Chaos vs Control: How Modern Teams Decide When to Add Governance
 

The textbook example of successful start-ups is often viewed as a small, scrappy team that moves quickly and breaks things. The benefits these ingenious teams can harness are undoubtedly the ability to take action rapidly and not wait for decisions to go through countless layers of approval.

However, at what point do innovative start-ups get too large and complex to thrive without some level of governance? There can be concerns that adding more management that essential choices can be needlessly delayed, slowing down innovation. In practice, finding a happy medium between total chaos and full top-down control is likely to achieve the best results for teams on the up.

A research paper found that the vast majority of software development processes are deployed using a mix of frameworks. “Based on 732 data points collected through an international survey, we study the software development process use in practice,” read the summary of the report.

“Our results show that 76.8% of the companies implement hybrid methods. Our findings show that companies that combine planned improvement programs with process evolution can increase their process’ suitability by up to 5%,” it continued.

When products, workloads and corporate environments expand, governance can actually help decisions to be made with the right context and remove duplicated work, when implemented correctly. The most effective businesses that reach scale want to keep the shared standards and clarity from the early days of founding, at the same time as laying the right groundwork for even more sustainable growth.

Scaling Exposes the Limits of Pure Agility

In the 17th State of Agile Report, the challenges of keeping different frameworks as the company size expands are clear. According to the report, smaller firms say they found Agile to be a powerful productivity and organisational framework, but larger firms are less happy with the impact of Agile.

“Those in small companies are more likely than those in medium and large ones to say it is working well for them (52% vs. 39% & 43%),” reads the report. “42% of respondents report their organisations use a hybrid model that includes Agile, DevOps, or other choices. 49% of larger organisations are more likely to use a hybrid model, while 45% of medium-sized companies are doing so.”

It’s no easy skill to create a structure that ensures creativity and pace are maintained, while recognising the changing form of the business. Simply adopting bureaucratic processes from larger companies is unlikely to work for scaling start-ups, with a bespoke approach offering a far higher likelihood of success.

By starting small, in areas like creating clear naming standards and definitions, alongside a decision log and a “How We Work” guide can slowly establish governance without adding friction.