Taking the tiger by the tail Nat Pryce @natpryce natpryce.com Julie Camosseto @juliecamosseto

Wicked problems "A wicked problem is a social or cultural problem that is difficult or impossible to solve for as many as four reasons: incomplete or contradictory knowledge, the number of people and opinions involved, the large economic burden, and the interconnected nature of these problems with other problems." Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving by Jon Kolko

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Funding deals Funding bodies, individual institutions or consortia usually cover the publishing and subscription costs. They strike deals with publishers to cover the costs in bulk: ● Better author experience ● Simpler administration ● Predictable cash flow ● Better reporting to funders

Springer Nature was formed by merger

Springer Nature wants to make "cross-entity" deals Funders and Springer Nature want to make deals that cover all content of all the merged companies, not each one individually. But our systems and business processes: ● are not integrated ● are old and hard to change So a programme began to create an integrated system for payment and financial reporting

For two years, the programme made little progress

The whole programme landed (back) in our laps

Postmortem: where were the hold-ups?

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We started to plan the programme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stakeholder_analysis

NASA: "a team of undomesticated and uninhibited technical specialists, selected for their experience, energy, and imagination" We formed a Tiger Team

We established a Situation Room

We used Event Storming to see the big picture https://www.eventstorming.com/

People were not busy all the time

We transitioned to implementing the solution

We worked with Conway's Law We: ● Changed the team structures to match the required architecture ● Merged teams in different continents ● Invested in tools and training to assist distributed collaboration "Organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations." Conway, Melvin E. How do Committees Invent?, Datamation, 14 (5): 28–31, 1968

We focused on getting IT off the critical path "Organise your stuff into two piles: stuff that needs to be done and stuff that improves the stuff that needs to be done. ... Do you need to estimate the stuff that needs to be done? No! It all needs to be done. ... Do you need to estimate the stuff that improves the stuff that needs to be done? No! Focus on the stuff that needs to be done." http://slap.pm

We used the Mikado Method to plan & track progress http://mikadomethod.info/

We abstracted the Mikado Method in reports to the board

We met the deadline... and got some new ones!

We now have a way forwards...

Reflection Your current organisation, process & architecture may not fit the problem They may be stopping you reaching or even conceiving a solution But the people have the solution: bring them together and let magic happen "Never let a good crisis go to waste!"