How do I manage Brave New Work

How do I, as a manager of teams, get to do the right things, be less operational, and let my people do the work they are good at. How can I help my people in bringing quality products to my customers and how can I help them do a better job. As a manager we need to look at strategic goals and how to achieve those. You cannot do this alone. You need the people in your teams to help you build this overview. Actually to build this overview in what you and they think the future should look like. We don’t need the situation as it is now, because it is already there in practice. We need a situation of how it should look in the longer term, say a year or two years from now. 

Get vision, mission and goals straight

Ask your manager what the long term vision is, when they don’t know, help them build it. We need to know what the company or department drives. What they think the world should look like in two years, what their position in the market is. A company vision, mission and goals can be translated into a vision for the department. Which can be translated into a vision for a production line. When there is a vision, the team can find out which product should be in the store. Combined with the BCG-matrix they can then choose what products to focus on to be able to offer the right products in the shop.

List your products

Let’s imagine we have a grocery store specialised in greens. There are many products in that store that we offer to our customers. Some sell fast, some sell slow. And depending on our customers' wishes we remove or add vegetables to or from our store.

Each crate in the store has only one product, like broccoli, oranges and carrots. In order to know what we are selling we take a look in the store. We see the crates of goods and we can see what sells good and what doesn’t. 

The first step in an organisational transformation is to get a grasp of the products we are selling. We are going to make a list of all the products we are offering to our end customers. We don’t sell half oranges, we don’t sell semi-finished products. Only the products that our customers buy from us are on that list. Products might be services in this case as well.

Find out who your customers are

Next thing we do is to find out who our customers are. We need to find the target audience and define them in a way we can work with them. For this case we are going to create personas. These are fictive characters that represent the entire customer base for one product. So we create a persona for carrots and we create another persona for broccoli. These personas have distinct characteristics. And have different needs. Someone who is buying broccoli doesn’t necessarily need carrots; they have different goals for the product they buy.

Map the products

Off all the products in the shop we can create a BCG-matrix. In this matrix we can see which products are hot and sell well. We can also see which products are not sold very well and have a small customer base. Carrots are always a popular vegetable and can be considered a cash-cow. It will generate money no matter what. But some vegetables like salsify don’t sell well. They have a low market share and don’t have any growth potential as an independent product, these are called dogs and we might be better off in removing those products from our offerings. The other option is to innovate and pivot.

You might find new products that you need to discover the market for, rising stars, like multi coloured carrots or tomatoes. You don’t know if they will make money but you like to experiment with them and they have a big growth potential.

Get the processes chartered

After we know what products we sell we need to find out how we come to the end product. For vegetables there is a field to plow, fertiliser to put in, seeds to be sown, crops to be harvested, sorted and put in crates, transport to the shop, putting it all on display and selling it. Now this process can be done for any product. This exercise is called value stream mapping and takes in account all the work that is done, the failures that occur and the time that is spent.

Get a grip on dependencies

One of the biggest problems in creating products is that you are always dependent on other people, processes and some form of technology. We need parts only when we need them, not sooner (then we have dead money in the form of inventory) and not later (then we slow down the process). We need our team to understand the complete picture and share knowledge so all the stations can be worked upon when there is a holiday or someone falls ill. And we need the organisation and all the processes to support the goal we want to achieve.

We need to find out all the dependencies we have on the process we use to create a product. There are technical dependencies, like machines and maintenance. There are dependencies on other departments which deliver parts for our product. There are dependencies on knowledge within and outside the team. Find all those dependencies and add them to the drawing we are making. Draw arrows to the parts of the process they influence.

Put it all to practise

Start with finding out what the company drives, why it exists. Formulate the vision, mission and strategic goals for the next two years. Then reformulate with some people on your teams what that means for your product lines. You can make the goals smaller in this exercise, formulate the goal for over two years and break them up into smaller goals of three months each. It is important to do this with the people in the teams because you want them to own the vision and changes.

Next up is to define the products that match those goals, this can be done with product line managers or with some team members. First you make a list of all the products they are making, then you make the list smaller by taking out what is not actually in the shop. Then you plot the products in the matrix to form a picture of what is important and what is not.

For all the important products, the ones you will still be selling over two years you are going to create a value stream map with the team responsible for creating that product. You do this with the team because you want them involved. When they are involved they will commit to the changes as well. As a matter of fact, only their opinion counts, yours is irrelevant. You are here to facilitate the process and to come up with products that everybody likes to buy and build. This might mean that your pet project is killed, we call that collateral damage.

