By giving them detailed instructions what to do, by giving them very fixed and tight constraints, you can drive them into a funnel of efficiency.

It’s like a bobsled track.

The less room you have to move sideways, the faster you go.

But what happens if you have a big obstacle on the tracks? What if your path is blocked and you go fast and efficient, but without any room to maneuver?

You could hit all the brakes at once.

Suppose you are real lucky and stop just before the obstacle. Suppose.

You could order the team to get inside the control room, ask them a gazillion questions, order them to lay new tracks around the obstacle, and continue their downhill race.

You could also make the tracks a little wider.

Give them room to step aside, adjust course.

You could also let them make the decisions themselves. Without providing you with all the information. Without having to wait for your, possibly misguided, opinion.

Creating self-organized teams is hard work.

You need Project Leaderships skills to enable the team to get self-organized.

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - Having Enough Room To Step Sideways is a post from: Project Shrink.

Next to “communication” the keyword is “transparency”.

What happens if you take this to the next level? What if the productivity of the developers is captured by a third party? What if the “know-how” of your team members is directly visible to your customers? Talk about Transparency!

Programeter has just launched their Outsourcing edition. As a service provider you use it to check in your code base and it provides you productivity and competence metrics. Now your customers can view the same metrics.

Image by Programeter.

“Look at contributions of your project team members while they proceed with development of your software product code, and mitigate project risks with an unmatched level of remote project transparency.”

Is this the ultimate transparency? Will this be a new prerequisite for service providers; “you have to be on Programeter to earn our business”?

What do you think?

Bas de Baar helps people find ways to enjoy the diversity of human interaction in their organizations so that they can get out of their own way and achieve their goals. - How Fast Does Your Vendor Go – Transparency In Outsourcing is a post from: Project Shrink.