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Alignment through documentation, status reports, and formal presentations is usually not alignment
There’s a story of a technology team inside a large automaker where 200 people were working on a substantial, new incentive program for dealers.[1] The output of the team’s work would have a big impact on outcomes: better tracking of activity, better alignment of effort to opportunity, more sales. There was nothing special about this team, exactly: It contained all the normal capabilities that you’d expect from a scaled unit, like infrastructure services, information security, and business-aligned teams.
This story is true. You can probably find it online in video form, if you look hard enough. I’m leaving out the name of the organization to protect the (?) innocent. ↩︎
What’s also unremarkable is that they hadn’t delivered anything of value in five years.
You can imagine what the meetings were like between this team and the rest of the business.
The quarterly updates featured glossy slide decks filled with technical jargon and complex architecture diagrams, while business stakeholders sat stone-faced, mentally calculating the millions spent with nothing tangible to show.[1] Each meeting ended with vague promises about “upcoming milestones” that never materialized, while dealers continued using their decade-old systems.
Assuming an average salary of around $150K per person, across five years, that’s $150 million wasted (to say nothing about the additional costs that surround a team like this)! This number will probably strike you as either way too high or way too low depending on where you work. ↩︎
This situation was fixed by applying many of the patterns in this book, but it’s a perfect illustration of the failures of a document- and meeting-driven approach. This approach is about representing work rather than properly demonstrating it, leading to misalignment between those doing the work and those supporting or funding it.
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