A VSM is simple for starters. Only the process is mapped from beginning to end. Then we are going to add on the mapping. We are going to add times it takes for each step in the process, we are going to add inventory stacks, we are going to measure defects. Defects are results of processes that are of insufficient quality. Nobody likes broken things, so we measure how much is broken and toss the defect in the bin (and preferably recycle when possible).

Improve

Since we mapped all the things we need to create quality products and we create a picture of the future it is now our task to improve. We are going to facilitate the team and the rest of the organisation to improve. We do this by working from right to left if we look at the VSM. We always start with the user experience. With our customers. For instance we take a look at what they need, how many of our products and what features of the product they use. We are going to improve on their needs. We are going to lower inventory based on their needs and try to deliver just in time (JIT). We will also put this JIT trick to work with our dependencies.

At least weekly we will go over our grand master plan with our teams to find what we can improve. Perhaps waiting time can be lowered. Perhaps we need to have more people able to work more stations and need some kind of knowledge sharing or transfer. Perhaps we need to go and talk to our suppliers to deliver smaller batches of parts more often.

With our managers we need to discuss what prevents our teams from reaching maximum performance. We need to discuss the impediments we face. They need to facilitate improvement, like we do. Operational concerns should come from the teams, strategic decisions should come from management. People should do what they are good at and they are perfectly capable of mentioning what holds them back as long as there is a safe environment to speak up. As a manager you need to create that safe environment, involve people so they own the product they make. Facilitate learning through reflection and regular intervals. Never tell people what they need to do, only show them the goals and the way to achieve that.

If you need help, just give me call. And as always, all feedback is welcome.

This is what it means to be transparent

One of the pillars in Scrum is transparency. But what does it mean and what should we do to be transparent. 

Transparency is about showing the work we do, to ourselves, to our peers and to our stakeholders. By being transparent, people around us can see what we do and help improve our performance. They can help inspect and perhaps notice things that we are unaware of. We might be too deep in our work, because of our expertise, to take a step back and oversee our work. People from the sidelines can share their vision and help us to see what we do and where we are going. They can be our extra pair of eyes and spot improvement opportunities. 

Besides improving they can also see what we do and therefor don't have bother us or the team with status reports; because they can see for themselves what we do and how we work.

Show work
We are transparent in what we do when we show the work we do. All the work we do. There are no hidden jobs, everything is on our work overview. When we use a tool to select work and plan the work, we can show the planning. We can create plans for the long term, but we surely want to create plans for the short term from one week up to four weeks. We also want to show our progress towards the goals we have defined for ourselves, this way we can inspect if we are still doing the right things to achieve those goals. As an example a team can use Jira and let everybody view the Kanban board used as sprint log. Everybody in the organisation can see what is happening workwise in the team and see the progress they make. It allows stakeholders to ask questions in order to improve the solution being build.

Show failures
We only learn from our mistakes. So sharing mistakes is useful. There is never one solution to a problem and in collecting mistakes or failures at least we know what the wrong solution was. In collecting those and making those available we can learn and teach others about problems we had and educate them on not doing the same. A knowledge base of post mortems is a very useful tool for the team and other teams in learning and solving problems fast. A fail party or the sharing of biggest screw ups is a nice variant of the board; those are not only insightful but also big fun.

Impediments
Keeping a list of impediments that are clearly visible empowers stakeholders and managers to do work for the team. They can help fix things when they are considered dependencies, whether it be technical dependencies, organisational dependencies, the lacking of knowledge or blockers in any other form. When those impediments are clear and available for inspection, they can work in our advantage so that others can help our team improve.

Inspection, adaption
We are transparent in order to inspect the work we do and how we do it. With transparency we open ourselves up to feedback from the outside. This might be scary at first, but most people in and around our team are there to make great stuff and want our team to succeed. When we inspect what and how we do things, we learn and are able to adapt. Adaption is a super power. Those who can adapt best, will survive. 

So in order to perform at out peaks, we want to be able to adapt. This we can only be done through learning by inspection. And we can only inspect if we are transparent in our work.

I'm curious what you do to be transparent and how well your team adapts. If you want to share, please leave a comment below.

