This week it is time for Chapter 4 of Great Big Agile, An OS for Agile Leaders by Jeff Dalton. The Performance Circle, Envisioning, encompasses the behaviors and actions to describe what is required for “high-quality products and services.” Concepts in the circle include the product vision, maintaining the product backlog, and clarifying customer needs. Over the years as part of the outro of the Software Process and Measurement Cast I’ve asked people to describe the two things they would change to improve value delivery (or some variant of that question). Over the 14+ years, one of the common themes has been the need for better requirements. A significant amount of what makes agile, agile, is the creation of an environment where the team and the product owners work together. That togetherness brings the work closer to those people who describe what needs to be delivered so that the feedback loop is shorter. The Envisioning Performance Circle is critical to being agile, but it is one of those areas that sounds easy but isn’t. The three holons and the actions in each are helpful for addressing common scenarios in which a product or an application can have a huge number of stakeholders each with different needs and different perspectives. The holons are:
- Defining
- Clarifying. and
- Roadmapping.
Historically frameworks assume that teams (or teams-of-teams) are magically endowed with a product backlog or roadmap. Envisioning addresses this oversight. One of the reasons this Performance Circle is difficult is due to the issue that many of the key players are outside of the span of influence of agile (or any other approach) transformation efforts. Stakeholders in the business, whether marketing, finance, or sales, are only given cursory support for understanding what their role is in product delivery. In most organizations, efforts are made to insulate stakeholders outside of product and technical areas from involvement in the software development and delivery process. This reduces efficiency and effectiveness, which means fewer features they need are delivered and those that are delivered take more time and are more costly. This is a tradeoff that might make sense but is rarely done consciously.
One of the performance outcomes in the Defining Holon is the requirement that the product owner and the agile team members are trained in the creation in management of the product backlog. While the new Scrum Guide certainly draws the boundary around both of these roles being charged with owning the backlog. The explicitness of this wording change is a reaction to implementations that forced hard boundaries between the product owner and the development teams. Boundaries generated behaviors that included the identification of multiple proxy product owners which sometimes include separate technical and business product owners. Envisioning provides a structure to establish and maintain a backlog even if some of these issues can not be addressed.
Another critical concept in this Performance Circle is road mapping. The term ‘product roadmap’ evokes a mental picture of the flow of value. Regardless of whether you are using a product or project metaphor, being able to visualize both the flow of features AND the delivery flow facilitates the delivery of value. Techniques like product roadmaps, process maps, and value chain maps are important to understanding how ideas translate to value and when that magic might actually occur.
The whole idea of envisioning all of the separate parts really requires the people doing the work the people thinking about what needs to be done and those interacting with outside stakeholders to be part of an integral whole. Scaling agile is a matter of establishing one vision, one goal that energizes any number of teams. The only way this can happen is if everyone understands the path forward and there are communication and feedback loops to keep everyone on track.
Happy 2021!
Remember, buy a copy and read along.
This week’s installment can be found at http://www.tomcagley.com/blog
Previous installments:
Week 1: Re-read Logistics and Front Matters – https://bit.ly/3mgz9P6
Week 2: The API Is Broken – https://bit.ly/2JGpe7l
Week 3: Performance Circle: Leading – https://bit.ly/2K3poWy
Week 4: Performance Circle: Providing – http://bit.ly/3mNJJN7
