Right to Left
This week I finished reading Mike Burrows’ latest book Right to Left.
Yet again Mike manages to expertly tie together numerous aspects of Agile, Lean and everything else, in a manner that’s easy to digest and understandable from a reader/practitioner perspective. One of my favourite sections of the book is the concept of the ‘Outside-In’ Service Delivery Review. As you can imagine from the title of the book, it’s taking the perspective of the right (needs, outcomes, etc.) as an input, over the left (roles, events, etc.) and then applying this thinking across the board, say for example in the Service Delivery Review meeting. This is really handy for where we are on our own journey, as we emphasise the need to focus on outcomes in grouping and moving to product teams that provide a service to the organisation. One area of this being around how you construct the agenda of a service review.
I’ve slightly tweaked Mikes take on matters, but most of the format/wording is still the same:
With a Service Review coming soon, the hope is that we can start adopting this format as a loose agenda going forward, in particular due to it’s right to left perspective.
Formulating the above has also helped with clarity around the different events and cadences we want teams to be thinking about in choosing their own ways of working. I’ve always been a fan of the kanban cadences and their inputs/outputs into each other:
However I wanted to tweak this again to be a bit simpler, to be relevant to more teams and to align with some of what teams are already doing currently. Sonya Siderova has a nice addition to the above with some overarching themes for each meeting, which again I’ve tailored based on our context:
These will obviously vary depending on what level (team/service) we’re focusing on, but my hope is something like the image above will give teams a bit clearer steer as to things they should be thinking about and the intended purpose of them.
Digital Accelerators
We had another session for our Digital Accelerators this week, which seemed to be very well received by our attendees. We did make a couple changes for this one based on the feedback from last week, removing 2–3 slides and changing the Bad Breath MVP exercise from 2 groups to 4 groups.
It’s amazing how much a little tweak can make, as it did feel like it flowed a lot easier this time, with plenty opportunity for people to ask questions.
Last weeks session was apparently one of the highest scoring ones across the whole week (and apparently received the biggest cheer when the recap video showed photos of people playing the ball point game!), with a feedback score of 4.38/5 — hopefully these small changes lead to an even higher score once we get the feedback!
Next Week
Next week is a quieter one, with a trip to Manchester on Tuesday to meet Dave, our new DevOps Engineer, as well as help coach one of our teams around ‘Product’ thinking with one of our larger IT projects at the minute. Looking forward to some different types of challenges there, and how we can start growing that product management capability.