Category: Leadership

How we Plan at Bonial (part 3)

Collaborative digital stickies board that we use for planning.

Ok, after all that, how do we actually plan at Bonial?

The heart of our planning activities is the Quarterly Planning which is loosely modeled on Program Implement (PI) Planning from SAFe.  During quarterly planning / PI planning, everyone in the product development organization – developers, designers, architects, testers, product managers, operations specialists, designers, etc. – get together for a couple of days to map out their next phase.  We do our planning during the previous quarter’s HIP (Hardening Innovation and Planning) sprint, which is sprint 6 of each quarter.

Before I dive into the actual planning days, I should point out that the preparations start several weeks before when the product teams actively work with stakeholders, customer facing teams and the executive team to validates the backlogs against the current company priorities and business realities.  The prep phase looks something like this:

  • The senior management team and product strategy board review the overall strategy and primary business goals to assess if any change in focus is needed.  
  • Next we make sure that product and delivery management has the same level of clarity. We get the delivery leads and product owners together and communicate the company goals for the upcoming quarter to them, taking the time to answer questions about strategy, challenges, current market trends etc. Our goal here is to make sure that all our leaders are able to bring clarity to their teams so that local decisions are made with the right context.
  • 3-4 weeks before the planning event, the product management team starts curating the backlogs for the different product and system streams.  They create a “long list” of major features and work items and meet with stakeholders, customers and Bonial management to validate priorities. 
  • A week before planning the “long lists” are reduced to “short lists” of the highest priority items. This is probably the hardest part of the process and it requires saying “no” to things… we find that our stakeholders and customers all agree that discipline is needed so long as it mostly impacts other stakeholders and customers.  Over the years we’ve tried various formal mechanisms to prioritization – Weighted Short Job First, Feature Bucks, etc. – but in the end we find that different tools are needed for different situations and that, with experience, people often people intuitively know the order.
  • Over the next week the product team spends time working through open questions and details while architects and engineers do the same on the technical side.  There’s also generally some intense discussions about “bubble” items – features that are right on the cusp of making the list – as well as hot items that didn’t make the list.

I wish I could say that this process was easy.  The truth is that a great deal changes in three months – new opportunities and challenges, unexpected curveballs – so we’re constantly challenged to re-assess our priorities with each planning cycle.  On top of that there’s a lot we want to do, so we find ourselves often having hard discussions up until the planning day, especially around the “bubble items”.  It’s not clear to me that there’s a much easier way – we’re in a fast industry and a complex business – but we try to get better each quarter.

So the primary inputs to planning are a short, discreet, prioritized set of epic-sized initiatives for each team.  Most of these are functional but there are usually some architectural or operational topics as well.  That brings us now to the actual planning days (typically a Th/F):

  • On planning day 1, we start with a team breakfast at 0900 and then a kickoff presentation at 0930.  The kickoff presentation covers the big picture goals for the quarter and a quick review of each team’s focus and top items so everyone has context.  We also cover logistics – where they can find flip-charts and stickies, who’s in which rooms, etc.
  • Following the kickoff (and the kitchen cleanup), the teams go to their planning spaces and get started.  Basically, they start with the top priority item, plan it through to completion, and then repeat with the next item.  Once they get to the allocated capacity they stop planning.  The remaining items simply don’t get done.
Teams plan with flip charts for each sprint and colored stickies for tasks, milestones, etc.
  • “Full capacity” is an interesting and oft debated question.  We have a loose agreement that teams should reserve ~20% for bugs and team discretion and should reserve another ~20% for refactoring and architecture work. 
  • As the teams are planning they’re also working with other teams on inbound and outbound dependencies.  We’ve organized the teams to minimize dependencies but they’re still a fact of life.  The teams negotiate how to support each other based on overall priorities and goal (ref. the “context” from the breakfast).  Any un-resolved conflicts are escalated or raised at the review meeting (below).
  • At 4PM on the first day the scrum masters and other delivery managers get together to share their current plans with the group.  We use a web-based collaboration tool that allows each team to put virtual stickies on their assigned row with different colors illustrating milestones, spikes, tasks, releases, etc.  Dependencies are made visible by connecting two stickies with a line.  
Teams gather to review the day 1 draft plan.
  • Putting everything together allows us to visualize the major streams, see what made the cut and what didn’t, and address any dependency challenges or conflicts.  Generally there are several to-dos coming out of the review, primarily around working through dependencies or going to business stakeholders for clarification.
  • The morning of day 2 is primarily for making adjustments from the previous day, collaborating with other teams where combined efforts are needed and tying up loose ends.  Most teams wrap this up pretty early and then get back to their HIP sprint, others need most or all of the day.  
  • At 4PM on day two we grab a beer and get back together in front of the stickies board to review any changes from the previous day and discuss any unresolved conflicts.  This exercise typically goes much faster than the day 1 review.  At the end we check confidence and then head home for a much needed break.

