Align to Accelerate: an approach to change culture and practices through Digital transformation

Initiate — Invest — Improve

Foreword: Accelerate was devised, developed and rolled out initially for a team of 60 with my partner Hélène Soulard, Agile Coach — alongside Geoffrey Graveaud — Technical Director at Zenika

Our Approach: Why?

At the end of 2020, we were keen to change our practices and agile way of working to satisfy the following driver: “Have the right product with the right delivery thanks to the right team”, and launched a transformation based on Accelerate.

We felt it important in our agile practice to opt for an approach that, instead of promoting individual accomplishment favouring well-being and psychological security, nurtures a certain functionality and synergy within a team. This would allow everyone to evolve within an ecosystem that advocates collaboration and alignment; action through meaning and autonomy in order to enable teams to quickly, frequently and effectively bring the greatest value possible to our products for both our customers and sportspeople. So when we discovered Accelerate, and the study’s potential (not just in terms of performance, job satisfaction outcomes and more cohesive working together, but also its underlying agility), we saw it as a pragmatic way to develop our teammates.

But we didn’t want a top-down approach that would enforce a change that teams didn’t understand and for which an unnatural effort was required. We had already seen too many “miracle” approaches imposed on teams, which at best achieved nothing and at worst were demotivating. In addition, everything we had done previously had succeeded because we had created meaning first.

In fact our driver ends with “… thanks to the right team”. When we say “We have to perform well and reduce time-to-market”, it’s the team who drives this improvement because it understands the context and organisation.

To summarize, we wanted to continue to “Be Agile” and not “Do Agile”… No cargo cult.

We therefore had to build an approach for and by teams that:

• Creates meaning
• Explains the Accelerate mechanics
• Generates interest within teams and results in initiatives and outcomes.

Our Approach: INITIATE — INVEST — IMPROVE

When rolling out Accelerate, we wanted everyone to be able to appropriate the right reflexes, to facilitate its adoption by people and teams and eventually change our culture and mindset. As a company keen to promote the benefits of sport, we usually make this comparison:

When you want to start swimming and you’re properly equipped, you dive into the water, trying to move in a way you think suits your abilities, in order to go as fast as possible. But before you complete the first length, you find yourself out of breath; you’re moving slowly and it’s clearly frustrating. Why? Firstly, we have to adopt the correct approach, learning the moves slowly and correctly before trying to go any faster. It’s the same philosophy as Shu Ha Ri.

First Phase: Initiate

Our first aim was to explain to all teams the Why of our approach, to:

• Make sense of Accelerate
• Help people understand its mechanics
• Stimulate interest in teams and generate initiatives through concrete actions.

Everyone from our Business Unit follows our suggested three-part training:

1. Kick-off
2. An appropriation workshop
3. An assessment workshop.

Kick-off and Appropriation workshop

Accelerate affects all the roles in our teams, including our managers. As Agile Coaches, we are expected to have expertise in helping teams to boost their performance, but we aren’t experts in any particular field of the value stream:

We also adopted this centralized and facilitating stance to engage people as key players in this approach. In this respect, everyone involved in these phases was invited to participate and interact because we were keen to define what our approach was and what it wasn’t:

The Appropriation workshop was designed by Geoffrey Graveaud, our special partner in this venture. His workshop, played out as a proper game, is called “Discovering Accelerate”:

The power of this workshop resides in its light-hearted way of helping participants understand the outcomes that can be achieved by playing with capabilities: how each individual can have an impact on performance, and unexpected outcomes.

With this workshop, teams were able to:

• Take ownership of the approach
• Understand meaning and mechanics (the right actions)
• Understand capabilities
• See themselves using Accelerate

All teams and personnel were involved in these workshops, including managers and cross- functional teammates (communication, IT security, support, etc.) because Accelerate is about transforming the overall mindset.

We have run this workshop enough times (about 30) to see some benefits:

• it enables them to better understand Accelerate.
• it makes you want to take action
• by giving participants as much say as possible so that they can share their experiences, they realize that they are already doing Accelerate
• the overall ROTI is 4.6/5. So there is no time being wasted.

