What is the power of systems integration done right?
Scott Meadows: Delivering any major infrastructure programme is a complex business that requires a well-considered systems integration strategy. Strategy should focus clear actions on crucial problems that connect operations to aims1 supporting and driving the journey to attain the end goals, on time and within budget. Sounds simple, but this is hard to achieve, as clear actions are rooted in interconnected systems of activities.
Systems Integration should look at each programme as an integrated whole, linking together the elements by understanding the relationships between people, processes and ideas.
Of course, this necessity makes those 36 easy steps seem so appealing.
What 36 easy steps?
Scott Meadows: When typing into a search engine is your programme in trouble, hits are likely to give you the following: specific key indicators to check for, provision of a specific health status in the form of a coloured rating— Red, Amber, Green—on a dashboard to help identify how much trouble your programme is in, and after diagnosis prescribe remedies to cure your programme ills in, say, 36 easy steps, using a stage gate programme management method where progress is controlled by achieving a milestone or stage before proceeding to the next phase. Sounds logical, doesn’t it? But there is significant evidence to suggest that too often these steps do not create the most effective path to deliver a complex programme.
An effective systems integration strategy requires a diagnosis, a guiding policy and coherent action. Systems integration can identify troubles with your ‘in-flight’ programme if you have not already applied SI from the beginning—which is of course the best scenario; it can determine what needs to be measured and what doesn’t and prescribe effective actions to move forward. However, these are not simple rules to abide by; there is no specific set of rules for a programme as each programme is different and choices will vary. Systems integration requires making strong choices and also helps to shape those choices. Inevitably, choices may lead to ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ within the programme—as entrenched ideas are challenged, new ideas and processes are adopted.
We must also recognise that placing rigid technical analysis within a changing political environment is problematic. Solving programme problems is just hard and made even harder by governmental, organisational and people-centred issues, which are unique to each programme.
Can you expand upon people-centred issues?
Scott Meadows: Systems integration requires technical analysis, but it also requires an environment that encourages people to think differently to solve problems.
The delivery culture has evolved over time to dictate that the worst thing you can do is admit that you have a problem you cannot handle. So, it becomes a technical problem, as responsibility and accountability for technical problems lies elsewhere. As programmes get into more trouble, the number of technical problems increases, but still you don’t have a problem; manual workarounds or interventions provide operational solutions to technical problems.
However, operational solutions are delivered by people, so your problem just got much bigger; more people are involved and need aligning to solve your problem.
Except, as it is now a technical problem with operational solutions, you are convinced there is no real problem for you to solve. It’s not your problem.
As you don’t have a problem, only technical problems that need operational solutions, it is highly likely that you and everyone on your team have transitioned into fire-fighting mode. This is comforting but addictive and extremely risky, as everyone is likely to be ploughing on with operational solutions, at, say, 767 miles per hour.
In the rush to find operational solutions to technical problems, no one is thinking about the best way to coordinate activity to achieve programme outcomes and solve real problems; no one is challenging technical problems and operational solutions to see if they are correct—as something needs to be done in the programme and the need for action is now.
What happens next?
Scott Meadows: If no one is thinking about how best to define and solve a problem, the top-level strategic view that provides integrated coordination over the programme can be lost, as are the programme’s chances of meaningful success. This can lead to programme cost overruns, late delivery and shortfalls in benefits realisation.