My boss, Max (Bonial Group’s CEO), and I sat down recently for a “year-in-review” during which we discussed the ups and downs of 2017 as well as goals for the new year. In wrapping up the conversation, I shared with him my gut feeling that velocity and productivity had improved over the past couple of years and were higher than they’d ever been at Bonial – perhaps as much as double when compared to 2014.
He asked if I could quantify the change, so on a frigid Sunday a couple of weeks ago I sat down with a mug of hot tea and our development records to see what I could do. We’ve used the same “product roadmap” format since 1Q14 (described here), which meant I could use a “points” type approach to quantify business value delivered during each quarter. As I was looking for relative change over time and I was consistent in the application, I felt this was a decent proxy for velocity.
It took me a couple of hours but was well worth the effort. Once I’d finished scoring and tabulating, I was pleasantly surprised to find that I’d significantly underestimated the improvements we’d made. Here’s a high level overview of the results:
The net-net is that in 1Q 2018 we’ll be delivering ~630% more business value than we delivered in the first quarter of 2014, largely driven by the fact that each person on the team is ~250% more productive.
Sweet.
The obvious next question: how did we do this?
The short answer is that there is no short answer. There was no single magic button that we pushed to set us on this path to accelerated velocity; this was a long campaign that started small and grew, eventually spanning people, process, technology and culture. Over time these learnings, improvements, changes and experiments – some large, some small, some successful, some not – built on each other and eventually created an environment in which the momentum sustained itself.
Over the next few weeks I’ll summarize the major themes here in this blog for both myself as well as anyone who’s interested. Along this journey I plan to cover (and will link when available):
- Building Leaders
- Building Great Teams
- Creating Situational Awareness
- Providing a Growth Path
- Enabling Independent Action
- Clarifying Processes and Key Roles
- Creating an Architecture Runway
- Optimizing the SDLC with DevOps
- Getting Uncomfortable
- Doing the Right Things
Each of those topics could alone make for a small book, but I’ll try to keep the articles short and informative by focussing only on the most important elements. If there’s an area in which you’d like me to dig deeper, let me know and I’ll see what I can do. Assuming I get through all of those topics I’ll wrap things up with some final thoughts.
So let’s get started with part 2: Building Leaders…