From Divided to United – Aligning Technical & Business Teams

@dominicad ddegrandis.com

@dominicad

Dominica DeGrandis

Director, Learning & Development

www.leankit.com

Alignment: a position of agreement/alliance

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improving alignment with clarity

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Customers pleased?

Work transparent?

Team structure/measures?

Communication effective?

Nashville, TN August 2015

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Katie Sr. Product Marketing Manager

What do you do when you are unable to do what you were hired to do?

system limits + delayed delivery =

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high demand on application impacts architecture

and features not delivered as expected, results in sad panda

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a move closer to the core changes the game

Customers pleased?

Work transparent?

Team structure & measures ok?

Communication effective?

@dominicad

Customers determine business goals

After innovation of a new tool, what are the priorities based on customer demand?

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capacity limits provoked priority convo

collective agreement by leadership reached after energetic discussion ✔ prioritize top 3 features

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large customer affirms good experience

“you were a huge part of moving > 90% of our projects from waterfall to agile.”  

Not everyone was happy

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more please •  ux enhancements •  new features •  better integrations •  faster loading  

tech stack

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.net webservers and SQL DB Servers Docker hosts node services Redis for caching and volatile storage Rabbit MQ for messaging hosted off linux Puppet for managing infrastructure configuration automation Tableau for Analytics

yes - relational data model limits, but

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does the way the code consumes

the data factor in?

strangler pattern in play to tackle

architecture

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internal customers determine biz goals

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marketing coordination cost is high

Will product feature be released in the timeframe

Marketing team expects?

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the need for change was self-evident

Become more predictable Allow Sales & Marketing to influence the roadmap

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Ops team sacrifices go unoticed

Business exec investigates

new technology

promising zero impact on tech

teams, but guess what happens?  

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Let’s talk about IT like it’s part of the business

 Apologies only go so far. need actions to improve the mindset

Customers pleased?

Work transparent?

Team structure & measures ok?

Communication effective?

@dominicad

transparency is the necessary factor

done  next  up  

work-­‐in-­‐progress  theme  

Optimize your workflow – avoid starting new work

until done with current work  

All team boards roll up to the roadmap

Each team has a team board where work is broken down into smaller chunks.

roadmap team board

From theme to working software A3 the most valuable thing that fits within a sweep (≤ 5 weeks)

DIV: Deployed, Iterative, Value (≤ 5 days)

Task

DIV

Task Task

Task

A3

DIV

Task

DIV

Task Task

Task

Sequence of DIVs add up to A3 value

DIVs deployed to prod

done  in  produc4on  

@dominicad

Ops Team board Current DIVs

MKT MKT FIN

UX MKT

MKT MKT

SLS DEV UX UX

SLS CSS

QA UX

DEV OPS SLS

SLS

1

2

3

4

6

5

DEV

DEV

OPS

How the A3 is populated

Cost of Delay?

Impact to users? What benefits who?

What does feature do?

Sustainability impact? fine print /misc?

What? So what? What now?

Demo DIV – Each squad has 5 min to demo their DIV*  

*DIV – Deployable Iterative Value    

Customers pleased?

Work transparent?

Team structure & measures ok?

Communication effective?

@dominicad

team organization & measures

Web Dev Core Dev Operations Mobile

Product Development team structure 2015

Tightly coupled

FSGD as a company wide thinking tool

Web2 - Rocket

Web1 - Groot

Platform Ops

A3

Mobile

Product Development team structure 2016

Analytics

A3

A3

A3

A3

Automation & Tools

Business Enablement

A3

A3

Loosely coupled

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metrics on individuals avoided

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conversation on number of

deployments metric

•  What does it mean to deploy to prod? •  concerns with this measurement? •  What was learned during experiment? •  What counts? •  What doesn’t count?

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Vanity metric? Does metric pass “so what?" test? Does it: 1) Matter to my customer? 2) Help me make a decision?  

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Number of deployments is easy to game?

Not so easy when the qualification of a deployment is that it must be related to a DIV*, on the roadmap.

DIV – Deployable Iterative Value

Team metric morphed to dept metric

Deployments this Sweep

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Cycle Time metrics

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Prod issues impacting cycle time on feature work

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“Be approximately right instead of exactly wrong” ~John Tukey

Customers pleased?

Work transparent?

Team structure & measures ok?

Communication effective?

@dominicad

team communication protocols

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Demo DIV feedback from Biz teams

* DIV - deployed iterative value

“I just want to learn about the things I can sell.

“I don’t want to listen to the technical stuff.”

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Forum for discussing A3’s

A3 reviews

A3 Wall •  all invited •  context provided

•  user perspective

•  why’s addressed •  goals explained

•  concerns heard

•  opinions aired •  feedback

welcome  

@dominicad http://leancoffee.org

Forum for retrospectives

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Forum for raising & solving problems

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What makes a great team?

Google two year study results: Who is on a team matters less than

how team members interact.

The willingness to talk about errors is by far the most important factor for a team

Amy Edmonson TED talk: 

h5ps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhoLuui9gX8  

Alignment requires absolute clarity

@dominicad

Customers pleased?

Work transparent?

Team structure/measures?

Communication effective?

@dominicad

For the innovators

Generate ideas to

increase transparency

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For the doers

Investigate and study customer recommendation levels

Net Promoter Score = % promoters - detractors

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For those with budgets

Offer teams the tools and training they need to do their job well.

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For the influencers

Acknowledge perceptions - then shift incentives toward transparency, safe measures, & listening.

Wired article - The science of why no one agrees on the color of this dress

@dominicad www.ddegrandis.com Dominica DeGrandis www.leankit.com

Questions

@dominicad                    www.ddegrandis.com                      Dominica  DeGrandis                    www.leankit.com