El Ciclo de Vida de un Proyecto en una Metodología Ágil

Vertical empowerment is essentially concerned with flattening hierarchies. Hierarchies are, by their very nature, concerned with control. To quote Dr Seuss:

Oh, the jobs people work at! Out west, near Hawtch-Hawtch,

There’s a Hawtch-Hawtcher Bee-Watcher. His job is to watch...

is to keep both his eyes on the laz y town bee. A bee that is watched will work harder, you see.

Well... he watched and he watched. But, in spite of his watch, that bee didn’t work any harder. Not mawtch.

So then somebody said, ‘Our old bee watching man

He ought to be watched by another Hawtch-Hawtcher! The thing that we need

is a Bee-Watcher-Watcher!’ WELL... The Bee-Watcher-Watcher

watched the Bee-Watcher. He didn’t watch well. So another Hawtch-Hawtcher

had to come in as a Watch-Watcher-Watcher! And today all the Hawtchers

who live in Hawtch-Hawtch are watching on

Watch-Watcher-Watchering-Watch, Watch-Watching the Watcher Who’s watching that bee. You’re not a Hawtch-Hawtcher. You’re lucky you see.

If you happen to be a corporate employee, I am afraid that you are not quite as lucky as Dr Seuss makes you out to be. Organisations are like this. There are the bees who do the work, and then there are the watchers. A watcher generally does not see his job as making life easier for the bee. Rather, his job is to make life uncomfortable enough for the bee to make him work hard. The miserable implication of this tale is that all of them are living on the honey made by one bee.

At a major bank we have worked with they have a principle called ‘The Four Eye’ by which everything done by the bee is checked. There are people for whom this is their sole job. In insurance companies you have verifiers (whole departments) whose sole job it is to check what capturers (also whole departments) put into the system. Yet a significant percentage of policies are still incorrectly handled!

Who are the bees in an organisation? They are the people who execute the key transformations that typify the enterprise’s contribution to the client. They are the people who physically and actually make or do those things that the customer buys. There are

two kinds of human bee: those who make things and those who sell things.

For example, in a manufacturing operation, the bee would be the operator who runs the machine that produces the goods. In a sales organisation, it would be the sales person or representative who meets the client. In a service organisation, it would be the person who physically services the client. Strictly speaking, everyone else in the organisation is a watcher, an overhead. Unless you are making, selling or doing, you are an overhead.

Watchers see their role as making sure that the bees do what is required of them. This control logic has within it a dynamic of expansion. The more you control, the less control you have, the more you need to control. The demeanour of the watcher to the bee is essentially hostile, malevolent and demanding.

The watcher is not there to help the bee, he is there to get something from him. What we are arguing for is the inversion of the hierarchical triangle. The watcher should understand that his job is not to get something from the bee, but to serve him. It is a giving, not a taking agenda. The first implication of this is that you probably need fewer watchers, since the bee is going to be responsible and accountable for the honey he produces.

This is not a madly seditious thought. The technology of the global village has turned the corporation into a dinosaur bound for extinction. How do you control a virtual workplace? How do you keep tabs on the employee who works from his study? The corporate interlacing web of controls is just not fleet-footed enough to deal with the new information age.

This issue of authority also holds true of leadership. You cannot care for or enable someone if you cannot make a decision about them.9 _{From this point of view, one would want to see a line leader}

having full authority over his or her people regarding: • Leave • Procurement • Special rewards • Overtime payment • Appointments • Promotion

• Discipline • Time management • Transfers • Creativity/new ideas • Cash advances

Horizontal empowerment

Dr Seuss’s Watchers come in two forms. Firstly there are the Hawtch- Hawtch kind. These are people who have direct line authority over the bees. In a manufacturing organisation, this would include the production manager or a production superintendent. In a sales organisation, it would be a sales manager or, possibly an account manager. The second kind are the staff watchers. These are people who, for example, watch the quality of the bee’s honey, or keep themselves occupied with how happy each watcher is in his job. However, in the case of both line and staff watchers, the insistence that they should earn their keep and make a useful contribution to the bee will have a radical impact on how they function. In both cases it amounts to an insistence that the watchers do not arrogate to themselves something that the bees do; and that they do not make decisions about what the bees do, but rather help them to make their own decisions.

If the assumption is that the bees and their immediate bosses should be doing more and more of the things that are being done by staff function, the current role of staff functions requires dramatic reviewing. There are two questions here: what is the role of each particular staff function, and should it have a role at all? We will examine a few examples that are applicable to most organisations.