How Epics Flow Through Our Value Chain

If you are familiar with my previous posts, you probably know that I'm a Release Train Engineer. But as I've told, that's not all I do. Nowadays I'm not anymore Product Owner, but instead I try to concentrate more on being an owner for the value chain. So let me next try to describe the flow from idea to implementation.

When new (big) ideas are introduced, there are first a few prerequisites. There must be a business case. When we plan few years ahead, the idea must be profitable. Forecasted amount of revenue must exceed the direct development costs and the future maintenance costs. We also need to analyze roughly the size of the effort and amount of resources needed. Checking the time criticality and whether we have the capacity to squeeze the job through our pipeline in time are essential factors. It's also practical to check if the idea is in line with our strategy in general.

When all necessary groundwork analysis is done, our Portfolio Managemenent Team will make either a Go or No-Go decision. If the idea is approved, it will be added to a product Roadmap and scheduled for development. At this stage the idea is called Roadmap Theme. In SAFe the corresponding term is Epic.

The Roadmap Themes enter development through Release Planning (PI Planning). They are broken down into pieces that can be implemented within our release cycles and formed into JIRA Epics. After that the Scrum teams will further refine the Epics into Stories and tasks. Then they will work on them in an iterative and incremental fashion in Sprints.

Then comes the part that SAFe (to my knowledge) doesn't answer anymore. As in Scrum, there are lots of activities left for the organization to figure out. Also for releasing, there's usually a lot more than creating the software package. Even if you have managed to get your act so well together that you are practicing Continuous Delivery or Deployment (which we are not), you still need to communicate with your customers. People don't like surprises. Even if the changes are improvements, many times people will get pissed if they didn't know about the changes or asked for those.

For me the final touch for releasing are the accompanying activities. Do we have the marketing materials ready? What do we tell the customers? How do we sell them, whats the story? Sometimes we might need to train people. Or the very least we need to let the customers know about what they will get. And we need to distribute the same information internally. Otherwise communicating the new added value might be really difficult.

Product or solution might be only one layer inside a big onion. For some companies it's even relatively tiny compared to all other things. For example Supercell uses over 400 M$ on marketing. I don't think the budget for game development was anywhere near that sum.

In practice (in our setup) all these different activies for an Epic should be lead by Product Manager. S/he isn't the one who should do everything, but make sure they happen. As a Release Train Engineer and Value Chain Owner I try to ensure this happens. It is maybe worth mentioning that through SAFe, the activities related to writing software are rather well formulated and established. The cadence based thinking still needs to be implemented for these other activities.

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!

Release Planning in One Day

In this blog I have shared experiences of our Release Planning Days. Of course the first one was most memorable since back then everything was new and exciting. Second attempt proved that it wasn't pure luck, but that the concept was actually working. I documented also the third one, but after that I thought that it maybe isn't that exciting anymore.

One unfortunate thing to mention is that the day was a public holiday in one of our offices. But quite a few of our colleagues from that site were willing to come to work on that day and get another day free in exchange. I call that going the extra mile.

But maybe I can tell about the most recent attempt, since it was again a bit different from the previous times. For our latest Release Planning I had given some of my colleagues a few chores to fill in advance. Here's the list:

• Portfolio Backlog is in presentable state
• Product Managers have discussed their the Roadmaps with teams working directly with them
• Product Managers have made an initial Launch Plan for their products
• Product Owners have crafted Draft Release Plans for their teams

Out of these, the first task went to our Chief Portfolio Officer who is like the Grand Vizier of the Portfolio level. Second and third tasks went to Product Managers (Program level) and the fourth one to the Product Owners (Team level). 

Launch Plan is a term that isn't originally from SAFe (as far as I know). It communicates the intended usage of the Release if and when it would be successful. Previously we had identified a waste of extra waiting time when the Release was ready, but we had not decided what to do with it. The accompanied business needs are in most cases clear already when the work on the release starts. That's why it is practical to craft also a plan about the usage. And if something is left our the Release scope, the plan can be adjusted.

So, in essence we skipped the first Team Breakout. Also the organization of the presentations was modified. In our past Release Plannings all Product Managers have presented their Roadmaps in a row. But since we had the Draft Release Plans already available at the beginning of the event, I wanted to form logical entities of the Roadmaps and associated Release Plans. This also helped in focusing on one subject at a time.

The morning part of the day was heavy. That was clear already beforehand. But we didn't come up with any better alternatives. At least grouping the presentations in the new way was seen as an improvement.

All in all things went pretty much as expected. During the Team Breakout some plans were modified but most of them were almost the same as during the draft phase. The new, more compact way of conducting the day seemed to work well and we will probably do it like this also next time.

Second Release Planning Day

Before the summer I wrote about our first attempt to do a whole company Release Planning Day. Since we do releases in regular cadence, now was the time to try this activity again.

After the first trial I had received feedback that doing everything in one day was maybe a bit too overwhelming. One concrete remedy was to divide the activities to two days. Another improvement that I was happy to witness, was that this time the Product Managers really prepared for the event. They discussed and worked on their Roadmaps together with the teams during the past couple of weeks. And this activity really paid of in the quality and in the level of realism.

People took the event seriously. Even though one of our Business Owners and a Product Manager were visiting customers abroad, they took the time to do their part in the agenda. Their presentations were broadcasted over a VOIP connection. But for me the message was clear: this event is really important.

The first day started as during our first time. The schedule for the day had been delivered to everyone already via email, but I briefly revisited the agenda. Then our Business Owners gave an overview of the market situation. What is happening now and how we should prepare for the future.

