Operations vs. Innovation? The Old Divide Is Breaking Down

Operations is operations. Change is change. It is a neat distinction on an organisation chart. In practice, I am not sure it holds anymore.

That was the argument behind a short Project Management Mythbusters conversation with Al Zeitoun. Al went further. He asked whether we are entering an “Age of Value”, with more organisational attention shifting towards innovation, growth and changing the business.

My reaction was that treating operations and change as separate worlds is becoming harder to sustain. You cannot have operations sitting over here and change sitting over there. They have to be joined together. Customers change. Technology changes. The environment changes. Changing the business increasingly has to become part of running it.

The next generation may find this whole debate strange

One of Al’s most provocative points was about the next generation. He is hopeful that people growing up with experimentation, digital tools and constant change will find a project mindset more natural: focus on the outcome, try something, learn and adapt.

That reminded me of Anara Asylbekova and Little Project Manager, which she co-authored with Timur Asylbekov. Here was a project-management book literally teaching children to think in projects.

Maybe Al is right. Perhaps the next generation will find our distinction between “the business” and “change” increasingly artificial.

Technology has changed what is practical

Technology gives me another reason to question the old divide.

My father was a project planner on the Polaris submarine programme in the early 1960s. Critical path analysis meant slide rules and enormous paper plans stretching across the room. That was cutting-edge planning at the time. It was also slow, physical and difficult to change.

Today, software can help us explore different portfolio choices and recalculate as assumptions change. In the episode I use TransparentChoice to make that contrast concrete.

But faster analysis is only part of the answer. Better technology does not help much if operations and change are still managed as separate worlds. Al keeps coming back to mindset and organisational capability. I keep coming back to how quickly technology now lets us respond. Both have to move together.

So, are we really entering an Age of Value?

Maybe.

Al ends the conversation by asking people to tell us what they are actually seeing. Where does this shift get stuck? Is it technology? Culture? Mindset? Is the hard part making a different way of working normal across the organisation?

I like that ending. Eight minutes is enough to pose the question, not settle it.

But it does leave us with a challenge: if change is becoming part of everyday business, why are so many organisations still set up as though running the business and changing it happen in separate worlds?

If that question resonates, Al and I go much deeper into the culture, leadership and ownership side in How to Drive Transformative Change with Portfolio Management.

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