Straight talking on business, brands, technology and employee engagement.

Your business is under threat. Not just from competition, but from somewhere you may not have thought of - from complexity. All businesses are threatened by complexity and it is an evil that is worse than your most effective competitor.

Unless managed and driven out, complexity creeps up and overcomes you. You’re lean and nimble one day and sluggish and unresponsive the next. We have a constant war on complexity at Asperity and it’s one of the reasons we’ve been able to grow so quickly and so smoothly.

Asperity has grown steadily at around 50 clients per quarter for the last three and a half years. Some people think thats a rapid growth level, we occasionally get asked how we cope - we just think its normal. But “normal” fast growth means we now have 150 staff across seven offices in 5 countries. We have 750+ clients using 8 different products. 2 million users with, it seems sometimes, as many different sets of desires and needs.

Complexity increases with time, unless you manage it down. A natural by-product of work seems to be complexity. I’ve seen businesses get complex without actually growing in size that much, complexity seems to just creep in by a factor of their age. So it requires constant work, constant vigilance to defeat complexity in every part of your business.

There are 4 places that complexity creeps up.

In an online business, complexity develops in 4 key areas. You must defend against it and defeat it in all of them. If you do, you will scale quickly and profitably. Your clients will love your smooth, slick service and your staff will be motivated, engaged and know clearly where they are going.

1. Product
   If you’re in manufacturing, you make new products. Each product improves on the previous one or does a different job, satisfying a different niche in your marketplace. If you keep adding new products without looking at your whole range and trimming and reframing you can end up with an overly complex product line. An overly complex product line requires an overly complex supply chain and an overly complex sales and service channel.
   
   When you’re an online service you do occasionally start again and build a new product. But most of the time you add features and functionality to your existing platform. So rather than starting again you add. If you’re not careful, if you don’t take steps to remove things and take things away as you progress you end up with a product that looks too complex to the user.
   
   Designing by committee is a guaranteed way to get product complexity. If everyone  can bolt on whatever feature or idea they come up with you’re going to get product complexity. And that will turn some users off. Someone needs to be the product owner and have both strength of vision and an understanding of design restraint. They’ll also need the strength of character to get others to see their way because sometimes you need to leave off a feature that 3% of your users would like because adding too much will make your product look too complex for a different 33%.
    
2. Technical
   As a company grows, the development team that builds your product often grows. And as each month goes by they write more code, more modules, create more subsystems. Even if someone is keeping an eye on minimising complexity of the user, the technical complexity behind the scenes can grow and get bigger and bigger.
   
   In software development there are some rules that never change. Everything always takes longer than you think; Version one of a piece of software is never that good; There are always bugs; Something involving a manual process will go wrong; If it should’t happen it almost certainly will so you should code for it.
   
   As your system grows, technical complexity increases in an upward curve. Quickly no single person knows the whole system and soon after that there are parts of the system that no-one understands. When my career at BT started I was, as a naive young programmer, amazed that not a single programmer or tester in my unit had any idea how the debt management system worked - it hadn’t been changed for years and all the knowledge had gone. When it did need changing it took us forever to unpick it and reverse engineer how it had been built.
   
   As technical complexity increases, bugs increase, cost of development increases, likelihood of outages increases. When considering development work you need to be ruthless in your evaluation of “do we really need it”. Ask yourself what the true lifetime cost is of the new back end system you are considering. Is it really worth it?
   
   At Asperity we just avoided building a new and complex rules engine just to avoid sending all of our credit transactions to a third party for anti-fraud verification. The rules engine could have saved us 30% of the external costs of this external checking - but actually when you really looked at it, adding the complexity of another rules engine to build, tweak, improve, maintain would have cost us more than the 30% we would have saved.
    
3. Operational
   This is where your people interact with your systems and customers. Operations are the people who do, whether they run your help desk, your fulfilment operation or your clients services team.
   
   When designing new products and services beware of introducing unnecessary operational complexity. A classic place for this to develop is in the gap between what an IT system does and what it should do. In so many businesses the IT misses the mark and operations fill in. You can see it when operations are dealing with manual workarounds and “fudges” to get a system to do something it wasn’t really designed to do.
   
   Operational complexity is a menace. It causes scaling problems because complex operations need more senior people to run them. Your staffing costs go up and they need more training and more support. People are harder to replace when off and they make more mistakes because their jobs are too complex.
   
   Be alert for operational complexity - look for people doing jobs that should be being done by systems. Look for them doing jobs that don’t need doing and look  for them doing jobs in a more complex or time consuming way than they should.
   
   A couple of years ago, at Asperity we used to sell £10 million of retail gift vouchers every month (now it’s almost all moved to plastic cards and e-vouchers). I remember noticing the laborious process or someone recording endless batch numbers in a huge spreadsheet every time they did a despatch. When I asked why they did this they said “because Finance need it”. When I went to ask Finance what they did with them they said they printed them and filed them for audit. We found out together than we actually no longer needed to do this - the files weren’t being used but none of us had realised. We stopped doing it that day and saved a whole piece of complexity.
    
4. Organisational
   All small organisations start out lean and fit. They make decisions fast and they generally make good decisions because the people with the power are close to the coal face. They have the facts first hand and they act quickly.
   
   As organisations grow they inevitably need to delegate power and responsibility to groups, committees and structures. Levels of hierarchy start and people end up with narrower responsibilities. Some of this is an essential part of growing. Develoved power and team working are good things, great things even. Without them your business can’t grow and it won’t sustain a bigger market share.
   
   But as you grow you will add structures and hierarchies so you also need to keep a close eye on other structures and hierarchies that no longer work or you no longer need. Many structures need to be retired not because they are failures or were bad ideas, but just because they have served their purpose.
   
   If you don’t do this, you’ll keep adding things every year and your organisation will get more and more complex. You’ll find that decisions take too long and are poor as they are made by people who are too far from the facts. You’ll find staff getting disengaged as they are frustrated by what they see as pointless bureaucracy. You’ll find your people making only half an effort as they don’t quite know which way the company is going - they can’t go the extra mile because they don’t know which direction to do the extra mile in!
   
   Organisational complexity is one of the hardest things to minimise because it tends to involve people, and where people exist and have power they naturally protect it. Who would want to give up their position and power if they are afraid of what will happen to them without it.
   
   Defeating organisational complexity requires really great managers who can spot it, who can spot structures, departments and allocations of responsibility that are not really working as well as they could. It requires managers to really want to fix it and make things right and better because its a lot of work and it is sometimes painful. 

Whatever department or organisation you work in make today the start of your renewed war on complexity. Look for processes not adding value, products not pulling their weight, features that you don’t need. Look for organisational situations that aren’t really working. Look for concentrations of power or authority where that power or authority is not effective. Look for work being done in the wrong place, where it is less effective and could be consolidated. Look for dysfunction and look for ways to improve on it. It is all of our jobs to make things better after all. 

Whether you’re in marketing, sales, product or service you must contribute to your organisations war on complexity. If you don’t, you’ll leave the door wide open for your leaner, uncomplicated competitors to steal your lunch, and all of our jobs.