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From dysfunction to cross function in 8,593 easy steps- team building at the cbc
- 1. From dysfunction to cross-function in 8,593 easy steps: Jade Stephen & Sam Lightowler
- 2. WHAT DO WE PLAN TO COVER? Who are we and what do we do? Our metrics and what they tell us Autonomy vs Interdependence and which wins Our successes and failures as a department What’s Next?
- 3. WHAT IS DIGITAL OPERATIONS AND WHAT DO WE DO? ● 100 staff members with varying skill sets ● Autonomous, agile teams ● Stakeholders that represent content areas and business units ● Work together to build CBC’s digital products ● Serving 18 million unique visitors monthly CMS Web Presentation APPS A/V Ops A/V Events & Extensions Maintenance Content Distribution Analytics
- 4. WHAT DO WE DO WELL? ● We make use of agile frameworks like Scrum and Kanban ● We have reasonable team sizes ● We focus on products, not projects ● We have persistent teams ● Most teams are colocated ● Most teams collaborate well internally CMS Web Presentation APPS A/V Ops A/V Events & Extensions Maintenance Content Distribution Analytics
- 5. HAVING AN OPEN DIALOGUE WITH STAFF Staff survey based on Gallup’s Employee Engagement Survey issued quarterly Share results publicly Develop action plans together based on results Communicate updates frequently
- 6. ENGAGEMENT HAS IMPROVED 3.6 3.7 3.6 3.9 4.0 3.8 3.9 4.4 Sept Jan/15 3.4 3.4 3.4 Apr/14 3.8 4.0 3.9 3.9 4.3 May 3.8 3.7 3.7 4.1 Sept 4.1 4.0 3.9 4.3 4.1 4.0 4.0 4.3 Apr/16 Aug 3.8 3.8 3.9 Dec 4.1 6
- 7. WHAT WAS THE PROBLEM? Lack of shared goals within leadership team Lack of strategic alignment across teams Autonomy lead to lack of true collaboration and trust No capacity and support for learning and experimentation Disempowered, stressed staff
- 8. WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU HAVE GOOD CROSS-TEAM COLLABORATION? We find room to collaborate We gain stakeholder trust We save time by not constantly “putting out fires” Creates a more unified approach to problem solving
- 9. OUR CORE VALUES All team members are expected to exemplify our values - collaboration, learning and improvement. We design and build better solutions through collaboration. We focus on our audience's expectations to foster a learning mindset. We commit to helping each other, both inside and outside of our respective teams, to improve and grow in order to reach our full potential.
- 10. HOW DID WE GET THERE? Managers formed a real team Core Values were developed Modified our recurring alignment meetings Focused on transparency Developed a new mindset Emphasized the importance of relationships
- 11. OUR SUCCESSES AND FAILURES
- 12. WE TRIED TO SOLVE THE PROBLEM WITH MEETINGS Product Platform Update Meeting Product managers taking turns updating a group of stakeholders and staff Content Backlog Update Meeting Product managers sharing team roadmaps Individual Stakeholder Meetings Product teams meeting with stakeholders on product-by-product basis All-Staff Update Digital Operations management updating Digital Operations staff on key
- 13. THE INTEGRATED DEMO ● Meeting for all staff and stakeholders ● Teams discuss work from the last 3 weeks ● Cross-team tasks are given priority ● Each team has 5-7 minutes to present ● Preference is given to working software ● No questions, talk after the meeting
- 14. THE INTEGRATED SCRUM ● 15 minute daily meeting ● One developer attends from each team ● Developers address today’s possible dependency issues ● Takes place before all daily scrums
- 15. INTEGRATED STAKEHOLDER MEETINGS Bi-weekly All stakeholders and Product Owners working on a single product attend Everyone hears the same message Work together to make decisions and solve problems
- 16. TOOLS FOR TRANSPARENCY ● All teams use Git, Jira and Confluence ● Product Owners meet quarterly ● Teams use visual task boards ● A dependency board is always visible
- 17. TEAM OUTINGS & SOCIAL GATHERINGS
- 19. Management team formed a real team Employee engagement survey issued quarterly Developed “Core Values” statement Organizational priorities were communicated clearly Empowered teams Introduced new meetings with clear focus SO WHAT’S CHANGED?
