Scaling-up Requires Alignment

And it's a wrap-up for the Quarterly Alignment for Fiscal Q2 2023 !

The week of January 30th 2023, many AlayaCarians from the product and engineering teams got together in Montreal. The focus was to align more than 30 agile teams working on the different components and domains of our flagship AlayaCare Cloud platform. This SaaS cloud-based platform is empowering home care providers to achieve better outcomes with transformative technology and data insights that help them focus on what really matters: excellent home care.

Here are some of my take aways.

Continuous improvement is key

Kaizen, or improvement processes, is considered to a key element of the lean method. Kaizen focuses on eliminating waste, improving productivity, and achieving sustained continual improvement in targeted activities and processes of an organization.

I started this "Quarterly Planning" process at AlayaCare for our Fiscal Q3 2021 in April 19, 2021. So this week, was our 8th "Quarterly Planning", and it is now called "Quarterly Alignment".

For the first edition, I took inspiration from the ScaleAgileFramework Program Increment planning. We had a business context presented by some of the executives, and then teams were working on their plans and dependencies, and presenting their plans. It was far from perfect, many teams were discovering the "business value or plan" of what they were working on, just before planning, they were focusing on the outputs (i.e. Epics) and its predictability, and we had a somewhat cumbersome 6 hours of each team presenting their detailed plan at the Epic level for 15 minutes, as well as their risks and dependencies to the whole company.

We had a retrospective for this first edition, and for all the other ones, and we improve every quarter. We ask everyone for their feedback, we prioritized the improvements, and with the LACE governance committee we agree and roll-out improved approach every quarter.

The 8th edition format

For this 8th edition, we are now talking about the value (outcomes) that the product and engineering teams have delivered and are going to deliver to our customers (home care and infusion agencies), their clients and our internal customers (like implementation and customer success teams). We become obsessed about helping our customers improving their business. We started with some information on the different markets segment we are servicing, and what are the key elements to help our customers on these markets.

We had a Q1 celebration, which exposed what feature we released in Q1, and more importantly quotes from customers, for example "Recurring visit premiums! This is going to save hours for our workforce and admin teams" - did I say that our theme for 2023 is the war on repetitive tasks for our customers. We also had a business context where we exposed the sate of the business, restating the product strategy with the business priorities, exposing some key missing feature or to be improved workflow. We reviewed where did we invest, and compared that to our target of investment. Finally, we talked about the key enablers (read architecture driven Initiatives and Epics) to solidify our platform foundations to improve scalability, performance, quality and security.

Every single team spend some time with the product and engineering executives, and our founder and CEO, to discuss their plan, ask and answer questions. This was a great opportunity to have a collaboration with team members and the leadership team. We completed on the third day, with 3 hours of presentation to the company of every domain leaders, on what their teams are going to contribute to the top 10 business priorities. Transparency is a key value of AlayaCare. With this new approach of "Quarterly Alignment", and focusing on outcome, we are more agile and flexible, and while we have a plan we execute against, we are also adapting to the business priorities as required.

Metrics are important

Despite the fact that software engineering requires a lot of analytical skills, we have struggled over the years at find the proper metrics to measure speed and quality. Thanks to DEvOps Research and Assessment (DORA), in 2014, we started to focus on 4 key metrics which had been proven to have high correlation with business success. We are tracking the metrics of velocity and stability (aka DORA), and during the quarterly alignment, we reviewed how we did during Q1 with some of the top teams. For Q2 we are focusing to improve our Cycle Time, and target to have all team cycle time average under 120h. We shared with the teams some best practices and concrete actions to take to improve this metrics.

We discussed trends, which is what is important in many metrics.

Humans are social animals

This latest quarterly, brought again multiple people in our marvellous Montreal office and I am so grateful about it. Getting together, exchanging news about parents or kids, sometimes arguing on workflow or technology approach, having good food, great discussions about a philosophical topic, laughing together or just discussing what kind of sports you are going to do this week-end is an excellent, and in my mind mandatory, way to build trust. Humans are social animals and need to get together. While zoom has enabled people in certain type of role, to work remote and enjoy less commuting, it's not the same has exchanging face.

I had built several remote teams before covid, yet I always insisted to have at least quarterly face to face experiences to build our common memories and experience the way people work together. The culture of a tribe is based on common memories and the way we are doing things.

During the Quarterly alignment, we encourage many agile teams, or group of teams (called domains), to get together for a dinner. We had many great lunches at the office, including Pasta, Tacos, and Lebanese food. On Wedneday evening, we had a party at the office, with a great Paela for everyone!

There were almost 100 people in Montreal and several dozens joining remotly through zoom. Some in the office, did a little bit of rower in our small gym following the lead of we are all in the same boat.

We are always looking to add top players to our teams

We are on a mission to help the world by enabling the care we want our loves one to receive in the place they call home. Home care time is now, and is a growing necessity due among other factors of the age pyramid in many countries.

I firmly believe that having great people is a way to attracts top players. If you feel inspired by these, feel free to apply to one of our openings in Product and Engineering in Canada, Brazil and Australia here. If you don't find your role, feel free to ping me directly on Linkedin.

Finally, I would like to thank you all people who participated in the organization, and everyone deeply engaged in the quarterly alignment. I am grateful to be part of such ?an amazing team?at?AlayaCare! .