When Flintstones Don't Work

As you can tell from some of my articles, I am a massive fan of digital projects that start with a Flintstones Pilot. I have used this approach in over 300 projects. There are some situations though, where this approach is ill-suited.

Mission-critical Applications are hard to Pilot even for a Flintstone. If the system we are building is being used to control robotics in the operating theatre, we are obviously not going to be piloting a 10% complete solution! Another example would be a real-time stock trading platform.

I would point out here however, that just because we are working in the context of medical or trading systems, doesn't make every system mission-critical. Quite the contrary. Several of my recent projects were in the space of medical equipment, some of these being surgically implanted. One of the systems we avoided using Flintstones for was the support system used by surgeons whilst implanting the device. This system interacted directly with the device to conduct tests during the surgery. But in contrast to this one use case, the organisation had another 100 business processes that were not mission-critical – for example, the convoluted process of ordering and having the devices delivered. These supporting processes, which make up the vast majority of business processes, are still ideal candidates for the Flintstones approach. What is interesting, is that the culture in these organisations applies the same risk aversion to re-engineering support processes as it does to the ones genuinely requiring this degree of caution. I've seen this hold back organisations like hospitals.

Similarly, in trading, there are a host of supporting business services that are not mission-critical (in the sense that I mean here), like customer onboarding, provisioning and billing.

The second situation where the Flintstone approach does not have widely applicable value is in software companies, like SaaS vendors.

The strength of the Flintstones approach is in solving efficiency bottlenecks in organisations with a reasonable number of humans, say over 100. These are projects, not ongoing initiatives.