When Good Strategies Fail in Implementation
October 14th, 2002 by HalI've been working my way through Mary and Tom Poppendiek's book Lean Development: A Toolkit for Software Development Managers. Chapter Five: Alignment Tools is a very good survey and synthesis of some of the best thinking on how to get projects done. The chapter is well-written and engaging. This primer provides good guidance whether you're doing software development, hardware engineering, or carpentry.
Mary and Tom expose one of the major struggles for organizations. Good strategies fail in implementation. Why? The chapter title says it all — alignment. Organizations fail to produce it. Mary and Tom propose three tools for getting your team going in the same direction and then keeping them going: professionalism, passion, and signalling and commitment. As is usual throughout the book the authors do a good job sharing their references behind each of their claims.
I see managers speak about issues of alignment once thinking that if something has been said then it is so. Align is a verb. It is an action that must be taken throughout the course of the work of teams and projects. I'll add a twist to Mary and Tom's proposal. Leaders and team members use stories to elicit profesionalism, to evoke passion, and as context for coordination. Good strategies fail in implementation when the practice of story-telling is missing.
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