Assessment workshop

Following the initiation and discovery stages, we entered the appropriation stage, where we wanted teams to self-assess in order to review their practices in relation to capabilities, and identify those to be worked on as a priority.

At the end of these workshops, we have:

• action plans defined for each team
• themes requiring global actions

This last workshop brings the initiation phase to a close. After a five-hour session, each person is able to understand what Accelerate is and how to contribute to improve delivery performances, and begin taking action.

With this first phase, INITIATE, we grant that it is a time-consuming phase — lasting at least 4 months — but an essential one, since people and teams must take ownership of it.

In fact, Accelerate is easy to understand but difficult to implement. It was also necessary to spend this time gently easing off the brakes before launching into anything, and put teams at the centre of the game.

Second phase: Invest

Alongside training the teams, we launched the investment effort. We chose three main topics to work on: CI/CD, workflow and measurement.

CI/CD & Workflow

One way to improve delivery is to act on the value stream and its infrastructure. To this end, we have taken a two-pronged approach:

For CI/CD, we have asked our team’s Technical Leader to run two sprints in a dedicated taskforce. Their mission: build the dream CI/CD resources for working on other technical capabilities — build the best possible racetrack to enable our athletes to perform at their best.

In fact, some issues in our development and delivery practices have been observed:

• Too many different branch management strategies
• Many tests still manual
• Some tests arrive too late
• Too little standardisation

Our objectives were also:

• To send finalized code to production within the hour
• No manual action
• A unique way of working within the BU
• Native integration of performance measurement

This team created a CI/CD in just a few weeks, allowing development of small volumes, using temporary environments as close to the production environment as possible. These environments are unique and very short-lived, and have replicated data from production. It provides rapid feedback on current development at each commitment stage (security, performance and integration). Last but not least, it allows for a complete automated testing and deployment strategy to capitalise on experience, reduce manual errors and focus on more valuable actions.

Once we had created this new pipeline, we wanted to provide a more global view and understanding of this progress by developing a common workflow that would be based on this CI/CD and the result of a development-wide Value Stream Mapping.

We examined all teams’ workflows and made the surprising observation that teams had almost exactly the same workflow but used different terms to describe it.

With these elements, CI/CD and workflow, we possessed all the prerequisites for building an automatic measurement approach.

Measurement

How do I get started? I want to improve my performances quickly but how do I choose the best capability for that? Without measurements, how do we know who we are or where we have to go? This initiative is therefore of vital importance in a continuous improvement approach. So we took the time to obtain a reliable measurement that reflected the reality on the ground.

Using our manual MVP Metric Dashboard based on our common workflow, we wanted to implement an automated measurement tool in one of Accelerate’s most important mindsets: automate to focus on real value and be more resilient. Inspired by the Google Four Keys Project, as part of the Decathlon Digital internal collaborative approach, we have developed our own tool, called Delivery Metrics:

Combined with our onboarding approach, this tool has facilitated Accelerate’s roll-out in other Decathlon Digital departments. Teams can quickly access their own performance measurements and can assess themselves.

This second phase was a real investment because it’s a cost. In other words, it takes both time and human investment, but is a necessary expense.

To achieve this, we needed leaders’ sponsorship to facilitate choices, particularly after deciding to form a task force and temporarily remove some developers from your teams.

This phase generates certain benefits:

• Drastically increases the involvement of both teams and people
• Delivers concrete action fast
• Profoundly impacts human and technical organisation and skills requirements

Basically, the first phase — Initiate — was our attempt to change the mindset and the culture, while this second phase actually succeeds in doing so, because changing the culture is as much about changing what people think and feel as what they do.

Third phase: Improve

Well, that’s the easy bit done: teams and people are aligned. They have understood what it is, what matters, what we want to do, and what they have to do.

But now how do we keep the impulse and energy going? How can we prevent this habit from being replaced by another?

