Trust Part 1: Governance and Bureaucracy
Is governance an impediment or an enabler?
Recently at Nationwide we have done some deep dives into our colleagues’ experience of governance. Being a large regulated organisation it’s fair to say that from getting funding all the way through to releasing into production it can feel like there is always another hoop to jump through.
The recurring themes from teams are that governance is too admin heavy; and that they don’t feel trusted to get on with the job.
A core principle of the ways of working we are striving for is ‘Accountable Freedom’. This aligns nicely to an agile mindset of wanting to take accountability for one’s own work. However, in a large organisation knowing exactly the boundaries of personal or team level responsibilities can be difficult. And not having the freedom of movement to act within that remit is frustrating.
An enabling bureaucracy?
In my team we have our sleeves rolled up working on the theme of Lean Portfolio Management. This includes the colleague experience of things like funding, status reporting, governance committees and realising value. In my experience of multiple ‘agile transformations’ these are among the first systemic blockers or impediments raised by teams and yet remain some of the hardest to address.
The vision is to create an ‘enabling bureaucracy’ as Mark Schwartz would say, that supports, rather than impedes, teams trying to create value for Nationwide’s Members. In this series of posts I’ll examine how we are evolving our processes and systems with the aim of building trust.
People first — empathy as an enabler
Using empathy for colleagues in teams and those in governance functions we are finding win-win opportunities to address impediments. Here are some basic colleague needs:
Delivery Leader: I need the funding and resources required for my team’s success, with minimal administration, so we can focus on delivering value. I need to manage and reduce the delivery risks we routinely face in a complex environment.
Strategy Office: We need to ensure that there is strong alignment to Nationwide’s strategy and that the execution of that strategy is as effective as possible.
Finance: We need to ensure that our strategic investment is using Member’s money wisely and that we can evidence that to stakeholders.
Value Realisation Office (VRO): We need to reduce administrative effort in portfolio reporting and orchestrating dependencies, so we can focus on value realisation and create insight that enables good decision making at portfolio and team level.
We’re glad to say this is very much change from within and we are making progress specifically because we are coming together as a cross-functional team representing these personas.
Transparency builds trust — some early wins
Transparency is a key principle to build trust. Ironically an impediment to transparency can be the typical approach to portfolio status reporting. In most large organisations there is a significant ‘cottage industry’ based on spreadsheets and PowerPoint style reports. This provides layers of human intervention as reports move up the hierarchy and can result in more discussion deciding whether something is ‘Amber’ or ‘Red’ than clarifying the root cause of an issue or the actions required.
An improvement we’ve made is to introduce a less formal 121 discussion between a product team’s leaders and representatives of the Strategy Office and the VRO. While it may feel at times like an additional layer, it provides a safe place for discussion and ensures that there is a shared understanding of the real situation for the team. It has also identified several systematic issues such as dependencies faced by multiple teams that we swarm around to resolve.
More recently we have simplified and automated the written status reports based on information provided in JIRA. Importantly, this is seen by teams as an effort to improve their ‘user experience’ of governance by leveraging the tool they use day to day rather than imposing a template or tool designed just with the needs of the governance forums in mind. On the back of that first step, we are working through a solid backlog of improvements utilising good data and visualisation. More on those as we progress.
These are modest improvements compared to our vision of ‘Accountable Freedom’. A state where federated accountability with transparency reduces reliance on central decision making.
At the same time as simplifying portfolio processes, Nationwide is overtly aiming for more agile methods within teams. To build trust in that environment, we first need to talk about that word ‘A’gile and how it is perceived by many.
The ‘A’ word and headless chickens
When it comes to investing in anything dependant on technology you have probably heard the adage: Good, Fast or Cheap, pick any 2. Trouble with the word ‘A’gile is, that outside the agile community, it is now universally understood to mean Fast and Cheap. The origins of the agile movement with its focus on quality are pushed to the background or delegated to the just as mysterious word ‘DevOps’.
Compounding this is the idea that Agile = Doing Sprints which creates the Headless Chicken Anti-pattern as expressed by Jon Smart:
Imagine that product development teams have adopted agile ways of working suitable for the Age of Digital. However, they have become a “feature factory.” They keep adding new features to products; however, the features are disconnected from customer needs and company strategy. … The teams become a self-fulfilling prophecy of backlog replenishment.
Sometimes, the cause is a lack of clear strategic alignment, the absence of a “North Star” to guide outcomes and link the work being done to strategic goals. When there is low alignment and high autonomy, the result is often something that looks like Brownian motion: there’s plenty of movement in random directions without a shared purpose.
Sooner Safer Happier, Antipattern 5.3 — Jonathan Smart, zsolt berend, Simon Rohrer, Myles Ogilvie
From the viewpoint of those that invest in such teams, they are running around delivering ‘stuff’ with undefined value. In multiple organisations I have seen such ‘A’gile teams have their funding cut and the team disbanded.
Building trust between teams and central functions
What is needed here is to think like a start-up. This concept is often related to agility inside large enterprises as a vision for descaling and busting the bureaucracy. However, an element of start-ups not often discussed is the venture capitalists that come with the territory. In the start-up ecosystem there is zero tolerance for headless chickens.
Regardless of your context someone is investing in your team. Transparently demonstrating alignment to strategy and rigor in managing that investment is required to maintain the trust they are putting in you.
That trust is a two way street. Your investor also needs to understand the complexity and uncertainty of the work you are doing. The challenges with building that two way trust are nicely expressed by Scott Ambler and Mark Lines, as the principle of Enterprise Awareness:
Unfortunately there are two main challenges to supporting enterprise awareness on agile teams. First is the cultural challenge within the agile community that some “agile purists” perceive this as unnecessary overhead. Reasons for this misunderstanding include a lack of understanding of the overall enterprise picture or some agilists who have previous experiences with enterprise professionals who struggle to work in an agile manner.
This points to the second challenge that enterprise professionals often don’t understand how to work effectively with agile teams. Sometimes this is because the agile teams they’ve been working with until now haven’t been sufficiently disciplined to work with them effectively, but more often than not it’s because they still choose to follow older, more traditional approaches to their craft.
Disciplined Agile — Enterprise Awareness, Scott W. Ambler, Mark Lines
The next part in the series will show how we are working to build enterprise awareness and trust with a key enabler, capacity based funding.
Coming soon: Trust Part 2: Capacity Based Funding
