Excerpt from A-CHIEVE! (July 2011)

When we first read Harvard Business Review’s “The Big Idea: The Age of Hyperspecialization”, the graphic that came to mind was a knowledge worker assembly line – very similar to a manufacturing industry’s production assembly line, but with workers contributing a very narrow slice of intellectual capital (or narrowly defined skill set) based on each person’s area of expertise. For those of you who may not be familiar with the term ‘hyperspecialization’, it is defined as extreme specialization. What exactly does that mean? 

If we were to dissect an employee’s job description, we could typically break down each role into component parts. As an example, let’s dissect the Project Manager’s (PM) role since many organizations are familiar with this job function. Traditionally PMs are chartered with delivering a discrete body of work while attaining timeline, budget, advertised outcome and customer satisfaction targets. Generally speaking, while many PMs excel in building work breakdown structures, assigning activities and tasks to the right subject matter experts and managing their teams to task completion, PMs are also expected, by default, to: 

• Create highly collaborative and engaging team environments
• Manage customer, key stakeholder, executive management, team member and vendor expectations
• Navigate through ambiguity, political landscapes and various other organizational complexities
• Arbitrate team conflicts
• Hold team members accountable to time and cost estimates plus quality outputs
• Develop then execute project management deliverables requiring capabilities such as the following:   

 …all of which are not ‘typical’ PM wheelhouse strengths. To further exacerbate the situation, the PM is additionally responsible for creating the project’s Scope Definition, which is the single most crucial project deliverable because it positions the project for out-of-the-gate success or failure. In today’s tumultuous business climate, unlike years gone by, scope development requires that the PM consider all of the before-mentioned moving parts from a systems thinking/cause and effective relationships perspective plus vet out and wrap in two oftentimes overlooked success criteria: 1) solution usage; and 2) anticipated business value. Whew! Not only is that a lot to take on, but many of the required talents aren’t prevalent within the PM ranks. We know this based on data. Depending on whose survey results you embrace (Forrester Research, Gartner Research, Carnegie Mellon, Standish Group, and the list goes on and on), projects continue to fail at a rate of 30% to 80%, year-over-year, with the 10+ year pattern continuing to fall at the feet of the Project Managers. As Benjamin Franklin would say “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Obviously, the wide swath of expectations that we have layered onto the Project Manager’s role isn’t working and is therefore, ill-conceived as evidenced by the results. It’s time to take a step back and reassess.

With the advent of hyperspecialization, what if organizations were to recalibrate the Project Manager’s role, breaking the work currently performed by one person into more specialized components fulfilled by several people (percents of people, either employees or consultants, whichever approach is more feasible given your particular organization’s talent pool plus construct), with the end goal of leading to organizational improvements in project outcomes – specific to increased quality, speed and value and decreased costs? As an example, for medium to large-scale projects, particularly those projects of strategic importance, what if organizations were to engage a part-time:

• Systems thinking expert
• Business results expert
• Finance/cost accounting expert
• Communications expert
• Human behavior expert  

…as project team members, consolidating ‘experts’ where feasible, meaning, you could find systems thinking, business results and finance/cost accounting expertise all rolled into one credible resource, and even then, only draw upon the resource on a percentage basis. Could the benefits of implementing such an approach offset the costs? If your answer is intuitively “yes”, because you know that your organization is struggling in the project management delivery arena, how would you sell your organization on the hyperspecialization approach? In the case of the Project Manager, it shouldn’t be too difficult to:

Taking hyperspecialization to yet the next level, consider Boeing’s hyperspecialization-on-steroids example, where the world’s largest aerospace company engaged 379 ‘major’ suppliers to build the 787 Dreamliner. While initially hailed as the epitome of subcontracting, the end result proved otherwise, when the parts failed to come together as seamlessly as envisioned, and delays ensued. Other organizations have successfully plunged into the world of hyperspecialization – as both service providers and customers – and are reaping the benefits. TopCoder, a community of 300K freelance developers representing 200 countries, touts Acatel-Lucent, FaceBook, LendingTree and PayPal as customers who tee up ‘competitions’ (identify complex business problems requiring innovative, technology-based, expert solutions), where TopCoder developers openly compete with their colleagues to create the ‘ultimate solution’ in order to win the contest. It’s not unusual for customers to reward competition winners with six or even seven figure payments. Beyond the monetary incentives, the winning developers advance in TopCoder’s highly publicized ‘top contributors’ ratings plus continue to select only those competitions that align with their passions plus areas of specialization. But like the Boeing example, quality control and seamless integration are key when operating in a world of power brokering at the task level. 

For those organizations who want to reap the faster, better, smarter, cheaper benefits of knowledge worker hyperspecialization, the best place to start is a three-pronged approach:

• Select a job that is a competitive advantage enabler; 
• Map both the primary and secondary tasks associated with that particular job; and
• Identify which tasks could be performed with higher quality, at a greater speed, or at a lower cost by a specialized resource(s).

You may find, like the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, that their most highly skilled knowledge workers were spending 20%-40% of their day on data entry, web research, basic spreadsheet analysis and PowerPoint development tasks. Pfizer offloaded these tasks to several specialty firms to optimize their knowledge workers’ capabilities. Or, using the previous Project Manager example, you could find that engaging specialty resources to perform the work that falls outside of the typical PM’s core capabilities, will result in less project failures and increased business value.

Check out this article plus more in A-CHIEVE! (July 2011).