Here’s the final plan from last quarter.  

Q2 final plan

It looks complex and it is complex.  Without developing our process, our teams and ourselves over the last couple of years we’d be hard pressed to effectively manage this complexity.

Following the planning we package up the plan and communicate a high level, consumable version for to the business and stakeholders.  We emphasize that these are our current targets and best estimates – this isn’t a contract.  We’ll do everything we can to stick to it but we may be surprised or, in good agile fashion, we may decide to make changes as the situation evolves.

So that brings us full nearly full circle.  I started this series during our last planning days and expected it to be a quick post.  As I pulled the thread, however, I realized how much work had gone into our evolution in this area.  I could also see that a high-level flyover would leave huge gaps in the journey, so I decided to fly lower.   

You can see by now that undertaking a journey like this takes a fair amount of time, experience and honest self-evaluation, regardless of the specific methodology you choose.  That said, the investment is worth it, and a great deal of value can be realized even early in the process.

In Bonial’s case, we had a few advantages as we set off on the journey.  First, everyone was open to change, even when the change made them nervous.  The importance of this can’t be overstated.  I’ve lost count of the organizations I’ve worked with in which the teams had no motivation to improve (though paradoxically most of them complained constantly about the status quo).  In the end the team has to want or at least be willing give it shot.  Which brings us to point two…

Second, we had good people and a healthy culture.  Where we lacked in experience and skills, we more than compensated by having a team of smart, energetic professionals.  With good people, you can generally solve any problem. 

Last, but not least, we have a skilled, SAFe-trained Release Train Manager to drive the process (though her role has evolved).  Even the finest orchestras of the world don’t play on they own- they have a conductor.  In our case the conductor/RTE ensures:

  • The stage is set. Everybody knows the timing, their roles and the rules of the game and All the needed supplies are in place and easily accessible to everybody.
  • Short (really short!) list of candidates for planning is finalized before we start.  The RTE ensure we’re observing Work in Progress (WIP) constraints, which are critical to maximizing throughput.  As she often says, “Let’s stop starting things and start finishing things instead.”  
  • People know who to go to regarding priorities and impediments during planning.
  • The planning is properly wrapped up, all roadmaps and agreements put together, and outcomes are properly communicated to all key stakeholders.
  • Solid retrospectives are done both on the quarter itself as well as the planning process so we can continue improving.

Whew!  That was a lot of writing for me and reading for you.  Kudos if you made it this far – I hope it was worth it.  So now you know how we do it – feel free to share your own stories about how you and your teams plan.  Best of luck in your own journey!

(Special thanks to Irina Zhovtobrukh (the mysterious RTE) for her contributions to this post as well as teaching us how to “conduct” better planning evolutions.)

How we Plan at Bonial (part 2: competence)

In the previous two posts I talked about the importance of clarity and control, but even perfect clarity and unlimited control will likely still lead to failure and frustration if the team isn’t ready to take on these new responsibilities. That’s where Competence comes in.

