{"id":726,"date":"2021-12-07T21:20:30","date_gmt":"2021-12-07T20:20:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.christian-listmann.de\/blog\/?p=726"},"modified":"2023-12-21T15:07:59","modified_gmt":"2023-12-21T14:07:59","slug":"the-productivity-paradigm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.christian-listmann.de\/blog\/2021\/12\/07\/the-productivity-paradigm\/","title":{"rendered":"The Productivity paradigm"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the biggest challenges for larger organizations is the lack of productivity which ties back to organizational structures. If a company wants to create something complete new, e.g. a new business modell, then there must be a phase of idea creation, conceptual work and finally implementation – all of that is surrounded by decision making processes on all stages.<\/p>\n

Start ups typically can move fast because of their lean structure, but maybe often also because of the fact that the decision making is left to a realtively small group of people. Typically there are no lenghty democratic processes to get to a decision, founders and the VC define the direction and the team executes.<\/p>\n

This is often different in larger organizations (for good reasons) but at the same time is introducing a lot of challenges. It can even lead to ridiculous situations where the productivity – so the actual outcome of an initiative is almost zero although there was much effort put in from a pure resource perspective.<\/p>\n

You can illustrate that easily:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

In the above illustration you have a lot of (typically senior) people involved in discussing requirements, forming decisions, discussing these decisions again.<\/p>\n

The lower part of the diagram shows the amount of hours floating into the \u201ereal\u201c creation of the product, so conceptual work, testing, implementation.<\/p>\n

It becomes clear that the ratio of the two components (discussion and decision making vs. creation and implementation) is key to improve productivity.<\/p>\n

This is even more important from a cost perspective, because typically more senior people are involved in the discussion and decision part:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/div>\n

What should larger organisations do?<\/h3>\n

If you want to increase your productivity and improve your speed to market their is only one choice: find the right balance of allocating resource to discussion and decision making vs. creation and implementation.<\/p>\n

You\u2019d probably never get to that state of how a start up can do it, but I am convinced that even larger organizations can change to a diagram like the below. What is required?<\/p>\n