When budgets are tight – a leader’s guide to amplifying software product engineering impact

In such an environment, many have already ceased operations due to the higher standard for ongoing funding. For many, this means demonstrating a path to profitability. Those who remain are still at risk of failing and, at the very least, must find a new path to operate more efficiently and focus on delivering value.

To complicate matters further, simplification offers organisations opportunities and risks. On the opportunity side, bloat resulted from companies’ liberal spending when the cost of borrowing was low and inefficiency crept in. This provides opportunities to focus on leveraging existing resources. On the risk side, there’s an industry trend towards short-term or overly simplified solutions that don’t address what is needed. Vendors and service providers will sell you quick fixes and silver bullets. The problem with silver bullets is that their effectiveness is limited to the realm of fiction.

In response to recent trends of high interest rates and lower market confidence, most organisations have made cuts and cost-management decisions, introducing new challenges to their operations. From this position, it can be hard to imagine how to compete successfully when the answer in the past – during an almost unprecedented period of low interest rates and high confidence – was to add new roles and other investments to do more. The good news is that an opportunity exists to improve the organisation’s impact.

For executives to identify opportunities to continue improving their organisation’s ability to compete, let's first explore where organisations waste time and effort which could be harnessed to do more.

Where organisations waste effort and capacity

In the past, you may have rationalised that the payoff for adding more people outweighed other improvements. Still, it’s a great time to explore other means of increasing productivity in this reduced investment environment.
There’s a range of common ways organisations habitually waste effort. Understanding where time is wasted and assessing how much time may be wasted by each of these aspects in your organisation provides the opportunity to prioritise improvement efforts.

Here are some common issues I’ve observed in organisations and are likely to be present to some degree in yours:

• Politics
• Too many captains, not enough crew
• Context-free policies and decisions
• Unchecked quality decline
• Misalignment
• Comfort with non-achievement of outcomes
• Handoffs and delays
• Failure to correct course
• Trying to do too much at once
• Realising predictable risks
• False urgency

For each of these, we explore why this contributes to wasted effort and what we can do about it.

Politics

We’d be hard-pressed to eliminate office politics as the typical organisation has too many incentives that encourage it. However, we can reduce the amount of unnecessary energy invested in politics by having more transparent decision-making processes and emphasising objective assessment over subjective assessment.

To be political takes effort. That effort may go into persuading or undermining others, campaigning and other activities that can cultivate influence. Influence is not bad per se and is a good skill to develop. The challenge is the amount required to get something done. It also can draw energy into debates that may have been avoided if all the parties had been across key information.

Too many captains, not enough crew

A pattern plays out in many organisations where leaders reach their capacity but still have things they want to achieve – so they create new leadership roles to own the thing. At some point, the organisation cannot hire the number of individual contributors required by its leadership structures. The net result is that – to be fair to each leader – the organisation agrees to too many priorities for the number of people available to do them. Then, the leaders, in a desire to participate, slow everything down further with their uncoordinated interactions with the overworked ‘doers’.

Context-free policies and decisions (copy-and-paste leadership)

It's constructive to look beyond your organisation to see what others are doing. Particularly in this attention-driven content economy, there’s a strong incentive to present any work practices written about as ‘mind-blowing’ and the ‘one secret trick’ for success. Occasionally, a leader will latch on to one of these ideas and want to put it into practice. It's possible that something in their subconscious and awareness of the organisation’s situation helped the practice catch their attention.

Still, all too often, they read something that excited them and look for an excuse to put it into practice in the hope of reaping the glory of the success promised. A classic example of this is for people working at startups reading about the technology in use at large-scale unicorn companies. The context is different in almost every way – and the technology used by big companies has been designed to solve problems the startup is nowhere close to experiencing. The experience for the individual contributors trying to achieve the company's goals is generally confusion as there are now additional hoops or constraints adding difficulty, without visibility of what problems they should address.

Unchecked quality decline

It's easy to fall into the trap of trying to deliver features you believe some customers desire. These features feel concrete, can be easily understood by different groups of people in the organisation and appear to provide value within a finite amount of time.

Many organisations quickly reach a state where their product becomes more complicated or bug-ridden and the number of features used by the user base stays relatively static, regardless of the output of their development team.

The cost to the business is often borne elsewhere – such as by customer service and sales teams – who may feel compelled to expand to handle an increasing number of customer issues or worsening conversion or attrition rates. You don’t want to invest to cover for avoidable problems.

Ensuring you understand the critical qualities your customers are looking for in your products and services and knowing what you need to achieve to run your business successfully can provide helpful context. This context helps everyone see the importance of prioritising quality practices relative to other activities. Without this, it can be hard to make the case to invest in improving quality when it's competing against the next feature. (We covered more about software quality in an earlier post). It is also essential to ensure that leadership is not unintentionally providing a message suggesting other priorities are more important, which may lead to skipping quality practices for more glamorous deliverables.

