Evolutionary Change - A Novel
The Crisis
It was 7:15 PM and Mark was still in the office. He had called home to tell his wife not to wait on him for dinner.
The place was deserted and dead quiet. He was thinking of tomorrow’s back-to-back meetings and intense discussions. He was starting to realize that the more hours the development teams were putting in to meet current demand, the more his business partners were demanding. And the gap between expectations and capabilities was going in the wrong direction: it was widening with no relief in sight.
He was bracing for his 11:00 AM SteerCo meeting where he was expected to represent the Tech Organization for the company and confirm the current committed scope and timelines. Mark was worried that he might have to redraw new timelines which he would have to stake his position on and provide a 100% guarantee for hitting those timelines. The line “if you cannot provide us with some solid timelines for this critical delivery then why are we having this conversation?” was sounding in his mind over and over.
How would one deal with the fallout of committing without confidence?
Mark’s last two major projects burned through all the built-in money and time contingencies after delivering only half of what was in their planned scope. Mark and his reports also never managed to build the teams the way they had intended. Ultimately, the projects always ended up running several months late. Mark and his team of reports had to cut scope and compromise on several aspects of the technology architecture that was meant to support strong and tight requirements for uptime and more. Several of the business stakeholders were quite unhappy with the outcome and had very much lost trust in Mark’s Tech Organization.
Mark searched through his email and tracked down a message with a phone number. The phone number was for an old friend, Dan, that he had connected with at a meetup. During that meetup, Dan had shared some innovative approaches that spoke to these types of challenges Mark was now facing. He wasn’t sure what to make of it, but it couldn’t hurt to hear some new ideas no matter how farfetched.
He dialed the number and after a few rings he heard a familiar voice. After some pleasantries and regular chat about the weather—Dan was Canadian after all!—they jumped into the thick of it.
“It sounds like you’re being asked to make firm commitments at the point in the project where you’ve got the least understanding, at the start of it,” reflected Dan.
“Well, now that you put it that way, I can see it. My pain is dealing with ungrounded commitments!” Mark realized.
Then again, it’s not like Mark had a choice. After all, those folks he was talking to were his bosses, their business counterparts, and the finance folks. These folks carried all the authority, were responsible for managing the budget, and had full control over the organization. It’s not like Mark could change their minds.
“Sure, you can,” jumped in Dan. “Show them the facts! Describe the whole situation in more precise terms—their asks, the current capabilities and capacity, the current constraints. And when they tell you to get more people, show them how that would not help short term, and add in the midterm risks of ramping up an org too early and the exponential increase in dependencies that will work against creating any kind of predictability whatsoever.”
Initially, Mark was slightly irritated by the interruption, but then he started to get Dan’s point.
What was the worst that could happen? After all, they didn’t like him much lately anyway, or that’s what he got from these discussions. The SteerCo crowd was not going to be happy, but they would have to acknowledge the rigor of that picture. If they wanted this to happen with any semblance of normality, they would have to look at aligning on their expectations and even more so, roll up their sleeves and jump in to solve some of the problems rising in their domain.
“Sounds great, Dan. But how would I do that? I remember your session at the conference, but that was a different situation. In my case, I don’t have any control. I don’t control what my teams get asked to do, and business keeps wanting more.” Mark could have come up with another dozen reasons why this was not going to work. “I have always made sure I understand every aspect of my projects. Everyone on the project knew to come to me if they needed help. I could explain every detailed requirement, every aspect of our solution architecture, every team’s coding practices and all the dependencies between our teams or platform providers. For some reason, on the last two major projects, that didn’t work. It didn’t matter how closely I tried to track everything. It was just a matter of time before the whole thing was running away from me: timelines, budgets and scope. Everything!”
Dan saw the opportunity.
“Here’s what we’re gonna do! We will first create awareness and transparency at the team level and above for the leadership. Then we will align all teams into an integrated model for commitments. With the core set of metrics assembled from the teams, we will enable on-demand reporting and streamline access to this data. And we will close the loop by regularly revisiting the medium and long-term plans and commitments, and see where we need to adjust.”
Then Dan patiently described the parallels between the situation of his other client and Mark’s project.
- In both cases, the decision makers were keeping their distance from the working groups.
- In both cases, multiple business stakeholders with different agendas were competing for the development group’s attention without any regard to capacity.
- In both cases, the project owner did not have the standing authority to control the demand and especially to push back and control incoming requirements.
- In both cases, the budget was predefined and the amounts of assumptions and high expectations from all the stakeholders were insurmountable.