- 20. WHAT DOES THE FUTURE LOOK LIKE? Are we perfect? no. We know that We are committed to upholding our values Continuous improvement Build, measure, learn Committed to each other and ourselves to constantly get better Adapt Be agile (experiment and learn)
Editor's Notes
- Sam Lightowler, product owner of web presentation at CBC. I’ve been working on digital products at CBC for about 6 years. My team is currently working on building a responsive version of all CBC’s websites. Jade Stephen, I am a Scrum Master at CBC. I have about 4 years experience in Agile Leadership. Sam: We adopted an agile way of working more than two years ago in our department. Over the past couple of years, we’ve learned a lot and have run several experiments to improve the way we work, so we thought we’d share some of the learnings with you! Jade: Specifically, how we’ve gone from dysfunction to cross-function, with a focus on cross-team collaboration.
- JADE Who are we and what do we do? Our metrics and what they tell us Autonomy vs Interdependence and which wins Our successes and failures as a department What’s Next?
- SAM To provide some context for what we are about to share, I’ll tell you more about what we do. Both Jade and I work in CBC’s digital operations department. Digital Operations is core to CBC Around us, we have stakeholders who represent the various content production areas like News, Sports, Radio, Arts, etc. The content production groups focus on content production, and we focus on building and maintaining digital products that support their content production. We are approximately 100 staff, divided into autonomous, agile product teams who each have a specific mission or set of products to support. Just to give you a sense of what type of work we do and why cross-team collaboration is important…[explain each team] In order to build a website for our audience to read/watch/listen to our content, we need all of the components to come together. You can’t have a website without content or video. We reach approximately 18 million unique visitors each month. This makes product development challenging for several reasons, as you can probably imagine. The impact a release can have on the audience is huge, so proper testing and collaboration are really important.
- JADE We have done a few things very well over the last couple of years. We have done a good job adopting an agile mindset, and have made good use of frameworks like Scrum and Kanban across our teams. For the most part we have managed to follow guidelines set by the various frameworks and kept our team sizes to a reasonable level, where we can still communicate and work with minimum overhead. We focus on products and their lifecycles, not on short projects. This helps keep us focused on continuously improving our software and prevents it from being abandoned or unmaintained. We have also been able to form strong teams that are persistent, and in most cases colocated. This is a foundation for collaboration, and over time our groups have learned to work well within their teams. They have strong collaboration skills and have built a group dynamic that allows them to perform well together. Agile frameworks are very specific about team member roles and responsibilities, and how collaboration should take place between team members. Scrum has meetings set up to ensure teams are planning every day (daily scrum), setting up their sprint goals (sprint planning), and even reflecting on what they do after each sprint (retro). That is all fine and well, but at an enterprise level like ours, there will always be more than one team, and that’s where things start to become tricky.
- JADE When we started our Agile journey, we needed a way to find out if we were on the right path. In order to get a view into how our groups were doing, we had issued a quarterly survey to all digital operations staff. We ask questions like: Do I know what is expected of me at work? At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day? At work, do my opinions seem to count?
- JADE When we look at the survey results, we see an upward trend, and people are responding that things are getting better in all of our categories. People are responding that they are happy, but we still have some unusual results. Do I know what is expected of me at work? 28.5% Average This last year, have I had an opportunity to learn and grow? 21.5% Average Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work? 30% Average It looks good and a lot of people would stop there, but you have ask why?
- SAM We work really well in our own teams. Got that down pat. Our staff even tells us that we are improving as a department, so that’s great! But we still felt like we were missing some really important things. It took us a while to figure out what they were. Before we transitioned to “Being Agile”, we worked in a project-based environment. Proposals to the PMO... The most obvious problem with this model is that products were never maintained or iterated on. They were left to linger until another proposal was submitted and accepted to redesign the experience (this would often take multiple years). News website example. At the beginning of our agile transformation, we reorganized ourselves into the product teams I mentioned previously to mitigate the issue of orphaned products. Each team now owned products. They are responsible for building and maintaining them on an ongoing basis. We believed that one of the keys to being completely agile is that teams had to be autonomous and as dependency-free as possible. Now, imagine for a minute you have a hockey team - there’s multiple coaches for each function of the game. The goalie coach focuses on helping the goalie block shot, offense coach makes sure the offence can score goals and the defense coach makes sure the defense can protect the net and block shots. All of the players get really good at their specific function, but because there’s no one setting overarching goals for the team and coming up with a cohesive strategy for game play, they end up like the Leafs and don’t win games : ) We don’t want to be like the Leafs, but unfortunately, I think we jumped into trying to be autonomous too quickly. Without thinking of the consequences, our focus was exclusively on eliminating dependencies. We lacked a true leadership team, no one oversaw the goals for the department. This lead to not only a lack of shared goals, but there was no strategic alignment across teams. We were supposed to be building a single digital experience for our audience, instead we got really good at building digital products that operated independently of everything else. Each team was given the freedom to modify their agile processes at will (1 week sprint, 3 week sprints, kanban), interact with their stakeholders however they saw fit (meetings were structured differently, some saw stakeholders as requirement dictators, other saw them as partners), build their roadmaps and commit to delivering products without worrying about the effect it would have on anyone else. This lead to teams feeling like they had to protect their work in order to deliver on a promise. Overall, autonomy ended up leading to a lack of true collaboration and trust. We were also hearing from our staff that they were always being forced to rush through their work. There was no time to deal with the inevitable technical debt they were creating or for learning and experimentation, which is the heart of agile. I think the combination of all of these things contributed to people feeling confused about what was expected of them at work, concerned that they weren’t doing quality work and like they didn’t have an opportunity to learn or grow.