Here’s the approach we found. Some of the artifacts worked well for a while, but became less suitable as time went on. We should always be able to adapt this way of working, for various reasons:

• when we started, there were 60 of us; now there are over 200 (we’ve gone from four to 21 product teams)
• people who were there yesterday are not there today or tomorrow, so team spirit is always fluctuating
• ambition and strategy is always fluctuating too, so time to improve can also seesaw.

What we want

To safeguard our continuous improvement approach, we identified several requirements:

• Teams always need to know their level
• Teams have to own their continuous improvement plan
• Teams have to regularly debrief their performances
• Teams need to share their evolutions, improvement plans, successes, failures and good practices
• All capabilities need to be documented and capitalized on

Being measurement-centric

Using our Delivery Metrics measurement tools, we have gone on to build dashboards like this:

In the top graph, there is an average lead time of all jobs done in a 2 week-sprint. The bottom graph shows a 4-sprints rolling average.

Here we want to display the sprint-by-sprint situation and improvement trend. We have never imposed a specific objective (e.g. “Your Lead Time has to be 1 day”). Inspired by Charles Goodhart — “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure” — the only “rule” is — “Improve yourself!”. To this end, having visual management to track improvement trends is a key requirement of our approach.

About autonomy and responsibility

Teams are conscious that they need to drive their improvement. Using Scrum, we have already implemented a progress culture through retrospectives. This practice affords them a great opportunity to inspect themselves. What better place to scrutinise their measurements and evolutions?

Previously, retrospectives were driven by feelings and remembering highlights. It all depended on the person — as is often the case with Agility. It’s an important element — having somewhere for people to express themselves, and share how the sprint feels… But there must also be time to share, study and understand metrics — the right metrics –so we can issue the team with hard facts. It’s essentially a question of balance — as is often the case with Agility. I could almost write:

Measurements and facts over feelings and moods

That is, while there is value in the items on

on the right, I value the items on the left more.

This way has made our team’s action plan more activable and helped them to better understand what occurred during the sprint.

The second benefit lies in our ability to put an end to what many consider to be a means of tracking performance: velocity. Estimation-derived velocity is an “indicator” based on feeling and the practice of “making the manager feel good”.

About learning culture

It is widely recognized that all members inside an organisation are heterogeneous: some teams are stable, some teams are old, some teams are just starting out, some teams are too big or too small, some teams are not even a team, and not all teams share the same background or the same performance. This is not how we should compare them. But gradually teams improve themselves, and understand the best and worst approaches. They capitalise on their experiences. This capitalisation, this learning, is a goldmine for improvement and performance. We also set a series of procedures within our sprint to encourage this learning culture:

• Internal demos: A monthly session of sharing wins and learnings. This is a transparency exercise during which the teams present their metrics and developments from our Delivery Metrics tool, share their improvement action plans and explain the best practices they have developed during a review session: for example, how the new automatic deployment process allows them to deliver more frequently).
• Coding Dojo, Technical Lean Coffee and Community of Practice meetings. These sessions are genuinely free and valuable sharing events inside sprints for individual levelling up, and collective sharing on new practices outside the traditional productive rhythm. This is all about offering our teammates the opportunity to be better tomorrow. Essentially, it’s another way to invest.

About transformational leadership

And what about Managers? We want teams to be autonomous but that doesn’t mean they are alone. Accelerate defends Transformational Leadership. That means Leadership follows five characteristics:

• Vision: Understands clearly where their team and the organisation are going, and where they want the team to be in five years.
• Inspirational communication: Says positive things about the team; says things that make employees proud to be a part of their organisation; encourages people to see changing conditions as situations full of opportunities.
• Intellectual stimulation: Challenges team members to think about old problems in new ways and to rethink some of their basic assumptions about their work; has ideas that force team members to rethink some things that they have never questioned before.
• Supportive leadership: Considers others’ personal feelings before acting; behaves in a manner which is thoughtful of others’ personal needs; sees that the interests of team members are given due consideration.
• Personal recognition: Congratulates team members when they do a better-than-average job; acknowledges improvement in the quality of team members’ work; personally compliments team members when they do outstanding work.

