Value Proposition of Essence
1. Introduction
Essence has a profound impact on many different personas concerned with software development. Some impact is measurable because you can easily compare how similar work is done today. However, the most value bringing impact is hard to measure in real time. How do you measure the impact of people being more competent in software development (not just producing features), people working in a more engineering-like way or people being able to select practices from anywhere in the world instead of using canned methods. Intuitively, we know that the impact of the latter aspects is dramatic, but not every executive responsible for a transformation program would count on it. However, some dare take the leap and they may be the winners.
Here we will try to concretize the values of Essence for the most critical personas in the software industry.
2. Essence addresses many personas
The are many different user personas in industry and academia that can be identified with respect to Essence, its usage and its benefits. In academia we have at the forefront teachers and researchers. However, we will focus on three personas in industry:
1. The Team
2. The Coach (Scrum Master, Trusted Method Expert)
3. The Executive
There are many other personas that could be identified and analyzed, such as program, product and project managers and methodologists, but focusing on these three keeps it simple and covers the most important general cases of the beneficiaries of Essence. Next, we will discuss the values to each one of these three personas.
3. Values to the Team
The following key values of Essence teams can be identified:
1. Easier to learn practices for several reasons:
a. The focus on what is really the essentials is a great way to really understand a practice. Once you have learnt the essentials by for instance using a practice with a team, you can learn more and more. We think the essentials is just say 5-10% of what an expert knows, but it is enough to work with others who know more.
b. Capturing the essentials on poker-sized cards makes the cards excellent placeholders for conversations. It engages the team to discuss important aspects of the practice, and there is a practical way to get consensus within the team. This helps the team members to learn by actively engaging with and using the essential guidance within a practice.
c. The cards with the essentials of the practice are used to play a multitude of serious games that involve using the cards to drive problem analysis and solution-oriented decision-making.
d. Maybe most important is that people will learn in a more systematic way than today. They start by first learning a common ground – the Essence – and then they learn practice after practice based on this common ground. Big methods are primarily compositions of a selected set of practices.
e. The common ground provides a stable big picture view of software engineering and will be useful to them throughout their careers, even as the specific practices they use change and evolve around them.
2. Easier to modify.
a. Cards can easily be extended, for example by adding new checklist items.
b. The team can add project-specific data to each card, for example by attaching their Definition of Done to the Definition of Done card, or pointing from the Product Backlog card to their active Product Backlog.
c. The team can introduce new cards to summarize lessons learnt, decisions taken and commitments made so that these can guide improved team performance in the future.
d. The team can flexibly mix and match practices from a number of sources that suit their situation and needs, and then go on to modify these to their unique circumstances.
3. Easier to use in daily life
a. The team can get started faster because they have the essential guidance at their fingertips in the form of cards that give clear guidance on what to do and how to do it.
b. Each card plays a clear role and provides clear guidance on one key aspect of the team’s way of working.
c. Serious games can make use of the content of the cards to prompt and guide the team in the key parts of their “plan, do, inspect, adapt” cycles. They provide regular reminders of the most important parts of their practices and help reduce the gap between how a team agrees to work and what actually happens on the ground.
d. Live Guidance? actively drives the “plan, do, inspect, adapt” cycle by clearly indicating the current status, options for next steps and guidance on how to achieve the next advances.
4. Values to the Coach
1. Easier to learn many different methods
a. Methods and practices are broken down onto small pieces, in the form of cards, each of which is a coaching opportunity to help the team improve one aspect of their approach.
b. Serious games with the cards engage the team with the practice theory by enabling them to immediately apply it to get value and improve their way of working.
2. Getting updates on practices as the organization learns more
a. As practices evolve, new versions can be independently assimilated without having to “rip and replace” other aspects of their way of working.
b. It is clear what has changed, why and how, so that the team remains empowered to control how they respond to practice changes.
3. Helping the team help themselves
a. Essence and practice information is available as a constant reminder to the team’s way of working, reducing the reliance on the coach over time for most basic things. The team can become self-sufficient quicker allowing the coach to spend time on the more difficult challenges.
4. Values to the Executive
1. Moving from primarily being a craft to primarily being an engineering discipline
a. Codifying practices in the simple but rigorous Essence language makes them more understandable by all stakeholders.
b. Similar practice steps and patterns can be used in a repeatable fashion, enabling more value to be delivered faster and cheaper.
c. The common language and way of thinking about process makes it easier to form teams and have them coordinate with others. The organization can still have common practices but not constrained within a one-size fits all process. This is future-proofed as rather than following the latest ‘fashion’ in industry standard process frameworks, they can evolve over their own over time, practice by practice, as the organization learns from within and from the outside world.
d. The ability to automate practices through effective use of advanced tooling is massively increased because the practices to be automated are clearly understood and precisely communicated.
2. Building a forever learning organisation
a. Teams, team of teams, etc. select their practices from an eco-system of practices, which is continuously upgraded by other teams from other parts of the organisation.
3. Improved governance of ongoing projects and programs
a. Transparency – all stakeholders outside the team retain full transparency of the way of working and current state of progress of each team, including how they are living by their own commitments.
b. Understandability – the team’s way of working comprises common practices and is expressed in a common language, with known variations for known reasons (including different practice permutations and combinations for different types of endeavors).
c. Consistency – the teams will be using a mixture of industry standard practices, common practices within the organization, and practices specific to or modified by the team. Regardless of the mix of practices the overall status can be seen in a consistent way with the standard big picture view that is the common ground of all Essence practices.
d. Lean and agile governance - the teams themselves transparently apply the states and checklists provided by Essence to their own work for primarily their own benefit. This status information is then visible to all in a consistent way, avoiding much overhead and non-value-add bureaucracy in collecting or asking for it.