Pioneers, Settlers and Town Planners

A concept from Simon Wardley[1].

A business/industry will have many activities at various stages in Wardley's business activity lifecycle. You need to handle each stage differently: from more agile development to six sigma as you go.

Definitions

Pioneers

Handle the "innovation" activities. Highly chaotic and unknown. The R&D teams.

Settlers

Handle the emerging/custom built activities. Wardley says they're largely invisible.

Town Planners

Deal with well established activities. The productization and commodity sections. Shared services.

Organization around the terms

Wardly suggests instead of organizing around domain, do so around the lifecycle. When a product/project is ready to move from one stage to another it's handed off and the team moves on.

I disagree, though (and so does Matt Edgar[2]): an R&D team can structure code in such a way that it's not scalable, but who cares: they're on to the next project!

References


  1. Pioneers, Town Planners and those missing Settlers. - Simon Wardley ↩︎

  2. What do Wardley maps really map? A settler writes ↩︎