This week I’m taking a break from our 5 Top Challenges for Digital Leaders series to have a wee rant!

In my role I help transformation leaders, CEOs and boards with their digital transformation journeys. And there’s a lot to be done.

It was busy before COVID and now the pace of change required to keep up with both customer demand and organisational need is massive.

So why is it then that so many transformation leaders are happily endorsing and often leading teams for tasks that can only be described as “busy-work”?

Busy-work is that excruciatingly detailed and exhaustive analysis of a particular part of your transformation or business strategy. It might be customer journey road-mapping, persona creation, business architecture plans, technical architecture reviews, project value management methodologies. Whatever the nature of the work it involves numerous stakeholder workshops, collectively takes hundreds of hours of time and produces a detailed and extensive document that will be shared widely with stakeholders. But does it help you deliver more for your customers? That’s doubtful.

Busy-work is procrastination for an organisation. And large organisations love to do it.

Now don’t get me wrong, all of the examples of busy-work listed above can themselves be useful exercises and can provide valuable insights to your transformation work. But ONLY if expectations of inputs and outputs are carefully managed.

It’s when they become an outcome in their own right that we know we’re in trouble:

 “We didn’t deliver any customer features this month but we did complete the work on our 27 detailed customer personas”.
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“Our project isn’t going to deliver on time but good news we’ve process-mapped every single process in our organisation, even the ones that have nothing to do with our project”.

You may argue that the collaboration benefits of getting a bunch of internal stakeholders to work together on a task outweighs the opportunity cost of them spending their time elsewhere. But busy-work can be problematic for other reasons:
 

1. It sends a message that your company values process over delivery. This is especially a problem for agile shops that should be demonstrating a virtuous circle of delivery, feedback and iteration.
2. It’s a way for organisations to slow down transformational change, (deliberately or not). When change from your transformation programme starts to make your wider organisation feel uncomfortable then you can guarantee that you will be asked for pieces of work that are not critical to the agreed objectives of your programme (like channel strategies or value management methodologies) *.
3.  Worryingly, busy-work can also be a control mechanism that limits the demand from business teams to their technology colleagues (“sorry that change you’ve asked for has been prioritised under our agreed business architecture plan for 2025”).

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(* If your busy-work has come about from influencers outside your project then not doing it is not usually an option. See below for ideas to contain the effort.)

And what can you do about it?
 
Here’s some warning signs that your “important strategic task” is actually busy-work:

• There’s no clear connection between the outcome of your task and the performance of your transformation project. (If it isn’t going to help your project be faster, more effective, higher quality or more efficient then why are you doing it?). This is especially true if your project is being asked to solve issues that are clearly outside the scope of the project.

 

• The task is focused on detail and/or edge cases. Here’s my views about mapping every customer journey in your organisation (don’t do it). I would also argue that there are very few organisations in NZ that genuinely need more than five customer personas and that your benefits tracking really only needs your main revenue and cost drivers. Pedantic attention to detail can easily tip a useful piece of analysis into busy-work.

 

• Delivery of your “important strategic task” is getting in the way of delivery for customers and staff, and your team are complaining about it.

 
If your busy-work alarm is ringing then there are things you can do as a leader to contain the problem.

Ideally kill that busy-work outright. But if you can’t do that then review the scope, time-frame and output and tie it back closely to your transformation project. “Let’s limit the scope of the persona work to the customer needs specifically for this major new feature. We need to be ready with this information when discovery starts in three weeks”.

And limit the number of people involved to a small diverse team. Conventional wisdom is that teams of 5-9 provide maximum effectiveness.

Above all, remember that process is not a substitute for quality of ideas or talent!

Best of luck and see you next week!

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