ATMAN HB summary seminar #2

1. ATMAN HB summary seminar #2 17.09.2010

2. Challenges ATMAN project

3. From strategy to daily work and back again (not established) Business mgmt Product mgmt Project portfolio mgmt Project mgmt Iteration mgmt Daily work ATMAN project

4. ATMAN project

5. Too much multitasking and task switching ATMAN project "The longer you have been in the company, the more people ask you (to do) things" Ignoring resource allocations • Feelin' a bit queasy (3) Optimizing efficiency with respect to parallel work • Feelin’ a bit queasy (3) Number of ones own responsibilities • Feelin’ a bit queasy (3) Amount of parallel work in general • Ouch, it clearly hurts (2)

6. Insufficient resources ATMAN project "Too much stuff in parallel with several product lines" Sufficiency of resources • Feelin' a bit queasy (3) Impact of busyness to work quality • Feelin’ a bit queasy (3) Pipeline pushing • Feelin’ a bit queasy (3)

7. Lots of small stuff that originates from many different sources ATMAN project "There are strange 'nippelijuttuja' [details] people sometimes use their time on" Target spending levels • Feelin' a bit queasy (3)

8. Specialized knowledge ATMAN project Cascading effect of resource changes • Feelin' a bit queasy (3)

9. Lack of effort estimation and slipping schedules ATMAN project "We should also understand what is left, not just what has been done“ "Effort estimates are hard to make" Activity progress status reporting • Feelin' a bit queasy (3) Ongoing activities are behind schedule • Feelin' a bit queasy (2,5)

10. The amount of effort spent on unplanned and unscheduled activities is not known nor managed ATMAN project ". . . , but where do answering questions to customers and similar stuff go?" Development activity type separation in practice • Feelin' a bit queasy (3)

11. Try this ATMAN project

12. Strategy Deployment by Team Workshops ATMAN project Each team gets the task to figure out what the strategy means for their work • A senior management representative can facilitate the group work and explain the thinking behind the strategy • Emerging strategic issues will surface during the discussion Each team presents their findings/ideas to the others • Enables learning from the other teams • Even senior management may get new ideas based on this

13. There are ”Portfolios” on every level • Product and project portfolio • Product/Service offerings • Product development projects • Epics • Release portfolio • Features and stories • Iteration portfolio or team portfolio • Stories and tasks • Personal portfolio or daily work • Tasks ATMAN project

14. Technical excellence as a prerequisite for agility/speed ATMAN project Technical problems increase thrashing and slow down new development with unanticipated problems If we don’t know that it is done-done and it really works, how can we even define a measure of progress? Technical practices from eXtreme Programming are still valid (and are especially helpful in multi-team projects) • Continuous Integration (and testing) • Automatic unit testing, TDD (and today also BDD) • ... Lean principles suggest that it is much cheaper to ”stop-the-line” and fix a bug immediately

15. Utilising Cadence ATMAN project Iterative and incremental, time-boxed software development is a form of cadence (rhythm) and has been around (officially) for 20 years BUT You can also use it for scheduling your personal calendar to help you get uninterrupted work time • E.g. Daily scrum is a form of this (every day, same time) • In a similar fashion, schedule Intra/infra ”Resident” Service Desk Q&A availability for knowledge sharing Meetings (it’s actually more efficient to schedule meetings on-cadence than on-demand, you can always skip the meeting, if there is nothing on the agenda)

16. Feature teams vs. Pooling resources ATMAN project Feature teams are great... • ...if skill and knowledge is equally distributed (=everybody is a guru)... • ...but if there is a bottleneck skill, Flow thinking suggest pooling the bottleneck resources Typically different amounts of the bottleneck skill is needed in different teams at different times Pooling (or centralisation) helps in coordinating for the variability of demand to achieve better system flow Flexible (T-shaped) resources should also be fostered • E.g. Cross-training

17. Contrain Work-in-Progress to control cycle-time and flow ATMAN project Do less in parallel to achieve more • Faster cycle-times (with less queing time) increase the total throughput and flow of a system to create more value WIP purging • When WIP is high, purge low-value projects Control WIP by shredding requirements • Flexible requirements (also known from agile SW development) • Continuous planning probably required, which can become a bottleneck Control WIP by flexible resources • T-shaped people (deep in one skill, broad skill base) Pull them to emerging bottlenecks and queues • Maximising resource utilisation minimises capability to react

18. Examples of WIP constraints ATMAN project Limit the amount of completed code that awaits testing Limit the amount / time horizon of detailed planning Limit the number of active projects in the pipeline

19. Scrum-of-Scrums for many things ATMAN project Normal Scrum-of-Scrums • Progress and impediments • Could benefit from participation of others than SMs Process improvement S-o-S • SMs discuss practices for improving processes • Knowledge transfer between teams Business S-o-S • Product Owners and/or Business Owners discuss emerging issues and impediments • Could facilitate better continuous planning

20. Thank you! ATMAN project