The Cellular Business Model

In 2004 we started working with a client who had, from our experience, a totally unique set of circumstances; they wanted to modernise their IT Infrastructure, both software and hardware and they wanted to retrain many of their internal developers to a more modern programming language. In short they realised that their IT Systems were really holding back their business and that newer companies were using more modern platforms, software and tooling to help rapidly grow their companies. From an engagement perspective we could not work out how to estimate or create a contract that would work well, for either party in this situation.

Luckily the two people involved in setting up the project were Steve Garnett and Ian Shimmings – Ian proposed that they use Scrum to run the project and Steve spent a lot of time working out what this meant from both a project management & contractual perspective; these were the very early days of Agile & Scrum and this was one of the first Scrum projects in the UK and it became an early showcase for Scrum – Ken Schwaber even spent time with the team.

As a result of the success of this project an Agile Working Group was formed to help drive adoption and understanding within our own consulting organisation, Scrum for Team System was born and we started engaging with other client on larger and larger Scrum implementations and Steve became one of the first 10 Scrum Practitioners in the world.

Steve spent a lot of time thinking about how to effectively scale Scrum across many different teams – having a Naval background and years of experience being a Project Manager on some large and demanding projects, he had some very interesting perspectives; he has just published his first whitepaper which pulls them all together. It’s called “The Cellular Business Model: How Software Companies Could Learn From Terrorist Organisations” and is available free to download from google docs. The basic premise is that seemingly over night, terrorist cells have created incredibly successful brands, PR, HR and recruit strategies along with a clear vision that a growing number of people believe in and try to make a reality:

An Organisation that maximises return on investment, builds up the world’s most recognisable brand name overnight, creates synergy between PR message and HR recruiting, attracts motivated loyal employees who make the ultimate sacrifice to extend the mission into new markets and keeps expanding despite the world’s most hostile environment is every manager’s dream. One manager turned this dream into a reality: Osama bin Laden.
- Hans van der Weijden

The whitepaper has some fascinating ideas on how you could take some of the patterns from a terrorist organisation and apply them to the modern business:

Mirroring the Cellular Terrorist Organisation, the Cellular Business Model is based on the creation of small, highly autonomous, highly skilled teams supported by a strong network. Where Al Qaeda has the 3 elements of cells composed of Activist Staffers, Boundary Spanners and the Network, so the Cellular Business Model has Business Cells, Pattern Units and a Knowledge Network.

At the heart of every modern methodology, process or movement is a series of tenets, The Cellular Business Model is no exception:

The Tenets of the Cellular Business Model:

Clear vision & objectives
Financial transparency
Direct correlation of employee effort to profit & loss
Transactional cost model for elasticity of demand
Autonomous units of 6-10 people
Seeding & de-coupling
Treasure experience

The whitepaper then goes on to discuss these ideas in relation to Agile, with particular scaling Scrum and seeding information between teams and how as an organisation you can utilise cloud offerings (for example Infrastructure as a Service) to help manage the elasticity of your organisation – allowing you a very valuable way of managing team & company growth.

For more information have a read of Steve’s post announcing the whitepaper.