Chris ConwayChris Conway
Chief Architect, Quantiv

I come from Nottingham. So, if anyone had to guess at two words I might use to sum up the game of football (bearing in mind I’m not that knowledgeable about the sport), they might choose ‘Brian’ and ‘Clough’, ‘Nottingham’ and ‘Forest’, or even ‘Notts’ and ‘County’.

But in fact, it’s none of these. The answer is actually ‘Total’ and ‘Football’ (even if the last word is a bit of a cheat given the question).

I was sadly reminded of this by the death of Johan Neeskens, sometimes unfairly known as ‘the other Johan’. In truth, together with Rinus Michels and Johan Cruyff, Neeskens was an equal member of the holy trinity that came to symbolise what was then a radical approach to the game.

Johan Neeskens and the Total Football approach

I’m not (quite) old enough to remember their Ajax team in its prime, and they belonged to an era when recordings of games were less common, so I’ve not seen that much footage of the team playing. However, Neeskens’ death still brought back memories of reading and hearing about the games.

Neeskens, Cruyff, Rinus, and the rest of that Ajax team, came to epitomise the Total Football approach. The tactical strategy they developed involves having a team of multi-position players, creating space for them to play, and letting the game develop around them at its own pace.

I’d love to say my interest came from a deep understanding of how they played, an appreciation of just how big a change they made, and the beauty that resulted. But while some of that is true, the reality is a little more down to earth.

What intrigued me was the similarity between the Total Football philosophy and my work in system design and development.

FC Barcelona op Schiphol, van links naar rechts Neesken Michels en Cruijff op S, Bestanddeelnr 928-7164
Photo: Bert Verhoeff for Anefo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Giving people space to adapt

Of course, individuals will always have specific strengths and there’s definitely a need for experts. But the best teams often consist of people who are happy* in multiple roles, and who are allowed to adapt to changing conditions as a project develops.

Seen from this angle, the job of a good IT project manager/product owner is to combine the right individuals and then create the space for their team to operate.

Here, it’s important not to dictate to a team what should be done, but to instead ensure they understand the problem to be solved and to remove barriers to them finding a solution in their own way.

Equally, at Quantiv we build products based on our experiences of the way we work, on the assumption that if those products help us, they’ll help others too.

We’ve also found the combination of cross-skills and trust to be far more effective than single-responsibility and onerous controls. And this approach is also apparent in our products.

NumberWorks and NumberCloud

By concentrating on identifying operational metrics, we designed our NumberWorks method to ensure just enough analysis is performed to allow a team to understand a problem. So, sufficient detail that ensures subtleties of operation aren’t missed, but not so much that critical handover points are hidden.

And we created our NumberCloud service to support systems built this way. It allows information to be exchanged easily and without loss of both detail and fidelity, and without imposing significant overheads or requirements on source or consumer.

So, if this approach can be summed up as ‘find good people, give them a framework, and trust them’**, then perhaps our products can help with the framework.

And while we can’t claim to have invented or even refined the original concept (I’m no Neeskens, Cruyff or Michels), I like to think I can still learn from what they developed, even if it was in another field entirely (no pun intended).

*Not just in a ‘technically capable’ sense, but in an emotional/social one too.

**Grady Booch said something along those lines, “Good people with a good process will outperform good people with no process every time.” (Object Solutions, 1996)

Talk to us about IT tactics

To learn more about how our approach could benefit your organisation (or to share your thoughts on football strategy!), contact our team on 0161 927 4000 or email: info@quantiv.com