- JADE If teams are not talking it is easy to lose information and opportunities As part of our CMS platform we provide an information feed to the apps so they can display stories and other content. A few months ago our team needed to make changes to a few fields that shouldn’t have caused many issues (or so we thought). After we released it came to our attention that we had broken the app, and it would take them a few days to fix it, plus a few more days to launch the new version in the app stores they rely on. By not communicating with others we had lost the opportunity to work and test together on these changes, and had instead cost several days of panicked development for another team and embarrassment to the corporation by having broken features in our user facing app.
- JADE In May and June of this year, our department set out to answer a question: What does “being Agile” mean? Hiring had become a major concern for us, and we wanted to ensure we were getting the right people, with the right mindset. ( We say we want to hire Agile People, but what does that really mean?) Our management team worked with our Agile Team Leads (& Product Owners) to establish new core values for the department. These values were then presented to each team, who were given the opportunity to discuss what these meant to them. Management got out of our way and let us build on theses ideas in whatever way they were meaningful to us. They act as a guiding light for any team who is not sure what should be done. Each team got together to discuss what collaboration, learning, and improvement mean to them, and explored ways that these could be used on their teams. When a team is in doubt about what direction they should go, they reflect on these values.
- SAM First off, our managers formed a real team and started to meet 2 hours each morning. Exhibited collaboration to act as role models for the rest of the department. They worked together to develop the Core Values statement Jade just mentioned, which now serves as the guiding principles for everything else we do. This lead to modifying our recurring meetings, put a focus on transparency, we developed a new mindset and we emphasized the importance of building relationships.
- SAM After going through that list, it seems like the solutions were obvious and simple. I guess that’s hindsight for you : ) We will take the rest of the time to share some of the experiments we ran to improve things that weren’t working so well for us. Hopefully you can take these tips away and get to a point where your teams are cross-collaborating faster than ours were : )
- JADE Describe meetings Ever sat through a meeting that just didn’t relate to you? Staring at the floor daydreaming, wondering why time is passing so slow? That was the problem with these meetings.The intentions of the people who put them together and worked on it were pure, but it just didn’t connect to the audience. These meetings were to spread knowledge of our products to other groups. They did not get enough people involved or spread the knowledge as far as it needed to. Many did not attend as it did not relate directly to what they were doing. Gave the false idea that we were coordinating in our activities, preventing other communications. (I just presented that, everyone should be aware).
- JADE Story: Vote Meter story Why does this work? Involves everyone who is or could be affected by a piece of work. Encourages team members to become involved. Team members are encouraged to do the demo. Shows a mix of demonstration types: Front end GUIs, Code, Metrics Dashboards, Graphic and Site design. Uncovers room for collaboration between teams. Helps us visualize the idea of one-team-one-product
- JADE Note: For those of you thinking “Scrum of Scrums” right now, this is not a Scrum of Scrums! A scrum of scrums focuses on what each team is working on. Here, teams come together to discuss dependencies and plans to resolve them over the next 24 hours. Story: A developer from the API team spoke about additions to the API, and the creation of a new search endpoint during the meeting. This gave the ability of the feed team to discover these features, and create a search page. Why does this work? Creates a sense of community among developers from different teams as they get to know one another. Promotes transparency amongst the developers. Helps with bottom up decision making Allows developers to think of the bigger picture, and helps them think in terms of a one-team-one-product mindset.
