the training and development; and then allow the players to play the game. Otherwise, the players are really nothing more than chess pieces, whose moves are as limited as the rules permit.

If you would like, please share in the comments your personal experiences, ideas and examples of how you have witnessed a motivated, self-directed, autonomous team, work an initiative and drive it home with little external control.

I hope you found this article informative and perhaps entertaining.

Best of luck in all your projects and in becoming agile!