Change Management

Weeknotes #24

Psychological Safety

A trip to Manchester this week involved interviewing for a new Product Manager role, making a point of focusing on questions centered around outcomes people had experienced (both good and bad). I was really impressed in particular during one of the interviews where a candidate mentioned around the importance of psychological safety for the team. This individual even went on to reference Amy Edmondson when I queried further, which was even more impressive! It’s clear now that more and more practitioners are aware of the importance of psychological safety in their environment with it often being the focus of talks at conferences, meetups etc.

For those unfamiliar, psychological safety refers to:

An individual’s perception of the consequences of taking an interpersonal risk or a belief that a team is safe for risk taking in the face of being seen as ignorant, incompetent, negative, or disruptive. In a team with high psychological safety, teammates feel safe to take risks around their team members. They feel confident that no one on the team will embarrass or punish anyone else for admitting a mistake, asking a question, or offering a new idea.

As part of Project Aristotle, Google found it to be the top key dynamic that set successful teams apart from other teams at Google. It also is referenced in this years State of DevOps report as positively impact software delivery performance.

The 2019 Accelerate State of DevOps

In our ways of working (WoW) programme, tracking this will be really important. Measuring it is no doubt hard, however there are some useful articles already that may help us in this aspect of our journey.

Dev+Ops != DevOps

This week we’ve taken a look at some of pilot teams in our WoW programme and planning the next steps in bringing them closer together in the value stream. With a traditional horizontal slicing of roles, we now need to rebuild that relationship between Dev and Ops into the same team, however that means for the time being we’re still going to have a bit of a split, something which we need to address in the coming months. Putting ‘DevOps’ teams together is not as simple as just chucking them together, it’s largely cultural based, with the right tooling to support them to work together.

Looking at where I would rank our organisation using DORA’s quick check, I’d suggest we’re at the following:

Which shows how much work we have to do/some of the challenges we’re facing. On the operational side we’re pretty strong in time to restore service, however we need to do a lot more in building that trust around deployments. The hope in the coming months is to pair up 1 x Dev and 1 x Ops together, in order to grow that capability around DevOps.

Next Week

Next week I’m helping put together some material on Lean-Agile Portfolio management for one of our clients, hoping to weave in some of the metrics we’re using currently, as well as that we’re looking at agreeing our next pilot team(s) and starting them on their Agile journey.

Weeknotes #21

Personal Kanban

I started this week by running a little bit of an experiment, using Kanbanchi as a personal kanban tool for the week. We’re current trialling the product with different teams, mainly as it nicely integrates with G Suite. It’s easy to get started, and once I’d created a board I mapped out my workflow (of course using WIP limits as well) of:

To Do This Week | To Do Today | Doing | Done (Awaiting Feedback) | Done

After that, I set myself a 15 minute daily standup at 7:30 each morning, to review my board and make a plan for the day. Much like when you work with new teams, you don’t quite realise how many things you’re doing (or things that are half done!) till you start to make it visible.

They’ve also recently added some metrics to the product as well which, for those that know me will be aware of, are something I’m very passionate about. Here is a look at my CFD for the week as of this morning:

Overall, I found it pretty useful and something I’ll look to stick with in the future. Nothing like eating your own dog food!

Continuous Everything

This week we ran a workshop to start to define how support would work in our new ‘Product’ world. With the traditional hand-off from Dev to Ops (throwing over the fence?), the conversation was all around how we bring these two groups together, in particular looking at some of our pilot product teams we’re working with at the minute and how we can incrementally introduce that in. It was good to have a number of the roles in teams already prepared to explain to a wider group, as it helped provide context around what outcomes we’re trying to achieve, plus the chance for us to get feedback around if they actually make sense. Whilst there’s no doubting there will be teething problems/learning, the good thing was that everyone came away positive and with a shared understanding on how we want things to work. Simon from the Operations side did a great job in facilitating, in particular by involving not only those of us on the Agile side, but also our supplier (for the pilot team) and procurement in the conversation. With this adoption of new ways of working, it is clear that everything now moves to being continuous. Not just continuous integration and delivery, but also continuous compliance, continuous support and ultimately, continuous transformation. There is no ‘end state’ and teams should now be constantly looking to experiment, learn and evolve their own ways of working.

Agile Outside IT

The Assurance Digital Audit team had a bit of a soft launch this week in their Agile adoption, which I attended along with their core team based in London. The team are taking a pragmatic approach to Agile adoption, using kanban boards at Project > Deliverable > Product Backlog Item (PBI) > Task level depending on your role in the team, combined with daily scrums to start with. What’s been great so far is the recognition that full blown Scrum is probably not right for their context currently, but they have expressed a desire to incrementally get there. The team have taken to it really well so far, with myself just needing to sow the seeds every now and then around what the principles of Agile are, gently steering them if they start to go off track. It will be interesting to see how the next few weeks/month play out, with a plan for a UK wide adoption based on the outcomes of piloting it in London.

Next Week

I’ll be starting next week off with a discussion around Machine Learning in an Agile world, with a team interested in learning more and applying the practices relevant to their context with the work they do in Assurance. We’ve also got a long overdue team night out planned for Wednesday at Swingers Mini Golf — looking forward to a few drinks, great company and hopefully not too many sore heads (and bruised egos after the mini golf?) the next day.