Is your delivery problem structural?
Twelve questions, two for each of the six conditions. They will not give you a diagnosis. They will tell you, fairly reliably, whether the problem you are wrestling with lives in the structure or somewhere else.
Answer each one honestly about your own organisation, and mark the ones that make you uncomfortable, because discomfort here is usually accuracy. Better still, ask a team lead to answer them separately, then compare. Where your answers differ, the difference is the data.
From Part VII of The Structure Beneath the Symptoms. Nothing you mark is saved or sent anywhere: it stays in your browser.
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Authority
When a team makes a decision inside its own remit and it turns out to be wrong, what actually happens to the team. If the honest answer involves a cost the team would rather avoid, you may be looking at an authority problem, not an ownership one.
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Authority
Think of the last three decisions a team escalated to you. How many genuinely required your authority or information, and how many could the team have made alone. If most could have been made alone, the boundary has never been set.
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Priority
When new work was added in the last cycle, can the team name what came off to make room for it. If it cannot, the priority mechanism is probably not real, however good the planning looks on paper.
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Priority
Ask a team its top three priorities, then ask its manager separately. If the lists do not match, the stated priority and the operating priority have already diverged.
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Outcomes
In your last few delivery reviews, was there a single measure of whether the work changed anything, or only measures of how much was produced. If only the latter, activity and value have likely come apart.
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Outcomes
If a stakeholder is unhappy despite strong delivery, ask whether the work actually moved the outcome it was meant to move, before you reach for relationship management.
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Constraints
When did a team last surface an uncomfortable problem early, and what happened next. If you struggle to recall an example, the silence may be learned rather than accidental.
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Constraints
If you believe you have an open door and nobody brings you problems, consider seriously that the second explanation, learned silence, is more likely than the first, that everything is fine.
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Pressure
Think of the last real pressure event. Did decisions get made the same way they do in calm conditions, or did the operating model quietly change. The pressure version is the true one.
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Pressure
As pressure rose, did the reports coming up the line get more accurate or more reassuring. If more reassuring, you are being managed, and the structure is teaching people to manage you.
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Load
When quality last dropped, did the response add oversight or remove work. If it added oversight, you may be feeding a spiral rather than breaking it.
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Load
If your teams are fully occupied and still not delivering well, ask how much of their capacity goes to the actual work and how much to coordinating, reporting, and switching between commitments.
What it tells you
0 of 12 marked so far.
If several of these landed uncomfortably, your delivery problem is probably structural, and there is good news in that. Structural conditions are arrangements, and arrangements can be rearranged. For the first time, the thing you need to change is a thing you can actually reach.
The diagnostic does this properly: a structured questionnaire for leadership and the teams across a whole area, with the answers compared and read for you.
Several of them landed?
The first conversation is free: about 45 minutes, online or in Bucharest, in English or Romanian.
[email protected]Need something narrower than a diagnostic or a programme, such as a workshop, a review of how a team is set up, or a second opinion before a reorganisation? Tell me. I'll scope it and give you a fixed price.
No proposal before the problem is understood.