1. Meetings to "align"
2. Cracking the whip.
That's it. That's all they have. They have poor insight into creating team chemistry, culture, focused work environments, mentorship, long-term planning, QA processes, sourcing efficiency feedback, etc. - all those things that are crucial to boosting productivity and creating supersonic teams. The people that really know their stuff and can work miracles are people that have been in the trenches for 20 years, regardless of profession. And they hands-down make the best managers.
That's my honest 2 cents, it's a bit of disgruntlement from working in large enterprise environments with engineering and technology.
I would argue that this is the problem unto itself. The idea that a manager can work invisibly "behind the scenes" to create these conditions is the squarest negative stereotype of the MBA - that they are clerical, remote, number-crunchers who don't have an intuitive human grasp of the unique challenges their teams face, because they lack experience where the rubber meets of the road of their organization. I think this Boeing case conforms to this stereotype, as does my personal experience.
But I don't believe they're a scourge, or anything. I quantified it with "a lot" but not "most" ;)
We're a compound of self-organized teams of Product Owners and Engineers.
Our traditional organization takes 10 weeks for feature X, we need at most 2 weeks, averaging at 1 week (10%).
We have the luxury of delivering the exact same product (as a green-field variant of our classical product as a SaaS solution), so it´s quite comparable in terms of scope.
The main difference is there is no hidden agenda of would-be managers, nothing between the customer than a PO who knows what he is doing (i.e. is doing regular A/B tests, customer interviews, involving the dev team as deep as possible to understand customer requirements).
We were awarded a nation-wide award for digital transformation.
No middle-managers, no HR.
You can reach me @ hackernews@disposable-email.ml for additional details if you like.
Summarizing: we got rid of all non-relevant management ballast and are able to deliver features at a pace of around 10x of a traditionally managed line.
Overtime: around 0% with a tendency to dip below 0%.
Addendum: the POs are 70% MBAs, but they are good (i.e. they learnt to deliver as opposed to manage)
My experience is that these lean approaches work well for something low on the severity scale, like an SaaS solution, but can more easily falter with complex safety-critical systems that blend multiple domains (e.g., mechanical, software, etc.) I think sometimes people interpret the process rigor that gets added to critical design to management bloat.
Much of the trouble at Boeing has been explained by various sources as having started with the replacement of managing engineers at a company known to be founded and run by engineers with executive types after the "reverse takeover"[1] by McDonnel. This seems to be as close as one could get to an A/B test and the results are exactly what I would have expected, as technical constraints are relaxed to boost margins and shrink/meet deadlines. Though I admit this is a small sample size and could be confirmation bias on my part.
>Do you seriously think that someone with an engineering degree would for some reason say actually we don't need to meet deadlines, I won't pressure you to finish these planes on time
No, but I would expect a manager with an engineering degree to be more likely to understand the absurdity and danger of building passenger aircraft with missing tools and incorrect instructions, red flag such issues, and push back deadlines to resolve them.
1. theatlantic.com/amp/article/602188/
+That's not strictly true, people can have different personalities at work vs family for example.
You don't need to be an engineer to do any of these things. You really just need to ask questions to people who understand the details and listen to them. A good manager will know the right people to ask these questions to and follow their advice. Good management is not an easy skill however.
Now what if the salesman was human. This human has a feelings and a personality and other things going on in its life. Now what if you have to manage 100 of these salesmen, all with different culture, religion, education and age... and when you put these salesmen together in teams, they all have a different group dynamic. Sometimes you'll get a salesman who will even try to sabotage you. Plus you need to motivate, train, and lead all of them. For some reason technical people think this problem is so easy. (I'm not an MBA by the way)
That could be why he led with "I wonder..."