To build competence across the team we invested in experienced practitioners as well as training and mentoring. We hired a talented SAFe-trained development manager (“Release Train Engineer” in SAFe parlance) to both lead our transformation as well as provide training and mentoring.  We brought in agile and SAFe trainers for multi-day training sessions on team and enterprise agile (more on SAFe in later posts).  We started leadership and management training for our product owners, new team leads and lead developers. The more experienced members of the team actively coached others in best practices.

Why go through all this trouble?  Simple – a common source of failure I’ve seen over the years is this: the fantasy that calling something ‘agile’ somehow makes it agile.  Too often I’ve seen organizations slap on the label of “scrum teams,” appoint a newly hired Scrum Master or Agile Coach, tell them to have stand-ups and sprints, and then hope that “agile happens”… a.k.a. “fake it until you make it”.  Good luck.  Like it or not, you have to invest in training, excellent people and experienced leadership.

A word of advice: don’t skimp on the training. Our first training session involved a half-day session for only key leaders. As we quickly learned, that’s not training – that’s just a teaser.  Frankly I was part of the problem – I needed to shift my attitude and accept that, unless the whole team is on-board and up-to-speed, we’d never be able to run a full speed.  Yes, it was expensive in both time and money, but necessary.  We’ve since opened up both the breadth and depth of the training.

We also learned by doing. We built on a strong culture of open and honest retrospectives and we actively shared the learnings between teams. We experimented with new techniques and, when they worked, spread them throughout the organization. We actively cultured an environment of “low fear” so that people had space to learn and grow.

As a management team, we also worked hard to “specify goals, not methods” as part of the shift away from the Roadmap Committee described in the previous post. Why is this a competence topic? Because by forcing ourselves to stay out of the details we provided space for the teams to learn and grow. This also opened up room for lots of great ideas that may never have been voiced in a top-down approach.

Key takeaway: invest in training and regular, iterative experiential learning. Put your teams in positions where they need to stretch their knowledge and experience so that they have the context and confidence going forward to execute the mission (but actively support them as they learn).  And, as always, hire and retain great people.

One thing before we get back to the original topic – as I re-read these last three posts I can see how a reader might get the sense that we executed smoothly via a carefully orchestrated plan.  Not so.  There was trial-and-error, plenty of course adjustments and a mix of successes and failures.  That’s ok – it takes time.  What’s important is keeping your eye on the ultimate goal, being realistic and working together as a team to make it happen.

Ok, after a long detour through the background, back to the original topic…

How we Plan at Bonial (part 2: control)

blue angels - extreme control
Blue Angels – extreme control

As you read in the previous post, we shed some light on what we were (and weren’t) doing with some simple Clarity mechanisms with regards to planning our software development.  Now we needed to make sure everyone knew who should be doing what – a.k.a. Control. 

We started with a new roadmap governance process.  We knew that if we wanted to scale the organization we had to fundamentally rationalize the “roadmap committee”.  To that end we developed the following decision flow chart:

Bonial’s first update to roadmap governance

Though it appears complex, it’s built around a single principle: push as many decisions to the teams as possible.  The “roadmap committee” would be responsible for major strategy and funding decisions and for monitoring progress; the teams would execute under the broad guidance from the committee.  

This shift to distributed control was fundamental to our later growth and success but the truth is that it took the better part of a year until we “got it right-ish”.  It was an iterative process of building trust on all sides – management had to trust the teams to make good decisions, the teams had to trust management to provide clear guidance and hold to it, and the stakeholders had to trust both.  But it was worth it.  

Most importantly, the teams began to “own” their mission which changed everything. 

The Roadmap Committee has long since been replaced with other more focussed and lighter-weight mechanisms, but the principles still hold true – executive management sets the goals, allocates resources and provides experience and mentoring; the teams decide how to achieve the goals and execute.  We continue to explore different organizations and alignments to optimize our software development and delivery and we assume we’ll continue to experiment as we grow and our missions changes.

