We spend a lot of time talking about our delivery team mix and structure, we put time into reviewing their progress looking for room to improve and we scrutinize their backlog and metrics. But what about the other team. The one regularly forgotten. In most places the team that doesn’t practice what they preach.
The leadership team.
In this session we look at the function of IT leadership and how it can benefit from the processes and approaches we strive to achieve in our delivery teams.
22. Action plan
1. Find a buddy from my peers - Form a team
2. Plan your work at the start of the week aligned to your purpose
23. Action plan
1. Find a buddy from my peers - Form a team
2. Plan your work at the start of the week aligned to your purpose
3. Start to collect your data - Visibility
24. Action plan
1. Find a buddy from my peers - Form a team
2. Plan your work at the start of the week aligned to your purpose
3. Start to collect your data - Visibility
4. Review it each day, add the unplanned work and inspect
25. Action plan
1. Find a buddy from my peers - Form a team
2. Plan your work at the start of the week aligned to your purpose
3. Start to collect your data - Visibility
4. Review it each day, add the unplanned work and inspect
5. Review what we got done on Friday - Retro
26. Action plan
1. Find a buddy from my peers - Form a team
2. Plan your work at the start of the week aligned to your purpose
3. Start to collect your data - Visibility
4. Review it each day, add the unplanned work and inspect
5. Review what we got done on Friday - Retro
6. Learn from your data to plan next week
27. Action plan
1. Find a buddy from my peers - Form a team
2. Plan your work at the start of the week aligned to your purpose
3. Start to collect your data - Visibility
4. Review it each day, add the unplanned work and inspect
5. Review what we got done on Friday - Retro
6. Learn from your data to plan next week
7. Socialise this approach and its purpose with your team, your peers and especially
your manager. Visualise it.
28. Are you a leadership group
or a leadership team?
Johnny Sammon johnny.sammon@cevo.com.au
Steve Mactaggart @stevemac
LastConf - 2018
Editor's Notes
Experimenting with a role play
Please give us feedback
What roles we are playing today
Set the scene - Hallway at LastConf after Johnny talk
JS what was it in my presso that resonated?
Steve is not feeling productive
Q. What are you supposed to be doing?
Mostly my job is
to help the engineers get their work done
There doesn’t seem like a single decision
or action that I am not involved in.
I’m currently recruiting staff,
trying to develop our standards,
Mentor the team on better practice
Uplifting our on-boarding practice
Etc,
And thats what I’d like to be doing,
what I’m actually doing feels like fire fighting,
I’m constantly brought into technical debates in the teams,
Dragged into operational incidents,
That’s a lot of stuff
And it sounds like you’re lacking clarity on your role
How do you plan your day?
People at my desk, slack email firefighting
That sounds really reactive to me, is that an efficient way to get work done?
Well no that’s why I wanted to talk to you I suppose
Do you plan together with your peers, your manager?
Do you find this valuable?
Have you raised this with the team? Do they see value?
You worked in delivery teams before right?
Identified waste
Focus on value for everyone
Focus on the outcome, not output
Is there a better way to achieve same outcomes, you use slack right?
Shake up meeting
From what I’m hearing, you’re not a leadership team you’re a leadership group.
Let’s go back and think about good delivery teams
They define and communicate their purpose
Clarity on what they need to achieve
Clarity on what they should not work on
Hold each other accountable to their agreed ways of working
They work together on a shared backlog
They always make time to make sure this is prioritised to work on the most important things
They know when they’ve delivered the value they needed to
---
They’re pretty simple and common activities good teams do right?
Are you actually a team
We can’t do that stuff, our work is too different
Is there anything that’s similar, you all work with the delivery teams right?
Practices in delivery teams
How’s it going?
Not really getting traction
Are you peers getting traction?
I actually don’t know
It sounds like it’s making life very confusing for the delivery team
when the leadership are not aligned
I can see that now, but I don’t know where to start
Well let’s prioritise, what’s your biggest problem?
Very reactive, no time to do planned work
Delivery Teams first understand their purpose.
Understand what their most important work is.
Make a plan with that work
They make dedicated time to prioritise backlog
They use WIP limits to improve flow of work
Make it obvious that they’re working on the things of highest value
Do you think you could start there?
- Lots of interruptions come up that are unplanned
DevOps prod incidents? How do they get planned?
Reserved capacity
How much of your work is reactive?
I dunno.
If they don’t have data, you’d ask them to get some
Then provide the telemetry so you can inspect
What data is there on this work?
Do you think you can start tracking your time and what you’re working on?
Focus first on getting the data
Inspect after small batches
Planned/unplanned
Understand if it’s even the highest value work
Plan for next week with more realism
What will really get done, Try hard to commit to being realistic
If you’re being realistic you’re going to need to say no to some things……..
So start to visualise your work
Then socialise this with your customers
Your teams, Your peers, Especially your manager
Will this help you become a leadership team?
You need a buddy.
So Steve, can you see this helping you?
Yep - Let me recap
Find a buddy from my peers - Form a team
Keep each other accountable
Support each other
Plan your work at the start of the week aligned to your purpose
Get your starting point of work that you know about
Start to collect your data - Visibility
Make it visible
Physical probably better to start with so everyone can see it
Review it each day, add the unplanned work and inspect
Standup
Keep it up to date
Review what we got done on Friday - Retro
Make the time to seek continuous improvements
Was the work valuable
Learn from your data to plan next week
Be real about what can be accomplished at a sustainable pace
Steve - I think that’s it
Johnny - 1 more thing
Socialise this approach and its purpose with your team, your peers and especially your manager. Visualise it.
Let all customers of your time know how you’re working
End our role play Steve