Team Agility

I'm not really much of a manager. Probably a slightly better coach, but mostly I'm a leader. I can give people direction and help them find the path. I don't like to tell them exactly what steps to take, just where I want them to end up. And when possible, I can walk in front of them or with them depending on the situation.

But I have a problem when I don't know where we should be going. Usually the company Vision and Strategy give guidance. But when the strategy work is still ongoing, one needs to make do without one.

In uncertain conditions it might be good to go to basics, identify the 'axioms'. When there are many unknowns, what can you rely on?

What can you rely on?

What me and my team decided to do was to improve our own group work. We are a loose group of people who work in the customer front in different roles. We are also guiding the work of others as project managers and team leaders. If we can work together seamlessly, it benefits the whole unit.

We decided to work more in pairs and coach each other. Some wanted to expand their profiles, some wanted to still concentrate more on their current role. We also decided to invite each other to our retrospectives and to arrange sessions specifically for sharing knowledge. Then we decided to change our work planning meetings (that had previously concentrated on resourcing) to sessions that combine resourcing, ongoing projects and new sales cases to get a better visibility to where we are and where we are going.

Add visibility. Prepare for changes.

These changes will increase staff liquidity, our visibility and our ability to respond to changes (which I call agility). Regardless of what the new strategy will be, these changes will help to implement it.

This post originally appeared in my LinkedIn profile. Feel free to check it out too.

Software Development - More Than Coding

Think about software development. I'm assuming you have an image of someone writing code in your mind. Well software development is that, also. But it's also much, much more.

In my company I'm responsible for the software development in this more broader sense. When I think about software development, everything begins from the customers. Developing software is solving customers' problems. Selecting what problems to tackle as a company is a strategic choice. Strategy narrows down what you develop and helps the company focus. Probably it also states in which markets you want to compete in.

Strategy helps the company define it's portfolio. What customer problems we want to solve and what kind of solutions we offer? The solutions can be products or services. Strategy should guide you in this. If it doesn't, refine the strategy.

Let's now assume that in your offering/portfolio you have product(s). Each product should have a vision. What the product will be in the future? What customer problems will it solve when it will be in it's ultimate, final form. (This form will never see the daylight. Vision serves as a distant goal, something to strive for. It's an idealisation that will be even more magnificent when you get closer.)

Vision will help you define a roadmap. Where as vision can be hazy, the roadmap should be really concrete and tangible. I think of roadmap as a guidebook for the next steps toward the vision. If your strategy is planned for the next 5-10 years, roadmap could cover maybe 3 years. It's worth noting that it's still a high level plan and as for any agile plan, subject to changes.

In software development roadmap is implemented in releases of new software versions. They are usually developed in iterative and incremental fashion. Old functionality is modified and improved with new features and bugs and defects are fixed. Many times companies try to shorten their release cycle. The ultimate case would be Continuous Deployment where every change would be deployed to customers. But this is very much industry specific. In some cases the overhead of taking new software version into use is so big that customers don't want to do that often. Then it's practical to select a release cycle that suits both the company and the customers.

In agile development, software is usually created by small teams in an iterative fashion. The length of these iterations or sprints is usually limited to less than a month, a little bit depending on the selected methodology. Sprints are like mini-projects; they are planned, executed and in the end there are sessions for examining the results and for learning from the experience. ...and then cycle starts over again.

Daily work in sprints is carried out by the development team. Developers are experts in their field and select the most fitting methods for the implementation. They have the authority for carrying out daily decisions.

We got to the part where the coder writes source code. But as there are many layers in onion, there are many layers in software development. Writing the code is just one of them. Never the less, it's an important craft if the software is to be of any use and even more so if it is to be maintained.

Using Scrum for Strategy Work

I'm continuing with the same subject I wrote about last week. Repetition is key to learning. And another important way to make things stick is to tie new information to previously obtained knowledge. At university I noticed the same thing with equations, groups of equations, matrices and linear operators (and functionals). Once you study enough maths you see how beautifully many things are connected...

But getting back to the point. I'm participating in our strategy work. Probably going into details about it would be wrong in so many ways that I won't even consider such option. But I think the (Agile) process how we are producing the new strategy is so interesting that I'd like to share it.

