Accelerate Chapter 16 Discussion Points

Chapter 16 of Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations, shares the experiences of Steve Bell and Karen Whitley Bell applying DevOps and Lean practices at ING Netherlands:

• We must improve  the way we lead and manage IT and reimagine the way everyone across the enterprise views and engages with technology
• A high-performing management framework in practice
• You have to understand why, not just copy the behaviors
• We'll share with you the sights and sounds and experiences of a day at ING, showing you how practices, rhythms, and routines connect to creat a learning organization and deliver high performance and value
• Entering the main space there is a large, open social area designed to create intimate spaces to gather, visit, and share ideas
• After that is the Tribe's suite, where upon entering you'll see a large room with glass walls, creating visibility to the space within
• This is the Obeya room, and is where the Tribe lead's work, priorities, and action items are visualized for the teams and anyone else
• Management meets on a regular cadence here
• Four distinct zones are visualized:
• Strategic improvement
• Performance monitoring
• Portfolio roadmap
• Leadership actions
• Each has current information about targets, gaps, progress, and problems
• Color coding is used to make problems immediately visible
• Each IT objective ties directly, in measurable ways, to enterprise strategy
• Each line of business is organized as a tribe delivering a portfolio of related products and services
• Each tribe is comprised of multiple self-steering teams, called squads, each responsible for a distinct customer mission
• Each squad is guided by a product owner, led by an IT-area lead, and sized according to Bezos' Two Pizza Rule
• Most squads are cross-functional, consisting of engineers and marketers, collaborating as a single team with a shared understanding of customer value
• This team composition is referred to as BizDevOps
• New roles emerge as needed through experience and learning
• There are also chapters, comprised of members of the same discipline, who are matrixed across squads and bring specialized knowledge to promote learning and advancement among squad members
• There are centers of expertise, bringing together individuals with particular capabilities
• There are internal continuous improvement coaches
• The squad workspace is an open area with windows and walls that are covered in visuals that enable the squad to monitor performance in real time, see obstacles, status of improvements, and other information of value to the squad
• Squad visuals share some characteristics; the similarities in Obeya design enable colleagues outside the squad to immediately understand, at a glance, certain aspects of the work, promoting shared learning
• Standard guidelines include
• Visualizing goals
• Present performance and gaps
• New and escalated problems
• Demand
• WIP
• Done work
• Visualizing demand helps prioritize and keep the WIP load small
• Squads have daily stand-up meetings
• Follow a leaders-as-coaches model where everyone's job is to
• Do the work
• Improve the work
• Develop the people
• Develop the people is especially important in a technology domain, where automation is disrupting many technology jobs
• For people to bring their best to the work that may, in fact, eliminate their current job, they need complete faith that their leaders value them
• A fixed percentage of each squad's and chapter's time is allocated for improvement
• Squads think of improvement activities as just regular work
• Jannes' tribes had been challenged by senior leadership to be twice as effective. "There was a tough deadline and lots of pressure. Our tribe lead, Jannes, went to the squads and said, 'If the quality isn't there, don't release. I'll cover your back.' So, we felt we owned quality. That helped us to do the right things."
• Too often, quality is overshadowed by the pressure for speed. A courageous and supportive leader is crucial to help teams "slow down to speed up," providing them with the permission and safety to put quality first
• The coaching team is experimenting with, and measuring, ways to maintain the same high level of collaboration and learning among cross-border squads
• As a leader, you have to look at your own behaviors before you ask others to change
• When you change the way you work, you change the routines, you create a different culture
• Transforming your leadership, management, and team practices
• We are often asked by enterprise leaders:
• How do we change our culture?
• We believe better questions to ask are:
• How do we learn to learn?
• How do I learn?
• How can I make it safe for others to learn?
• How can I learn from and with them?
• How do we, together, establish new behaviors and new ways of thinking that build new habits, that cultivate our new culture?
• Where do we start?
• There is a willingness to experiment with new ways of thinking and working
• You can't "implement" culture change
• Implementation thinking (attempting to mimic another company's specific behavior and practices) is, by its very nature, counter to the essence of generative culture
• A high-performance culture is the development, through experimentation and learning guided by evidence, of a new way of working together that is situationally and culturally appropriate to each organization
• Develop and maintain the right mindset. This is about learning and how to create an environment for shared organizational learning-not about just doing the practices, and certainly not about employing tools. Make it your own. This means three things:
• Don't look to copy other enterprises on their methods and practices, or to implement an expert designed model. Study and learn from them, but then experiment and adapt to what works for you and your culture
• You, too, need to change your way of work. Lead by example. A generative culture starts with demonstrating new behaviors, not delegating them
• Change takes discipline and courage. Practice patience It's going to take time to change actions and thought patterns until they become new habits and, eventually, your new culture