%20small.jpg){kind=small}
As most organizations have introduced New Ways of Working, not all promised benefits materialized. We share a generic approach on how to identify areas in your organization that can provide significant measurable benefits with limited implementation efforts.
But why even introducing New Ways of Working and what are expected benefits? Output of companies is determined by input factors such as land, capital, and labor productivity. While land and capital are both very critical factors, we believe that the productivity growth of labor has been neglected in the past decades. A report by the Deutsche Bundesbank [1] highlights a steady decline of productivity growth across several European countries since 1975.
However, labor productivity remains a critical factor to determine future output and profitability. While technology increasingly replaces simple and repetitive work, this digitalization requires a growing work force of high performing teams to introduce new innovations and maintain such systems over time.
Spark Mind has combined proven methods and developed an approach to systematically support any given organization in their capabilities to become faster, more predictable, and more resilient in their project delivery. These methods are already well known and established across the industry, which simplifies their adoption. And most of the structures and practices are applicable, independent of the company’s context, meaning whether an organization operates in a classical waterfall or agile environment. However, understanding the existing context is key to identify the elements best suited to improve delivery capabilities.
What drives your labor force’s motivation?
In contrast to wide-spread thinking, high performing leaders are not here to “tell & sell” or “command & control”, but rather to inspire and motivate everybody in their area of influence. Reason why? It is the people they are leading that are executing the work on the ground, and not management. Hence, productivity is determined by the bottom of the company’s hierarchy, while it must be ignited from the top. Therefore, performance growth is hardly ever achieved with a team having one hero and several followers, or a team which only executes orders from superiors.
Highly successful teams share three characteristics, which allow them to thrive [2]. The first is purpose. Understanding the reason, why my personal contribution matters is crucial to keep long-term motivation high and spread the feeling, that everyone contributes to a greater goal. The second characteristic is autonomy, for every individual and for whole teams. Fostering a collective thinking and incorporating the best of every team member will lead to superior solutions. The third one is mastery. Everybody can only feel motivated if the expected contribution does neither lead to boredom nor stress/anxiety. Every task should sound like a doable challenge and create a state, where the ambitious contributor can excel.
How to get there?
You may ask yourself, how to avoid a “command & control” culture? The key can be found in core leadership principles, and the way you motivate your team. Establishing a culture, where people are allowed to fail, where peers will support in case someone is stuck and where everybody understands that the common goal can only be achieved together. And how do you create such a culture? This is where incentives and corresponding metrics are going to play a key role in your leadership agenda.
Highly effective teams are usually guided by an intrinsic motivation, created through intangible incentives [3]. Measuring such incentives through metrics supports teams and individuals to align towards a given business goal over time. A metric must be objectively measurable, have a causality to the expected behavior and is directly controllable by the team. Therefore, performance accelerates where leadership personalities incentivize teams by:
Establishing clarity on the overarching goal (by formulating and reiterating the purpose)
Precisely formulating roles and accountabilities (to enable autonomy)
Transparently explaining, how progress and success will be measured (by formulating appropriate incentives, driving mastery)
Spark Mind has combined inputs from a broad set of frameworks, concepts, and approaches into a model, which has the intention to improve your organizational delivery capabilities over time and strives to support everybody in your organization to be part of that growth journey.
Spark Mind Delivery Capability Model
The model is based on three foundational pillars, reflecting the core elements required for a delivery organization. These are guidance on the common goal, teams capable to deliver solutions based on provided structures to collaborate, and finally a product/service where everybody involved can see the progress achieved through the contribution of all involved stakeholders. These pillars are aligned with the approach published by Leading Agile [4]. The second dimension considers us as human being as most crucial input variable and elaborates on how we collaborate in teams and subsequently how teams interact in a scaled environment across the organization.
Our model supports to understand the importance of the three pillars, and how to identify improvement areas with a high potential to increase effectiveness, resilience, and productivity over time. It serves as a reminder to create clarity on the overarching goal first. Only then it becomes possible to understand the required delivery skills, which in turn allow accountable contributors (individuals, teams, or trains) to deliver progress along the incentivized and transparently communicated short-, medium- and long-term goals.
Vision & Guidelines
The first pillar starts with the formulation of a vision and guidelines, to establish the necessary focus on deliverables within an organization, a division, or a team. This further becomes materialized in what we generically call a backlog. A backlog on team level shall contain very specific user stories, following a clear structure (INVEST [5]). All collaboration evolves around this central backlog, the prioritized user stories, and the capability to reliably label them with a high-level estimation of the expected effort (defined as velocity).
What does it mean for the organization?
Backlogs can be established on all levels. On a team level the backlog contains user stories. These user stories are formulated to deliver a feature (or epic). Features are tracked on the program level in the program backlog. The program backlog functions as the main discussion source for product increment (PI) cycles, usually taking 8-12 weeks. On a long-term perspective, features contribute to initiatives/projects, which are tracked on a portfolio level. The portfolio backlog is managed by senior management and is prioritized in-line with the company’s strategic intent.
We see this hierarchical connection from portfolio to program to team level as a way to create bi-directional transparency and enable economic trade-off decisions, given existing constraints present in every organization. The way these decisions are managed is part of the governance approach. It has shown to be effective to keep portfolio management as lean as possible. Prioritize strategic themes and allocate budget dynamically every quarter to those initiatives, where the biggest bottom-line profit can be expected. Such budget changes on a quarterly basis do not mean to change the teams within the organization, but rather requires rethinking portfolio priorities more often and reallocating teams to the highest prioritized initiatives more frequently.
