Release Planning With Customer Focus

I've written about our Release Plannings already (here, here, here and here), but maybe there's still something to add. These blog posts also help me understand how things have evolved over time.

This time we had agreed the Release Planning Day, our common company event, would only serve as a deadline for having the Release Plans done. So all the actual planning was done before hand. One tool that we extensively used was Microsoft Yammer. It has proven to be handy for sharing something get insights from different stakeholder around the globe. In addition there was a lot of face to face planning between the Product Managers, Product Owners and Development teams.

I had split the day's agenda into the following parts:

• Agenda and purpose of the day delivered by Release Train Engineer
• Where We Are Heading, market insight and Portfolio funnel status by Chief Portfolio Officer
• Product Roadmaps by Product managers
• Lunch and team break
• Each teams' finalized Release Plan by Product Owners
• Launch Plan for each product/solution by Product Managers

I think out of these probably all other items are familiar from SAFe except the Launch Plan. And actually even that is in SAFe. There the name is simply Release. But in our company lingo we have used the word Release for both the Potentially Shippable Increment (PSI) and for the actual Release.

Previously our Release Process ended when the PSI was done. Development and releasing were decoupled. Although this is often beneficial, it had proven to generate a lot of confusion. Sometimes we had a PSI, but no plan on what to do with it. We had concentrated too much on the technical side and forgotten what our whole system was supposed to do: provide our customers with new increments of working software and added value.

Launch Plan is an attempt to look at the same topic, Release, from the customer angle. In bare minimum I want the Launch plan to answer these questions:

• Who are the target audience for this Release?
• How will we communicate about this Release to our target audience?
• How will we deliver the Release to our customers?

Also the Launch Plans seemed to reveal interesting new things about the organization. What we talk about as Release is usually just release of the software component. Creating the PSI doesn't take into account how it will be delivered, configured, trained to new users or marketed. All these are really relevant topics and especially relevant for the customers.

I think generally the Release Planning Day was successful. It was shorter, more focused and took the customer view better into account. In short I would claim it was the best release planning we have ever done. But just as a note for if you plan to try this in your organization: this wasn't our first time. Without the shared history and previous steps on our path I don't think it would have gone like this. So don't try this at home. (Or who am I to decide. Maybe this is the killer recipe that works as a silver bullet. I've tried it once and it worked for me. :) )

As a main takeaway for next time I think we'll be increasing the cross functional collaboration and trying to take all relevant functions into the game, not just development. I think by tweaking our system we can reach so much further than where we are today!

Complexity of Multiple Development Locations

There are multiple reasons why companies spread research and development activities into multiple countries. In some smaller countries it might even be that the job market is not big enough to cover all the needs or that at least talent is really hard to find. That's why it is many times natural to spread activities to locations where the talent pools are bigger. Also the salary level can be a tempting factor especially in cost competitive countries, like India.

But there are certain challenges that are good to keep in mind before taking the step. I have no hidden agendas, my intention is to simply state some things that you might want to consider before starting activities in a new location.

Time-zone differences are good to take into account. Of course they can even be a positive thing if you are looking for 24/7 response times in services and you need to follow the sun. But if you are attempting to have distributed teams (members in more than one time-zone), they will have a limited number of common hours. There are some 'sharing the pain' approaches to this, but none the less it's a real challenge.

I think that if at all possible, people who work together should meet face to face at least in the beginning of their common journey. That helps to build trust and makes the team work easier. It's also easier to explain things and build understanding while being physically close. While this is nice, it will of course create some expenses when people need to travel. Again by far no show stopper but something to consider.

Having multiple development sites has an effect on the communication also. With one site you can rely mostly on physical boards and getting people together, but with multiple sites you need to have proper technology. Things like online backlog tools and communication software become a must. And I think many will find chat tools like Flowdock or Slack beneficial. Internet connection speed will also prove to be important. This depends also on your products, but if you need to transfer gigabytes of data there's a big performance penalty if moving files takes hours rather than minutes or seconds. Thus the local infrastructure also plays a large role.

Job rotation pace also varies between countries. Somewhere it might be possible to stay with one employer for the whole career (maybe not realistic nowadays anymore) whilst in some countries people tend to switch jobs every couple of years. If employee turnaround is really rapid, tens of percents annually, building silent knowledge might be difficult. I mean such information that slowly accumulates while you learn more and more about your field. I think rapid job rotation is also where bad for good team spirit. It's not easy to build trust between people who often change.

Cultural differences should be also taken into account. Countries differ in many things. For example Finland, USA and India are really different. To better understand one another it is good to study a bit what kind of things are valued in the other culture. One nice site to check the differences between nations is here. There you can check how the six pre-selected factors differ. It might explain why your colleagues behave as they do.

Inflation rates are also really different between nations. For example in Finland the tech salaries are high, but there's hardly any inflation. In India it's vice versa. Salaries are in general smaller, but they are raised in bigger chunks and more often. And one of my guidelines is that in the global economy talent is cheap nowhere.

Final thing that comes to my mind is the local laws and amount of bureaucracy. I guess many times the amount of bureaucracy can be bundled with the amount of hierarchy, but that's just my assumption. (What I mean is that if you always need to get bosses bosses boss's signature, you are probably in a hierarchical and bureaucratic setup.) Having a local representative who knows the culture while starting activities up is probably priceless.

