As the Enterprise Agile and DevOps Transformation Director at Atlassian, Tony drives the digital revolution of organisations at a global scale.
There are three pillars of repeatable autonomous delivery, trust, purpose and alignment. When teams are open, trust is built. By having a purpose, teams can build the right outcomes and alignment increases effectiveness.
6. • Dislike their work
• Avoid responsibility and need
constant direction
• Have to be controlled forced and
threatened to deliver work
• Need to be supervised at every
step
• Have no incentive to work or
ambition, and therefore need to be
enticed by rewards to achieve
goals
THEORY X THEORY Y
• Happy to work on their own
initiative
• More involved in decision making
• Self-motivated to complete their
tasks
• Enjoy taking ownership of their
work
• Seek and accept responsibility, and
need little direction
• View work as fulfilling and
challenging
• Solve problems creatively and
imaginatively
18. Document
Store
Management
Information
Rule
Engine
Credit
Risk
Huge Agile
Mortgage
Products
Mortgage
Broker
Mortgage
Sales Engine
Mortgage
Customer Service
Enterprise
Data Warehouse
Credit
Score
Z
Mortgages
Digital
Shared
Components
CRM Message
Broker
Mainframe Middleware
Test
Environments
Network
System
Management
Service
Availability
Database
Administration
Central Server
Support Software
Packaging
Midrange Unix
Ops
Digital
Retail Mortgages
Group Functions
Business Functions
TribeSquad (average 7 people) Alliance
2,000 people
1,250
people
8,000
people
1,000
people
1,000
people
14,250
people
+1,300
Managers
Z
Z
19. Efficient Teams
Every team is busy completing their
user stories and tasks but no features
are getting shipped!
26. Document
Store
Management
Information
Rule
Engine
Credit
Risk
Huge Agile
Mortgage
Products
Mortgage
Broker
Mortgage
Sales Engine
Mortgage
Customer Service
Enterprise
Data Warehouse
Credit
Score
Z
Mortgages
Digital
Shared
Components
CRM Message
Broker
Mainframe Middleware
Test
Environments
Network
System
Management
Service
Availability
Database
Administration
Central Server
Support Software
Packaging
Midrange Unix
Ops
Digital
Retail Mortgages
Group Functions
Business Functions
TribeSquad (average 7 people) Alliance
2,000 people
1,250
people
8,000
people
1,000
people
1,000
people
14,250
people
+1,300
Managers
Z
Z
28. Sustainable Quality
No severity 1 level defects
escape to production
Enabling Constraints
Value
Demonstrate which business
metric you plan to improve
Lead Time
Release from idea to live in
under 90 days
29. Have units create and
publish how they work and
how they’ll work with others
REPEATABLE AT HUGE SCALE
33. Purpose
People deliver better
outcomes when they
understand the “why”
Repeatable Autonomous Delivery
Alignment
Autonomy without a common
goal is chaos
Trust
If you’re hiring competent
people let them decide how
best to do their job
At Atlassian, something we spend a lot if time thinking about it is the future of work. More importantly though, when think about the future of work, we think about the future of TEAMWORK.
Because, as you may have realised, Atlassian is all about TEAMS. We’re passionate about teams. Making teams more effective is core to everything we do…
As part of this, we are continually looking for - and studying - high performance teams. <click to start animation>
And after 15 years of research, talking to hundreds of customers, and thousands of teams…
What if I told you we've finally found the perfect team?!
A team that has scientifically determined the optimal way for every person to perform their job to the highest efficiency.
We've documented this team’s attributes, and I want to know how many teams here in this audience also share these qualities.
So I’m going to read out a list and as I do, I want you to count how many of these attributes apply to your team
Clear processes
Strictly defined and measured outputs
Manage risks in order to reduce or eliminate variability
Clearly identified and structured roles
Strong & smart leader
Personalised and customised tools, specific for each job
Stable, unchanging team
4x more productive
Douglas McGregor
We’re using highly prescriptive methods to once again attempt to replace giving poeope
Openness isn’t a new concept for us Atlassian - it’s been in our DNA from day one. In fact, if you walk around any of our offices you’ll see one of our core values is ‘Open Company No Bullshit’ - something you may not be able to hang in your office, but we hang proudly do for all to see.
But this belief doesn’t just live on a poster - it’s central to our company and culture. It’s central to how we work and how we build our own teams. When I joined almost 7 years ago, this openness really shocked and impressed me. First, if you asked people for information, they always pointed you to our intranet which is Confluence. And then reading it, I was amazed at how open people were to ideas and criticism from others, but also how many people encouraged new thought.
We believe that 3 things have to come together to open up work.
I firmly believe that without openness, the Atlassian we all know today would not exist. Scott and I share the goal of building a company for the next 50 years and beyond, a company that will outlive us both. Openness has and will continue to play a vital role in our journey to build a highly successful, enduring company.
It is central to our company and culture. It is central to how we work and how we build our own teams. And it is central to the products we create and how many of you use them in your own teams. It is at the heart of everything we do and how we view the world.
Mike and I want to build a 100 year company - a company that will outlive us both - and we believe working open will continue to play a vital role in us getting there / on our journey.
When teams are open, they build trust faster, create stronger connections and operate at higher speeds. When information flows freely, it provides everyone in the organization with the right context to unlock their creative ideas.
So how do we be open?
Without a clear reason why agile teams are building what they’re building they’re back on a production line - employee 2742 building backlog item 1452, and next week building backlog item 1463 and so and so on…..
When dev and ops ship the hypothesis, built in the feature toggle and all the measures it’s disheartening to have no feedback on the feature or the first you hear is when your told the feature toggle was switched off as no one wanted to the feature without explaining what learning we did get from launching reversing the feature! They feel like they’ve wasted their lives! Story of Money Manager at Lloyds Banking Group and how Zak used that learning to prevent the UX teams being complacent and other teams from not expressing their concerns sooner!
When teams are open, they build trust faster, create stronger connections and operate at higher speeds. When information flows freely, it provides everyone in the organization with the right context to unlock their creative ideas.
So how do we be open?
A key challenge in working as a team is most of us are given different KPIs or the more cool OKRs
When teams are open, they build trust faster, create stronger connections and operate at higher speeds. When information flows freely, it provides everyone in the organization with the right context to unlock their creative ideas.
So how do we be open?
So with all of this newfound time, what does this mean for engineering teams?