Next the Product Managers shared their Product Roadmaps. We are still working on these and lot had changed since the last Release. Mainly many not-so-well prepared themes had been dropped and returned back to the funnel stage. There were clear pros and cons for this approach. Now the organization was able to focus the attention on the few Epics, but on the other hand, the longer term visibility was missing from the plans. But I'm confident we can work that out in the future.

We are still figuring out our Architectural Runway and how to coordinate it on the Program level. But as the manager of our System Team, I used some time to tell about the tool changes we are about to carry out during the coming Release Period.

After the common sessions it was time to split into teams and start forming the draft plans. Teams collaborated with the stakeholders and tried to formulate the needs of the business into a realistic set of PI Objectives. Actually, in our company language we call these Epics, since that's how they are called in JIRA Agile. The lunch hour was also incorporated into the first Team Breakout.

The next common session was the Draft Plan Review. Every Product Owner presented their team's draft Release Plan. This way it was easy to spot if something was missing or required coordination with other teams. There were no major surprises. It was as if people had actually discussed their plans together. Oh boy, who could have seen that coming!?

After the Review there were two options. Teams could continue planning today or go home and rest. The next common session was scheduled for the morning of the next day. Since we have development team members in multiple time-zones, I thought it was ok to offer possibility to carry on the planning on one site and pick up earlier on the next morning on the other site. Also the splitting gave people more time to do the planning. And at least I felt rather exhausted in the afternoon already.

I don't actually know how the teams decided to do. Maybe some continued the planning, maybe some went home early. Anyway, the next morning we gathered again to a common session to go through the finalized plans. Most of the plans had not changed much since the draft phase, but I believe it was good to have time to digest them a bit and work out the dependencies if any. There were still some questions and comments but generally people were satisfied with the plans.

In the end I wanted again to have a vote of confidence for the plans. Just so that nobody could walk away from the event and say it was not their plan. At first it felt a bit silly. And it was. So in the end I turned holding the microphone to the crowd and yelling "DO YOU BELIEVE IN THIS PLAN!!?" And they did. :)

Successful Pre-Planning

Sometimes things just go smoothly! Today was one such day. Today was the Pre-Planning of our next Release. Everyone was well prepared. As I have previously written, we are currently experimenting with Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). We have Product Visions and Roadmaps. This is an area where we have especially put our efforts on lately and it really starts paying off!

We had a two hour session. First some general information about the schedule and then introduction to not yet so familiar concepts of Themes and Roadmaps. Then the Product Managers introduced their latest Roadmaps and explained the business drivers. It was nice to see the leap in the quality since the previous Release.

After the Roadmaps, the Product Owners shared their teams' draft Release Plans. Some of them were not yet very realistic or contained way too many things, but it was good to have visibility to this none the less. Seeing some draft gives a lot more possibilities for improvement than having nothing at all.

Hopefully this two hour event gave the whole company a better view on where we are and where we want to go next. As the coordinator and facilitator of the event I felt it hit the spot. But I have a tendency of being over-optimistic from time to time. ;)

On a side note, I finished reading Management 3.0 by Jurgen Appelo. Great book! I can already see myself trying this stuff in action.

Facing the Reality in Product Management

For some reason Software Development is somehow so far from the physical world that it is very easy to neglect the truth for a very long time. Managing products is one area where I have faced some horrendous gaps between the plans and the real world.

This picture of Chinese traffic jam has become one of my favorites lately:

Unfortunately I think it characterizes the amount of things some people think can be done in parallel. A Product Roadmap that has nine things that should be developed in parallel. By one team. Of about nine persons. If you say it out loud like this, it's probably evident that it's not going to happen. But if you just add boxes to a PowerPoint, it's deceitfully easy to just add one more box. ...and yet one more.

My solution asks for another picture. 

"There you go. I think your Roadmap is great, but it only has this one flaw. Everything you have there needs to fit through this funnel." Well the diameter of the funnel of course depends on the team size, but I think one-piece-flow would be something to strive for.

Doing things in priority order one by one. Creating the features that offer the biggest customer impact and added value one after another. Doing things pragmatically and keeping the focus. Let's try to get there!

Scaling Scrum Beyond Teams

Our teams do Scrum. The lowest level of inspect-adapt-loop is the Daily Scrum. Above that are the Sprints that usually take one to four weeks. Most common is probably two weeks. This level is planned solely by the Scrum Team.

Our Sprints belong to Releases. We are currently satisfied with a pace of four releases per year. That means that a release comes every three months. With two week Sprints it means that we can fit six Sprint per one Release.

I know that in the most pure form of Scrum, teams produce each Sprint potentially releasable content. And there are probably no bugs. Unfortunately my version of reality contains a legacy product that has some known bugs. And since we have a long history and some dependencies, we really need to do some integration testing at the end of the Release cycle.

So we carry out an extensive Release testing at the end of each Release cycle. Currently we have reserved the whole third month of each Release for this, but the teams are free to use their best judgement on this. If they have everything tested in time, they can start new development already before the Release period is over.

The idea of four releases per year is actually taken from Scaled Agile Framework. We do not want to re-invent the wheel, so we rather use practices that someone else has found useful.

Release planning is carried out between Product Managers and Product Owners. Of course in the end the team needs to "accept" the plan, so we iterate until a mutual agreement is found.

Beyond the Release level are the Product Managers Roadmap and product Vision. And even above this is the Strategy. This whole setup is rather new, so I'll tell more once we have experimented a bit further.