What do we manage

What do we
manage?
A pragmatic approach with Disciplined Agile Toolkit
© 2021 Valentin Tudor Mocanu

Valentin Tudor Mocanu
• Software Development (1996)
• Iterative Development (1999), Agile Development (early 2000s)
• Agile training (2013)
• Disciplined Agile Coach and Instructor (2015)
• Disciplined Agile Value Stream Consultant
• DA Advisory Council 2015-2020
• Customer's domains: defense, documents management, retail
• PMP, PSM

Domain
Knowledge Work
Software developments
Others
Manufacturing

What we manage?
Projects Business What aspects?

Starting with the need
Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Production System

Challenges
Projects Product Health Improvement

Shared Experience
Traditional – Matrix organization
Agile – Product teams
Hybrid case

Real example – Matrix
Permanent teams
Functional teams
• Functional lead
• Developers/Testers/Analyst (specialized)
PM Department
Enterprise Specialists
Project teams
• Project manager
• Developers/Specialists – from functional teams
• Enterprise services
#Traditional

Challenges
• Projects
• Focused
• Forming team overhead; always at the beginning
• Risks for unappropriated life-cycle
• Product Health
• Unmanaged technical debt
• Process improvement – slow or no visible progress
• Short term, project focus & no focus for medium and long term
• Lesson learned - hard to transmit to the next project team
#Traditional

Real example – Hybrid case
Permanent teams
Product Teams
• PM
• Developers(specialized or cross functional)
Testing department
PM Office
Project teams
• Project manager
• Part of the product team
• Part of the testing team
• Specialists
#Mix

Challenges
• Projects
• Reuse teams, no overhead
• Product Health
• Not used opportunity (Product team)
• PM as only team lead is focused on projects and neglect the product risks
• Process improvement – slow progress
• Development – similar: high risk of not used opportunity
• End-to-end workflow – not managed
• Organization – not managed (teams focus only)
#Mix

Real example – Product Teams
Permanent teams
Products teams
• Team lead (or not)
• Developers (cross functional)
Project teams
• Product team members
• Specialists (services/borrow)
#Agile

Challenges
• Projects
• Reuse teams
• Product Health
• High risks without proper roles and practices
• Architects
• Collective ownership, collaborations & engineering practices
• Process improvement
• Development – the same risks described above
• End-to-end workflow – not managed
• Organization – not managed (teams focus only)
#Agile

What is missing?
• Development Life-cycle awareness
• Product health awareness
• Value stream awareness
• Enterprise Awareness
• Improvement awareness
• Growing people skills

Life-cycle awareness – DA Toolkit Agile & Lean Options
Agile (Scrum based) Lean (Kanban based) Program (teams of teams)
Continuous delivery: Agile Continuous delivery: Lean Exploratory Lean Startup
“Projects”
“Continuous flow”

Product health awareness
• Architect owner role
• “Lead surgeon”, coach
• DA Toolkit guidance
• Improve quality
• Reuse engineering
• Architectural strategy
• …

Value stream awareness
• That is the work !
• Main subject of management
• Main subject of improvement
• Cross-teams’
• collaboration, visibility, improvement
• Roles
• Values stream consultant
• Values stream manager
Scrum and XP
are (small) parts of Delivery

Value stream (also the flow of work)

Do you have value stream and workflow management?
Our management
is like this
Who manage the flow of work and the flow of value? Do we have full workflow visibility?

Identify waste and delays sources
Valuable work
• Planning
• Clarify requirements
• Implement & test
• Integration
• Deployment
Waste
• Inter-teams’ delays
• Fixing defects
• Bottlenecks
• Rework
• Handoffs
• Task switching between teams
• Build not needed requirements

Cost of delay/waste
• Not only direct costs
• Avalanche effect
• Waste create other waste, delay create extra-work
• Cost of missing opportunities
• Cost of extra work

Optimize the whole!
• “Reduce the overall cycle time, the
total time from the beginning to the
end of the process to provide value to a
customer”
• Optimize – not only for the team;
what is best for the whole value stream
and organization
• “Make work flow”
Reference: https://www.pmi.org/disciplined-agile/mindset/mindset-principles/optimize-flow

Improvement awareness
Evolve Your WoW process goal
• Support tailoring to context and improvement
Example aspects
• Communication Styles
• Collaboration Styles
• Identify & Implement Potential Improvements
• Reuse Known Strategies
• Share Improvements With Others
Reference: https://www.pmi.org/disciplined-agile/ongoing-goals/evolve-wow

Improvement references
Evolve Your WoW: Reuse Known Strategies
Not only specific/prescriptive methods
Industry existent experience
Organization and team existent experience
DA toolkit
• Map existent industry experience
• Offer guidance about options and tradeoffs
Reference: https://www.pmi.org/disciplined-agile/ongoing-goals/evolve-wow

Enterprise Awareness
• Enterprise process “blades”
• Enterprise assets – reuse engineering
• Enterprise team – collaboration
• Business agility
Reference: https://www.projectmanagement.com/blog-post/66383/The-Disciplined-Agile-Enterprise--DAE--Layer

Business Agility
• Consider
• All the teams
• The whole value stream & the whole enterprise
• Produce highest value in short amount of time
• Eliminate waste
• Small batches
• Improve skills
Guidance:
DA Toolkit

Growing people skills awareness
• Center of excellence
• Communities of practice
• Collaborative work
• DA Toolkit Guidance: Grow Team Members
Reference: https://www.pmi.org/disciplined-agile/people/centers-of-excellence

DA Toolkit Benefits – Fill the gaps of unmanaged aspects
• Choose the appropriate life-cycles in context
• Take care of your products
• Optimize the whole value stream
• Progress toward business agility
• Effective improvement approach
• Grow people’s skills according to the needs

Thank You!

Info
https://www.pmi.org/disciplined-agile
https://www.projectmanagement.com/blogs/Disciplined-Agile
https://www.pmi.org/certifications/agile-certifications
@Disc_Agile

QUESTIONS?
valentinmocanu.com
@ValentinTudor

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