Rise of Hyperspecialists and Agile Megageneralists

 

An article in the July 2011 issue of the Harvard Business Review, discuss the idea that we are embarking to an "Age of Hyperspecialization".  Here's a video interview with one of the authors Tom Malone:

In a nutshell, due to communication technologies and increasing reliance on knowledge based work, we are entering into an age where "much of the prosperity our world now enjoys comes from the productivity gains of dividing work into ever smaller tasks performed by ever more specialized workers... We are entering an era of hyperspecialization—a very different, and not yet widely understood, world of work".

You can read the article for the details, but the result of this article was highly polarized comments from readers on the HBR site as to the dehumanizing and repetitive drudgery of micro segmented tasks done by dispersed teams all around the world, with the added insult of having to complete with these individuals on price.

The authors do acknowledge the dangers of this trend and the abuses that could result.  I can't help but to mostly agree that this type of work will become more prevalent as the technologies that allow hyper-connectivity get better and better.  As the authors acknowledge, the best way to survive and thrive in this new work world will be to sell your hyperspeciaized skills as a portfolio of skills and to diversify your areas of expertise so that you are better equiped to adjust to market conditions.

The biggest impacts and implications of this movement would be the project managers who are tasked with tracking and putting together and delivering all these micro tasks into a workable, integrated solution.

This will force project managers to master a new set of skills (Some of these discussed in the article/video with additions and focus on PM): 

1. Rethink scope and requirements design
2. Divide work into assignable micro tasks (a WBS on steroids!)
3. Recruit and assign specialized workers to perform them
4. Have a hyper-connected, social media like communication plan
5. Control for acceptable quality
6. Integrating the many pieces into a whole solution

With our increasing need for adaptability and agility, this will require an agile mega-generalist project manager or Super-ScrumMaster.  This person will have to manage globally dispersed, self-organizing teams (they would have to be self organizing as it would be impossible to track and understand all those hyper-specialized tasks!), manage and maintain real-time, twitter like status updates and meetings throughout global time zones, then ensure all those micro pieces get put back together into a workable deliverable.  Iterations would have to be micro time boxed sprints (events and changes in this situation could be in the seconds).

If this scenario sounds unreal and maybe even comical, consider how much our world has changed in just the last decade in terms of the explosion of information and communication options brought about by technology and the accelerated changes that will take place in the coming years and the scenario is not all that unrealistic.

My feeling though is people who can truly be the agile mega-generalist project managers as outlined above, will be the leaders of this age.