As your WalkMe deployment grows, don't make the mistake of overdoing team division of labor. Here's what I mean:
I was reading Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations the other day..
(By the way, how's that for a start to a post?)
And it reminded me that some folks over-apply division of labor from physical work to knowledge work.
If you're not familiar with the classic example Adam Smith cites, here it is briefly:
One person alone can hardly make a single pin per day.
But we MASSIVELY increase output when we break the job down into steps and assign a different person to each:
Pulling the wire
Straightening
Cutting to length
Sharpening the end
Making the pin head
Attaching the head
etc
This underlies assembly lines and pretty much the whole modern economy.
Cool, let's do the same thing with building WalkMe solutions, right?
PLEASE NO!
Here's the faulty logic:
1. Someone in IT controls admin
2. Someone (the boss?) will run the "internal sales" to spread the word to other groups
3. Someone else will do the "solutioning" to figure out what needs to be done. Then of course we write "user stories" so we can hand the work off to....
4. A "builder" who actually clicks the buttons to create the Walk-thrus. At which point we can then have..
5. Someone else on the team QA (of course). And then we have..
6. A "Business Analyst" look at console.walkme.com for the analytics. And in the event this is starting to slow down or run off-track? That's when we'll need to bring in:
7. A "Project Manager" / "Scrum Master" who will keep it all on track.
Ugh. I have never seen this go well.
Here's why.
With a physical assembly line, each step concretely adds value to the physical product and the physical product is getting progressively more complete with each step.
With knowledge work like WalkMe, what we're putting together is MENTAL CONTEXT.
On what URLs is WalkMe configured for this app? How's the UUID Setup? What is this department's process? What app are they using? What are the challenges on the app? Which ones are most pressing? Are those challenges the same for all user segments or only some? How does that app work? What are different ways of solving it? What are the screen-level intricacies of solving it? How and when does this app get updated? ETC.
All of these questions need to come together into a single mental integration of: What should we DO?
The more cooks you have in the kitchen on a single project, the more you're just playing the telephone game.
Yes, WalkMe's Digital Adoption Institute defines a bunch of different "roles" involved with WalkMe. And WalkMe allows that one person can have multiple "roles".
But to be clear: you need to have a single person run a whole DAP project end-to-end.
If you have 3-4 people in your department, that's great, they should each own and run their own work end-to-end.