Well that was my not so short list of things to consider. Topics are not in any specific or prioritized order. But hopefully they will be useful for people who are pondering about spreading activities to new locations. Make sure you understand the challenges. Some are just risks that may or may not realize, but some of these you will encounter for sure. But if your plan is clear and you are doing it for the right reasons, you have a good change to succeed.

By the way, if you are academically interested in the topic, you might want to check out DD-SCALE project.

SLUSH 2015

If you are not familiar with SLUSH, it's a sort of a startup event. Or I guess at least originally the idea was to gather together startups and investors. And it's still a lot about that, but it has expanded into something huge. Not only startups are interested in being there, but also many established not-anymore-startups like NOKIA, Samsung, GE or F-Secure. Also the set of speakers includes people like former president and Nobel price winner Martti Ahtisaari, president of Estonia and prince of Sweden.

The size of the ~2 day event was around 15k attendees. I included the approximation sign, because two days is far from the whole truth. During, before and after SLUSH the Helsinki region is filled with all sorts of side-events. So it's actually a really great situation to have a product launch. I think at least Comptel, Nokia and F-Secure took advantage of the situation.

I participated in SLUSH as a representative of my company. We were not looking to sell the company, nor to acquire any others. But we are included in the Merit Project along with other Finnish maritime companies. So we had an own stand alongside Eniram, Arctech, Ixonos, Aeromon and others. Honestly there weren't many potential customers, but the emphasis was in trying to suck the most out of the inspiring atmosphere. :)

In the beginning everything was rather shocking. Dim lights and huge laser beams crossing the ceiling. So many companies represented that one got disoriented almost right after stepping in. And due to the fact that I represented my company at the stand and because the event all in all was huge, I didn't watch many of the presentations. But I can recapture some that were most memorable to me.

Risto Siilasmaa told about NGP, Nokia Growth Partners. It's a 700M$ venture capital. Now I have to admit that I'm not that familiar with venture capital companies, but my impression was that they most give 'just money'. Interesting in this NGP concept was that in addition to the investment they also offer a lot of their own contacts, experience and wisdom to the startups. That might be a huge advantage compared to 'just money'.

Then I watched Dyan Finkhousen from GE talk about Open Innovation. I think it was Lean Startup where I read about GE's approach to having separate units that are fully autonomous. They can operate in the new environments without the inertia of the big company. But on the other hand they can also benefit from the 'big shoulders'. I think that's really interesting. There are other similar examples about these sort of intrapreneurs. From Finnish companies Reaktor Ventures is operating similarly.

Ilkka Paananen told that the bar of success has raised significantly during the last five years. Before Angry Birds it was huge to get million downloads. Now with hundreds of millions or billions of downloads it's hardly worth mentioning. He also got big applause for saying that he believes the next Google could come from Finland.

I'm not sure if that is likely, but the atmosphere of SLUSH was such that anything could be expected to happen. I guess many startups could find their investors from the event, but for me it was a source of great inspiration. You are allowed to think big, currently there's venture capital for good ideas and there are no limits. Digitalization is regardless going to happen and it's going to change everything.

(In addition to following the official program I did get some low-quality selfies with various people I admire. One I missed... Daniel, the Prince of Sweden, maybe next time. :) )

From Forecasting to Cycle Time

I like measuring for the sake of improvement. I believe that measuring something helps to understand its nature. And by measuring you might learn if something is good or bad and going to positive or negative direction.

We have been using so called forecast hit-rate to measure how well the Scrum Teams are able to predict their velocity. It's the result of dividing planned number of Story Points with the actually realized number of Story Points for a Sprint. But in case the number of stories is small, there's easily large deviations when things don't perfectly as planned. And usually things don't go perfectly as planned.

Also this measure can result in some rather nasty dysfunctions. Teams start to favor keeping the forecast instead of trying to maximize the amount of customer value in a Sprint. Or even though some Story becomes obsolete it isn't dropped because that would flaw the statistics. This isn't nice.

We use Atlassian JIRA and JIRA Agile for our Backlogs and Scrum boards. (I guess I should start calling it JIRA Software soon.) It offers a handy Velocity Chart where one can follow these planned vs. completed results. This is essentially the source of our forecast hit-rate information.

But due to all the possible events that affect the Scrum Teams and the #NoEstimates movement that gains momentum also in our company, the data has a really high variance. Even after couple of years it shows no signs of stabilizing. (Of course it can argued that is a systemic dysfunction. As it is. But let's not go there.)

Another tempting alternative for this metric that I've been thinking about is Cycle Time. Average time that a Backlog item takes between the start of work until it is completed. Let's assume that such metric would be easily available and that there would be target on it or that management would follow the number. What kind of behavior would this drive?

My assumption is that it would make the Stories smaller. That teams would strive to get things done faster instead of having mammoth size stories. So In the end there would be a bigger number of smaller Stories and tasks that could be made in shorter time. I would like that. Also it would fit nicely with #NoEstimates.

Since this is still simply hypothetical, I don't have any results yet. But this is an experiment that I'm about to try.