Why your organisation is struggling to deliver meaningful customer value

This is a true story.

We have recently moved in to our first home. A very close family friend sent us a chest freezer as a house warming gift. It was a very kind gesture. We knew we could use it too as our old fridge was small and the freezer section was usually so full that we had to watch for falling items when opening the door.

But then, before we could unpack the new freezer, circumstances changed. Our trusty old fridge died. It was a chaotic situation, so we decided to act and bought a new fridge. It was delivered the next day. However, as we shifted the items from the old fridge to the new one, my wife said "there is more space in the new fridge for the frozen items...".

As we praised the design and our brilliant purchase choice, the implication was only made clear by our four year old daughter, who is discovering humour and attempting at creating new jokes, usually one liners.

Daughter: Mama, do you want to hear a joke?

Mom & I: Sure, we would love to...

Daughter: What if, you have a solution, but no problem? ha ha ha ha

As she laughed at her own joke, it slowly dawned on us what had just happened. I don't know how she connected the dots, but we had landed ourselves in a situation where we had the solution (chest freezer), but no problem (items to store).Inevitably, our focus has turned to creating enough of a problem to justify the solution.

This has been the catalyst for my thinking this last week. I've been thinking about how our organisations are struggling with solutions that have no linked problems. How do we get ourselves in these situations? What does it mean for our customers and the process of organising to do the work?

Organisations are putting the cart before the horse

It starts how a new unit of work starts its life. Most organisations, perhaps yours too, follow the following typical phases:

Vision --> Discovery --> Define --> Build --> Run

The names of the phases may be different, and build and run may be combined. There is nothing wrong with the concept of these phases. However, here are some of the issues that are highlighted by organisations:

1. The gap between Vision and Build is months; in some cases years.
2. The reason or the 'why' for doing any piece of work doesn't flow down from the vision stage to the builders. If it does, it is interpreted and re-interpreted by several layers and looses its initial meaning.
3. Discovery and definition should result in an exploration of the problem space, choice of the right problem to solve, an exploration of the solution space and find the right problem-solution fit. This takes time and energy and a bias towards new approaches. Instead due to how these efforts are budgeted, the sponsors tend to inject their own preconceived ideas into the process. Therefore, these very important phases result in an idealistic definition of the end state.
4. Builders are handed over a problem definition with a baked in how-to for the solution.
5. Builders lack the skills and/or empowerment to apply product management to the idealised end state. Instead, they build the solution they are handed. Hence, what they build is an amalgam that neither matches the initial vision nor does it arrive in time for the desired change that the strategy required.

Half life of customer value

Half life is the time it takes the radioactivity of a specified isotope to fall to half its original value. Ok, I'm using it as a metaphor, so just go with me.

We convince ourselves that our goal is to deliver customer value. Instead, we tend to find that there are many other stakeholders who have goals that some how attach themselves to the original value. This causes the delivery effort to bloat as it carries the load of this extra fat.

But, what the customer values is also time specific. It may be dependent upon the customer's environment or decisive change in behaviour. If we have proof through experiment that a specific new feature or product line will be valuable for a certain customer segment, then it follows that this customer value has a half life.

Marginal Improvements vs Evolutionary Shift

How often do we choose to improve locally, when there is opportunity for evolutionary change globally? Our organisations keep investing in marginal improvements whereas there is an opportunity for a dynamic shift.

As the materials for production and productivity evolve towards becoming commodities and utilities, so should the practices follow this evolution.

Many of our organisations don't have specific teams that are mission driven to be innovators or at least early adapters. These fast paced teams can work on quick implementation of strategy where there is opportunity for novel solutions or practice. These can also be the front runners in trying out promising results of experiments to see if these solutions scale.

One method fits all

We are learning that no one method fits all stages of value creation. May it be the choice of agile, lean or other project management methods, or the topology of teams; it is becoming evidently clear that the horses for courses approach is a requirement.

Instead, organisations we know are going through multiple transformation exercises every 2-3 years. It isn't working because no one consultant approach works for every part of a complex organisation.

Conclusion

Finding our way through this maze is the real challenge. Here is some food for thought that I intend to explore further in future articles.

1. The creation of work is as important as how we organise and do the work.
2. Distance between the customer and builders should be minimised. This will disturb stakeholders and people with traditional roles who think their job is to tell people what to do rather than facilitating the discovery of the most meaningful value we can deliver for the customer
3. Create trade-off agreements where meaningful value is placed higher than a perfect solution. Perfect is the enemy of great. There is ample time to shine a solution that is actually working for the customer; quite often it's just a waste that you didn't need to build.
4. Ensure the builders have access to product management data and that they are part of the solution definition. Long lived development teams who understand business and the technology are very creative and will surprise you with solutions that are valuable to the customer and will save on effort, time and maintainability cost of the solution.

I believe that all feedback is a gift. I am open to discuss ideas and learn from you.

I have reserved free time in my calendar that any one can book for 30 minute discussions. Continue this discussion with Adnan

Further reading

Why lack of technical coaching is wasting your transformation program