Managers act as servant-leaders. They support their teams and help them when they don’t have the means to act. So we instigated a cycling process:

Thus by sharing at different times, each individual party is able to understand the backgrounds of each team and act on the improvement.

Instilling a scientific culture of small steps

In Accelerate, there is a capability to Limit the Work In Progress. The capability is as relevant for individuals as it is for teams, when they manage their sprint backlogs and define their sprint objectives, and for leaders, when they set the course to be followed.

Here it’s still at least as important. A scientific approach to research and increasing knowledge is to determine all the parameters that influence the experiment you want to carry out, and try them out one after the other to find the one that works or improves your experiment. People and teams need to adopt this same approach. In the words of Marie Curie: “I’ve learned that the road to progress is neither quick nor easy.” That’s the paradox to be solved: all organisations must be performed to avoid being overtaken or left behind by competitors. Today everything is moving faster and faster. If you don’t take time to find the best way to perform well, however, you’ll run out of steam.

So, a definition of Accelerate could be: Adopt the right gestures

Incidentally, in order to choose the right parameter to change, you have to understand every single capability that might be concerned by your plan. A Maturity Matrix could help you. This is another way to measure teams more accurately, because for each capability you have to define the performance success factor. You must continue unless you fail to reach the maturity objective of your capability. Moreover, this maturity matrix could be a good visual management tool to represent the team’s level.

About newcomers and new teams

The organisation that was set up started at a precise time, but you have no idea when it will end — hopefully as far into the future as possible. During that time, things are always changing: teams are created, merged or disbanded. People are coming and going. Global knowledge is also changing; to guarantee a minimum level, it’s essential to re-do some of the Initiate phases. The goal is to onboard newcomers through an appropriation process of Accelerate, and teams through an appropriate assessment process.

About global continuous improvement plans

As seen above, all teams have a continuous improvement plan shared and monitored with Coaches and Managers. It’s also necessary to drive a global continuous improvement plan for capabilities that need working on by several teams. For example, a team could demonstrate a particular benefit as having Feature Flipping in a “Proof Of Concept” mode. If this capability works, it should be suitable to roll out to all the other teams. Or, with a retrospective view, you can identify a capability that was never adopted but that should be essential.

Conclusion

Using the Accelerate roll-out as an example, we have created and applied an approach (INITIATE — INVEST — IMPROVE) that facilitates the changing of practices and mindsets of both individuals and teams. This has been successful here, and could be applied to other transformations:

1. Identify the prerequisites for change: What do you change? With which action levers and measurements of success? Which people have to be involved in this change?
2. Prepare and test your INITIATE step: to give meaning and purpose, to ease off the brakes before launching anything, and to put teams at the centre of the game.
3. Launch your INVEST step by conducting essential work at the start-up phase, to allow teams to see initial improvements and inculcate them in the workings of the approach in a practical sense.
4. Lead your IMPROVE step as part of a long-term commitment; adapt it as required, so that it remains as close as possible to your particular context.

Acknowledgments

What an incredible journey!!! When we set out on it with Helene two-and-a-half years ago, we had no idea how it would change us or whether it would be successful in any way. Thank you, Helene, for your Agile mindset, your pragmatic and relevant ideas, your energy and your smile.

I would like to thank Ben Amar Kacimi for believing in our approach and giving us the chance to develop it.

Thank you, Zenika guys, for your knowledge, your support and your open-mindedness, all of which helped us launch our approach and be bold enough to apply for the Google DevOps Awards. Special thanks go to Geoffrey Graveaud (warm regards) for your awesome workshop: “Discovering Accelerate”, and to Sébastien Nahelou for your expertise in Delivery Metrics. Thank you, both, for the enjoyable times we had during our talks together.

Lastly, thank you to Google Cloud for rewarding us with a DevOps Dreamer Google Cloud DevOps Award, recognizing the relevance of this approach in its ability to align teams for the implementation of Accelerate. Thanks to the Customer Growth team !!! Big Up Guys !!!