Measure what matters
This week I’ve had a number of coaching conversations around metrics and measurement. On Tuesday we had our weekly portfolio review meeting which always proves to be one I find challenging. With an inordinate amount of WIP in our IT portfolio it’s proving very difficult to help people ‘get it’ and focus on finishing over starting, as well as slicing demand down to small batch sizes of work, regardless of methodology used. This boiled over as I found myself disagreeing/arguing with an attendee of the meeting who viewed slicing work down as admin, that customers have no problems with our delivery and that the data was “wrong”.
I wasn’t particularly proud of the fact I’d resorted to calling someone out publicly, but it did make me question what matters to people measurement wise, and challenge my own thinking. As you can probably tell I’m obsessed with small batch sizes of work and swarming on aged WIP, using empiricism to support the actions you take, mainly because for me you are viewing this with a customer lens. However it’s clear based on what happened this week that these metrics aren’t quite what matter to others. A positive was the conversation I had the following day which centered on setting limits within the overall WIP (say for a particular type of work), which showed that some were embracing the idea.
Checking today I can see that Throughput for this week has gotten to the joint highest it has been in the past six months, so looks like the message on Tuesday did land.
Slowly, slowly catchy monkey
Shameless plug
This week, the video of myself and my role within PwC was published to our careers website. Whilst I always find being filmed a bit awkward I did enjoy having the opportunity to share my experience, in particular as I feel people can have a certain view on the ‘big four’ life. It’s definitely not what I had imagined it would be like and I can safely say the last year (I’ve been here three and a half years) has been the most enjoyable I’ve had in any organisation so far. Watch the video below if you want to see someone over emphasise hand movements!
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-wg9CyLZr8[/embed]
Sprint Reviews
This week I attended a couple of sprint reviews, both of which were not particularly great to actually dial into. One was flat with little/nothing demonstrated (showing your Azure DevOps kanban board does not count), and no energy in the room. The other had an enthusiastic group ready to have good discussion but a main stakeholder who accepted didn’t turn up, which lead to the team just moving on to the retrospective.
Once you start taking Agile outside of software then the sprint reviews are hard, but not impossible. I’ve found that to make them engaging you should have meaningful discussion points and/or at least something to show.
If you are falling into the trap I mentioned at the beginning, be sure to take a read of Your Sprint Reviews suck, and that’s why!
Next week
Next week is a quieter week, with no training planned. We’re getting an increasing amount of project teams who, whilst not delivering in an Agile manner are at least wanting to adopt a kanban board for visualization/management of work. This for me is a good start for people on their Agile journey, and I’ve got 4/5 teams lined up next week to speak to and get them started on that journey…