Successful projects don't over specialise

A bit of history

Since the industrial revolution the trend has been towards specialisation. By dividing up the work into distinct repetitive tasks, and making each worker focus on only one, or a small number, it was found that efficiency could be massively increased.

These gains were obtained in two ways. By specialising, each worker learned to do a few things very well, rather than many things less well. And by ensuring there was no need to continually switch between tasks, it was possible to avoid the inefficiency introduced when people are required to change context.

There is no doubting that these changes made possible huge improvements in productivity, albeit at the expense of worker satisfaction.

Applicability of the model

Unfortunately, an obsession with efficiency and repeatability has ensured that this model is now applied to just about anything, including the kinds of work for which it is inherently unsuited.

Activities that cannot be precisely pre-specified are not amenable to increasing specialisation since they need to apply knowledge to solve problems which cannot easily be done in isolation^[1]. Where communication is required the overhead this introduces quickly swamps any productivity gain from specialisation and becomes a bottleneck.

Projects are an excellent example of an activity that sounds as if it should be possible to achieve great efficiencies by breaking it down into simple repetitive tasks carried out by specialists, but this approach fails - often spectacularly - when this approach is taken too seriously.

Finding the balance

Successful project teams reject attempts to rigidly partition tasks in this manner, and instead take a collaborative approach. Although each person has a specialist area, and takes responsibility for producing specific deliverables, there is an understanding that producing them is not the goal, but a means to an end.

Team members are encouraged to look beyond their specific areas to ensure that what they are working on makes sense in the context of what everyone else is working on.

Great project managers naturally understand, and encourage, this kind of cooperation and look for ways to make it happen - whereas poor ones see only unscheduled or unnecessary activity and take action to try and limit these interactions with predictably dire results.

For practical reasons, scaling to larger projects requires the creation of multiple teams, but it is essential not to create artificial boundaries and to encourage the same kind of collaboration across teams.

Building teams of generalists

Where the limitations of increasing specialisation are recognised, there is a shift in thinking towards building teams of generalists. Rather than recruiting for individuals based on a tick-list of highly specialist skills, the goal is to construct smaller teams (to reduce the communication overhead) of individuals with broader skills and experience who have the flexibility to work across multiple areas.

By all means recruit for specialist skills, but make sure you have generalists working across the interfaces if you want to be successful.

[1] People doing this work are called knowledge workers. Since manufacturing and other repetitive activities are now carried out by machines (or in countries where labour is cheap) most “value add” economic activities in the developed world now fall into this category.