Teams with a shared vision of the future achieve more
Recurring observation: teams invest in deployment tools and don’t improve delivery frequency. How can this happen?
When I am coaching a team plagued with quality issues it’s common to find frustrated team members. They often experience added frustration because each team member has their own aspirations for different aspects of the development process. Their various aspirations may even be in different timescales — some shorter term, others longer.
Mismatch of aspirations can contribute to friction. Each planning session becomes a calamity of individual ideas without a mechanism for prioritising. The team can get demoralised with the process, be frustrated with each other, and achieve less impact and a slow rate of improvement.
The example I teased at the outset of this article is teams building deployment tools that aren’t fit for purpose. The destination becomes building the tooling rather than the effect it’s supposed to provide. Often the result of a pet project from one of the team members or a collective desire to experiment with new technology.
The new version of the deployment tool may be technically more sophisticated but fails to fix the issues preventing the team from improving their delivery rate. When the goal is to build the tool then the project “can’t fail” even if the tool doesn’t address the problems slowing their delivery down.
The ability to deploy more frequently eludes them. There are always more tweaks to a dodgy toolchain but if the issue is somewhere else in their process then the technology may not address the root issue. For instance, the issue may be in how the team frame and vertically slice stories to ensure work is small and self-contained enough to deploy confidently.
Common gaps are a lack of holistic analysis of the issues, clear framing of the problem and lack of definition of the goal. Deployment tools seem like a natural solution to a delivery frequency and a team goes straight for this solution. The tooling may be part of the answer but it must be into consideration of the people and process elements.
The problem here is that the focus of the team is not guided by a meaningful improvement for them or their customers. Without a measure of progress towards that improvement or a way to assess whether the rate is adequate to realise a significantly improved situation in the future. To solve the right problem at the right time.
From this we can conclude the following aspects are important:
- Analyse the situation holistically considering people, process and technology elements.
- Understand and frame the problem and the issues at play.
- Set a clear goal describing the new reality being aimed for.
- Identify measures of progress that are symptomatic of progress towards the goal.
- Track progress towards the goal continuously using these measures.
Originally published at https://wioota.substack.com.