- In both cases, pretty much everyone involved dramatically underestimated the level of complexity and the amount of variability involved.
Mark was not going to need any command-and-control authority, just some help and know-how. Building up a shared language, a common framework for understanding the project context in detail, including all the constraints and progress, was enough to start building trust between the stakeholders and change the dialogue from the current transactional model to a deeper, collaborative, honest and transparent one.
The common platform for these types of situations was the design of a dedicated management system—fit to deliver on the needs of the specific organization.
“Mark, it sounds to me that you need to clarify and highlight to your group of stakeholders the change you so acutely need in your mind. Then engage with a consultant with expertise and credentials like mine to kickstart the cycle of training and change management of the organization in an evolutionary manner. This will eventually lead to dramatic improvements to the organization at all levels: team, department and all the way up to the whole company.”
First Steps
To start with, Mark and Dan worked with all the development teams to help improve their awareness and transparency at the team level. They identified the top three teams, walked them through a redesign and review of their processes and ensured that each team was self-sufficient in operating according to the new design of the system.
The interviews with the various team members revealed a span of internal sources of dissatisfaction—task switching, lack of understanding of priorities, deficient teamwork, working in silos, and poor dependency management—to poor coordination between teams. Assisting the teams with sprint reviews and other meetings with their direct stakeholders, they captured in turn external sources of dissatisfaction: regular slippage on deliverables, misunderstood requirements, and no clear understanding of the status of the initiative.
With Mark and Dan’s help, the teams started to understand their sources and nature of demand. These were the large planning sessions for major releases, the spikes in bugs and defects following these releases, the list of technical debt items identified regularly throughout the delivery cycle, and the constant stream of questions and requests for estimates from the business.
They followed with some deep dives into their capabilities and capacity. On a qualitative level, they looked at direct customer feedback including their expectations and perception of service quality and timeliness. They also looked on a quantitative level, reviewing pre-existing metrics like number of features delivered per release, frequency of the releases, sprint velocity, escaped defects, etc.
By this time, the teams had a much better understanding of their own flow of work and the classes of service they needed to support all kinds of requests from business stakeholders. Naturally, the teams incremented their team system design. In the process, they assembled a package of metrics to collect and feed up into the portfolio level.
The Recipe – Extending the Change
It’s 7:15 PM and Mark and Dan had just finished reviewing the updates from the three teams. They were both staring at the big screen monitor on the wall, in Mark’s office.
“It has been three months since we started, and we are finally getting there. Although team Cypress is collecting their data and calculating their metrics manually off their physical board while teams Maple and Birch get their metrics as extracts/reports out of their online tool, they all fit into the Executive Portfolio dashboard. Based on the types of questions the leadership is raising, and the deep meaningful discussions happening in the SteerCo, I think we’re ready to move on to the next batch of teams in the plan.”
Mark sounded really anxious. These last few weeks had taken a toll on his patience. He never thought it would be so much work just to start.
“Of course, now that we started, the other teams should be a breeze.” Dan had had a long day and was trying to decide if he should challenge Mark. He knew there was still a lot of unpredictability ahead of them. The interplay between factors that would speed up the process and roadblocks and diversions could take the exercise on several paths, from shortcuts to extensive journeys. Events beyond their organizational horizon could do the same.
What if the CIO decides it’s time for a full reorganization? What if the company gets acquired? What if their line of business changes business strategy? How would one predict how any of these events would impact their plans?
The rest of the teams were brought up into alignment one by one, in accordance with their pre-existing context. In the end, each team had its own operational system, while they were all aligned into the larger concerns of the portfolio.
Managing the Portfolio
Once the teams had their new system of operation in place, Mark and Dan went to work at the portfolio level. They needed to create a common understanding of the balance (or lack thereof) between all the incoming streams of demand and the capabilities and capacity of his teams. This would support alignment of all teams into a consistent structure of measurements and commitment.
The first item they focused on was adjusting the design, participation and agendas of the regular meetings organized to manage the lifecycle of the portfolio. Mark needed to change both the language and the perspective of the leadership and the group of stakeholders, from the head of the Business Product Development group, the CIO and the Finance group responsible for funding his initiative. Instead of him always providing them with updates and justifying any slippages and delays, he would facilitate deep, meaningful discussions on realistic capacity, on risks and dependencies and on the challenges encountered in development.
Early on in this cycle, the CIO caught on to Mark’s strategy, and after a handful of discussions one-on-one, signed up to support Mark as the executive sponsor. It turned out Bob had been looking for ways to empower leaders in IT&S for several years now, only had not been able to find a successful approach. By virtue of these changes, Mark engaged with the leadership and the business stakeholders on a different level and partnered up with them to solve impediments, mitigate risks and adjust the plans as needed.
