Software More Critical

I recently attended a keynote from Sue Gardner, she was the executive director for WikiPedia as it rapidly grew from 8 to 200 engineers. She explained how Silicon Valley is a leading indicator or canary-in-the-coal-mine for the future of many businesses. It has been at the forefront of a shift that is transforming many companies. The shift is the significance of software as a market disrupter. As she recounted: “Software is eating the world” and examples include:

• Amazon disrupting book sales and now other retail
• WikiPedia disrupting reference books
• Uber disrupting taxis
• Airbnb disrupting hotels

The common factor with these disrupters is a reliance on software for competitive advantage and the change is only going to speed up, not slow down. Software is becoming more critical to an organization’s success and software developers who were once regarded as support staff are now critical and core staff.  So, company’s need to figure out how to engage, hire, retain and focus these suddenly more central roles.

No More Projects

The hashtag #NoProjects is a shorthand title for a movement that thinks the construct of a project with a defined beginning, middle and end is harmful to software product development. Instead, proponents like Allan Kelly see software development as a continuous commitment to growing the business, believing it should not end and working for it to end is destructive.

Kellys states: “Software that is useful grows and evolves. That fact that the business wants changes and new features is a sign they actually value it. Stop it’s evolution and it stops being relevant, valuable and a market differentiator. “

However, attempts to manage executive’s expectations about ongoing expenditure and to “finish” projects, create real problems for the ongoing development and health of the system. With the companies I was involved at, our attempts to “draw a line under this release” or “change the project name for next year” worked at best once or twice, but inevitably ended up in a formal project closure and loss of key people.

This is a big topic that has many impacts and I plan on writing a number of articles on the topic. I have added a new blog Category “NoProjects” on my www.LeadingAnswers.com web site so you can quickly filter articles and find them.

Upcoming articles include:

• Realizing you are part of the problem and deciding to help fix it – Having pushed hard for project closures myself despite knowing the business need continues, how do we create a better system? The NoProjects movement have some good initial ideas about portfolio tools for managing ongoing teams but they seem to lack sophistication and scaling guidelines. Many of these challenges have been solved in the service industry and I think I can help.

• Helping organizations transition to NoProjects – Often when organizations realize their software development need will not go away they react by outsourcing it. Not wanting to be in the software development business long term they see it as the responsible decision. However, you likely only ever built a successful software product because of the close collaboration between your business group and the software team. Breaking this up and losing the intellectual capital developed is not smart. In addition, inserting new obstacles to communication (remote teams, new roles, new contracts) only hinders the process.

• The role of a Project Manager in a NoProjects Future – First the term “Manager” came under attack for denoting top-down, command-and-control style of task assignment instead of the servant leader, facilitator role really needed for knowledge worker projects. Now we are doing away with the “Project” part too. What does the future look like for product leaders and facilitators?