Resources

Some cafés grow by taking on staff while keeping the same coffee machine. Some pizzerias have their whole crew queuing in front of an oven that keeps its own time. And in our software and digital product industry, there are projects that watch their planned dates recede as they add people in the hope of doing precisely the opposite.

There is nothing new in any of this. In the classic The Mythical Man-Month, back in 1975, Fred Brooks was already writing about these problems out of his experience at IBM, exposing in the title itself every weakness of traditional project management.

Adding manpower to a late software project, makes it later.

The Mythical Man-Month, Fred Brooks (1975)

The mechanism is simple and still uncomfortable. Every new person has to be trained, and the person doing the training is precisely the one who was already productive. Communication channels, meanwhile, grow far faster than headcount: you are not adding capacity, you are adding coordination. Brooks was not describing a management problem that more discipline could fix, but the nature of work that does not divide the way digging a trench divides.

Without ever having absorbed this, the pace of the industry has kept putting more challenges on the table. To those first problems, understood within a frame of resources and efficiency, we have had to add new ones concerning uncertainty and adaptation. Agility is no longer only a question of speed; it wants to undo the assumption that there is a relay race.

The software industry is not the only one wrestling with these problems. Lawrence Levy, in his lovely book To Pixar and Beyond, tells us how solutions were invented to deal with the novelty they had on their hands. It was a novelty for him personally, trained in law and with long experience in finance and management. It was a novelty for the industry, where there were not enough examples to lean on. And it was a novelty for Pixar itself, building the train and the tracks at the same time. Without blueprints.

In Levy's account we find the same ingredients we know well in digital product work: uncertainty, weakly defined problems and innovation. And one refreshing anomaly: he attacks the problems by leaning on the specific elements of Pixar itself, rather than on methodological discourse, which in our industry has managed to cancel out critical thinking.

There is a very illustrative example of this, when Levy explains the headaches involved in solving the problem of stalled resources. Once an agreement for the first film looks likely, they have to work out how they will produce more within a set time. It is part of the contract. In the traditional film industry, seen through resource management, each film was a project that released resources (costs) the moment it concluded. But at Pixar the entire staff were still there; from the traditional viewpoint this could only be read as stalled resources, consuming and producing nothing.

Levy himself had to make an effort to change his lens. They began by trying to minimise that fixed cost — setting up tasks with reusable outputs (textures, backgrounds and so on) — and ended up convinced that nothing made sense without the story. Stories began in John Lasseter's team, and he liked to repeat:

Special effects entertain you for ten minutes. A good story keeps you glued to your seat.

With Lasseter, then, they began to see how they could start story cycles earlier; how they could get the first sensations without going through a full production cycle; how they could gradually involve the different teams so they could live those stories and make them their own. And it worked.

The software and digital product industry finds that change of lens hard. It finds it hard to move away from the lens of resources. It finds it hard to move away from the lens of the assembly line. It finds it hard to move away from the lens of technology for technology's sake; even when design emerged as an alternative, it has ended up as one more discipline rather than the mechanism for supplying meaning.

So any small step we can take towards story as the starting point, and towards the participation of every team in it — because anyone can live a story without their own area holding the key — will help us make better products. And fail rather less.

I have kept pulling on that idea of story as working material rather than presentation ornament in "Your product is a kind of film".