Reward and recognition
This week, I was really pleased to see that our team have been shortlisted for the Make a difference award for our IT awards on 17th June:
Reward and recognition are tough subjects when playing the role of coaches and/or change agents. We all want to be rewarded/recognised for driving a wider change but we can often end up failing to get recognised with the ‘old’ behaviours still rewarded, this then tests your own ability to continue driving the wider change, as well as not be perceived as bias by those rewarding the wrong behaviours. Individual reward conversations are happening in the next few weeks so it will be interesting to see what has been recognised as leading by example, in particular with our strategic shift at the end of November to move towards more Agile ways of working. Hopefully the right behaviours have been recognised, otherwise my fear is that the sense of urgency will not be created if we still reward business-as-usual, big batch projects, year-long delivery cycles.
Training Day
On Wednesday I ran a one-day Foundations session for fellow IT staff in our Manchester office. This was the first one we’d run for IT people in the UK where we have switched up the format, replacing Featureban with lego4Scrum to get more of a feel for simulated delivery in an Agile world.
Feedback was positive across the board, which is good to know given the changes made. I’m a big fan of lego4Scrum, mainly due to its potential variability in outcomes (plus the fact it’s lego!). I’d like to give Featureban 3.0 a go, but
FlowViz
With some time to myself after flaky wifi (Virgin Trains 👀) on the train to/from Manchester and then up to Newcastle on Thursday, I set about refactoring FlowViz, given the API is now up to v3.0 (I built it using v1.0).
It’s good to see the Azure DevOps team making more data such as builds, pipelines and test items available…although when looking through the data I was struggling to see what additions I could make with the new information. Ideally I’d like to bring in the 4 Software Delivery Performance metrics from DORA, alas this currently looks to be unavailable.
In any case, I made a number of tweaks, updating the endpoint to use both the new URL format (dev.azure.com) and the v3.0-preview of the API, as well as creating a few new charts for teams to use. With Power BI * still * (to my disbelief and frustration) unable to handle date on the x-axis without aggregating I’ve moved to using average cycle time per week with a trend line to see if we’re on the right path.
Wrong direction team!
I actually did this for existing teams a couple of months ago, so was quite pleased to see Troy’s new team dashboard having the same chart added a few weeks ago. Made me smile that my own thinking was in-line with someone far more experienced than myself.
Other charts added/updates include:
- Layout changes/new modern visual header
- In-Progress Item Age (Calendar Days)
- Stale Work (Days since item updated)
- Cumulative Flow by Day
I also made an attempt at the Tasktop flow metrics that get a frequent mention in Project to Product:
Nowhere near as good however feedback from others has been that they really like the ‘clean’ design — hopefully it’s a simpler way to present information that teams can start to leverage.
Check the link here for the free download.
Next week (or next few weeks)
Next week I’ll only be in the office on Monday morning, then taking an extended break till 3rd July. On Monday night myself and my fiancée will be flying out to Bali (not Hotel K — but thanks Jon for the book suggestion) for two weeks of relaxing and travelling. Of course, this means I’ll be taking a hiatus from Weeknotes till I’m back, so look out for Weeknotes #17 on 5th July.