Keeping Up with Delivery Management

A Q+A with Shane Hastie

Shane Hastie is no stranger to the evolving discipline of agile delivery management. In addition to being a globally-recognized expert in Product Ownership and Agile Coaching, Shane is known for his co-authorship of #noprojects: A Culture of Continuous Value (alongside Business Agility Institute co-founder Evan Leybourn).

Nevertheless, Shane stepped into a new role as facilitator of ICAgile’s Delivery Management Track Revision committee. Serving a group of global thought leaders in agile delivery, Shane gained a unique perspective of ICAgile’s efforts to refactor its Delivery Management Learning Track to meet the shifting landscape of agile delivery, an effort which resulted in two completely-modernized certification programs.

We asked Shane a few questions to learn more about his experiences facilitating the committee, and to hear his thoughts on the evolution of agile delivery management.

You’ve co-authored a book called #noprojects. Why is the shift away from project-based delivery important today?

The metrics by which we have historically defined success are no longer applicable. We need to re-examine the way value is delivered in the new economy. Our book starts from the premise that our goal is to create value for the customer, for the organisation and for society as a whole and shows how to empower and optimise our teams to achieve this.

Today success comes from building products people love, creating loyal customers and serving the broader stakeholder community. Evan and I explore the past, present and future of the “project”. We explain why, in today’s fast changing & hyper-competitive world, running a temporary endeavour is the wrong approach to building sustainable products and how #noprojects is fundamentally changing the way companies work.

What role, if any, does project-based delivery have in the future of delivery management?

Projects are a funding model and are applicable when the organisation who is responsible for building the product will not be responsible for running, maintaining and supporting it. In some outsource environments you may need to work in such a way, but generally we see better outcomes when there is a “you build it, you run it” approach. For evidence of just how much of a difference this makes, see the book Accelerate by Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim.

If you are building a physical product such as a building or a road, then a predictive project management approach where the builders hand the product over the customer at the end of the project makes sense. In the environment of knowledge-worker products where the product is never “finished” until it is taken out of use, this approach disincentives quality and customer value.

How do you expect these developments to impact training & learning for agile delivery management?

We hope to see training organisations teaching about different approaches to delivering value, with a customer-centric viewpoint. Explore the different ways that value can be realized and released through structuring around value streams or product lines, challenging the status quo and inspiring their course participants to disrupt their own organisations and their industries. We know that these approaches get better outcomes for customers, businesses, stakeholders and employees so let’s enable people to apply them mindfully and vigorously.

How has Delivery Management changed since ICAgile first wrote its Delivery Management Learning Outcomes?

The state of practice in Delivery Management has changed significantly since the track was first launched. When the track was first built the predominant delivery mode was projects. Bringing agile thinking to project management was a key goal for the track designers — moving from sequential, predictive project management approaches to iterative, incremental ways of delivering projects.

Since that time, the move from predictive to adaptive delivery has happened — iterative, incremental development is by far the prevalent mode for building software today, so the emphasis has shifted from bringing agile approaches into projects to exploring different approaches to delivering products. Projects are no longer the sole mode of delivering value, in fact there has been a very strong push away from project based delivery towards product or value-stream based approaches.

This change has been one of the biggest drivers for us to update the Delivery Management track. There are multiple delivery modes available today and projects are no longer the most effective means of building software products.

What has been done to keep ICAgile’s Delivery Management Learning Outcomes up-to-date?

As we recognized the shift happening in the state of practice and in response to feedback from course participants and our Member Organizations, we approached recognized experts in the community, people whose opinions and ideas are respected and who have hands-on experience delivering products using different delivery modes and working with many different types of organisations.

At ICAgile we see our role to be the facilitator of the learning outcomes, and the holders of the space to allow current and future practice to emerge. The track authors produce the content through a collaborative process that involves deep discussions drawing on each person’s knowledge and experience, coming to an agreed set of subjects, themes and individual learning outcomes. These are then given to a reviewer group for feedback and updated in response to the feedback received. Finally they are put into a publishable format and released under a Creative Commons license — anyone is free to use them in any way they want completely free of charge and without restriction. We see this as a key part of the value that ICAgile offers to the community and a way to contribute to advancing the state of agile learning globally.

We were privileged to have the following people volunteer their time and knowledge to the revised Delivery Management learning outcomes: Vladimir Gorshunov, Bruce Keightley, Johanna Rothman, Joshua Seckel, Horia Slușanschi, Helen Snitkovsky, and Pia-Maria Thorén.

My role on the team was facilitator — I worked hard to keep my opinions out of the content, but I did share copies of the #noprojects book as part of the context setting. Johanna Rothman is a published author in the space and she also shared her books with the team.

As a result of these revisions, portfolio management is no longer represented in ICAgile’s Delivery Management track. Why?

This marks a change in the central focus of the track, which was previously Projects and Program/Portfolio. Portfolios, instead, are represented in ICAgile’s Enterprise Product Ownership certification, on the Product Ownership track. The revised Delivery Management track now recognizes projects and programs as two funding and synchronization mechanisms among many rather than being the be-all and end-all of delivery.

What does the current state of Delivery Management mean for scaling at the enterprise level?

This revision prominently positions delivery at scale, empowering members to meet the unprecedented demand for flexible learning that serves the enterprise context. While revising the track for enterprise delivery, our contributors philosophically favored transformation organisations over scaling processes.

The different scaling models and approaches are part of the learning outcomes, with the emphasis on the need for flexibility and adaptation. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to scaling and we expect training providers to clearly identify the pros and cons of different approaches rather than promoting any one model.

Philosophically the approach is to, as far as possible, descale the problem rather than scale the structure. We see a lot of scaling for scaling sake rather than mindfully looking for ways to leverage the creativity of small teams and flattened structures. Performing any process at scale does not make an organisation agile — it is truly about the mindset, collaboration approach, feedback loops and enabling a culture of openness to learning across the whole organisation.

In addition to serving as a member of the ICAgile leadership team, Shane Hastie leads the Culture and Methods editorial team for InfoQ.com, where he hosts the weekly InfoQ Culture Podcast. Over the last 30+ years Shane has been a practitioner and leader of developers, testers, trainers, project managers and business analysts, helping teams to deliver results that align with overall business objectives. He has worked with large and small organisations, from individual teams to large transformations all around the world. He draws on over 30 years of practical experience across all levels of Information Technology and software intensive product development. Shane was a director of the Agile Alliance from 2011 to 2016 and is the founding Chair of Agile Alliance New Zealand.

ICAgile’s revised Delivery Management Learning Outcomes are now available on icagile.com.

ICAgile Member Organizations can find more information on re-accrediting Delivery Management courses by visiting the ICAgile Help Guide.