Tactics to Infuse Business Relevance in IT Delivery Teams
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This talk was presented during ThoughtWorks Converge - a platform for BAs, PMs and product management community to come together. The theme was Business Relevance, or how to make IT teams more closely aligned with business.
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Tactics to Infuse Business Relevance in IT Delivery Teams
- 1. InfusingBusinessRelevanceIn DeliveryTeams “But the Developers hate IE!” C O N V E R G E
- 2. WHY DO MOST SOFTWARE PROJECTS FAIL? 2 66% of all software projects over-run their budget 33% of all software projects do not finish as per time-lines 56% of all IT projects fail to achieve the desired business goals
- 3. WHILE BUSINESS EXPECTATIONS FROM IT FALL SHORT 3 For most Fortune 500 clients, IT spend as a percentage of revenue is declining, and spend on Innovation (cloud / mobile / data) is increase even as Business environment is uncertain
- 4. I.T. IS TOO FIXATED ON EXECUTION, MISSING THE BUS ON BUSINESS ALIGNMENT 4
- 5. FOCUS ON BUSINESS RELEVANCE CAN BE REWARDING 5 Shift focus from “Delivering Projects” to “Creating Value Together” Make your client look good in front of his management Deeper commitment and higher productivity from delivery teams
- 6. PRINCIPLES OF BUSINESS RELEVANCE 6 Empathy Business Context Customer Collaboration
- 8. TALES FROM THE TRENCHES 8 “I like testing in Chrome, it is so much easier than doing it in IE” - A developer Client is an auto-maker based in US mid-West and the application under development is targeted at business owners, most of them use IE exclusively.
- 9. TALES FROM THE TRENCHES 9 “I will do it only if it is in SCALA - it will be so cool, all my colleagues will love me, I can blog about it and may be write a book on it” Client wants the application in 4 weeks, has no SCALA skills, and even other people in our team have experience in Java or Ruby while Scala will require a learning curve
- 10. TALES FROM THE TRENCHES 10 “I don’t want to work on the Billing engine because it is legacy, can I please work on the mobile piece?” The Billing engine directly impacts 80% of client’s Top Line. The mobile app is a pilot by the marketing team
- 11. TALES FROM THE TRENCHES 11 “Look, we signed up for 10 story points for this iteration. You cant tell us to add more at this hour.” Client’s job is on the line unless he can put up a feature live on the upcoming release ASAP.
- 12. 12
- 13. A QUICK FAIL SAFE TEST FOR EMPATHY 13 Ben-Cohen’s test for Empathy: If your attention has a single focus—your current interest, goal, wish, or plan—with no reference to another person or their thoughts or feelings, then your empathy is effectively switched off
- 14. WHAT YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE BY INCREASING YOUR EMPATHY SKILLS 14 Shared understanding of the project vision and scope Identify key client stakeholders and their motivations and drivers Be able to map out the client organizational structure Identify your champions and detractors Understand how client perceives your organization Most important: Socialize these to the delivery team and get to a shared understanding with the delivery team
- 15. DON’T JUST MAP EMPATHY, SHARE IT WITH TEAM 15 http://idocare4design.wordpress.com/2013/08/02/toolkit-empathize-and-define- via-dtactionlab/
- 16. FOR EXAMPLE 16 Disorganized day care Patients are sent back Figure out the cause Attending lot of calls Overseeing all IT func of hospital Knows problems exist Needs us to identify root cause Need to spend time in “Day care” Interview team at ground level
- 17. 17 (STAKEHOLDER) RGCI IT Head (a detailed-oriented person) (PROBLEM / NEED) needs a way to optimally utilize “day care” beds (INSIGHT) because more cancer patients need to be served EXAMPLE PROBLEM STATEMENT
- 18. DON’T JUST MAP EMPATHY, SHARE IT WITH TEAM 18 It is no point keeping these insights in a file no one will refer to; socialize the learning with the wider team and discuss how it impacts your project approach.
