From Divided to United - Aligning Technical and Business Teams

@dominicad

From Divided to United – Aligning Technical & Business Teams

@dominicad ddegrandis.com

Dominica DeGrandis

Director, Learning& Development

www.leankit.com

@dominicad

Alignment: a position of agreement/alliance

@dominicad

improving alignment with clarity

Customers pleased?

Work transparent?

Team structure/measures?

Communication effective?

@dominicad

Nashville, TN August 2015

KatieSr. Product Marketing Manager

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

@dominicad

system limits + delayed delivery =

high demand on application impacts architecture andfeatures 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 thepriorities based on customer demand?

feature #1

feature #2

feature #3

@dominicad

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.”

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Not everyone was happymore please• ux enhancements • new features • better integrations• faster loading

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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?

@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

donenext up

work-in-progresstheme

Optimize your workflow – Avoid starting new projects

until done with current project.

@dominicad

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 softwareA3the 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

donein production

@dominicad

Ops Team board Current DIVs

MKT

MKTFIN

UXMKT

MKT

MKT

SLS DEVUXUX

SLS CSS

QAUX

DEVOPS 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 DevCore DevOperations Mobile

Product Development team structure 2015

Tightly coupled

FSGD as a company wide thinking tool

Web2 - RocketWeb1 - GrootPlatform Ops

A3

Mobile

Product Development team structure 2016

Analytics

A3

A3

A3

A3

Automation & Tools

Business Enablement

A3

A3

Loosely coupled

@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?

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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?

@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

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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

@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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhoLuui9gX8

@dominicad

Alignment requires absolute clarity

Customers pleased?

Work transparent?

Team structure/measures?

Communication effective?

@dominicad

For the innovators

Generate ideas to increase transparency

@dominicad

For the doersInvestigate and study customer recommendation levels

Net Promoter Score = % promoters - detractors

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For those with budgetsOffer teams the tools and training they need to do their job well.

@dominicad

For the influencersAcknowledge perceptions - then shift incentives towardtransparency,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

@dominicad

tech stack.net webservers and SQL DB ServersDocker hosts node servicesRedis for caching and volatile storageRabbit MQ for messaging hosted off linuxPuppet for managing infrastructure configuration automationTableau for Analytics

@dominicad

yes - relational data model limits, but does the way the

code consumes the data factor in?

strangler patternin play to tackle

architecture

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metrics on individuals avoided