Functioning environments as part of your organisation’s cultural agenda
‘Culture’ in organisations gets a funny rap. In most large organisations a strong capable culture is an aspiration.
A strong culture can only happen through having a functional environment. One which keeps good people, expands when required and works well together no matter the size.
I’ve seen first hand the challenges of embedding a functional environment when there are a large number of business areas.
More stakeholders, more points of view, more opinions on how it should be done.
It’s undeniable that it should exist. It’s undeniable that people should be looked after. Without people a large organisation would be nothing.
An organisation should be a collective.
Functioning environments — and delivery, momentum, morale
In order to have a functioning environment, you must have delivery, momentum and morale.
Without one of those things, the other two will begin to fail which will have a knock on effect on the environment.
The order in which you have them can be interchangeable. If one fails or starts to fail it will have a direct consequence on the others.
A couple of examples:
If you don’t have delivery, you’ll never gain momentum and you will lose morale.
If you can’t build momentum, you’ll lose morale and there will be no delivery.
If the morale of your people is gone, there’ll be no delivery so there’ll be no momentum.
And thus, the functioning environment should be a key part of your cultural agenda. It needs to be a part of the organisational ‘designed’ culture.
Making it work in a large organisation
There are core fundamentals required to make this work.
Delivery
Any organisation, both large and small should think of delivery as an outcome of great work. If the sole purpose of an organisation is to produce a product or service and deliver it to users then not delivering is not acceptable. Organisations and businesses can, will and have crumbled when they are unable to fulfil user needs.
There are many things which block delivery;
- Ownership
- In-fighting
- Relationships
- Prioritisation
- Technical environments
- Data
- Decision making
Ownership
Who owns the thing? I’ve seen ownership change hands on many occasions. Every time it happens delivery struggles to prevail. Someone own the thing.
In-fighting
Arguments between business areas over who finances or owns something should be settled early on in the journey. There needs to be facilitation to build relationships to protect delivery.
Relationships
In large organisations there are usually different business areas or functions which require some relationship building. There may be silos or factions of the organisation which are resistant to change. That’s fine, they have their own motivations. Those motivations need to be figured out and shared and the de-escalated before it impacts delivery. Build the relationships into strong partnerships.
Prioritisation
Get your prioritisation sorted. Everything cannot be a priority, it’s simply not possible or productive for it to be that way. Yet, the pragmatic part of me says that prioritisation can derail things for valid reasons. Please make sure they are valid.
Technical environments
A change in technical environment, a move to a new one or an unstable one can be a single point of failure. Make sure that environments are fit for purpose. That they’re set up and ready for you before a delivery period.
Data
Where is the data you need for your ‘thing’. Does it exist? Do you have access to it? Are there APIs? In large organisations, getting access to data even in another area of the business can be hard. Focus on what you need and when. If you can iterate and release over time, can you build in more data later?
Decision making
Or lack thereof. Good product people weigh up options, analyse what they have to work with and aim to delivery at the right time. You’ll know when product people aren’t / can’t do that.
Momentum
Backlog prioritisation / planning
Your organisation should do good prioritisation and planning. They know even from a broad view what their landscape looks like over a 1–5 year period. Things might not get validated, things might get binned, that’s fine. The focus is knowing there’s a strategy. It builds momentum.
Continuous delivery
This is momentum. The ability to continuously deliver no matter how large or small at any given time of the day. Hot fixes, no problem. Features, let’s go. Get your organisation to a position where continuous delivery is the accepted way.
Morale
Get the things above right and you’ll be well on your way to having good morale in your organisation. But there’s more.
Focus on your people.
Did you read that right, let me say it again.
Focus on your people.
Give your teams the room to do their best work. That’s what they’re in your organisation for. Hire great people, give them direction and let them be a better version of you doing the thing that they love to do.
Support their growth — have in your head that they may only be with you for between 3–5 years. In that time you need to strive to support their personal and professional growth. Provide them with learning opportunities and watch them flourish.
Protect humanity. Every member of your team, organisation or business is a human. Protect each other. It’s a crazy world out there. There will be parts of your team that need not concern themselves with challenges from above. Put ‘shit umbrellas’ in place to protect them.
Don’t be overbearing. No child liked an overbearing parent — as an organisation we’re there to nurture.
In closing
It’s hard. You’ll never get to having perfect delivery, momentum and morale. The output of continuous delivery, unbelievable momentum and 100% morale isn’t achievable. I wish it were. But I believe you can design an organisation to focus on those things above and be functional. You must aim high and keep things at an optimum level.
You need the organisational buy-in to make sure these points are part of the cultural agenda. They’re required to be across the whole organisation.
And that means in ‘operations’, ‘finance’, ‘digital’ and others.
A lot of things can’t be achieved in large organisations without fixing the organisation first.
Thanks to Simon Wilson for helping me frame and edit this.
