Anand is a VP (Engineering) with a FinTech start-up in Silicon Valley. His firm has built SaaS platform related to payment solutions for retail industry. He has core team of 30 members within his start-up. He has contracted with two technology services firms from India and Eastern Europe to get team of engineers. There are 250+ members working from 5 locations across 4 time-zones. They are responsible for developing and supporting the platform as well as providing professional services to customers. He has created pyramid structure for better control on development and operations. He has also asked technology service partners to provide Single Point of Contact (SPOC) for managing all the interactions.
Sriharsha is a Delivery Head in technology services firm.
She manages project delivery of a business unit in the domain on Life Science
and Healthcare comprising 3000+ members focused on 25-30 clients in the domain
of life science and health care industry. Her business unit is divided into 8
Delivery Units, each managed by a Delivery Partner. She also has specialized
teams of Technical Architects, Business Analysts, Program Managers, DevOps
engineers, Scrum Masters, etc. as part of her unit. All the teams are organized
in the pyramid structure. It helps Sriharsha to engage people, manage
operations, drive efficiencies, and scale growth.
David is a Delivery Partner for a Delivery Unit. He manages
portfolio focused on 3-4 customer comprising 250-300 team members. He maintains
pyramid structure of with ratio of 1:2:5:2 (Project Manager : Team Leads :
Engineers : Interns). This pyramid structure enables him to maintain stability
and gross margin.
These types of team structure are quite common in the
technology services industry. They are helping industry to achieve predictability
of growth and profitability. They are also addressing the challenges of employees’
aspirations for promotions every few years and engagement. However, they have also
created distance between team-members and customers / end-users. It has reduced
focus on innovation to one-off hackathon conducted in a every year.
How might we enable ‘Delivery Leaders’ to solve the conflict
of focusing on speed, innovation & customer centricity without loosing the
sight of stability, margin and employee engagement?
Answers lies in understanding two principles –
Principle # 10 (SAFe Lean-Agile Principles) – ‘Organize
around value’ [1]
Principle # 1 (Based on Agile Manifesto) – ‘Our highest
priority is to satisfy customer through early and continuous delivery of
software’
“The solution is not to trash what we know and start over
but instead to reintroduce a second system – one which is familiar to most of
the successful entrepreneurs.” – John Kotter (XLR8 – Accelerate : Building A
Strategic Agility for a Faster-Moving World). Kotter advocates a dual operating
system – A networked organization that is organized around ‘customer journey’
and ‘improves flow of value’ complimenting with the hierarchy structure.
#ScaledAgileFramework provides set of practices based on “Kotter’s Dual Operating System” to create a virtual networked organization within the hierarchy structure to improve speed and innovation. I have found following practices that provides significant benefits –
1.
Move focus from ‘project’ to ‘product’ [2]
Technology services organization operates with construct of
‘project’ and within the ‘boundary of SOW (Statement of Work)’. SOWs are
created for ‘capacity pool’ or ‘modules / functionality’ or ‘technology service’.
It’s essential to align all the team-members working on different ‘projects’ /
‘SOWs’ under an umbrella of ‘product’. Sharing product vision and roadmap, empathy
map of the end-users, how product solves the challenges of end-users, economic
value of the product, etc. helps team-members to connect with ‘big picture’ of
the product. It brings awareness about inter-dependence among team members.
2.
Build ‘development value stream’ for the product
[3]
SAFe recommends establishing ‘development value stream’ to align
all the teams under an umbrella of ‘product’ or ‘solution’. Development value
stream converts the ‘feature request’ into an incremental delivery of value
thru engineering activities covering define, build, validate and release of
product.
3.
Create ‘Agile Release Train (ART) to realize value
Product / Solution can’t be delivered by technical team
alone. It requires involvement of business, product management, procurement,
recruitment, compliance, security, operations, etc. to deliver working product
to end-users. ART provide construct to align all the members across the groups
to align. ART operates on set of common principles to deliver the features and flow
of value.
4.
Set-up ‘cross-functional’ Agile Teams
Agile team is a fundamental unit of ‘Agile Release Train’. It
should be cross-functional team to 6 to 10 members. If team is not agile then
none of the aggregating unit can be agile. Agile team should be self-sufficient
to perform all the activities from define to deploy. Agile team can be based on
value-stream activities, complicated sub-system, integrated technology platform
or specialized enabling activities. It’s necessary that all the members across
teams have visibility to the features and user-stories that they are working.
5.
Cadence and synchronization
Cadence helps to bring a common rhythm to the teams associated
with products even if they are geographically distributed, spread across the
organization boundaries and governed by own hierarchy. SAFe suggests leveraging
PI planning and roadmap create synchronization and commitment across teams towards
customer and business objectives.
In today’s business environment, Delivery Leaders are challenged with balancing ‘customer focus’ and ‘employee engagement’. Industry continues to debate, whether it’s customer first or employee first. Demand-supply gap related to talent availability impacts hierarchical structures and economic decisions. In this environment ‘Organizing Around Value’ enables creation of team structures that promote speed, innovation, customer focus with employee engagement and profitability.
References –
1)
Principle
#10 – Organize around value - Scaled Agile Framework
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