Integrated Product Teams - Digital Organisation

IPTs Are Not as New As You Think

I first came across the Integrated Product Team concept in the most traditional of environments, the Defence Industry. Their adoption was one of the major hallmarks of an attempt to revolutionise UK MoD procurement in recent times.

Benefits of IPTs

The best aspect of the IPTs, was not just that they were multi-disciplinary and therefore great at surfacing all the dimensions of a problem, but they also helped break down the barriers of distrust that exist in the Defence Industry. This is highly significant because, the industry has traditionally had a huge gulf separating the MoD and its contractors, due to the insecurity that is encouraged by the Treasury in its pursuit for what it thinks is Value For Money. The Treasury usually takes the stance that the costs are too high and the public sector is being ripped off by rapacious private sector companies, encouraging a general sense of insecurity in the public servants (in the MoD) who are dealing with them. This then leads to relationship problems and behaviours which inevitably stretch out acquisition projects, impact the quality of what is acquired and often results in increased costs. It is a situation which Demming (one of the grandfathers of the Total Quality Movement) would have predicted. As he advocated focusing on quality (driven by customer needs) and continuous improvement, with the philosophy that improved costs and value would follow.

Design Thinking And Agile

The concept of Design Thinking (see for example the UK Design Council's Double Diamond Model for product development) also relies on a similar multi-functional teams to get at what is the real customer problem to address, and then what is the most appropriate product design option for delivering it, supported by iterative design and prototyping to develop a right quality product.

So it is no surprise that the Agile Movement, building on traditional Rapid Application Development techniques of user-centric prototyping, has gradually moved to a Product Team based approach, particularly when the market driven influences of digital companies such as Amazon and Google are taken into account.

IPT Case Study

So I was really interested when SLOAN research into the adoption of an IPT based approach at a major bank was published recently. See: What to Expect From Agile. It has some great practical insights into some of the considerations to take into account if your organisation is thinking of adopting an agile or digital business model.