Another major step we took that impacted both control and clarity was to align our teams into Value Streams.  In our effort to improve how we applied Lean and Agile principles at the team and group levels, we decided to adopt best principles from the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) for software development at the enterprise level.  SAFe teams are built around “Programs” or “Value Streams” that allowed teams to focus on a specific portion of the mission and operate as independently as possible.  We deviated quite a bit from pure SAFe and formed three streams around our user facing efforts, our business systems and our operations initiatives.  Never-the-less the benefits were immediate as we reduced “prioritization hell” which is what I call the often fruitless act of trying to compare a revenue generating topic with, for example, a cost savings or security topic. 

Key takeaway: it’s impossible to both scale and maintain central control.  Effective scaling requires creating semi-autonomous, fully-capable teams organized to be relatively independent and provided with the clarity needed to tackle their mission.  This can be a tough step, especially in organizations with a long history of central control, but it’s a step that must be taken.  (FWIW I’ve seen the opposite and it’s not pretty.)

So now we knew what we were doing and who should be doing what.  We were getting a lot closer, but we had one more big step…

How we Plan at Bonial (part 2: clarity)

Clarity

How do you go about fixing something that requires you to change almost everything you do?  As described in part 1, this was the situation we faced at Bonial in late 2014 when it came to the governance and execution of our product development roadmap.  

Rather than re-inventing the wheel, we took advantage of proven play books – one for organization change and one for enterprise agile.  On the organizational side, we knew that the “top down, centralized control” model was already strained and would not scale.  So we leveraged elements from the (fantastic) book “Turn this Ship Around!” by Capt. David Marquett, which describes one organization’s journey from a top-down leadership structure to a “leader-leader” structure with distributed ownership and control.  Bonial would have to undergo a similar transformation – we needed everyone to be engaged and feeling ownership if we were to realize rapid transformation and scale. 

In the book, the author presents a couple dozen excellent leadership mechanisms and groups them under three high-level categories – Clarity, Control, and Competence.  In the interest of brevity, I’ll describe just a few of the things we did to improve in these categories.  (I’ll also break them up over several posts.)

Starting with clarity, we began with the simplest exercise possible: we documented all of the work-in-progress on one list.  Absurdly basic yet profound.  We created the first draft by literally going from team to team and asking them what projects were in progress and putting them in a Google Sheet.  (Why this format?  Because normalizing and adapting the existing tracking tools (Jira, Trello) would have taken far too long and wasted the team’s time and energy.  Also, Google Sheets allow for simultaneous editing which is critical for collaboration.)  To make this relevant for business stakeholders, we then dropped the small “story” and “task” level items and broke down the “saga” level items so that the resulting list was at a meaningful “epic” or “project” level.

Here’s a snap of an archived copy of the first version:

Screenshot of first Bonial Roadmap on Google Sheets

This exercise had several immediate impacts.  First, it showed our stakeholders that the engineering team was actually working on a quite a few projects and began to restore some confidence in the product development function.  Second, it shed light on all the projects and prompted a number of valid and constructive questions as to priorities and business justifications for the projects.  This in turn led directly to our decision to do more formal and intentional planning: we wanted to ensure that our engineering resources were “doing the right things,” not just “doing things right.”

Over time this simple Google Sheet has grown to be the primary tool for viewing and communicating the current quarter’s roadmap development.  We populate the sheet with the output of each quarter’s planning exercise (more on that to follow).  Twice a week we review the status of all items (red, yellow, green) and discuss as a team what we can do to adjust if needed.  The same spreadsheet is publicly available to all stakeholders for full transparency.  We’ve considered several times moving to more sophisticated (and expensive) tools but each time we decided that the Google Sheets does everything we need.

Key takeaway: it’s hard to plan if you don’t know what you’re already doing.  Take the time to get clarity on what’s happening, tune it to the right granularity, and ensure there’s full transparency.

In the next post I’ll talk about how we approach mechanisms for control. 

How We Plan at Bonial (Part 1: the early days)

Today is the first day of our quarterly planning ritual here at Bonial.  As I write this the teams are huddled away passionately discussing, digesting, challenging, and estimating their candidate work items.  We have over a hundred people from 25 different countries and multiple offices working through dozens of epics.  By tomorrow we’ll have a solid plan agreed upon by the engineers, designers, testers, data scientists, operations specialists and product managers as well as their stakeholders.  