Business goal To drive business value, software is either the product to be sold or a supporting tool to create business value such as the provisioning of services to clients. Clarity on what new feature will be available by when is key. Thereby, rethinking business priorities should be done often and communicated on a PI cycle cadence to the delivery organization.
Delivery goal Establish a central prioritized backlog and provide high-level effort estimations [6] to allow reliable delivery projections. Embrace change, plan where requirements are confirmed and postpone decisions and action otherwise (stay lean).
People & Structures
The second pillar reflects the human being, and the way people interact and collaborate with each other. A team consists of everything and everyone necessary to deliver expected product increments. Teams with a high maturity level can commit new features on a timeline, leading to a stable velocity on their deliverables. Such teams usually have two qualities; the team is stable and is cross-functional. Additionally, crucial roles are properly defined by formulating three elements: role purpose, domain (ownership) and accountabilities [7].
What does it mean for the organization?
When teams must work closely together to achieve the goal of a given initiative on a defined timeline, it becomes crucial to have a way to form these teams and foster collaboration at all levels and in all dimensions. Therefore, it is important to establish roles at scale, which are coordinating and consolidating the work executed across all involved teams (e.g., product manager as a scaled role for POs).
Additionally, a fundamental element is the concept of cadence. It states that a certain event happens always at the same day/time, same place, and has the same duration. Humans are creatures of habit, and accepting it reduces friction over time tremendously. Hence, teams perform their daily and sprint planning, while multiple teams are performing a PI planning, also called agile release planning (ARP) together. These coordinated efforts help to mitigate one of the most critical drivers of performance reduction, dependencies. Hence, these roles at scale are so crucial, because they are organizing these events across multiple teams and they are addressing topics like risks and dependencies, making a huge difference to the overall delivery performance.
Business goal Complex software solutions require teams capable to produce them, and often multiple, well-coordinated teams to parallelize efforts to meet shorter and shorter expected delivery cycles.
Delivery goal Product teams shall be capable to deliver by themselves high-quality product increments, coordinated across teams on an up-front defined cadence, and managing dependencies and risk transparently across the whole delivery chain.
“A transparent work environment leads to greater trust and alignment …, that’s paramount to our success.”
Katie Burke - HubSpot, Chief People Officer
Product & Progress
The third pillar is reflected by the final product that is produced, as well as the progress the team members can see when enhancing and improving the existing product. This in turn is further enforced by a definition of done (DoD) and by acceptance criteria for every new requirement, so that a common understanding can be established up front between business and the product teams (tech). Furthermore, reducing batch sizes and delivering smaller product increments enables a constant flow of improvements/enhancements, creating a faster feedback loop and lowers risk on quality flaws and side-effects.
What does it mean for the organization?
When releasing product increments requiring deliverables from multiple teams at once, a concerted effort is required to ensure that not only the parts are working properly, but the combined solution works and meets the expected quality. Most organizations therefore invest in continuous integration frameworks, where deployments, testing, and reporting becomes automated. This is a non-negotiable prerequisite to enable successful deliveries across multiple systems and several teams. Only on top of these technology prerequisites, a change towards a DevOPs culture can be enabled, where three core principles guide our efforts: improvements on flow (automation of repetitive activities), a quick feedback loop and a continuous improvement approach supported by senior management.
Business goal
Continuously receive high quality product increments in short intervals, containing a minimum of quality flaws (i.e. defects, missing functionality or known technical debt, all leading to required investments in the future).
Delivery goal
Reduce effort for deployments, integration, testing and reporting by reducing batch sizes and automating them. Furthermore, measure the quality of all deliverables and avoid technical debt whenever possible, or plan clean-ups.
What gets in the way?
While these approaches sound nice, corporations often find themselves with major blockers prohibiting them to allow such an inclusive and progressive approach. Removing these impediments is a critical task that often can only be resolved at senior management level.
Situation | Challenge | Mitigation |
Matrix organizations | Ownership and quick decision making | Establishing the three backlogs on portfolio, program and team level will allow to early initiate discussions and work against “ready for implementation” initiatives and features. |
Non-instantly available resources Limited access to subject matter expertise | Missing capacities Missing expertise | Establish stable and cross-functional teams, which can deliver end-to-end solutions by themselves for certain product areas. Foster a certain degree of self-organization to allow the teams to address the listed challenges as far as possible by themselves, by building up or recruiting expertise. |
Too much work in progress | Parallelization of efforts reduces or delays overall progress | Reduce work in progress by limiting on all three governance levels the work that can be executed in parallel. |
Shared requirements between teams | Late identification of dependencies and risks across teams | Create ‘teams at scale’ with the single responsibility to address these cross-team challenges and create transparency to mitigate implications, resolve issues and properly manage dependencies. |
Technical debt and defects | Changes and enhancements on an existing product lead to huge efforts due to technical debt | Refactor solutions and address defects continuously by automating the integration approach. Building an ever growing automated and daily executed test suite will allow to continuously identify and retest quality flaws (DevOPs approach). |
Conclusion – A Continuous Approach
Strive for excellence is not a “transformation project with a target date” thing to do. It is much more an evolutionary process that never ends. Everybody learned and improved their personal skills over many years of practice. So should organizations. Continuously improve in small steps and never become complacent with the current situation. There is always potential.
Spark Mind therefore approaches every project with a “Base Camp” approach, where in a “Base Camp now” challenges and opportunities are identified, and a path to the “Base Camp next” is drawn out as a set of activities, listed in an improvement backlog. These activities will then be prioritized with senior management and implemented continuously, step by step.
Download the PDF version of this article here:
_______________________________________________________