First Time Right by Failing Fast

A leader buzzword is "First Time Right" at the moment. I hear it all the time. But I wonder if people really understand the implications of this. FTR means that when something is published to the target audience it will deploy into production without errors. It actually sounds to good to be true. In all honesty I have never seen a 100% success record of things going into production. So there might be more than just whishing everything will go flawlessly.

There is no try

FTR means that when a thing is put into production, it won't go wrong. Deployment into the real world is full of risks and we can mitigate them to a certain level. No one can guarantee FTR. But we can mitigate the risks in changing the way we make things. When we think about FTR we can see that it should be more than just prayers. I can still see the picture of a former project manager demanding FTR without putting in resources to make it happen. The words of the project managers where literally: "Just try harder to do it right next time". Which reminds me of Yoda's famous words: "Do or do not. There is no try".

We cannot try harder. We can improve our work methods to limit the chance of fails but it is impossible to add another 100 pounds of try. So we cannot try harder, but we can try smarter. Building up to FTR is possible if we focus on the process towards production. We need to fail before we go to production. We need to fail often and as fast as possible. This will reduce the risk of failure at the most critical moment. And even then, there are strategies that we can use to reduce outage when deploying.

Fail Fast

FTR is only possible if we Fail Fast. FF means that we run a lot of tests and experiments early in the process. To FF we need to focus on the process, get a grip on what we do and standardise our way of working. With standardise I mean that a team has a standard way of working. Preferably an automated process in the form of a build pipeline. To that pipeline we add the "Move it to the Left" principle. Which means that, when we look at a pipeline that starts left at development and ends right at deployment, we add tests early in the process on the left side. Tests on the left are cheap, they look at small parts of the product and test as much as possible. These are technical tests or unit tests. The next step is to create integration tests; to see if all new parts of the product work in conjunction with the old parts. These tests are fewer in numbers than the unit tests, but will take more time to complete. Take a look at the testing pyramid to get an understanding of the testing strategy. 

Failing fast means that if there is anything to fail at, that we do that as fast as possible, so we learn fast as well and can mitigate risks when going to production.

Deploy safe

When we mitigated most risks by failing fast the chance remains that we fail our deployment in production. Deployment is never 100% waterproof. But we can use deployment strategies to reduce the chance of an outage. We can use blue-green deployments; in which a deployment is made to a shadow environment and when all is up and running, production is switched from the old to the new one. We can also think of a canary release strategy. In this strategy a new deployment is made next to the old one and instead of switching all over to the new environment, we switch small groups of user over, say 10% at the time. We can measure closely the impact of the users on the new system and if things go south we can roll back to the old instance.

So to reach a First Time Right situation we need to focus on the process of development: Move it to the Left in order to Fail Fast. And we need to focus on the deployment by using a deployment strategy that fits our situation. If you want to achieve FTR you need to put in effort, be ready to fail a lot and be open to learn when you fail. Have fun!

How to set up a successful review

The review is a scrum event that takes place at the end of a sprint. Its purpose is to inspect what has been done and what is going to be done with the team and the stakeholders. During this event there might be a demo to show what kind of stuff has been created. In the review a new plan is made to tackle the upcoming work, to check if we are still on the path to the intended long time result. Participants in a review should consist of stakeholders and leaders. They can relay their needs and strategic goals for the product that is being build.

Sprint goal

In the review the sprint goal of the next sprint is discussed. This goal can be seen as a mission statement; what are we going to do the next sprint. A sprint goal is typically a sentence describing the desired outcome. For example: after this sprint component X will be live. Or application Y will comply to all security demands. A sprint goal creates focus for the team, with a defined goal they understand what needs to be done. A sprint goal should be derived from strategic planning by leaders, so the purpose of the sprint becomes clear. All sprint goals should be achievable in the allotted time frame of a sprint.

Planning

During review the team and stakeholders should gather those stories that are needed to complete the sprint goal for the next sprint. They need to formulate which tasks needs to be done to achieve the goal. Leaders should express their strategic goals so the team can understand what operational goals are needed to achieve those. Stakeholders should do the same, they have needs that the product fulfils, and therefor they need to be clear on what they need. This planning part is not putting stuff on an agenda, it's about setting out lines how to approach the next sprint and to find out what is important.

Demo

During a review there is room for a demo, a moment to check if what the team has build lives up to what was expected. It is like a debrief of a mission. The team should present their accomplishments and check with stakeholders if they are satisfied. During the demo, stakeholders can be invited to work with the product so they will get more involved and are able to give direct feedback.

