Escaping The Deadly Tangle of Big Projects

Inertia is a crazy thing. And I’m not talking about physics, I’m talking about inertia of ideas. Of concepts… Once people lock onto an idea or a way of doing something, even the most convincing logic and evidence can’t cause a change. Once we get an idea installed into our brains about the way things work, it can become so encrusted in belief and blind acceptance that thought of challenging it is absurd.

My favorite example comes from the summer of 1854 in London, when people were dying of cholera.* And you may happen to remember from history class, Europe had suffered the black plague, chlamydia and a wide range of microbe-based ills in that time as well. It had been a rotten few centuries for the human immune system.

It took people a long time to accept the truth.

Current “medical” thinking was that miasma – the evil that was carried in the air, particularly at nighttime – was the cause of peoples’ illness. Given that belief, the answer to disease was to hang giant pieces of disinfectant-soaked fabric all over the place. This made logical sense because the city had poor sewage systems and stunk like an outhouse. The sheets with disinfectant made the place smell a little better, and it was an accepted fact that this was the answer to the evils floating in the air.

The problem was that this was completely wrong. People were dying of germs. Not air. And the germs were transmitted by water sources, in the case of cholera. Fleas and rats in the case of the plague, and we all know about chlamydia… The current thinking about “bad air” – as accepted as it was – provided a completely inaccurate framework of understanding, and therefore led to a strange course of action that was completely ineffective in solving the problem. A doctor named John Snow looked at the real evidence behind the cholera deaths and determined that people were dying from contaminated water sources. They cleaned up a few wells and people stopped dying.

Here’s the crazy part: Even though Dr. Snow had undeniably found the solution, it still took people a long time to accept the truth. The doctor’s data showed that the sickness mystery was solved, but it still took decades for London to fix its water and clean up the stinking, contaminated, rat-infested city.

Now, what does that have to do with technology and business in 2017?

We, as an industry, are currently suffering from an old idea. Nobody is dying of cholera, but this old idea is devastating to our companies. It causes us to waste billions of dollars. It sucks in our best talent and chews them up with fatigue and frustration. Companies have ceased to exist simply because they follow it.

And what is this idea? What is the miasma of 2017?

It’s the deadly belief that there are such things as big projects.

Big projects are not a thing anymore.

We think they still exist because we are misinterpreting the evidence in front of us. We have big things to accomplish, for sure. We have big visions of what we want to achieve, no doubt. We have pressure to disrupt and to transform and to innovate. We have the urgent need to re-platform and rebuild and redefine…. But here’s the shocking thing to get your head around: None of these things are big projects.

What are they? They are big initiatives made up of many small projects. And I want to be explicit here, an initiative is NOT a project. A project has a discrete outcome. An initiative is achieved by linking a collection of discrete outcomes together to achieve a goal. This is not semantics, this is the essence of understanding the difference between miasma and germs. This is the difference between leading your company into a multi-year, multi-jillion dollar death march or making incremental progress every day toward your goals.

I know it defies logic to say that there are truly no big projects, but follow me here. The attachment to big projects happened out of necessity. Years ago, when the current technology industry was in its infancy, it was really hard to get things done. There was nothing to work with and everything had to be done from scratch. My very first product was a self-serve web site creation service for businesses, and we had to build literally every single piece of it. There was a web server, a database… and the rest had to be written from nothing, and then it had to be hosted in our own data center. The minutia required was extensive, and very few of our activities were related to the specific value proposition. Back then every project was big, just to get the basics done.

At that point in the development of the technology industry, big projects not only made sense, but were required because everything was new.

It is completely understandable how we have had these beliefs, and the vast majority of leaders still believe big initiatives require big projects. I want to help you challenge that idea and upgrade your thinking.

We don’t need big projects any more.

Now we have every imaginable commerce, content, community and function available as a web service. It’s all connected together by APIs and hosted in the cloud. Need analytics? Click a button. Want to use AI to predict your inventory needs? Click a few buttons. Want to get your product catalog online and accept transactions? Every piece of the equation is available – with alternatives at every step of the way. I don’t want to diminish what engineers do today in any way at all. It is harder than ever to grasp the options available for creating new products and connecting them together requires immense skill. My point is to show how today’s technology teams can solve business problems because they can focus on creating things central to the value proposition you want to achieve.

We don’t need big projects anymore because the building blocks for our businesses are readily available and industrial-scale technology is at our fingertips.

Additionally, along with available building blocks, we have the ultimate set of tools for managing these capabilities in the form of Agile project management. When Agile first came on the scene in the 1990’s it was almost cult-like. There was a near-religious commitment to the notion that teams can move faster and more productively via collaboration. The enthusiasm was not misplaced. People who had participated in it, or seen it work, were transformed. What was once a slow, murky, contentious process that generated more documentation than code was replaced by a quick, responsive and even fun way of working together. And the results are undeniable. Agile – in its many forms – is a superior method for developing software.

So, where’s the rub? If we have powerful building blocks to do most anything and we have updated methods for managing the process, what is the problem? What is the solution?

The truth is, to do big things, we really need to do a lot of little things.

The problem is that we need to update our thinking. Our propensity to create large technology projects is a left-over from another era… an era filled with on-premises hosting, monolithic platforms, waterfall processes and an absolute lack of tools and skills for leaders to drive technology projects.

Our technology miasma is that we think that to accomplish big things we need to DO big things. The truth is, to do big things, we really need to do a lot of little things. And when this idea sinks in – really sinks in – the world changes.

Some things to ponder:

• As a CEO, how do you lead your executive team if you know there is a more effective way to frame up your business and technology goals?
• As a CIO or CTO, does this change your tech strategy? How do you interpret the initiatives within your company? How do you communicate your progress?
• As a manager, how do you structure your teams and what level of autonomy do you give them?
• As a strategist, how do you plan your resources and where do you focus for competitive advantage?
• As a business development manager, who do you select for partnerships and how do you structure relationships?

And the big one, regardless of your role in the company, how do you execute YOUR job? How do you interpret your role and the way you create value within the company? Can you help others to re-conceive big projects into a series of small projects and modernize your approach?

There will be a time when we look back and wonder why in the hell, in 2017, we still thought there were big projects.

* Thanks to Steven B. Johnson for his book Ghost Map, which tells the story of London and the triumph of science/data over popular beliefs.