It wasn’t always like this.

When I arrived at Bonial a couple of years ago, there was no documented roadmap or cohesive prioritization process.  The planning horizon ranged from intra-day for emergencies to a couple of weeks for most other items.  No-one had a clear understanding of what we were working on and why.  The stakeholders didn’t trust engineering and everyone was unhappy.

Getting from there to here hasn’t been easy.  Over the next few posts I’ll walk you through how we got to where we are today.  

But to understand the journey we have to start at the beginning-ish…

In 2014, Bonial was a mature startup with seven or eight years under its belt.  We had a very successful mobile and web app being used in a dozen or so countries.  The product development crew was organized into four scrum teams, an ops team and a design team and was responsible for developing all of the user facing systems as well as the critical business systems.  All-in-all, there were 40-50 people working together in product development.

Unfortunately the team was less effective than it could and should have been, in large part due to lack of clarity and governance.  For starters, not only was there a lack of a coherent roadmap, there wasn’t even any clear record of what work was currently being executed.  We had tickets in Jira scattered across a dozen or more “projects,” Trello boards, stickies on blackboards, and whole lot of ideas in people’s heads, but there was no one place a stakeholder could go and get a simple answer to the question: “what is the status of my project?”

What roadmap planning was done happened in a bi-weekly session called the “roadmap committee.”  This was a group of senior managers from the extended product development organization and stakeholders who reviewed development progress and made decisions on new initiatives.  I’m being nice when I say that it wasn’t much fun.  The selection of initiatives being governed was somewhat arbitrary and the value provided by the committee was questionable.  We often hashed over the same questions over and over again.  Unfortunately it was the only vehicle in place to provide some level of two-way communications regarding roadmap and status.

The end result was that no-one was happy.  The stakeholders and customers felt like their needs were ignored and that, when their projects were accepted, delivery was too slow.  The engineers felt like they were in a blender of arbitrary and incoherent requirements over which they felt no sense of ownership.  And the product management team was stuck in the middle, working to adjust to the latest change and managing both unhappy stakeholders and engineers both.  The end result was perceived and real low performance and sense that we were set up to fail.

So we decided to change this; the solution would require a great deal of work in many areas across the people/process/technology spectrums.  It all came together, though, in planning.  Stay tuned for part 2. 

Getting Extreme

 

In my previous post on Extreme Ownership I shared that I wished more technology companies would take the principles more seriously.  Over the last month my wish was granted right here at my company.  

Our executive team had an offsite strategy meeting last week, and one of the coolest things we did was take a deep dive into Extreme Ownership.  In the weeks leading up to the summit each member of the team – managing directors, senior execs and CxOs – read Extreme Ownership and prepared homework consisting of an introspective look into how they’d individually violated or been challenged by the principles as well as which principles we wanted to focus on bringing more into the company.

We discussed our experiences over dinner in a very candid fashion.  Each person shared one or two “fails” that tracked back to the principles, or challenges that could better have been solved by better applying the principles.  It’s not often that very skilled and accomplished senior executives are willing to admit to failures in front of their peers, so I think that says a lot about the character of those around the table as well as their commitment to Extreme Ownership.

Some of the maxims that resonated strongly and were repeatedly mentioned:

  • “There are no bad boats, only bad leaders” – the core idea here is that you have to look first at the immediate leader before blaming the team itself for underperformance.
  • “It’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate” – how true.  How brutal true.
  • “Check the ego” – as the authors note, “egos cloud and disrupt everything.”  If you don’t have the discipline to keep your ego in check you don’t deserve the trust and confidence of the people you lead.
  • “They don’t want me to fail” – how many times do we assume that a boss or outside organization is to purposely make our lives harder when they put an obstacle in our way?  Probably quite a bit.  And how often is that true?  Likely very seldom.  If we’d drop the assumption of hostile intent and the resulting “us vs them” attitude, business and life would be a lot easier.

