We continue talking to the greatest people behind Dash. This time it’s Balazs Bezi, our scrum master, organization manager, event facilitator, project manager and just a good person.
Balazs makes Sprint Reviews happen every two weeks and connects teams within DCG. We talked about his goals, team challenges, goals and solutions.
What are your current duties in DCG? What’s your main focus?
We don’t know what to call this position I have. In a small organization, the roles are more fluid. I started as a scrum master supporting the platform teams and shortly began to think outside this role. Currently, we call my role an Organization Manager. In practice, it has two parts.
On the one hand, I support the platform teams as a scrum master, helping them improve their processes and facilitate events, communication, and program management. On the other hand, I facilitate management team work, coach the whole organization, and supervise project management initiatives. My main focus is on the program management or orchestration of development teams.
What do you think is the main problem in DCG?
I do not think we can define one main problem from an organizational perspective. In development processes, DCG doesn’t have special problems among other software developer teams. Having common issues alone doesn’t make organizational change easy, but at least we have good practices. The area we are operating in is research-heavy with much discovery work. This, and many other reasons, lead to difficulties estimating the delivery schedule. The same is true for most software teams in innovative areas. So the delivery schedule is what we are focusing on with Patryk Sakiewicz. Patryk is supporting Core and Mobile teams as a scrum master.
The goal is not to tell the future, as it is impossible to project accurate software delivery dates in research-heavy environments. The focus on the delivery schedule is a tool for the clarification of the roadmap and for the orchestration of cross-team efforts and inter-team dependencies. As a byproduct, the variability of our estimates should be lower.
If I have to say one thing that is the most pressing issue from my perspective, it would be the management of dependencies between teams.
In general, in such an environment, I would focus on thinking more about what brings the most customer value and the scope. Because working on the most valuable thing is often much more important than worrying about productivity gain/loss on how we optimize our processes.Though this period is a bit different for us, because at this point, we see clearly what needs to be done for the first version of the Platform, which also changes the focus for me.
What are your main goals right now? Solutions?
Everyone’s joint goal in the short term is to release the Platform on quality as soon as we can. Regarding our constraints, the scope and the quality are fixed, and the resources are somewhat fixed, so we are paying close attention to our timeline and scheduling of inter-team efforts.
The teams’ efforts become increasingly intertwined as we get closer to the release. Integration work is always complicated. We have a lot of cross-team dependencies, and everyone should be aware of how other teams are progressing and adjusting their effort based on that. I call this type of synchronization effort orchestration.
We use Miro boards to visualize and update inter-team dependencies. The Platform teams track issues and progress in Jira. We also use a project management tool for thorough resource planning called Gantter. Using these tools could sound like overkill, but all serve different purposes and help this orchestration.
Next to these program management efforts, I encouraged the teams to start public sprint reviews to involve the community and increase our transparency. Also, we have initiatives for cross-team knowledge sharing, like the Brown Bag sessions.
What was the purpose of Brown Bag sessions, and how do you think they influenced the team? (Brown Bag Session is a closed event inside DCG happening weekly where we can share our visions and experience)
Brown Bag session is an internal event in DCG we started in April. Biweekly on Fridays, we have 1-hour knowledge-sharing sessions on work-related topics, but they are not strictly part of our daily operations. Participation is optional for everyone. Topics like team performance metrics, how to give/receive feedback, internal demos, or what exciting things other projects are doing on the market. I wanted to create space for the “important but not urgent” topics — before they become urgent. These sessions are held for DCG members by DCG members, but sometimes we open these sessions to the public.
We have genius engineers at DCG, though we could improve our soft skills, inter-team cooperation, and giving and receiving feedback. Previously we were almost entirely focused on daily operational work, and this dedicated time allows us to stop for a moment and learn something new. We are here for the long term. We should develop ourselves and not only the code base according to that. Feedback is pretty positive on this initiative, but this fall, we will be laser-focused on delivery, affecting brown bags.
