Responsibility, Got Some?Thomas M. Cagley Jr.
Communities are built on a web of relationships and specifically identified responsibilities. A web that creates hierarchies within the community, boundaries around the community and generates peer pressure that enforces behavior. Blurring the specificity of responsibility changes the dynamics of a community and I would suggest that the impacts of these changes are not good. The problem is that not everyone in the community wishes to accept responsibility and that living and working within a community of requires responsibility. Committees can be a means of dispersing the spotlight of responsibility. Committees by their nature require agreement and consensus which can be used to distribute the responsibility for decisions. Distribution of responsibility can lead to defused accountability. What happens when managers use committees as a tool to defuse responsibility for process improvement initiatives? Most process improvement initiatives are guided by steering and governance committees. Committees like steering committees or EPG are supposed to act as a nexus to focus the voice of the customer. Customers include management, developers and anyone else that uses or contributes to work within your community (see my essay on customers). When the evil alter ego of these decision-making bodies rears it is ugly head, these committees become tools to blunt and defuse the responsibility for change. At this point process improvement projects become troubled. Committees can make sense as a gravity well to focus the requirement for change, this is not just opinion. Frameworks such as the CMMI use committees in various shades to provide governance and leadership however when leadership is replaced by consensus driven management, committees become a tool to deflect responsibility. This deflection is a disservice both to the organization as well as to the individuals that see change as the path toward the future rather than an end to an era. Does using committees as a tool to diffuse of responsibility affect process improvement initiatives more than other projects? One of the three requirements for change is the existence of a trigger to change immediately. Triggers are effective only when responsibility can be attached. Therefore change can only happen effectively when responsibilities are part of the trigger. Are process improvement programs affected more dramatically when responsibilities are diffused? Simple logic suggests that the answer is yes because process improvement programs are focused on changing your larger community. I suggest loudly that you assign and focus responsibility or suffer the consequences.
