Published on the 19/06/2023 | Written by Heather Wright

Forget the good and focus on the great… 

Kill your darlings.  

That’s the message from Michael Fagan, Village Roadshow chief transformation officer.  

Previously chief technology officer at Kmart, Fagan is blunt: When he joined Kmart he ‘killed’ 75 percent of the projects Kmart had going. At Village Roadshow he did similar.

“Don’t do good things, so you can deliver great things.”   

At Kmart, part of the Wesfarmers group, Fagan says he got to speak to many different businesses. A private equity owned Village he gets exposure to a lot of what those other businesses are doing. And prior to either job he was with consulting firm Accenture, working with a diverse range of businesses. 

Through it all, he’s seen organisations consistently biting off more than they can chew and letting the ‘good’ get in the way of the great. 

“Great strategy is about saying no to good ideas because you are saying yes to great ideas,” says Fagan, who is a speaker at the 2023 CIO Summit New Zealand in August. 

It’s the 80:20 rule: A small amount of work adds an outsized benefit to organisations. The rest are good ideas, but not the great ideas that will shift the dial and, by loading teams up with those ‘good’ ideas, you’re diverting them from more important ‘great’ work. 

“If someone is working on five things and you give them another five things, essentially what you’re saying it that you want those first five things to go slower,” he says. 

“When I say that to people it’s a bit of a lightbulb going off in their head. Of course they don’t want those five things to go slower, but they can see the paradox – they don’t want things to go slower, they want you to do twice as much. And it’s not possible. If I’m busy with the first five things, and you give me five more there is no way I can complete the first five in the same timeframe.” 

Happily, the converse is also true. Take away a couple of those pieces of work and you’re clearly signalling that the remaining three are very important and you want them to go quicker. 

It sounds simplistic, but Fagan is adamant it’s something most, if not all, companies are struggling with, staff shortages be damned. 

“I’m sure every organisation I look at or talk to I could find something your team is working on that you either don’t know about – which is bad – or that isn’t going to deliver any value and is stopping you from delivering the important things.” 

He says several factors are at play, including a lack of prioritisation.  

“Prioritisation is the key to success, particularly in large transformation efforts,” he notes. “But we often get down a big laundry list of things we want done, but don’t effectively prioritise.” 

Not understanding or being clear on where the value is, is an issue, with Parkinson’s law – the observation that work expands to fill the allocated time – and the desire for ‘perfect’ also factors. 

“Done is better than perfect is a motto I use with my teams. Particularly when it comes to technology products you can diagram and try to predict what people will do, but the only real test is to get something into the user’s hands. Let their feedback dictate what you do.” 

There’s also cognitive bias towards adding elements, rather than removing existing components when faced with problems, Fagan notes, referencing work done by Leidy Klotz, professor of engineering at the University of Virginia, and Gabrielle Adams, an associate professor at the University’s School of Leadership and Public Policy. 

They found people systematically overlook making subtractive changes and instead constantly look to add things. 

“We need to give our teams cues – ask them all to come up with one thing we could take away to improve the product, or one thing we could stop doing to make a process go faster, or make it expensive to add things to a project,” Fagan says.  

He cites an example from his time with Kmart, which sold 19 types of kettle. The company sold 150,000 different items. That was reduced to 30,000. Sales went up significantly. 

At Village the menu was overhauled, reducing choices for customers to just the most popular, best products and eliminating ‘fringe’ items. Sales again improved.  

On the tech front, Village also streamlined plans for its online system for Gold Class, focusing on improving food and beverage ordering, while removing a ‘good’ idea, of being able to notify friends via the app of which session you were going to so they could book the same session.  

“More choice is a tax, not a benefit. Giving people more things to choose from is our natural default setting. Every buying team and retailer in the world wants to expand their range. But what customers really want is more confidence in their choices. They want the retailer to do the work. They don’t want to see 19 kettles. They want to see the three best kettles with the best features at the best price.” 

For IT leaders, Fagan says being overt about killing projects is key.  

“Make sure everyone knows this is a good idea, but we’re not going to do it for the next 12 months. Don’t put it on a maybe list or say we’ll think about it later. You have to overtly say no, so it no longer takes up mindshare.” 

He urges IT leaders to frame questions differently, asking their teams how things can be simplified. 

“Instead of asking how can we improve this, or what features are required, say ‘what can we remove’. 

“And make things smaller. Smaller projects at the scoping stage are much more likely to succeed. 

“But prioritisation is by far the most important thing. It should be a constant mantra: Don’t do more, do the most valuable things.” 

He advocates using a ‘forcing’ function. Before sprint planning, do a backlog review. When workshopping, ask everyone for one idea each on something that can be subtracted from a project or product. 

“You have to be absolutely ruthless on what things will make a difference for the business.” 

Working out exactly what things are most important, is of course, the hard part.  

First step is getting a full list of all the work people are doing – something he says often throws up plenty of work others weren’t aware others were doing.  

Fagan’s process then is to assign three things to each piece of work: The business owner, the technology owner and, hardest of all, the value. 

Lots of projects drop out in the first section of finding a business owner, Fagan says. “If we had someone working on something in IT at Kmart and there was no business owner and it wasn’t a compliance issue, then why are we doing it? That was the first tranche to drop out.” 

Less drop out in the second stage.  

And the value piece? 

“That’s the hardest thing: Assigning value to a piece of work. It could be an increase in revenue, reduction in cost or avoidance of complex legal issues. 

“And it’s where the majority of things fell out because they weren’t scoped properly or it was a good idea, but no one really sat down and said ‘do customers really want this?’ ‘Is it really worthwhile?’ Because by working on project A, I’m saying project B is not as important.” 

It needs to be a combined business and IT decision, he stresses. 

“Opening it up and talking in terms of value was how we did it at both Kmart and Village – what’s the value of this, what do we want to deliver first? 

“When you frame it that way both the IT and business are usually remarkably aligned.” 

Removing the ‘good’ projects, doesn’t mean companies can’t experiment with new technologies. 

“We shouldn’t make experiments hard. Experiments should be easy to start, but there must be a reason for an experiment. And by me reducing the 75 percent of unimportant things, you’ve now got time for experimenting with things that might be useful. Prioritising and killing off work actually helps get more important things done and allows time for experimentation. 

“IT teams are very adventurous and they’re smart and would love nothing more than to have six months to play around with blockchain or ChatGPT, which is fine. You could do a little bit every week for six months, but 80 percent of your week must be on delivering your top three priorities,” he says. 

“You have to kill your darling. Don’t do good things, so you can deliver great things.” 

The 2023 CIO Summit New Zealand runs August 15-16, in Auckland. Register here.