Applying Agile to Support and Operations

Many of the early agile frameworks focussed on project delivery – specifically software projects. Indeed today there is still a lot more information and discussion about how to deliver a scope of work incrementally over a period of time. Scrum is an obvious example of this. A sprint – typically 2 weeks in length – has a fixed scope and the expectation is that the team will deliver on the sprint goal by the end of the sprint without significant changes to scope.

However operations teams typically don’t have the luxury of knowing what they will be working on two weeks ahead. Customer Support, IT Support and similar teams respond to incoming cases. At the start of the day they won’t know what new issues will be raised and what their priorities might be compared with the open tickets they had yesterday.

So how do we apply agility to operations – something that by its very nature is already very flexible and dynamic?

Below are some core concepts inspired by the agile and lean principles, let’s see how they might be used and extended in an operations environment. This discussion focusses on the case-driven operations work. Where operations teams are undertaking specific projects then a framework such as scrum might well be the appropriate course to take.

1. Satisfy the customer early and often

Incremental delivery often isn’t so applicable to case management so in this context satisfying early and often means keeping the user informed. Acknowledge their ticket as soon as it’s received (preferably by a human rather than an automated response) and provide regular status updates. Set expectations early for when the ticket might get resolved but keep the user updated – new information is likely to change the original estimate of when something might get resolved. Engage the user the user in the process as much as realistically possible.

2. Prioritise value

Many operations teams will already have an approach in place for how they prioritise the work that flows through the team. Make sure that everyone understands the criteria for what makes one ticket more urgent than another so that the whole team can prioritise the stream of work rather than relying on a manager to do it.

3. Simplicity

The art of simplicity can be applied to many situations, although achieving real simplicity is very hard. A prime opportunity for simplification is in processes and governance. It’s not just a case of stripping out half the information, you need to ensure you have the minimum viable and that the culture and mindset within the company is such that the right behaviours and actions happen without having to spell out every case and detail. If you can find ways to reduce bureaucracy altogether you will be rewarded with a company that is able to deliver value much faster and be far more innovative – and people will enjoy what they do more. For example, NetFlix allow every developer full access to production from their first day – and they have never had an outage because of it.

4. Collaboration, transparency and visualizing work

When everyone on the team knows what is being worked on and the priorities they can make effective judgement calls about where best to collaborate to get things done. A very effective way of managing the flow of work in an operations environment is to use a Kanban to visualise the work of the team along with a daily stand-up to discuss priorities for the day.

A simple Kanban might have a backlog off the board for all potential work items, a To-Do column for those items to be picked up at the next opportunity, an In Progress column for items that are currently being actively worked on the team and of course a Done column to clearly show what has been achieved and what was recently closed. A daily stand up would facilitate discussion around In Progress tickets along with decisions around what to pick up next when someone finishes their current ticket.

Additionally, make use of Work In Progress limits. You want to ensure the team is focussed on completing tasks and moving them to Done – if they pick up too many tasks and try to multitask this can result in all work grinding to a halt and nothing getting completed. This because even more critical when a major situation occurs which requires multiple high-priority tickets to be dealt with – there’s a temptation to pick them all up and show action to leadership but in reality you’ll resolve the situation faster if you focus on one bit at a time.

5. Autonomous self-organizing teams

Build effective teams around motivated individuals -give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done. An operations team might not be cross-functional but it can still be self-managing – a leader should set the business intent and parameters for prioritisation and let the team manage the work. Functional managers don’t check on or approve the work of their functional members, and they certainly don’t micromanage or provide daily oversight.

Additionally, some operations members should be present on cross-functional teams elsewhere in the business. For example, customer support should have a representative within the product and engineering planning efforts so that they are aware what is coming in the pipeline and how that might impact their support operations.

6. Regular reflection and adaption to become more effective

The Retrospective isn’t just useful for scrum teams. It’s vitally important for every team to undertake reflection and adaptation of processes and interactions on a regular cadence. Whether that team be cross-functional, flow-to-work or a self-managing function like Customer Support, regularly sitting down as a team and looking at what is working and where improvements can be made is vital to ensuring the team is operating effectively and optimally. This can be a benefit for teams that are struggling but also for highly performing teams that need to evolve and adapt as their work, company and marketplace evolve – nothing stays constant for long.

7. Unlock the intrinsic motivation of knowledge workers

Peter Drucker noted that “knowledge workers are individuals who know more about the work that they perform than their bosses.” Therefore it is not practical for managers to dictate what tasks are needed and how they should be performed to achieve the team mission. What managers can do however is enable individuals to be motivated and successful, typically through coaching team members, helping to remove problems that stop them performing optimally, providing training opportunities and above all allowing them autonomy to perform their function.

Pink asserts that knowledge workers have a need for autonomy—the ability to self-direct and to manage their own lives. Providing autonomy, while harnessing it to the larger aim of the enterprise, is an important leadership responsibility.

8. Optimize processes and eliminate waste

In order for a teach to be high-achieving and highly efficient they need to eliminate waste. There are a variety of opportunities for doing this but perhaps the most obvious is waste that occurs within a process. For example, the time a ticket is spent idle with no-one working on it, hand-off delays between members or teams, overly complex process steps, approval workflows, tasks that add little or no value but take time to complete, and so on. In short, optimizing your processes to make them as simple as possible with the minimum of delays will result in a faster throughput of tasks.

9. Optimize the whole

An operations team doesn’t work in isolation, it forms a key part of a dynamic organisation. The work the team does is often directly or indirectly impacted by the work of other teams. For example, Customer Support will be affected by the quality of output from the product delivery teams – more bugs means more customer support tickets. The less intuitive a product is, the more training customers will require to use it. The more restrictive the policy for user devices, the more IT support tickets will be raised to help users achieve their goals. Therefore, whilst optimizing Operations will have huge benefits by itself, in order to take it to the next level the Operations team needs to engage with other parts of the business to drive improvements across the company that will ultimately impact the Operations team’s effectiveness.

10. Sustainable work

And finally, work effort should be sustainable. Operations work can suffer from peaks and troughs of workload but trying to optimise resources to maintain a high level of utilisation can result in burn out of resources and significantly impacts the ability of the organisation to respond to a peak of work. It can be advantageous to have spare capacity to pick up an increased workload when it happens, rather than having to potentially re-prioritise and delay other important items. An extreme example is a Firefighter – we pay them to spend 99% of their time idle so they can respond immediately when a fire occurs. Can your team respond immediately if a proverbial fire occurs?

We’ve only lightly covered these topics and clearly a whole topic could be written on each one. Indeed others already have, so if you want to learn more there’s plenty to research – or reach out to me with your questions and let’s have a conversation!