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
@dominicad
improving alignment with clarity
@dominicad
Customers pleased?
Work transparent?
Team structure/measures?
Communication effective?
Nashville, TN August 2015
@dominicad
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
@dominicad
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?
@dominicad
capacity limits provoked priority convo
collective agreement by leadership reached after energetic discussion ✔ prioritize top 3 features
@dominicad
large customer affirms good experience
“you were a huge part of moving > 90% of our projects from waterfall to agile.”
Not everyone was happy
@dominicad
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?
@dominicad
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?
@dominicad
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
@dominicad
metrics on individuals avoided
@dominicad
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?
@dominicad
Vanity metric? Does metric pass “so what?" test? Does it: 1) Matter to my customer? 2) Help me make a decision?
@dominicad
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
@dominicad
Cycle Time metrics
@dominicad
Prod issues impacting cycle time on feature work
@dominicad
“Be approximately right instead of exactly wrong” ~John Tukey
Customers pleased?
Work transparent?
Team structure & measures ok?
Communication effective?
@dominicad
team communication protocols
@dominicad
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.”
@dominicad
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
@dominicad
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
@dominicad
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.
@dominicad
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
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