There is a lack of coherence between management processes, workflows, systems, and ways of working for teams working on projects or products. 

Beyond Budgeting is a way forward, and I spoke about that at the 2025 London Beyond Budgeting conference. Executives in attendance understood their role in supporting the improvement of coherence.

I love a one-liner from Steve Dennning that I'll paraphrase here: When there is institutional BS, it is naïve to be transparent. You might call institutional BS muda or organizational inefficiencies, but it doesn't pack the same punch.

In this article, I'd like to illustrate the nonsense that delivery teams must deal with until institutional BS is removed. Executives and board members have a role in facilitating the removal of institutional BS.

Let’s say:

• I am a product developer in a Scrum Team
• I am a generalising specialist. My specialism is software development, and my generalisms include UX, testing, and documentation.
• I report to a software development manager who is more inclined to reward me for top-notch software development than any of my generalisms, so my generalisms are likely to stay as generalisms and not become specialisms.
• I also need my software to comply with enterprise architecture, information security and risk, and data privacy and protection.
• The software development manager, who also handles my pay and performance reviews, wants me to be fully utilized. So, I am assigned to three projects.
• Each project has a project manager who wants me to move from team to team as needs arise.
• My colleagues, also fully utilized, have no time to collaborate as they are constantly pulled into meetings.
• The focus is on delivery. But at some point, I need to go home every day.
• I feel down as I’m not getting the time it takes to do a professional job.
• Change and continuous improvement are what happen when everything else is done. Everything else is never done.
• Product Coaches are rightly encouraging me to run experiments. But product managers and project managers have already committed time to arbitrary deadlines.

Here is a visual with some suggestions. What ideas do you have?