One way to produce a new strategy is to assign the task to a couple of persons. Then they spend some time (X months) to gather data and make relevant analyses and present resulting strategy to CEO and/or Board. Then the strategy might be accepted or some modifications are requested. Process is effective, because the people working on it don't need to negotiate much and they can move fast. On the other hand, the result is produced by the mental energy of only a couple of people. And these are also the only people who know the new strategy at the beginning.

In our case the work is split into work streams. Each work stream has an Owner, a Facilitator and a dedicated team. Teams produce their own piece of the general strategy puzzle, but they need to make sure they are aligned with the other work streams. This is achieved via cross-team communications (which is always non-trivial) and facilitated through weekly Facilitator Calls. Teams also have regular sessions when they all meet, present their current findings, challenge each others current results and generally push each other forward. This is also a session that feeds the overall strategy which will be the crystallized result of all the combined efforts.

If you have used Scrum with multiple teams you might spot some similarities. I think the work stream structure is a one-to-one match with a Scrum Team. It contains (Product) Owner, Facilitator (Scrum Master) and a (Development) Team. The Facilitator Calls are like weekly Scrum of Scrums sessions that are used for cross-team synchronization. (Of course this close relationship with Scrum is not that much advertized.)

I can't think of a good Scrum match for the session that combines the results of the different work streams, but there's one in SAFe model. These regular sessions bring to my mind System Demos. All in all the work is like traveling on board an Agile Release Train. The end result will be full-fledged strategy that is already well understood by the people who have been crafting it. And although this probably costs the company a lot more in the short term than a strategy crafted by only a couple of persons, I think it's a clever investment. If we have N work streams with M members, it totals N x M people who are already quite familiar with the new strategy. I think that is already a really nice sized Guiding Coalition.

And maybe still one thing that I want to add (because I'm so proud of it): the strategy process is out there in the open! Not in the basement, nowhere lurking in the darkness. Anyone is free to give input. People are encouraged to discuss and even the meetings are held in open space. Transparency. A cornerstone in Scrum. To me it signals trust.

Strategy, Vision, Story, Culture

First I need to admit that I'm a total newbie in any strategy work. I can openly admit that most of what I have is just scratching the surface and guesswork. But I'm getting increasingly curious about how to craft a strategy.

Even the best strategy isn't worth a penny if people don't know about it. People need to hear about the strategy. They need to be able to discuss it and ask questions. Possibly even help in crafting the strategy. I believe that's not always possible and maybe everyone doesn't even care too much about such things, but it's easier to embrace something you have been involved with early on. (I believe same things apply for leading change also. And well, strategy is about changing the company from one stage to another.) Communication becomes critical when executing the strategy.

I have recently learned that I've confused crafting a strategy and crafting a vision in my mind. I mean, if we start making a new strategy, first we should have a goal. Ambitious and challenging, yet reachable with some stretching. Or even unreachable. I was again happy to watch a video about Spotify. The second part of Spotify culture introduced the Definition of Awesome. I think company Vision should be something similar. What you aim to be in the future, the ultimate goal.

And then Strategy would be 'just' those steps that take us towards that goal. There might be big and scary actions that will need to see the daylight, but more or less this is how I see it. Now I'm facing some doubts. Spotify is emphasizing the importance of culture. Almost all companies have values. The recent presentation by Eric Schmidt from Google seems to point to the direction of culture plus right people and even directly saying that having a strategy is stupid. In today's fast moving world the strategy might be out of date quite soon after it has been crafted. Old truths don't hold anymore.

Experience is less important than skills, enthusiasm and willingness to learn. Months and weeks have turned into seconds and you can be either a dinosaur or a small and agile mammal. Those who don't adapt will become fossils and relics of the past.

But maybe strategy can also be to create an kick-ass culture while pursuing that vision. If you aim to be the best damn player with the most awesome products that customers love, that vision is not going to get out-of-date soon.

Fourth interesting concept related to the same topic is the company Story. I read about this from Ville Tolvanen's blog (who unfortunately blogs in Finnish). I like this approach of having a Story. Stories are easy to remember and they don't need to be precise. Using metaphors is often a powerful way to get the message through. Maybe the trick is to tell a story about a company that had an awesome culture and was chasing a glorious goal...