- 20. WHY IS CONTEXT IMPORTANT? 20
- 21. THINGS YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE 21 Understand the Client Business Be aware of the industry trends that could influence your client business. Have an informed opinion on the technology trends that could affect the technology landscape at your client. Be aware of industry accepted best practices and their implications. Invest in domain capabilities where critical Offer insights to client based on experience from similar projects being done in your organization
- 22. DOMAIN KNOWLEDGE IS NO LONGER OPTIONAL 22
- 23. INDUSTRY BEST PRACTICES GO A LONG WAY 23
- 24. ENSURE MULTI-LEVEL STAKEHOLDER SESSIONS 24 Informal sessions to discuss industry trends and technology trends. Develop / Hire Domain Specialists Talent Time-off from projects for self-learning and innovation Get external specialists and clients for workshops
- 25. QUESTION MORE: THE FIVE WHY FRAMEWORK 25
- 26. STRUCTURING DELIVERY TEAMS : WHAT WORKS? 26
- 27. USE SOCIAL MEDIA WITHIN TEAMS 27
- 28. CHANGE THE DEFINITION OF “DONE” 28
- 30. GETTING CUSTOMER COLLABORATION RIGHT 30 Delivery Excellence Empathy Driven Relationship Business Context Customer Collaboration Cant happen without getting the basics right!!
- 31. CUSTOMER COLLABORATION – WHAT IS THIS? 31 The state where client is looking at you as a partner, with equal or more capability and a shared understanding of their business needs; if you are here, Congratulate yourself!!
- 32. THANK YOU
Editor's Notes
- Recap of why we are talking about BR – What is BR How delivery teams can become more aligned to business Proven tactics
- http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/delivering_large-scale_it_projects_on_time_on_budget_and_on_value Numbers tell a story – A study by Mckenzie and Oxford University interviewed more than 600 senior IT executives and came up with above numbers. While this is true, it gets even worse as we go. Several other reports, where IT has failed to deliver as per business expectations. IT has failed to deliver as per business expectations. A study by Mckenzie and Oxford University interviewed more than 600 senior IT executives and came up with above numbers. While this is true, it gets even worse as we go. IT has failed to deliver as per business expectations. But what is the root cause? What is the beast we are trying to tame? As long as we see the problem from IT hat, we wont see the complete picture – A bit like blind men trying to identify the beast here. We need a fresh perspective.
- http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/delivering_large-scale_it_projects_on_time_on_budget_and_on_value The IT budget outlook is positive as CIOs look forward to growth in 2014. However, while budgets are up, IT spending as a percentage of revenue – the metric CIOs love to hate – remains at 2 to 3% for most companies. CEB collected 2014 IT budget plans from almost 200 companies globally representing $47B of IT spending. Based on this data, we expect IT budgets to rise by an average of 3% next year. This overall rise is driven almost entirely by increased opex, as capex is forecasted to grow less than half a percent. But focusing solely on the increase in IT spending misses much of the story. The benchmark shows that CIOs are redirecting spending within their budgets to accelerate capabilities such as mobility and the cloud, and to fund new roles. At the same time, business leaders are devoting significant additional spend to technology initiatives that they want to oversee for themselves. All of these trends are signs of transformational change within IT. In the past few years, CIOs have adopted more flexible approaches to budgeting, either informally through contingency spending or formally by using rolling budgets. As a result, in 2013 actual IT spending outstripped the initial budget projections made last year. Given the brightening economic outlook, we expect to see the same pattern in 2014. This may be particularly true for organizations in Europe where the current forecast is for almost zero budget growth.
- Biggest bucket – project failures – Missing focus – unclear objectives and lack of business focus Execution issues come second – Internalize this slide and think about the impact BR can have if you bridge this successfully
- http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/business_technology/delivering_large-scale_it_projects_on_time_on_budget_and_on_value Shift
- Definition: The ability to understand another person’s circumstances, point of view, thoughts, and feelings. When experiencing empathy, you are able to understand someone else’s internal experiences. Some psychiatric disorders, including autism, antisocial personality disorder, and narcissistic personality disorder, have been associated with a lack of ability to empathize (or experience empathy). People often confuse the words empathy and sympathy. Empathy means ‘the ability to understand and share the feelings of another’ (as in both authors have the skill to make you feel empathy with their heroines), whereas sympathy means ‘feelings of pity and sorrow for someone else’s misfortune’ (as in they had great sympathy for the flood victims).
