Getting Started with People-Centric Planning
Governance is necessary, micromanagement is not. Business moves fast, and if every decision needs to be routed through a central authority, progress will slow to a crawl, but easing off on the brakes requires trust.
Instead of focusing on work and specific, granular requirements, leaders need to give people key metrics, and offer them the autonomy to determine the best way to achieve those metrics. This is only possible when everyone is measuring value in the same way, and everyone has visibility into the work.
Business stakeholders want a new feature in Q1 because they are trying to drive growth. IT leaders say it can’t happen until Q3, because they are trying to create resilient systems and need to prioritize backend architecture issues. They’re both right, but no one ends up happy.
The problem is competing priorities and different metrics for success. When teams are organized around value streams (instead of siloed by department), they can establish shared metrics based on customer value. Teams can work collaboratively to negotiate priorities that balance growth with risk management.
Top-down decision making inevitably creates bottlenecks (or worse, creates painful approval processes that prevent teams from raising a flag when plans should change). The result is wasted work and disengaged teams.
Teams are given funding and clear business objectives, then empowered to figure it out. They are evaluated regularly based on the value of their work, not the volume of it. Funding is adjusted accordingly, and low-value products can be identified and wound down efficiently.
What makes a people-centric approach work is trust and communication. When business and IT leaders have total visibility into work and shared metrics to evaluate it, you can make better decisions faster—without increasing risk.