Dependencies

During the review all the stakeholders are present. This is an excellent setting to find out dependencies and talk about them. There are technical dependencies; like machinery that is needed to make the product. There are process dependencies; like other departments delivering a piece of the puzzle (like a service that is needed for this product). And there are people dependencies; people are needed, or knowledge is needed to make a successful increment on the product. All these dependencies should be mapped, to mitigate risk and to make the team able to make a proper planning during the planning event.

At the end of the review event there should be a sound sprint goal with a description of what to do. It should be clear who and what the team needs to be successful. And last but not least, the team ought to have obtained feedback so they can improve in the next iteration. All in all it is imperative that stakeholders and leaders are present during a demo to improve performance of the team. They need to share vision and their strategic goals. And they need to let themselves be heard so the team can collect feedback and improve.

Team skills for cloud solutions

If you want to go to the cloud, you need to learn how to fly. In order to prevent castles in the air, teams need to have a fair understanding of the risks and capabilities that are needed to successfully move to the cloud. Whether internal or public, any team needs to obtain knowledge to prevent screw-ups. A cloud environment is a hostile environment, without proper knowledge or experience any team moving to the cloud is bound to fail if they don't educate themselves.

The main risks of cloud are complexity and costs. Both can be managed if a team understands them well. Let's start with costs. In the cloud, we are talking container platforms here, billing is done by compute. Compute means usage of system resources. Containers with apps that are switched off don't cost a thing, containers with apps that are running are billed by the second. Traditionally apps ran on (virtual) machines, which were always on. So a monthly bill about the costs of the VM was about it, there was a fair understanding of how much the app would cost upfront. With cloud this is a bit harder to predict. If your app isn't very much used and is always available, the bill might be high. If it is not used and switched off (ready to start when a request to the app is made) the bill might be much lower. And if your app is populair and scales up, thus using more compute, it will costs you a lot more than perhaps anticipated. 

To take advantage of the cloud model, up- and out scaling is important to understand. Breaking your application down into micro or macro services is paramount for a successful scaling model. This model can be used to take advantages of the cloud in shutting down low used services, limiting costs, or scaling up much used services to improve revenue.

A team building and maintaining the app in the cloud needs have some capabilities to support this cloud model. They need to be autonomous, command themselves, be able to take action without approval (or with implicit approval). To facilitate this an agile way of working is required. It doesn't have to be a particulair practice, method or framework. The agile concepts need to be understood and implemented. 

What they need to do next is to automate the development pipeline. Everything from check-in of a change to deployment should be automated. There cannot be any manual steps in this process. This requires rethinking of testing, approval and deployment. Another part of automation is monitoring. The app needs to be monitored, the business process needs to be monitored and the team should monitor its own performance. All these metrics should be easily available in a transparent manner. This enforces interaction and trust with the stakeholders. 

This was all about mitigation, but what if the shit hits the fan and there is a disruption in the service provided by the app? Think of break ins or outages. The first thing is security. This is a discipline that should be practiced by all members of the team. It's just like locking your house or car, or providing a good lock on your bike. A team should understand security risks by applying some form of thread modeling (STRIDE) and they should practice outages on a regular bases. The last one can even be automated by the use of a Simian Army. 

Also think about when there is actually a compromised situation or an outage. No one else is going to be called upon then the team. So they need to organise themselves to be available at all times. 

Moving to a cloud solution might sound easy, but it's much more complicated. Teams need to learn a lot of new practices to be able to safely navigate the complex cloud world. They need to feel responsible, they need to inspect their performance constantly and they need to learn new things each day.

How to start a DevOps team

DevOps is about the removal of silos. Breaking down barriers between different parts of the organisation. It is about getting everybody on the same team and be more effective. Teams focus on one product and making sure it works for the customer. It is like moving along a makeline with the complete team to build a car. Everybody has their own specialty at different stations in the process and instructs the team how to operate that station. The whole team works together to pass the quality standards of that station. This ensures the team owns that build, and be proud of it. It ensures sharing of knowledge of that particular station to all team members. 

For (team)leaders it becomes most important to lay out the goals, to work on a strategic level instead of an operational one. They need to work on resolving dependencies. If for instance a supply line to a certain station stagnates (they are running out of bolts for instance) they need to go over to the supply line and find out how to help that line speed up production.

