Getting away with it

Daishik
4 Jul 2022
0

Over the past few articles, we've shown how your organisation can cut corners and play fast and loose with best practices - if you so choose!

If you're serious about this, you would layer the three shortcuts (analysis, planning, testing) upon each other, potentially shaving weeks or months of time, resource and cost off your projects and business-as-usual (BAU) operations.

Of course you might also compound each of the downsides and make the overall software pipeline more difficult to manage, more time-consuming, more stressful and potentially more costly. You may also experience fierce push-back from your staff.

However, you're determined to tear up the rulebook! You have to impose your will over the best professional and well-intentioned motives of your underlings.

Nevertheless, being dictatorial is not a good strategy. My experience with organisations - some of which are household names - that have successfully* delivered product and profit whist deploying all these (and other) shortcuts is that the most effective tactic by far, is manipulation of culture.

The culture club

The best way to get things done in a particular way, good or bad, is by ingraining it in the company or team culture.

Company culture can emerge organically within teams and departments, or they can be imposed top-down by senior management. In the former, the method of propagation and persistence is peer pressure and conformity - not wanting to rock the boat or be isolated.

In the latter it is authority, threat of disciplinary measures or withholding of rewards and ultimately, fear of dismissal.

In terms of stability and longevity, the organic cultures get the best results, regardless of whether the trait is a net positive or negative. This is because the 'enforcers' are usually peers and colleagues.

The top-down cultures last only as long as the current management structure and the personalities within that structure.

Of course, where a toxic culture is organic and permeates an organisation, management bears a responsibility in allowing such a culture to persist. To that extent, all culture can be traced back to steer, or lack thereof from the top.

“Don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions”

So, if you want to enforce a particular way of doing things - especially if it goes against the better nature or professionalism of your staff, you need to discourage dissent and discussion, preferably whilst simultaneously appearing to encourage openness.

Most professional and skilled people - in my case software professionals - want to produce and deliver a high-quality product or service. They're generally motivated to apply best-practices and industry-recommended techniques to do this efficiently.

If management and the wider business don't accept or fully consider the professional recommendations, or ignore the negative impacts of not following them, or ostracise those that don't toe the company line and raise concerns, then it's likely that over a period of time, team members will stop engaging.

The first rule of culture club is you do not speak about the culture

After a while a "don't ask, don't tell" culture normalises and the business can settle into a state where all seems well because nobody speaks pre-emptively or proactively about issues. You must make sure that nobody ever discusses the fact that there are no discussions!

Once a team gets the impression that their organisation isn't interested in quality, or has accepted the risks and repercussions of shortcuts, the team may make an unspoken decision to concentrate only on the things that management wants to see - the flashy UI, or a feature that's caught the imagination of a significant person in management, for example.

Bluntly put, they will cut corners - which is exactly what you want!

The team may also hide 'technical debt' - the practice of creating quick or cheap solutions that may cost more to maintain and extend in the future, but that's a problem for another day!

Key to the culture in these environments, is that when someone does raise an issue, they are painted as though they have a negative or disruptive attitude or are not a team-player.

If that person is a new starter or contractor, culturally you can feed the notion that "they don’t understand the big picture", or "don't appreciate how things are done around here".

Be aware though, that the biggest risk with a culture where you seek to hear only good news, is that’s all you'll hear. Until things go wrong that is, seemingly out of the blue.

How would this work in practice?

If your objective is to take shortcuts, you must portray these as positive aspects of the culture of your organisation.

You will need a few key or charismatic individuals to help you normalise this culture, drive compliance, and suppress rebelliousness with a combination of peer pressure, authority, and good old-fashioned lies e.g. "next year we'll have the budget to hire a business analyst".

You can ease new recruits into your culture by branded the shortcuts as positives.

When something is not easily spun as a positive, it should be cleverly balanced out or contrasted with a genuine positive or some perks of your organisation.

For example, an organisation that doesn't want to plan their projects or pay for analysis could claim to be "agile". Potential recruits may be lured into the company with the expectation of working in a well-known Agile methodology, only to find that the reality is very different, and your definition of agile just means 'flexible'.

Another firm may highlight the "great team spirit" in their software department, to mask the fact that the team is under-resourced and unsupported and therefore is constantly lurching from one crisis to another with just team camaraderie holding everything together.

Yet another may make noise about how "fast-paced" and unbureaucratic they are: which may appeal to people who don't like planning, meetings and discussions and just want to “get on with it”.

It's time to pray

Although it can pay off, creating a culture is hard work, and can take a long time to bed in.

An alternative and surprisingly common route to success for organisations rife with rule-breaking is to have one or more "Team Gods". I explore this phenomenon in the next article.

*"Success" is whatever you want it to be. I've witnessed projects fail in nearly every metric, yet been declared as successes at the last minute because someone senior didn't want to have their name associated with a failed project. Others could be called partial successes.

Click on the links below for the other articles in this series

Tearing up the rulebook - We know our business is unique, so let's just tear up the rules and do everything in our own, unique way!
There is no Plan A! - Cutting back on discussions, workshops and planning of work, or even skipping them entirely, is an important shortcut that could reap dividends!
Analyse this! - A popular shortcut is to leap over the analysis phase, with the hope that issues will be easily resolved during implementation
Testing times - Another favourite! Shortcuts on testing and quality assurance is a great choice if you're keen to cut back on cost, resource and time
The gods among us - The ultimate, and most effective solution to managing the fallout from shortcuts. But there is a price to pay!