‘Division of labour‘ promotes specialisation. In theory, it makes sense. For example, someone will cut code, another resource will test, and someone else will manage the project.
However, ‘Division of labour’ has crippling effects on digital projects!
Here is why:
- Too many cooks in the kitchen: The ‘ Division of Labour’ requires more specialist resources to co-exist and prove their existence.
- Resource overhead: Cooks need to talk and coordinate. As the team size increase, so does the admin cost for managing communications.
- No one is in charge: It is often difficult to find who drives the overall initiative and ensure the information flows through the right stakeholders.
- Promote working is silos culture: This model promotes silo thinking and operational models.
- Lack of understanding of the big picture: As the project team works within silos, only a few are interested in the big picture (project objective).
The result is – too many resources that do not add value to the initiative.
The fact is that this model is out there, and you may need to work with it. The question is how creatively you can transform the team into ‘generic specialists’ that understand the end goal.