- A lack of empathy in sales can result in a lot more work and a lot more lost business than anyone deserves. Example: A customer made a significant purchase, based on our discovery conversation and the recommendation I built around it. Then a manager got involved and suggested a hot new item that essentially doubled his spend. In all the excitement, the customer agreed. The manager did a fine job “selling” the services and the customer signed the up-sell contract. The problem was that the client was now over-extended, wreaking all sorts of havoc with his budget and with our finance department. Eventually after a lot more work and vexation for me and for the customer, we went back to the original transaction to salvage a balance again. How did this happen?: The manager had his eye on selling something based on the companies goals rather than on the customer’s situation. We all have quotas and we all want to win, but I find my job gets much easier when I take the high road and employ more empathy in sales. It’s faster and more lucrative in the long term when we get out of ourselves, orient our efforts toward our customer’s best interests; making it our business to know what our customer is going through, what will truly help them be successful, not just for our own good, but for our companies.
- A lack of empathy in sales can result in a lot more work and a lot more lost business than anyone deserves. Example: A customer made a significant purchase, based on our discovery conversation and the recommendation I built around it. Then a manager got involved and suggested a hot new item that essentially doubled his spend. In all the excitement, the customer agreed. The manager did a fine job “selling” the services and the customer signed the up-sell contract. The problem was that the client was now over-extended, wreaking all sorts of havoc with his budget and with our finance department. Eventually after a lot more work and vexation for me and for the customer, we went back to the original transaction to salvage a balance again. How did this happen?: The manager had his eye on selling something based on the companies goals rather than on the customer’s situation. We all have quotas and we all want to win, but I find my job gets much easier when I take the high road and employ more empathy in sales. It’s faster and more lucrative in the long term when we get out of ourselves, orient our efforts toward our customer’s best interests; making it our business to know what our customer is going through, what will truly help them be successful, not just for our own good, but for our companies.
- A lack of empathy in sales can result in a lot more work and a lot more lost business than anyone deserves. Example: A customer made a significant purchase, based on our discovery conversation and the recommendation I built around it. Then a manager got involved and suggested a hot new item that essentially doubled his spend. In all the excitement, the customer agreed. The manager did a fine job “selling” the services and the customer signed the up-sell contract. The problem was that the client was now over-extended, wreaking all sorts of havoc with his budget and with our finance department. Eventually after a lot more work and vexation for me and for the customer, we went back to the original transaction to salvage a balance again. How did this happen?: The manager had his eye on selling something based on the companies goals rather than on the customer’s situation. We all have quotas and we all want to win, but I find my job gets much easier when I take the high road and employ more empathy in sales. It’s faster and more lucrative in the long term when we get out of ourselves, orient our efforts toward our customer’s best interests; making it our business to know what our customer is going through, what will truly help them be successful, not just for our own good, but for our companies.
- A lack of empathy in sales can result in a lot more work and a lot more lost business than anyone deserves. Example: A customer made a significant purchase, based on our discovery conversation and the recommendation I built around it. Then a manager got involved and suggested a hot new item that essentially doubled his spend. In all the excitement, the customer agreed. The manager did a fine job “selling” the services and the customer signed the up-sell contract. The problem was that the client was now over-extended, wreaking all sorts of havoc with his budget and with our finance department. Eventually after a lot more work and vexation for me and for the customer, we went back to the original transaction to salvage a balance again. How did this happen?: The manager had his eye on selling something based on the companies goals rather than on the customer’s situation. We all have quotas and we all want to win, but I find my job gets much easier when I take the high road and employ more empathy in sales. It’s faster and more lucrative in the long term when we get out of ourselves, orient our efforts toward our customer’s best interests; making it our business to know what our customer is going through, what will truly help them be successful, not just for our own good, but for our companies.
