Organisations think at the pace of their product life cycle | Working Principles

I have worked with many different organisations, mostly businesses, in many different sectors.

In that time, I have noticed this general rule: businesses think at the pace of their product life cycle, in everything.

Where this applies to me is the knowledge that there isn’t a pace at which organisations think about their IT, organisation think at their pace a pace that is set by their product life cycle.

I first noticed this when I switched projects between two organisations in two completely different sectors. The first organisation was a utility engineering organisation where the product life cycles could be measured in the decades, the second an advertising and marketing organisation where they were launching products all the time and campaigns might only last a few days. One was purposeful and methodical in its adoption of IT and consumption of change, some would say, slow. The other was all about action with quick fire decisions made every day, and the worst thing you could do was not act.

I’ve since observed different organisations in different arenas and found this rule to be generally true (with some exceptions of course).

Manufacturing organisations where the life cycle of the product is 20+ years think at a similar pace to financial services organisations that focus on long life cycle products like pensions.

Consumer insurance companies can be launching new products all the time and think at a similar pace to a consumer technology organisation.

Deep in the back office of these organisation you have the corporate IT team, which itself has a desired life cycle and a desired pace. There is some flexibility in that pace, but there are huge external forces defining the minimum pace. Security compliance demands a rate of patching and updates. Technology vendors demand a pace of upgrades to retain supportability, and profitability. The currency of skills also plays a significant part.

The person stuck in the middle of these mismatched paces is the IT manager who needs to think at two paces. They are a bit like a drummer trying to make music while playing one tempo in their left hand and another one in their right.

The current transformation around AI is, again, highlighting this dilemma.

I am sure there are IT managers in long life cycle organisations who are head down avoiding the bright young things in their own team who want to transform their company by adding AI here or by sprinkling an agent there. Meanwhile, in these more methodical organisations, the IT manager is trying to work out how to get spare parts for the 1980s manufacturing systems that keep the organisation solvent. Or they are trying to work out how much longer they will have the skills available to maintain the pensions application last updated in 1999. Over in the faster-paced organisation the IT manager is trying to work out how they get all of those bright young things to talk to each other and stop the costs ballooning.

This IT manager is the same one who thought they had managed to ride out the same pressures from everyone wanting them to move at the pace of the cloud.

The life cycle correlation is often strongest in organisations where the IT department report to the VP for Finance, so perhaps it’s Finance that sets the pace?

(It’s also worth noting that both the fast-paced and more slow-paced organisations both have a problem with technical debt. One struggles to make decisions fast enough to keep up, the other struggles to give attention to decommissioning things.)

Personally, the lesson here is one of expectation. I set my expectations on pace by the life cycle of the customer product. Expecting a slow-moving, methodical organisation to make decisions fast is a road to frustration. Expecting the fast-paced organisations to consider their decisions leads to a different frustration. Sometimes I am wonderfully surprised, I’d rather be surprised than frustrated.

Header Image: We are in snowdrop season as the first signs of spring start to show. These are on the grounds of a local historic house which is now owned by the local community.