Functional Areas Not Synchronized

Posted on November 18, 2010

There are many ways that organizations can stumble when functional areas aren’t synchronized. Here are some of the problems that may arise and five strategies for mitigation.

Some companies walk like Frankenstein. They are stiff, with legs, arms and head coordinated in only the crudest sense; the parts of the monster having been chopped off from different dead bodies and crudely sewn together with little attention to the connection of nerves. The act of creation is unnatural; from the sky, in one big bolt of lightning Frankenstein comes alive. Without good coordination, the monster doesn’t know his own strength, accidentally (at first) killing people, then growing confused, angry and afraid all at once. After a sad string of events, Dr. Frankenstein dies and the monster commits suicide on a funeral pyre (at the North Pole).

In our organizations, we hire our people from various other companies, toss them together into different departments in our company, then sometimes sit back and wonder why the various departments don’t work well together. We wonder why our progress toward our objectives is clumsy, delayed, and occasionally self-destructive.

It’s because we forgot to sew our organization’s nerves together, to test them, and to allow them time to grow strong before we call on them to perform in an agile, effective manner.

There are many ways that organizations stumble when functional areas aren’t synchronized. Here’s one example. The business decides to launch an important new product. Product Development creates that specs, and engineering starts building it. But the specs turn out to be unclear, and some months are wasted going in the wrong direction. Some new big prospects, having not been visible before, identify some new features that are added to the work-plan. Marketing and sales, still on the original schedule, staff up too early burning too much cash, harming the ability of the company to get more debt/equity at fair prices. And the stumbling continues as…..

The root cause of all this is that the organization doesn’t examine its future in detail. It’s easy to say that things move so fast in today’s environment that planning more than a quarter in advance is futile. Nonsense! Most of the problems inside companies are predictable, and once we’ve stumbled into them, we realize we could have foreseen them. But focusing on detailed planning is hard, because we’re so busy dealing with the consequences of not carefully planning last quarter. It’s a vicious cycle. I like to call the process of detailed planning, playing the movie forward. Think of it like viewing a movie of the future, and when you foresee a series of events you dislike, you can make changes to the script so that the movie plays exactly the way you want.

Failure to play the movie forward manifests itself in two categories. The first is that we begin heading toward objectives that are unrealistic, and/or that the executives are not held accountable for delivering on their commitments. Lack of experience can be a big contributing factor, along with hasty execution, poor project management of the effort, and lack of strong consequences for failure. The second category of causation is inadequate resources, or the shifting of resource allocation after the plan is set. In some cases, the level of resources required was underestimated. Even if planning was done well and it was clear what level of resources were needed, those resources can get drawn away and refocused, or lost entirely.

Strategies for Mitigation

Planning. This may seem obvious, but many organizations behave as though like planning takes time away from execution. Nothing is further from the truth. Planning saves execution time, because in the process, many unknowns become known. Fewer surprises means faster, cleaner, less wasteful execution. Spending two days at an offsite to do strategic planning is only a start. Not only does the strategy have to be clear, but the tactics of execution must be debated and decided. This applies to the short term – like what to do now, and to the mid-term, like the next year. Measures of success must be set up and tracked. The organization’s executive team must have played the movie forward, watching carefully to notice the details, adjusting the script over and over until the characters are well coordinated, and the movie ends well.

Integrate with Budget. A critical but oft overlooked part of planning is the organization’s ability to fund the plan, even in the high, medium or low revenue generation cases. It is often easy to spend on plan but very hard to predict sales. Enough homework must be done to ensure that the executive team knows how all departments will adjust if the company starts rolling forward on the “worst case” scenario, or on a better case scenario. For those companies that have long development cycles or long sales cycles, dropping from a medium-case plan to a worst-case plan (and the appropriate reduction in initiatives) can be painful, and can leave half-finished efforts. Sometimes this can’t be avoided. But thoughtful planning will expose these risks ahead of time, and will allow for workarounds to be found, if they exist.

Dependencies. I’ve seen many cases where one executive plans well, including getting commitments from another executive to provide support, subcomponents, or other internally generated services. But their peer bails out when they find themselves in a bind, and does not to supply what was promised. This can create a waterfall of failures. Upper level executives have to be convinced that those whom they depend upon for success are careful and realistic planners, and that they’ve not over committed their teams. Likewise, the CEO must respect the planning process and avoid the temptation to “steal” resources for pet projects, resulting in failed dependencies.

Accountability: Penalties for Failure. Even with great planning, it takes strong executives fighting hard to stay on track, dealing with the inevitable surprises. Keeping organizations synchronized and on track requires that everyone deliver as promised. That everyone loses some sleep over the risk of not producing timely results. The desire to measure up is one of the key drivers of innovation within organizations. Metrics must be in place, be utilized and reviewed regularly, at all levels. Corrective action, taken as needed is essential. Ultimately, if an executive can’t deliver, it may well be time to find another one. Some failure is understandable, and often objectives are not realistic. But everyone in the organization must know that if they don’t deliver on what they promised, they will pay a price for that failure.

Ongoing Communication. Organizations are complex. Just as planning properly takes significant chunks of time, so too does keeping the right people up to date on what is going on, and coordinating the modification of the plans to stay on target. Regular meetings to chart progress and to readjust as needed are critical for staying synchronized. If this sounds like project management, you are correct. One great communications tool I’m familiar with is a “monkey”. Yes, a stuffed monkey that would be held and displayed by the department under pressure–the department with the “monkey on their back”. This symbolizes to the other departments that special focus and effort is being put in, and reminds the people in the department that they are under the gun.

To those entrepreneurs used to moving super-fast, and tacking quick-return projects with very small teams, all this talk of planning might seem like a planning monster—like a Frankenstein of its own. While the tools I’m advocating to have teams stay in sync with each other do require time, they do not need to be cumbersome or bureaucratic. Done well, and with a strong team, the planning effort will save many fold the investment through better and faster execution.