- SAM Tell story first - CMS story in feed meetings Used to meet with my stakeholders to discuss the website redesign. Often we end up in CMS-territory where people start asking about changes to the content input form template, or a new drop down item is added, etc. This lead to me saying either “I can’t speak for CMS” or “Let me take this away and talk to the CMS team about it” or we make assumptions about what they might or might not be able to do. Not only is this time consuming because of all the meetings that result from one or two questions, but it also leads to miscommunications because the message may get lost in translation, tone may not communicate urgency or the context might be missing for why the request was placed in the first place. Now we meet with the stakeholders together. [GO THROUGH SLIDES] Make decisions together, in the one meeting, working collaboratively.
- SAM Transparency is a huge factor when you’re trying to build trust and encourage collaboration. Started with tools that allowed us to store code, backlogs and documentation in a shared location. By everyone using the same tools, we can exchange work and information much easier. You can see the progress or status of requests you have with other teams. We know tools aren’t the complete solution, but they definitely help. Product owners meet quarterly. This started as a meeting where we all shared our roadmaps for the next 3 months and identified who we were dependent on in hopes that by acknowledging that we need help, we will get it in a timely fashion. It didn’t work that way. Two things became apparent to us after the first meeting: 1. There’s no way we were all going to get through all of the work because there was just too much, 2. We set out at the beginning of our agile transformation to eliminate dependencies and here we are with more than we ever had before.. It has now evolved to discuss priorities for the department and coordinate collaboration that needs to occur in order to work as a team to meet the shared objectives. All teams also make their work visible on physical boards (digital or using stickies) Department dependency board is always visible in our kitchen. This board has gone through several iterations. Once it served as a roadmap for all teams, now it indicates dependencies to allow us to see opportunities for collaboration if we are working on similar items. Reviewed weekly by all POs and ATLs during WIP meeting. Highly visual, so it is easier to see if something is missing that your team is depending on.
- SAM One question in the engagement survey is about whether you have a best friend at work. We all thought it was a ridiculous question at first - why would I need to have a bestfriend in the office? I’m coming here to work, not develop my social circle. But we quickly came to realize why it’s an important question to ask. It’s simple - If people are comfortable with each other, they will work better together. We started social activities within our own teams and quickly expanded it to be cross-team. Examples: Bowling, Lunches, Escape Games, etc. Then we expanded it further to include the whole department - On the last Friday of every month, we gather in the afternoon for snacks and drinks. We share learnings, challenges and successes with each other. We share tidbits of our personal lives. This helps us build our teams, reduce the culture of fear, flattens the hierarchy and breaks us out of our silos. It has been amazing to see the transition. Where people used to sit at their desks with their headphones in and try to solve a problem for 7 hours, finally give up at the end of the day and send an email to someone cautiously asking for help, they are now getting up, walking across the floor and asking each other questions or for advice. They share information about what they are doing to make sure it only has a positive impact on the work other teams are doing.
- JADE Our biggest shift comes with one realization - We are all working on one common goal, and need to act like it. Each team in Digital Operations works as an independent team, on an independent product or platform. It’s easy to think of each team as an island, contributing only to the things they touch directly. The more complex but more true image is a bigger picture. We are all contributing to one product, the cbc digital presence. Though we work on different pieces in the end it’s one puzzle, and we are one team that should be working in unison to contribute. Thinking more about this bigger picture makes it clear that the only way that we can deliver our end product is by working together, and collaborating to assure that we are aligned not only in our product vision, but our approach to the work as a whole.
- SAM Just to summarize… Role models for department-wide, cross-team collaboration Employee survey is issued quarterly to make sure we keep tabs on how people are feeling Core Values continue to serve as our guiding light as we make decisions and run experiments Org. priorities are set and constantly reviewed to make sure everyone has a common goal to work towards. Team are empowered to function how they see best, but with common goals and core values, we are much more collaborative than we were in the past. Meetings were modified to have a clearer focus and to ensure everyone was getting value from them. Transparency is mandated to make it easy to follow the progress of work and to foster alignment.
- SAM / JADE Lots of buzzwords. They aren’t just words on a screen for us anymore. They are a set of guiding principles that form the foundation for everything we do. Every interaction within our team, other teams in our department, our stakeholders and even as wide as our audience. We are constantly learning and adapting to changes in technology, people, processes and audience behaviour. So, what does the future hold? Constant collaboration, learning and improvement.