Another goodie from InfoQ Engineering Culture podcast: CA Agile Leaders on the Using Data and Creating a Safe Environment to Drive Strategy. Some quick notes + insights:
- Biweekly status reports don’t really mean anything. Progress is shown with real data: stories/tasks moving to Done (based on the agreed Definition of Done). This data is critical. Executives need access to it in order to make informed decisions. Q: How do you break down the work in advance effectively? If you’ve got a clear target, but no clear way to get to it, how do you convert that into stories?
The natural human reaction to try and do more when we have a history of not delivering, thus overloading the system even further
- I didn’t realize how natural this really was until I heard it. If your team’s batting .200, just increase pitching frequency! Then you’ll definitely end up with more home runs, right? Not sure how far this analogy will go, but I’ll try: what you end up is non-stop bunting, because there’s no time to wind up or recover.
- What worked for CA was Management asking everyone in the org to limit their WIP. That’s true leadership courage right there.
- Organizational temporal myopia: people’s inability to see themselves in the future, applied to organizations. Organizational focus is often on the long-term vision, so individuals end up inflating the amount of work that can get done to get to that vision sooner. I think the implication in the podcast is to focus on and commit to the short-term (sprint?), because you can imagine what the organization will be like a week from now versus a year from now.
Everybody gets mad if you’re not working on their stuff
- Nothing gets done, but at least it looks like you’re working on everyone’s thing. Addressing this may be a matter of shining a light on what is vs. isn’t being accomplished. Circles back to safety. If you feel you can’t say that you’re gonna miss, it will look like everything’s going great with 67 projects in progress until the last second when all of them go red.
Not one person can save the ship from sinking, and not one person can bring the ship to shore.
- There’s a culture of heroism, which mitigates against this collective thinking. Leaders are incentivized to work against each other by optimizing their portion at the cost of other parts of the org. There’re individual performance reviews too. Individuals get praised, which then causes people to create situations in which they have an opportunity to save the day. CA tries to show that collective work is more effective than individual, and work with organizations to change incentive structures away from individuals and toward teams.
- Act “as-if”. Start showing and encouraging behaviours before they’re made “official”.
- Withholding information is punishment. It’s actually painful. People will do this to each other at work. Culture of transparency helps work against these bad behaviours.