The operational level is covered by the people working on the product, they are skilled and trained to work on those stations. No leader is needed to tell them what to do. The team therefor needs a fair understanding of what they can and cannot do. For the latter one, they also need to know what they need to fix the impediment of not being able to perform a certain task to the level they need to. They need to understand their short comings so a leader can help them overcome that. This often means injection of knowledge. This knowledge can only be obtained from an external source, either a specialist that runs with the team for a while or a training course. For the specialist the most important task is not to fix the knowledge gap, but to inject their knowledge into the team, so they can leave safely after a while.

A typical DevOps team incorporates different disciplines. In software engineering this means that there are at least developers, testers and operators in the team. While they have a certain job, working in a DevOps team also means taking interest in the other disciplines as well. Pairing up to fix stuff is one of the major aspects of an effective DevOps team. Therefore I prefer to call all team members in a DevOps team engineers. It doesn't matter which profession somebody has, if they are not able to switch roles and help the team perform better, there should be no place for them in a DevOps team. DevOps teams are about performance and delivering stuff to customers they need. 

When you want to start with a high performance team, make sure all the disciplines needed to build a product from concept to grave are in the team. Not all disciplines are roles, some people can perform more than one role. But do try to avoid a local hero, one person that can do everything, this can prevent knowledge sharing. As a leader find out how you can best help the team, remove impediments and resolve dependencies. Start with forming a small team (3-5 members) and formulate the goal of the product. Use an agile work method to create small iterations with a lot of room for inspection and improvement. Keep stakeholders close and get them involved. Take small steps and keep things as simple as possible.

A DevOps team is a high performance team that will take responsibility and pride in their work as long as they can be autonomous and are supported by the leaders. Leaders that help them overcome impediments and resolve dependencies. With clear goals, a small team and a supporting leader, DevOps teams will outperform any other team all the time.

All about removing silos

Organisations are optimised in silos. This makes work efficient. Costs can be reduced by economise work done in a particular field. This has been the way of working since Taylor died. It does optimise work in factories for people working in a particular order on an assembly line. In a modern world where we build software, saving money on one silo can result in extra costs in the other. The taylorism way of working is therefor no longer rewarding. Taylor had some ideas of improving efficiency in production systems which we massively copied and still use. His idea was to improve the productivity by improving the efficiency of each process step; how would the world have looked if he had chosen effectively instead of efficiency?

What do we mean with silos? Silos are people of the same expertise put together. Put together in teams to build a small piece of the end product. Silos result in many handover moments. To reduce those moments factories implement assembly lines. Software development is a creative processes and it cannot be put into an assembly line model (no matter how hard we squeeze). How can we get rid of those silos and improve our effectiveness?

1. Product focus

Instead of focusing on process optimalisation we should focus on delivering a product that a customer is willing to buy. Our responsibility is to deliver that product with enough quality to satisfy the customer. A team should be focusing on the customer and only deliver what the customer needs.

2. Merge expertise

We merge expertise in a team, so one team is responsible for all the work done on a product. Including development, testing and maintenance. No single silo of experts remains, this is important. Of course there are experts, we just need to know where to find them. This will result in no handover and no waiting moments between teams, but it implies a lot! 

We need to know what work team members do, we need to learn, we don't have to ace it but we need an understanding how stuff works. In a DevOps team we need at least 10% time reserved to learn, just to keep up, learn and share.

3. Transparency

In order to find the right people for the job, we need to know from each other what we do. So instead of working silos, we have silos of knowledge sharing. We organise teams around products and customers, we gather to share knowledge.

4. Responsibility

With creating a team of mixed expertise around a product and its customers we are getting more responsibility. The teams makes promises, it needs to deliver, they are expected to keep up quality. Getting more responsibility means even more learning, the teams will be small companies inside the umbrella of a big one. The big one shares vision, mission and strategy. The team will follow the strategy, but gets its work from the customers. This also means that managers get less responsibility about the product, but more about developing team expertise.

5. Autonomy

All this results in autonomous teams that are capable of delivering quality and value to the customer through a product. 

By removing silos an organisation will change significantly. Work will shift and change. Teams will be in the lead to deliver customer value. DevOps has even a bigger impact on management comparing to teams. Teams know about software development, testing and operations. Management needs to learn to let go, to inspire, to share and to help removing impediments.

Do you still work in silos? What is the most difficult thing you are experiencing adopting DevOps?