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Alignment through documentation, status reports, and formal presentations is usually not alignment
There’s a story of a technology team inside a large automaker where 200 people were working on a substantial, new incentive program for dealers. The output of the team’s work would have a big impact on outcomes: better tracking of activity, better alignment of effort to opportunity, more sales. There was nothing special about this team, exactly: It contained all the normal capabilities that you’d expect from a scaled unit, like infrastructure services, information security, and business-aligned teams.
What’s also unremarkable is that they hadn’t delivered anything of value in five years.
You can imagine what the meetings were like between this team and the rest of the business.
The quarterly updates featured glossy slide decks filled with technical jargon and complex architecture diagrams, while business stakeholders sat stone-faced, mentally calculating the millions spent with nothing tangible to show. Each meeting ended with vague promises about “upcoming milestones” that never materialized, while dealers continued using their decade-old systems.
This situation was fixed by applying many of the patterns in this book, but it’s a perfect illustration of the failures of a document- and meeting-driven approach. This approach is about representing work rather than properly demonstrating it, leading to misalignment between those doing the work and those supporting or funding it.