The second item they focused on was enabling the Leadership with solid, reliable data and information. They built a dashboard that tracked customer-facing metrics and KPIs and provided a solid understanding of the status of the whole portfolio. The dashboard was a great platform for the deep conversations happening during the portfolio level meetings and reviews.
The dashboard tracked significant metrics like lead time, throughput, and flow efficiency, complemented by quality-focused metrics like number of defects and volume of failure demand.
Mark and Dan used several opportunities during the regular reviews and meetings to both educate the leadership and enable them with the review, understanding and use of the data and information assembled on the dashboard. All the while they iterated on the design of the dashboard itself to better align it to the needs of the group.
At this point Mark switched his focus to closely collaborate with some of the leaders that took a deeper interest in the dashboard components. As they were looking for additional details or more clarity, Mark engaged them in refining and aligning all these aspects to better suit their needs and style.
The leadership already had a biweekly meeting to review the status of the whole project. They ended up spending the majority of that time connecting the metrics and data from the dashboard to the realities of the delivery teams. Sometimes they had to clarify priorities and help sequence items of demand. Other times they had to reach out to execs at partner organizations, to clarify some of the critical dependencies that needed specific focus and support. And yet other times, they discussed ramping up resourcing and capacity in specific areas to balance out the whole flow of work throughout the organization.
Mark managed to initiate a new recurring meeting with the same group. The new objective was to review the levels and quality of communication and collaboration between teams and other delivery partners. Another objective was to identify opportunities to improve and streamline the work throughout the whole department.
Reflecting on the New Way
It was 7:15 PM, they were in Mark’s office as usual, and the latest version of the dashboard was on the large screen on the wall.
“Dan, I don’t know how we managed to deliver anything meaningful with the previous mode of operation. The norm was miscommunication! None of the groups were aligned and in sync. And nobody had the clarity of how close our progress and state were to achieving the goals and objectives of this project!”
Mark reflected. The coffee in front of him was cold and stale. Dan let the silence linger, as Mark’s train of thought was priceless and not to be interfered with.
“I guess all the focus, hard work and overtime were worth it. We’ve got several major milestones delivered. We feel comfortable with our plans for the next several months. We are well down the path of building the yearly plan and roadmap for the next fiscal year, to ensure we secure the budget.”
Dan again held silent.
“But the major difference is in the way our leadership looks at the project. First, they understand their critical role as partners in delivery when it comes down to major dependencies and blockers. Secondly, their expectations have changed as they are the first ones to ask for options and changes when something new and unpredictable comes up. Third, they are much more focused on outcomes and they have changed their definition of success.”
Dan finally decided to jump in.
“Do you think they are aware of these pivots? I would really want them to acknowledge and validate these points, so the change starts to set in and become the new state of affairs. And I would want them to maybe invite other leaders in other parts of the company to shift.”
Mark perked up.
“I wouldn’t mind assembling some of these facts into a deck and presenting it to the group in our next SteerCo meeting. And then I would like to morph the presentation into an overview of the project to present to Communities of Practice, and to townhalls and quarterly lines of business events. We do need a bit of positive exposure with our business partners. Most of the times they talk to us when there are issues, delays, and challenges. I’d like them to see the progress too. And all this would help me build up my image and brand in the company, not a bad thing at all!”
Mark followed through.
“One thing I have noticed already: people are looking to copy our system of work the way it is today. And people dramatically underestimate the effort and timelines needed. That’s almost guaranteed to not give them enough benefits.
I need to describe to them the four steps they should follow.
- First create awareness and transparency at the team level.
- Then align all teams into an integrated model for commitments.
- Follow that with enabling on-demand reporting and streamlined access to data and metrics.
- And finally close the loop by regularly revisiting the medium and long-term plans and commitments, and adjusting accordingly.”
Dan was stone-faced and hard at work hiding his excitement. His work was pretty much done. Mark was ready to take on new work of any level of complexity. He had everything he needed to either evolve his group or to start from scratch and set up a new team if that’s what his Leadership asked of him.
If Mark’s story touches on your reality in one or several aspects and you even suspect that there is a chance this approach would be of use to you… If you’re an innovator in your domain not afraid to experiment with new things and evolve your processes and structures to fit your needs… If you want to thrive and win the market, not just barely survive from day to day…
Then let’s talk. Schedule a Discovery Call to start your own transformation story.