- During the US elections in 2010, Mitt Romney would often attack Obama on his plans for affordable healthcare. However, Romney was often rude towards minorities and immigrants, who he believed would be the only people gaining from access to affordable healthcare, and was labelled as insensitive and even borderline psychotic by analysts. Empathy can take you places, and a lack of it can bring you down as well.
- Tele sales caller example Simon Baron-Cohen, Britain’s leading expert on autism, suggests that there are two stages to empathy: recognition and response. As Baron-Cohen says, ‘[b]oth are needed, since if you have the former without the latter you haven’t emphathised at all’ (Baron-Cohen 2011: 12). Recognition involves both identifying and responding to another person’s emotions, and Baron-Cohen suggests that one can recognize emotions by reading faces. However, he does suggest that ‘if your attention has a single focus—your current interest, goal, wish, or plan—with no reference to another person or their thoughts or feelings, then your empathy is effectively switched off… In such a state of single-mindedness, the other person—or their feelings—no longer exists’ (Baron-Cohen 2011: 12-13). Baron-Cohen then suggests that there are seven levels of empathy, from zero to six, with zero empathy being the lowest. People with zero empathy can be zero-negative, which involves borderline personality disorder, psychopathy and narcissism, while people with zero empathy can also be zero-positive, which Baron-Cohen associated with various forms of autism (especially Asperger’s syndrome; see Baron-Cohen 2011: 30-87).
- Getting empathy right is no rocket science and there are tools available for you to help you gain from it. A good listening skill is a basic, but you can build on this with the Empathy framework example shared in the next few slides. Refer the link to read more about this. Say: How client defines his problem in his own words Do: What client does (activity) in your presence Think: What you think the clients wants you to do Feel: What you feel about the client Framing the problem: Stakeholder ( use some adjectives to describe the client here ) needs a way to ( define the need) because (define the Insight)
- http://idocare4design.wordpress.com/2013/08/02/toolkit-empathize-and-define-via-dtactionlab/
- Invest in building business context to win client confidence and allow true collaboration to happen.
- Domain knowledge is no longer optional – understanding industry trends has a direct bearing to the acceptance of the final solution. For example : A publishing house realized late in the development of its digital platform solution, that Android constituted more that 85% of its effective user base.
- Industry Best practices help your solution provide an edge over competition, and ensure your solution has a strategy, and is not relegated to being a tactical fix.
- We need a platform to discuss industry trends, best practices, socialize these ideas with the team. Developers need some time off to think out of the box and focus on following industry trends, and best practices. Multi-level stakeholder sessions not only with the team, but also between client stakeholders. When different stakeholders with differing product requirements collaborate in a focused feature workshop, the requirements that emerge are a shared understanding of what the product should finally look like.
- The 5 Why Analysis is a question-asking exercise used to explore the cause/effect relationships underlying a particular problem. Ultimately, the goal of applying the 5 Why method is to determine the Root Cause of a defect or problem. Encourage everyone in your team to question more. Simple exercises like these can help teams gain more perspective.
- Structure your teams around business outcomes and not roles. Have all four roles in your team for max impact Consciously Rotate Different Roles onsite to get context Product teams versus project teams
- Use group chat applications Use blogs, and group emails Use agile project management tools like Mingle or tools like Jira with a shared instance for the team http://blog.timedoctor.com/images/2010/12/The-best-collaboration-tools-for-virtual-teams-john-edit.png https://www.atlassian.com/software/confluence
- Traditionally, a feature is considered complete when it has passed all testing and is in production. We questioned this approach and did not count a feature as complete until we had measured its outcomes and learnt from it. Agile Story Wall and put a column labeled “Measured and Validated”. Adding this to the story wall meant the story was visibly incomplete until we had measured the effect of the feature. The whole mindset shifted from delivering features to delivering measurable outcomes.