"There's a process model that overlays the evolution of any work. Every process has a gestation or invention period, a prolonged deployment period, and an optimization period. All these tasks have to happen. Manufacturing has all three. Advertising has all three. Magazines have all three. People invent new magazines. Other people put them out in the market, and then others optimize them.
But at too many companies, all the resources are getting stuck in mission-critical context. They think they've lost their inventors. They have not. They've lost their deployers. Or rather, they haven't lost them—they're stuck on mission-critical context. But they need to shift to the next generation of core.
Meanwhile, optimizers are key to getting the work out of the hands of the deployers stuck in the deployment process, down to where it can eventually be outsourced. That frees the deployers to come back to core and begin deploying the next round of invention.
Who are the optimization people? They are all the Six Sigma monks. Six Sigma people shift roles all the time, going from group to group to group, bringing their quality-control capability with them. Deployers are program managers; when they finish one program they go do another program. I think human beings tend to gravitate toward one of these three zones.
Companies need to identify their employees' relative interests and passions and skills at doing invention, deployment and optimization. Then they need to detach investment from the task and reinvest it in the skill—to shift deployment resources to core to take the next round of invention and deploy it." -Geoffrey Moore