Salami tactics

Salami tactics is a popular term for slicing up a problem into multiple small pieces in order to eventually reach a larger goal. I was both using this and subjected to it before even knowing about it. It was brought to my attention years ago, when I discussed a project with an architect who smilingly exclaimed “Ah, salami tactics!”

The term is more frequently used as a strategy in business or politics as the archetype of methods for progressing in small steps and avoiding drawing attention to unpopular end goals, or causing competitor awareness. For more information read the wikipedia article. The salami tactics can be considered dubious from the perspective that it consciously tries to achieve a greater goal that is kept secret by gradually gaining acceptance and progress through actions disguised or described as something else.

For enterprise projects where internal transparency is great and tolerance for competing initiatives is culturally acceptable this can in practice be indistinguishable from agile approaches. First you perform a small amount of work and evaluate the benefits of it, then you continue with another small piece of work until you either can no longer deliver value with the activity or until you have depleted the entire relevant problem space.

A real world example of this is when vendors continuously try to expand by offering you additional pieces of cheap services only to later heavily increase the prices once they are established enough to be difficult to remove or replace. Another example might be how a project can overtake another by offering similar functionality and piece by piece take over as the new solution for something an existing solution or a different project was already planned to do.

In defense of the salami tactic there is an additional prerequisite besides secrecy, it requires skillful execution in order to overtake the existing competitor. In politics it can be viewed as well deserved if a party can attract voters by gradually adjusting its politics to convince them to vote for them. Similarly if a new project can develop software quickly and cheaply enough to attract users it must have some qualities that are valuable. Cutting a problem in independent slices and evaluating each one by one before trying to make more general conclusions can be beneficial. This is frequently done in scientific work where individual research reports verify or falsify individual well defined hypotheses.

No matter how you think about salami tactics and whether or not it is a relevant strategy for you to apply in the environment you are operating in, it’s a must to be able to recognize it. If you don’t detect it, you are very likely to find yourself in a bad deal or poor situation, even if you at every minor step of the way think you made the right decision.