Management by Value & Opportunities — Enabling Remote
Micromanagement is difficult to fight. With the coming of agile methodologies we gave a few steps in the right direction, but when the mindset doesn’t change, the team ends up getting forced to maintain senseless backlogs or unnecessary details, what keeps preventing people from exploring unforeseen opportunities, or shifting the focus from the results to the tasks.
Even after so many years, people have been still maturing their comprehension on where it’s necessary a more structured approach, or where an “iterative and incremental” mode takes place.
What seems to have not changed completely yet, is the hunger for control! Sometimes, even working with “Agile Methodologies”, teams end up using User Stories to micromanage.
By the other hand, in a world full of opportunities, it’s still a challenge to avoid the focus deviation.
Read also my article about Service Oriented Organizations.
Open Scope
In 12 years as an IT Management and Governance professional, I developed a preference to undertake open scope projects. However, if you work as a consultant, you may face a challenge convincing your client that you can get there, independently on having a detailed plan.
This scenario is particularly contradicting because, when companies hire their executive leaders, they commit in a long-term relationship without expecting the candidates to develop a detailed plan. While, for a executive consultant to engage in a short-term project, clear plans are still expected.
In strategic efforts, being led by a consultant or an executive leader, there’s always a wide range of hidden opportunities to achieve the objective faster, simpler and easier, and these opportunities only come up as we move on.
In this scenario, getting stuck into a predefined plan makes the strategic changes harder to be made, even when this hard plans come masked as User Stories.
So, let’s explore another way of reaching the result in a creativity demanding project:
the Management by Value & Opportunity.
Managing by Value & Opportunity
Every single professional, internal or external, high leadership or not, are contracted to add a given value. In the digital age, this value comes more and more from creativity and problem-solving, instead of routine predictable work.
Management by Value
As we come from decades of routine work, we still tend to expect predictable outputs, ignoring the opportunities along the way to achieve the outcomes.
Management by Value means that, for a highly creative work, we stop imposing formal task control — no more backlogs and related metrics — and start monitoring the outcomes, results or value!
So, the first challenge is to define a measurable expected value!
In this phase, you can explore many methodologies, such as OKR, BSC, or a combination of both. Just be careful, since even OKRs may be only masked traditional goals, just as User Stories are frequently masked waterfall schedules.
As an example, instead of creating an objective “Implement DevOps”, measured by a Maturity Model, create an objective called “Increase Application Reliability”, which will be measured by the percentage of failed transactions and Mean Time To Recover (MTTR).
Management by Opportunity
Once the expected value is defined and metrics are in place to measure its enhancement, the next step has nothing to do with following predefined methodologies, creating product backlogs or something similar, but only to start moving.
You can start by interviewing stakeholders, brainstorming, resolving smaller problems or collaborating in an on going initiative. Wherever you’re able to start from, just do it.
The opportunities are along the way. You need to move to find them.
Use Case — Change Control Process
In 2020, I was leading multiple initiatives to ensure long-term SOX compliance within the technology department of a global e-commerce platform publicly traded on NYSE, and one of those initiatives involved ensuring a sustainable Change Control in a SOX regulated environment, without slowing down the continuous delivery.
Side tip: regulatory projects are good examples of the difference between What and How. SOX, GDPR and other regulations don’t determine specifically how your processes should be, but what must be controlled to ensure the mitigation of a given risk.
The Value to be added was clear, the IT Controls. Then, the 1st attempt was to form a coalition composed by representatives of different areas to discuss the model.
Side tip: even mastering management practices and models, bringing people to the discussion can always provide valuable insights on better ways to achieve a result.
A few things may happen when you involve people:
- They feel engaged to the defined model, mitigating a potential resistance
- They reveal practices in place that can be just adapted, instead of disrupted
- They can really bring knowledge that even you, as an expert, didn’t have yet
- They challenge your assumptions, avoiding a few problem-solving pitfalls
- You quickly detect who will be your allies, and who may be a barrier
Continuing in our coalition attempt, while the group discussed the Change Control model, two unexpected opportunities came up:
- A software engineering team got in contact about the automation of a kind of “user story approval” process, what ended up being nothing else than a Change Control with other name.
- Almost simultaneously, the Release Engineering team got in contact to automatize the Release Approval process in sales peak periods, what, once more, was nothing else than another part of the Change Control process.
Those were great and unexpected opportunities. A team using proactively the change management process because they saw value in that, not because someone imposed this, and a manual Release Approval process running, for which a new automatic Change Control model would come with a clear benefit. It couldn’t get any better!
Suddenly, we had almost 1,000 engineers knowing what Change Management meant and using our MVP, while the working group was still discussing the model.
If we had just followed the script, we would take almost 2 years to implement a process that ended up having its 1st version already adding value in about 3 months.
Enabling Remote Work
Remote work is a one-way ticket, and fighting against this is the recipe for losing your best talents.
Read also Remote work — an opportunity you’d better get ready for
One of the benefits of the remote work is that it’s harder to micromanage and control tasks. There’s only one way to measure success: measuring success! I know, It seems redundant, but as we saw along the article, there are still many managers measuring task throughput as it was success.
Management by Value & Opportunity is a way to ensure things keep moving on the right direction without having to dictate, micromanage or being physically in the same place. You set the value clearly and measure it’s progress.
Some companies, such as Critical Techworks, a company focused on the “[…] next generation of software systems for the BMW Group’s future driving machines”, already adopts roles like “Head of Interactions” to make sure the teams (guess what) interact!
We must work on enabling remote work, not fighting against it. Managing by Value & Opportunities is one of the tools to do this!
Conclusion
In the presented use case, the results achieved were only possible because we had clearly set the expected value, and we were open to the opportunities, not just following the plan.
Agile manifesto talks about “Adapting to changes over following a plan”. Against to that, people use the User Stories to freeze the changes, instead of adapting to it, measuring outputs, not outcomes.
Management by Value & Opportunity means we have to set a clear and measurable value, and give people flexibility to find unexpected ways to get there freely, not measuring how many hours they work, where people are or how many story points they deliver, but measuring the value added!
Strategy in the digital age is about having a solid long-term vision,
and a flexible action plan.
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