The positive signs in systems delivery

Obvious statement alert! Awful times we live in! However, it's not all doom and gloom there are some positives emerging in the systems delivery space. This is a personal post, my own opinions, formed while both working and talking to peers.

Part of my role is talking to tech and delivery leaders and in those conversations I have picked up some emerging positive trends.

In the last 15 years, software delivery practices have improved our ability to deliver better organisational outcomes. Recently however, our focus has shifted to process fanfare over business value creation! Companies and individuals market "Look at us we are doing Agile!". We have lost our way, we have moved our focus from reaching better organisational outcomes to the production and marketing of more glitzy practices and ceremonies. It is why when experiencing harder times, transforming organisations stop investing in or roll back Agile transformations. It's not that organisational leadership doesn't value Agile or Lean. It's that there are better places to invest organisational energies. Agile transformations aren't adding enough demonstrable value. 

Last year, I presented at conferences, to delivery divisions, and to individual teams, talking about the way we deliver products and software. I have regularly been asked to comment on what I think of the way we, the Australian software delivery industry, works today, and I pretty much always included the following sorts of criticisms:

• Today we use "The Business" and "Delivery" as identifiers of two independent groups within companies. Today we still have significant divides between the groups of people running businesses and the people building products and services.
• Due to a divide between the two groups, delivery teams goals are misaligned with their organisations objectives. It is quite common for delivery teams to believe that the feature or service they deliver is their actual goal. They rarely understand what their organisational goals are, and how their activities could contribute towards them.
• We are complacent towards and show a lack of understanding of the processes we use when delivering software. Most people in teams do not understand the intent, the need, and the purpose of the practices within their process. The goal has become the implementing of a marketable implementation of Agile. We do not strive to build delivery processes that marry to our team's capabilities, within our organisational context, and designed to achieve a business outcome. 
• We have focused on Diversity too long over Inclusivity. I haven't seen many organisational Inclusivity measures. I have seen lots of Diversity numbers; Gender Ratio's, number of meetups, number of females on boards. However, if you don't have Inclusivity the diversity numbers don't matter, all you have is a diverse group of people unable to work together.
• We work in teams, in open-plan offices; however, we still don't understand what each of us is doing. We have lost the art of listening and understanding when we collaborate.
• There isn't an acceptance for failure! On hearing "We failed", very few people will cheer and say "Well done, that deserves a celebration!". We just don't seem to approach building something with an experimental mindset. We seek certainty of outcome Over knowledge creation.

COVID-19 has thrown a real spanner in the way we work today. We need new ways of working! We need a new effective communication method. Effective communication will empower our delivery practices. If we cannot communicate we will not be successful. We need to reestablish a continual improvement process, continually improving what we achieve. It's our time to get back on track, improve the way we work, get back to creating business value. 

In talking to people and companies over the last couple of weeks, I think we are off to the races. Maybe no more than just out of the gates, but we are off racing.

When companies instructed their teams to work from home, it seems to have highlighted the need for us to communicate more, for leaders to be more present, and the need for information to be continually broadcasted over multiple mediums. We have started by over-indexing on connection and communication. It's a great thing! Although I'm going to scream, if I see one more Zoom-grid post with something like; "Hurray us, our meetings now!". Quite a few people have said that more people are now attending showcases. People at all levels of organisations are connecting and talking. Skip meetings are coming back in fashion. Organisational alignment is created through conversation, not through posters on walls or email broadcasts alone. I believe the only way of getting a vision understood is, have one, then to continually talk about it with everyone and anyone until people start saying "Stop we know!". This "over-indexing" level of communication, I believe, is the vehicle we need to ensure our teams understand why they are doing what they do, what outcomes they should strive to achieve. The "over-indexing" levels of conversations will probably prove itself out as no exaggeration at all. Instead it will become the new base-level requirement for the level of communication required within a company. 

We are proving work-life integration is the thing to strive for and not work-life balance! Work-life balance is having dedicated times when we change between work and home tasks and act differently to suit the different needs. We were never after that and it's just now become so evident. We need to integrate work in with our lives, and vice-versa, so that the combination of the two makes us whole. We are more productive, bring diverse experience and thoughts when we bring our whole self to work.

We have become more tolerant of things going on in the background, more accepting that people need to manage their family lives alongside their work commitments. Proving we can integrate the demands of both work and home means that's the addressable employable market has become bigger. This new work-life integration confirms that someone who is a primary home-care giver can be a valuable contributor to a delivery team. Before COVID-19, a home-care giver would have been excluded because they had little chance of dedicating consistent blocks of time to work. How great is it going to be when someone can describe themselves like this: " I'm a developer, a primary at-home caregiver for my infirm parents, a contributor to my team, a loving mother, and I work at company X!"

I have been in several conversations talking about the need to have a consistent work pace in delivery teams. It has become undeniable that people become tired, unproductive when they work long days. Companies are telling people to have shut off from work, take frequent breaks, don't work all night. Pre-COVID-19 can you imaging leadership teams doing that? I'm hoping this means I never have to debate the virtues of the Agile "Sustainable pace" philosophy.

We are starting to look deeper into delivery practices, seeking to understand what they seek to achieve, At Last!!!!!  People are now looking at the practices employed by teams and how best to make them work with dispersed teams. It has become a forcing mechanism for people to learn the intent of practices so they can get them to work in this new way of working. Methods are being unpicked, reshaped, and new forms created and tested against their purpose. We will have to do it all again when we start moving back to the old normal way of working in offices. I feel we are in for at least a year of process improvement in three phases. Now, whilst we are learning to all work at home. Then when we start to transition back to a new normal, teams mainly at home, some at work. And finally when we make the decision to work predominantly at work again. During every phase we will need to adapt the way we work.

I don't see all the delivery wrongs being corrected, straight away. However it's been a great start, change has happened quickly, and over time we will make software delivery so much better. I feel we will shift our focus back to business value creation over process practice establishment. The fanfare, and the self-promotion will abate, at least until companies start trying to compete with each other when hiring.

So if you are looking for something positive out of this mess, I hope my observations and ramblings help! If you have seen other positives, please post them in the comments. If you are seeking advice, reach out to me, Im always happy to chat. I can't promise to be the most knowledgeable about the new world we work in, any more than anyone else - Although I will listen and try to help!