Simplifying Business

Complexity is insidious and costly.  It comes too easily by way of entropy, and fighting entropy takes vigilance.   Simplicity is hard, mental work.  It takes active analysis, teamwork, and lots of practice.  Simplicity also requires humility – a willingness to let go of initial decisions, to course-correct.

Complexity is Insidious Because…

  • Modern life is naturally complicated. We live in the age of Moore’s Law where technology is advancing at exponential rates.
  • Humans are naturally builders. We look first to add, not to subtract.  It takes an unusual outlook to truly understand that less is more.  The designers at Apple understand this.  Part of the genius of Pablo Picasso is that he understood that “Art is the elimination of the unnecessary.”
  • Humans are naturally myopic. We tend to be single-minded on the problem at hand to the exclusion of the bigger picture, and we tend towards one-size-fits -all answers.  Think about that every time you hear someone utter, “There ought to be a law…”  The number of laws on our books far surpass our ability to enforce them.  What we really need are less laws that are more generalized giving back judicial discretion (but that’s bad politics).
  • Humans get complacent. We do things for the sake of tradition and tend not to question why.  “Because that’s the way we’ve always done it around here.”
  • Complexity is a huge drain on resources. In an IT department, complex systems can easily use up 70% or more of the available resources just “to keep the lights on.”

Top Seven Strategies and Tactics for Simplifying Business

  1. Empower the front lines. Encourage them to speak up when things are wrong, to hit the proverbial “big red button” that stops the assembly line until things get fixed.  Fight complacency.
  2. Conduct regular retrospectives to illuminate and identify your particular complexities
  3. Improve internal communications. Get “on the same page” with shared visions that are internalized and repeatable by everyone (not just memorized Dilbert-speak).  Similarly, go to lengths to ensure everyone is using a shared vocabulary.  It’s surprising how often coworkers using the same terminology actually have different understandings for what the words mean.
  4. You get what you measure. So, question the metrics you gather and decide if they really encourage the right kinds of results.  If not, then consider that the acts of gathering of those metrics might, themselves be unnecessary complications.
  5. Clean as you go. Facing a “big ball of mud”?  Don’t try to tackle the mess all at once with grand rewrites and do-overs.  Tackle it a little at a time, as individual issues come up.  If you adopt a policy of always leaving each part of the system just a little bit cleaner than you found it, then the whole system will show signs of improvement in surprisingly short order.
  6. Institute a separation of concerns. Do you have personnel who generalize in performing many different tasks?  Might they be more efficient if they divided up the work orthogonally to how they are doing it now, doing it instead in assembly-line fashion?  (To fight boredom and maintain their generalized skills they could rotate positions periodically.)  Note: This often requires changes to your systems and procedures, and just going through the exercise of making those changes can prove enlightening and introduce innate efficiencies.
  7. And the biggie… Adopt Scrum (or another agile methodology) to manage your development projects — not necessarily software development.  The Scrum process is designed to be simple and adaptable.  A good coach can explain the basics in under 15 minutes.  It’s not rocket science.  The challenge is usually in figuring out how to apply the techniques to the project at hand, and in unlearning old ways of project management that interfere.  The payoff is a committed focus on the items with the highest business value, delivering them faster and with higher quality.

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a blog by Craig L. Jones, Software Agilist