>What you're advocating for seems like a SOA (or micro-services) approach?
No, I think SOA and micro-services are technical considerations that have relatively little bearing on division of labour or organisational/project structure. You can statically link a library created by someone you don't even know, or you could have one huge dysfunctional in-house team split up a monolith into fifty different micro-services without creating any new ownership rules at all.
So I think splitting up projects in smaller subj-projects alone is not good enough if all it does is create a deeper organisational hierarchy based on exactly the same command and control principles as before. As you say, it just creates new planning issues on the next level.
We need manageable units of planning, and we need to know when things become too complex for planning and require some principle of self organisation. The difficulty is that self organising systems are not easily steered towards a single goal.
It's interesting that you quote Branson, because the most important feature of a separate company is that it is a unit of economic responsibility and ownership. It usually serves more than one customer, unlike a micro-service that is a fragment of some in-house monolith. And it sets its own goals, mostly independently.
No, I think SOA and micro-services are technical considerations that have relatively little bearing on division of labour or organisational/project structure. You can statically link a library created by someone you don't even know, or you could have one huge dysfunctional in-house team split up a monolith into fifty different micro-services without creating any new ownership rules at all.
So I think splitting up projects in smaller subj-projects alone is not good enough if all it does is create a deeper organisational hierarchy based on exactly the same command and control principles as before. As you say, it just creates new planning issues on the next level.
We need manageable units of planning, and we need to know when things become too complex for planning and require some principle of self organisation. The difficulty is that self organising systems are not easily steered towards a single goal.
It's interesting that you quote Branson, because the most important feature of a separate company is that it is a unit of economic responsibility and ownership. It usually serves more than one customer, unlike a micro-service that is a fragment of some in-house monolith. And it sets its own goals, mostly independently.