It is all about the teams
We had last year an opportunity to get involved in a big transformation with one our our customers, Aller Media. Naturally this is a transformation that is still ongoing but we have made remarkable progress already. I was asked to support local IT and service development organization as an Agile Coach with the following reality: media and media houses in general are becoming digital technology companies and therefore Aller Finland development organisation wants to embrace Lean-Agile principles and to get started with continuous improvement. I was more than happy to hop on board and use my professional background and experience to support teams and developers to help them in moving forward with this journey.
One of the first things we decided to do was to introduce One Backlog into the operations. Main purpose behing the concept is to move business item priority conflicts away from the individual developers table. Best way to deal this conflict is to have a structured approach with business stakeholders and product owners to deal with over increasing demand and let the teams handle the supply. Improving the supply (from team perspective) makes demand ordering also much easier in the long run. That is one of the main ideas behind continuous improvement: make business decisions easier to do.
Connected to the above it was clear that we needed real teams. Instead of group (around 15) of individuals we introduced 3 cross-functional teams with their respective business areas. It was also obvious to structure Product Ownership to match the teams and respective business areas (=3 Product Owners for 3 teams). All teams had their own separate work areas (chosen tool to pull work was product backlog) and teams also had clear business stakeholders to deal with. Very well received improvement. This brought business and customers much closer to the developers.
Another rapid change was to move from Kanban approach (with tasks assigned towards individual developers) to common Sprints (team based iterative approach). Main purpose of a sprint was to help the teams to plan together as a team instead of doing it individually. A common planning horizon supports teams to achieve goals and makes much easier for newly formed teams for further improvement.
Visualisation was introduced as well. Some low hanging fruits we have already identified: all teams with their own white boards, monitoring and visualisation towards production, common portfolio board, team retrospective visualization and organisational level improvement board. Main purpose of radical visualization is to create awareness and gradually have behavioral changes happening in the company and teams.
Essential key motivator behind whole transformation was the different aspects of learning in changing business conditions. Only way to address rapid business changes is to learn fast. This was approached from team and individual level. Leaders helped the developers to identify different improvement areas: for example AWS competence was addressed. These areas were also shared inside and between the teams. Eventually learning is something that is natural to keep and nurture in the culture.
I am extremely proud of the journey Aller has started. As was expected, all real progress started with teams and is continuing to flourish with them. At the same time there is ongoing modernisation in the techical domain of Aller. You can read about it here. What I am anxiously looking forward is to hear more good news and see interesting insights from this company.
