| Mostly agree, but this > aging manager suffering from Peter Principle, partly it’s the fear of negative pushback from senior leadership is not typically the reason, in my experience. I've seen a lack of full comprehension on the part of the team pushing the innovation as to the actual benefit and cost of the innovation to all the affected teams. And as a result, the lack of a plan to address those issues... I've seen a lot of incomplete innovations, where the benefit is real and useful, but the plan leaves various concerns of different teams unaddressed -- no doubt due to the innovation team being unaware. Strangely, the innovation team often wants to push forward anyway, which is not good since the plan is basically unworkable with critical issues unresolved (I can tell they kind of think the issues aren't critical but only because they don't understand them -- leading with ignorance when the processes and products actually have to work at the end is always doomed to fail.) The most common way plans are incomplete that I've seen is when they don't account for the schedule. The plan will take X time away from other work to implement, but the schedule for delivery of that other work isn't moved back X, nor are there other compensating measures. That's an unworkable plan, and any half-decent manager will push back on it. (Schedule impact is usually a tough one... at least at larger places, in my experience, the high-level delivery schedule is negotiated at a high level, and it hard to change for political reasons. That means time for any innovation plans has to be included from the start. Yet slack in any schedule tends to get gobbled up at the team level or below, addressing their concerns -- who doesn't have tons of technical debt they are dying to resolve? There's a way to handle this, but it has to be planned for and done at a high level, and done correctly. The fruits of any innovation team that doesn't have this are gong to be minimal.) |