Modern delivery principles for complex work

Published on 09 Feb 2021 in agile

Values guide behaviours. We choose these.

These values are correlated with successful delivery and motivated people in modern enterprises.

• People come first. Creating an environment where they have safety to be open, to be human and where communication between individuals and teams is effective is a moral obligation and leads to better business results.
• Learning and improvement should be part of daily work for people, process and product. It will bring innovation, continuous improvement and fulfilment.
• Constant connection to the customer should be maintained for rapid, frequent feedback. External and internal. So we can understand their needs, respond to them and continually improve that response to move towards the best possible outcome.
• Flow of customer value delivered continuously. When flow of value is accounted for in organisation design and the way work is broken down and delivered, it means faster value realisation, decreased risk, faster learning, lower stress and cognitive load, happier people and teams.

Principles are universal truths and observations. Our values shape the Principles we choose to follow.

Flow of value

• Handoffs and dependencies cause friction. The more friction, the more misunderstandings, rework, failure demand, greater cognitive load, wait times and work in progress. Small cross functional teams improve communication, ownership and reduce the aforementioned. Strive for autonomy; every dependency doubles your chance of being delayed or late.
• Where handoffs exist, explicit policies, events and working agreements improve their quality. Minimise rather than manage dependencies.
• Prioritisation and focus is vital. WIP increases cycle time of work and delays delivery of business value. Too much reduces flow, increases context switching, reduces quality and motivation. If everything is a priority, then nothing is. It’ll all be late.

Learning and improvement

• Embrace change; if we find out something needs to change it means we were heading in the wrong direction. Find out and act quickly.
• Small batches allow more frequent delivery of value, reduced risk and faster learning. Find the sweet spot between batch size and the tradeoffs of economies of scale.
• Progress towards the desired outcome is the primary measure of progress. Working software is an inferior proxy, but better than any percentage complete type measure. We shouldn’t put confidence in anything until we can see it working.
• For effective learning to happen, business areas, customers and development must be part of a tightly knit feedback loop.
• To improve the Product, Process and People (relationships and working patterns) we must inspect these areas on a regular basis and adapt as necessary.
• Pursue improvement through evolutionary change. In the complex context we discover the answers through inspection and incremental changes.
• Transparency through visualisation improves collaboration.
• Collect, find and use data. Be data informed rather than data driven.

Environment

• Stability and consistency produce more sustainable, predictable environments.
• Psychological safety is essential for discovering issues early, which is a prerequisite for fixing them early.
• People need purpose, autonomy and mastery in their work to be motivated. Connection to others produces a great working environment.
• Communication should be frequent and explicit. Where teams interact, working agreements and policies smooth interactions.

Grappling with complex contexts

• Aim for the simplest viable solution: minimise work, facilitate knowledge transfer and ease maintainability.
• Be effective first, efficient second. Only put your foot on the accelerator when you know you’re heading in the right direction..
• Commit at the ‘last responsible moment’; minimise the possibility of wasted effort, maximise the chance of learning something new before starting.