One of the longer and more challenging discussions was around how to move to “Decentralized Command” – let’s face it, it’s not easy to step back and let others take charge of executing a mission that you’re accountable for.  But it must be done to scale the organization and to develop the next generation of leaders.  And guess what – sometime they will fail, and you’ll still own the result.  Our COO made a key point here – while failure in the SEALs often results in injury or death, a business fail will have much, much lighter consequences, so we need to take an objective look at the real risk and balance with the cost of not decentralizing. 

As a team we decided on three of the principles we’d like to focus on for the entire organization and each of us was assigned a buddy from within the group to challenge us grow in these areas.  

I was really energized by this process and I’d recommend it to any team that wants to move in this direction.  In hindsight, I recognize that our company already has a pretty solid accountable culture and a general lack of fear, which probably made this a lot easier; some teams will have to overcome much bigger culture and ego challenges.  Which, in the end, means it’s even more vital.

Extreme Ownership, Tech Style

I recently read “Extreme Ownership,” a popular read on leadership by former Navy SEAL officers.  The core premise of the book is that a leader must fully own the results (good or bad) of their results if they are to create and lead a successful team.  Accountability is key, even in cases (or especially in cases) in which events are out of one’s direct control – the leader is responsible for ensuring that everyone in their organization has the context and competence to succeed, even to the point getting rid of underperforming team members when necessary.  There are no excuses.

How I wish I could find more of this in the tech domain.

I have limited experience in non-tech industries so I can’t say whether it’s better or worse elsewhere, but techies love their excuses.  When I was consulting I called it the “Any and All Excuses Accepted Here” phenomenon.  I’ve lost track of the number of status reports (standups, etc) in which someone reports that their task or project is late and everyone (leadership included) just nods at the excuses and moves on.  Perhaps a developer got sick or another team didn’t deliver on time.  Maybe there was a massive network outage that blocked access to servers or critical services. In truth the challenges are legitimate, but so what?  I rarely see the person who owns the outcome and explains what they’re going to do to make things right. 

Why is this attitude important?  Simple: as one of my mentors used to say, the market doesn’t give a damn about your excuses.  Either you deliver and win or you don’t.  

There are certainly companies who are much less tolerant of excuses in their relentless pursuit of market leadership, however that doesn’t mean their leaders actually embrace the concept of Extreme Ownership.  Many of these companies have cultures in which blame replaces excuses and leaders throw their subordinates or peers under the bus.  Shit rolls downhill.  The culture quickly becomes toxic and, while the short-term business results may be impressive and the investors are happy, the people responsible for delivering the success work in fear under weak leaders.

So how do we fix this?

It starts with you.  If you’re a leader in your organization you must embrace Extreme Ownership yourself if you want the rest of the organization to follow suit.  Once you do, you’ll find that it becomes contagious and spreads quickly throughout the team/s.

Getting into the Extreme Ownership mindset takes work.  Start here: the next time your team fails, resist the urge to make any excuses or to pounce on the person who screwed up.  First ask yourself the question: “What could I have done to get a different result?”  Then make it right if at all possible. Own up fully and personally to the failed result and set about doing what you can to make sure it doesn’t happen again.  Sometimes it’ll involve better communications; sometimes more training.  Usually it will require hard thinking in how to do things better.  Often it will need hard conversations about individual performance and in extreme cases the removal of people who simply can’t fulfill their team duties.  The latter is tough and is a last resort, but is necessary to ensure the health of the team.

Creating a culture of ownership is not enough – training is also needed.  Let’s face it – most people are not natural-born leaders. But I believe, and my experience has shown me, that most people can learn to be solid leaders.  As leadership has strong components of science and psychology it lends itself well to training.  We do a great disservice to our industry by thrusting new leaders into roles without any training or support (or worse, sending them to bland corporate boilerplate training).  More on this in a later blog. 

In closing – read the book (preferably with your team) or listen to the interview on Tim Ferriss’ podcast and start adopting the principles.  You won’t regret it.  

Own it!