Tom Breur
21 January 2018
Zombies
are horror figures that are neither dead nor alive. “Zombie projects” are those
that are not valuable enough to merit assigning sufficient resources to, but
then are placed in a kind of “maintenance mode.” This typically means people
have grown attached to investments already made, but are not willing to assign
resources to it because they are needed elsewhere. The reason for that is
telling: some other effort is deemed more valuable or pressing.
Zombie projects are a horrible drain on valuable resources,
as this
HBR
article explains. In many cases they are actually largely hidden, or
invisible, since they aren’t supposed to usurp any resources, or at least as
few as possible. So “nobody” is working on them! In a perverse way, zombie projects
fascinate me from a corporate planning perspective, when I think about cycle
time, WIP and Kanban principles.
An enterprise is a set of value creating processes, or in Kanban
this would be referred to as "a set of interconnected [value creating]
services." Over time, as business opportunities wax and wane, the “holding
costs” for WIP fluctuate. The economic reason for that is because the “optimal”
WIP is a function of the value of output – which goes up and down as business
circumstances change. This gives rise to emerging and disappearing bottlenecks.
When resources are urgently needed somewhere because the economic value of
reducing cycle time for one of the value creating processes has gone up (a
business opportunity or threat), they need to be pulled from elsewhere. That is
where projects are “put on hold”… I have often experienced there are few things
as permanent as a temporary quick fix – that is where zombies are created.
For all businesses
except
maybe manufacturing processes of tangible goods, bottlenecks are
always in flux. This
may explain why the
Theory of
Constraints (ToC) appears to have gotten such a strong hold in
manufacturing, but not so much outside of it. In software development, for
instance, bottlenecks are rarely as fixed and stable as they are in
manufacturing. They come and go, pop up and vanish. Cross training enables
swarming to dissolve any bottlenecks as they arise. Assuming you are working in
iterations rather than a flow based process, within any given iteration, the beginning
will be dominated by business analysis tasks. Towards the end, most people in
the team will be devoted to testing the iteration feature.
As
Don
Reinertsen pointed out in his (fabulous!) book “
The
Principles of Product Development Flow” (2009), when you picture an
organization as a set of interlocking processes, there are many ways (pp. 150-157)
you can cope with emerging queues (=accumulation of WIP). But whichever way you
turn it, when you squelch resources form a less economically valuable process
(a lower priority), it still maintains it’s original WIP, contributing to
overall holding costs. You can either cancel the effort (with the
option of later starting anew), or it
will consume resources that economy has shown are a suboptimal use of resources!
Shedding earlier efforts is always difficult, although all managers are
familiar with the concept of
sunk
costs. The problem is rarely financial, almost always “political”: someone
losing face, difficult conversations with reallocated staff, etc.
An organization that seeks to maximize shareholder value has
little choice but to allocate resources where the payoff is highest. If output
value has changed, you work to reduce WIP and drive down cycle time (see e.g.
Little’s Law, explained
for data warehousing
here)
for the most valuable products in your portfolio. When business opportunities
change, you continue to do so, forever maximizing (economic) throughput by shifting
resources.
When the value of a workstream has dropped below economic
par, it’s a horrible half measure to transition that project to maintenance
mode. It’s a disservice to shareholders, and an outright insult to people you
assign to that work. Weak, ineffective leadership. Companies exist for business
reasons, and senior leadership needs to take responsibility for “following
value.” As
Willy Sutton
famously said in response to the question: “Willy, why do you keep robbing
banks?!?” “Because
that’s where the money
is!” Likewise, senior leaders sometimes “have” to take painful measures, like
cutting losses (“
Killing Zombies”),
to be effective.
If you ever happen to get assigned to a “zombie project”: run for the door! Or as a friend of mine
used to joke: “Oh! I just remembered I need to go home to floss the cat.” J
