Your team includes your suppliers, visualize their work too

I have worked with a number of organisations whose IT teams did not have a software delivery capability. Instead they worked with, and managed, suppliers that provided this for them. If you are part of a team who do the same, here are some things to think about:

·      The risk of screwing up is always shared, so

·      No matter what, behave like a single team, and

·      Identify and tackle blockages together, wherever they are

There a very many reasons why you might choose to partner up with an external supplier, and there are definitely many other great articles out there discussing the pros and cons. Here I would like to talk about how you should approach what can be (in my experience) a difficult situation; i.e. two sets of people, intending to come together to create an amazing product for the end user, succumb to the pressures of serving different masters bound together under a commercial contract. One is buying and wanting to get the most for their money for the minimum amount of effort, one is selling and wanting to make the most money also with the minimum amount of effort).

Here are a few things that have helped teams, on both sides, that I have worked with over the years…

Do not view outsourcing the work as outsourcing the risk;

This may seem idealistic, but if you begin any relationship thinking “well if this fails, I’ll be ok and the other person will have to shoulder all the cost” you may as well give up before you start. You could have the most water tight contract going, but what it will not give you back is the time you spent, not collaborating and not delivering product.

The risk of not having an end user able to use the most fit for purpose software or tool set is always carried by your own organisation. If you and your supplier fail to deliver that, yes you may be in line for compensation or a reduced rate, but that wasn’t the outcome you had in mind when you entered in to this partnership was it?

You are a single team, behave like one;

The supplier is not there to meet your need, you are all here to meet the need of the user.

Weekly catch ups and separate plans will not cut it. If you have chosen to adopt Lean Agile practices like visualisation, Scrum, Kanban, tight feedback loops etc. then you need your supplier team to join in.

The major stumbling block, which I have witnessed, is that they do not want to. It jars, it gets in the way of their tried and tested processes, and the transparency leaves them open to criticism as to how they are managing their people and work stacks (more of that later) - they can feel very vulnerable.

If you truly want the right, user centric, outcome then don’t be afraid to lead the way in doing the hard work yourself. As you can see from the picture atop this article, you can track the work of your supplier (here in yellow). You can track their progress against your plan through “to do, doing and done”. You can invite them to help you understand their reasoning when it comes to sequencing and prioritising and how they are spending their time, and if things are proving difficult for them maybe they need your help solving their (really your) problem. If you visualise it yourself then you put yourself in the driving seat to prompt the conversations that need to happen.

Your visualisation is a picture where you should “show your working out”, where you depict your understanding of what’s going on in their world and yours. The most powerful thing about that is you can put it in front of everyone and invite scrutiny – have a look at this, tell us if we are right and if we are wrong help us understand, show us the bits we are missing. That’s the behaviour of a (single) team; collaborators, conspirators, cooperators.

Most importantly, as in the pic, you can show them how you deal with blockers (the small pink stickies) by treating them with urgency, and seeing that this is work that is unplanned/unforeseen and is therefore high priority because, cumulatively, over a sustained period of time these are the things that turn an 18 month project into a 3 year project, a 3 year project into a 5 year project – and we’ve all been there too many times.

At first this may seem to the supplier like micro management and interference, a lack of trust. Be sensitive in your words and actions and show them that this is in fact team work, transparency and being responsive to everyone's needs. At all times focus on progressing the work to the point where they feel safe that it is not about personalities or cultural clashes. It is about learning how to get things done.

There will be “Brents”, find them and look after them

If you haven’t read The Phoenix Project you should. In this novel-cum-textbook describing how and why to adopt modern, transparent, collaborative ways of working there is a chap that the whole of the IT organisation relies on, and because of this the whole organisation relies on him. He has been there long enough to have been involved in the creation of every piece of software the company uses and knows all the nuances and social networks that have evolved as the company itself has evolved over time.

In every supplier to every company I have worked for and with there have always been Brents. In the example used for the picture above it was a chap named Charles, but it could just as easily been a Charlotte, a Joe or a Jo. They are all lovely, hard working people. It is theirs and our misfortune that the traditional management paradigm will often have them working with the largest number of clients possible to maximise profitability and inevitably this means they may well be charged out 10 or 11 days a week (hush your mouth Turner, how dare you say such a thing!)

Back to the picture up top. We had an inkling Charles was being asked to work in this way and, because of that, so much of the work he was being asked to deliver was slowing down, blocking up and waiting for days, even weeks.

A very powerful visual tool in combating the tendency to overburden highly skilled people is to (1) show the blockages and (2) each day they are blocked add a little dot to the sticky. Over time you can see the cumulative effect of the over burden/over utilisation. It becomes undeniable.

At one stage Charles had 12 pieces of work that he had committed to and started, all were blocked. We dotted the days they were blocked (not progressing) and over the space of 2 weeks (10 working days) the cumulative wait time was 34 days and we had no reassurances that he was able to finish any of those things soon, because as they got blocked he picked something else up for us, or a different client, so that he remained highly utilised, and every time decreasing his productivity, slowing down the delivery process, and pushing out dates.

Showing this to the supplier team project manager added to our narrative – the picture alongside the words were more compelling. We suggested that we could help deprioritise some of the tasks Charles was struggling to deliver. We would give him permission to stop doing some of those things, and guess what, once we did Charles was able to focus again. He was able to finish something for us whereas before all he showed us was that he could start things.

Please consider trying these simple behaviours with the supplier side people you have as part of your team, and let me know how you get on.

Thanks Matt