Misalignment

When there’s no shared view of the strategy, customer needs or a common set of facts that different people from across the organisation work from, misalignment in expectations and effort creates friction. This can manifest in disagreements, wasted effort that other collaborators won’t leverage and time spent reconciling issues.

By investing more effort in communicating and sharing information and supporting a culture of feedback, you can realise much more significant gains across the organisation in terms of efficiency and effectiveness. What is required in terms of deliberate effort for people to be aligned in their objectives is more than most think. However, that effort pales in comparison with the potential for time wasted due to misalignment.

Instilling the importance of investing effort in alignment with your leadership team can help demonstrate that these activities are valued. Without this, you may observe that people claim ‘they don’t have time’ – something they may feel should an activity be perceived as unvalued.

Another opportunity is to ensure mechanisms are in place for supporting alignment such as decision-making forums, communication channels and common language to describe priorities, goals, measures and other relevant concepts.

Comfort with non-achievement of outcomes

This might seem overly obvious but many organisations allow this situation to occur without adequately addressing the issues causing it. For instance, many organisations fail to clarify the desired outcomes for their initiatives. Or the desired outcomes are relegated to the background in favour of activity-oriented measures of progress, such as task or milestone completion.

In some organisations, the problem is that people don’t feel safe from retribution to raise issues that may contribute to the lack of achievement. Addressing this issue must start with listening to the team to understand how and why they feel that way. It's essential to avoid the temptation to debate what you hear from them; these are their feelings, so how they are feeling should not be up for debate, and instead, the effort should be to understand.

Understanding could lead to identifying opportunities to address the factors undermining their feeling of safe communication. You may even start by using anonymous feedback channels to break the cycle of fear that prevents you from learning where things go wrong.

In other organisations, there may be no hesitation in discussing issues and they may even dominate conversations within the organisation, but how to respond to the issues is the problem. This may be a problem of misalignment (covered separately), or it may be that the organisation lacks clarity on how to get work done. It's not uncommon to find a team who knows how to change things within the small corner of the organisation but is unaware of how to achieve changes beyond their direct control.

Addressing these issues may involve identifying opportunities across the organisation or establishing more transparent ways to initiate changes or new work. It may also require better visibility of the organisation's health and any indicators it needs to improve.

Handoffs and delays

Even in the modern era, the typical default is to organise people by reporting lines into functional units that group similar skill sets. An unfortunate side effect of this approach is that it can complicate the coordination of delivering value, as most value relies on multiple groups of people working together. If functional groups prioritise efforts local to themselves, this can maximise the handoff costs, as the organisation becomes victim to local optimisation and unoptimised for delivering on its purpose.

This situation can worsen as organisations grow, as functional units may lose contact with the effects of their actions on the overall organisation and their customers. Without this visibility, they will tend to maximise their unit's performance based on internal metrics.

You might have channels for people to bring such inefficiencies to leadership's attention. Or you may have measures that provide a more holistic indication of how work flows through the organisation and how well it contributes to its performance.

Trying to do too much at once

Various reasons can drive leaders to take on more than their organisation or team can handle:

• The anxiety of wanting to be seen as achieving things
• Wearing ‘being busy’ as a badge of honour
• Lack of discipline and ability to say no
• If the organisation has no mechanism for understanding its capacity constraints

Too much concurrent work increases the overall elapsed time for all work undertaken. Everything slows down when an organisation tries to do more than it can. Frustration with that slowness causes responses that make things worse and a downward spiral ensues. The knee-jerk reaction is to attempt to do even more to ‘catch up’.

The discipline to say no to starting new work, kill initiatives that may have proven less impactful than initially thought and ensure adequate visibility to understand the organisation’s capacity, are all opportunities to improve the completion of impactful work.

False urgency

Some leaders like to create a sense of urgency and, in some cases, manufacture a ‘burning platform’ to keep the urgency high on their initiatives at all times. They may have experienced actual crises and the degree of unity they often inspire and wish to recreate. This may have short-term benefits, but it increases the likelihood of cutting corners and diverting effort from issues that are a ‘burning platform’ – the inevitable watering-down effect that comes with ‘Peter crying wolf’.

Strategic planning and deployment approaches that link the strategy to operational activities are great ways to identify the organisation's imperatives and, from there, the required level of urgency. Some problems are important, but less urgent than others, and can benefit from more extended exploration and discovery – which is impossible when tackled in a rush. Having a strategy may also identify potential risks you were unaware of, such as genuine burning platforms that need swift attention.

How to take advantage of these opportunities

Most organisations will have many of these opportunities to improve. Many can represent considerable productivity improvements and, collectively, the effect can be game-changing.

Taking advantage of these opportunities requires change and success with change requires a systemic approach that engages those who the changes will most affect. In a subsequent post, I will explain this in more detail.

If you’d like help assessing what is limiting your organisation’s impact and where opportunities may exist, please get in touch.