Thursday Morning
At 10:00 AM on Thursday morning, the entire crew filed into Conference Room B.
Sam sat down and pulled out his paper and pen.
“Heard any good rumors?” he asked.
Ginger and Jason chuckled.
“I hear Operations is going to hire ten more people in the next month,” Jason said.
“Oh. What’s the implication if that’s true—what does that mean to us?” asked Sam.
“I’ll have to help interview, and we do the bulk of the training,” Jason responded.
“That would certainly affect the planning we did last week,” Sam said. “This is ad hoc work at its best—it comes out of nowhere and affects everything. Has anyone else heard about the hiring in operations?”
“Nope, this one is new to me,” Ginger proclaimed.
“Okay, I’ll take that one on. Any other rumors?” asked Sam.
After a few seconds of silence, Sam asked, “Ready to continue?” Everyone nodded.
“I have some news. We have another large customer, BigCompany. They bought $5 million worth of product over the next two years,” said Sam. “That means it’s even more important for us to figure out how to release the product on time.
“The BigCompany news is a good lead-in for our next agenda item, setting our goals as a management team. Now that we know what we’re doing for the next three to four weeks, let’s shift to more strategic thinking.
“You know from last week that our department is being asked to increase revenue and decrease operations costs. We’re going to have a hard time doing that unless we work together as a management team. So, I want us to define some goals for this team related to the department goal.
“Okay, let’s look at where we want to be in three months.
“What are practical ways we can contribute to reducing costs and increasing revenue?” Sam handed around stacks of sticky notes and markers. “Start writing them down, one on each sticky. Then we’ll group them to see what the common themes are.”
After seven minutes, when he saw the pens stop moving, Sam cleared his throat. “Okay, everybody done?” Everyone nodded.
“Alright, let’s start organizing these on the wall. Come up and place your stickies on the wall, and we’ll cluster them as a group.”
Ginger jumped from her chair and strode to the front of the room. “The number of releases,” she said, slapping a sticky on the wall. “Bug fixes when Marketing changes their tiny little minds again!” She slapped another sticky on the wall.
“That affected us, too,” said Patty. She placed a sticky, “ripple effects from changes in requirements” right next to Ginger’s bug-fix sticky.
Kevin and Jason joined in, calling out their stickies, asking questions, and repositioning stickies. In ten minutes they had five distinct clusters (Figure 5, Affinity grouping of ideas).
Figure 5. Affinity grouping of ideas.
Sam stood back and looked at the clusters. “What’s the common theme in each of these clusters?” he asked.
Kevin pointed. “That one at the top is about more releases than we know how to fit into a year,” said Kevin. The others nodded in agreement.
“I think the second one is about rework—working on the same features again and again until we get them right,” said Jason.
“I feel like the third one is about how we use contractors,” Patty said.
The group continued until they’d stated the theme for each of the clusters.
“Which of these has the biggest effect on costs and revenue?” asked Sam.
“Rework and schedule. If we can’t release on time, our revenue numbers are affected. And if we have to keep fixing it, we get hit with operations and support costs,” said Jason. “And the problems ripple into the next releases.”
“I think you’re right,” said Patty. Ginger and Kevin nodded in agreement.
Now that the group had identified issues that prevented them from reaching their goals, they could define actions to change how they worked.
“Okay,” said Sam. “Now I want you to do some work to identify the concrete actions we can take as a management team to release more often. Take five minutes, and write down the most important actions we can take as a team. Then we’ll compare notes and build an action plan for us as a management team.”
When the five minutes were up, Sam asked to hear what people had written as key actions.
“Work harder,” said Patty.
“How is that different from the way you’re working now?” asked Sam.
“We work hard now,” said Patty. “But I guess we don’t always work on the right tasks to finish a specific release.”
Jason interrupted, “I know. Instead of saying ‘work harder,’ let’s say something like ‘release internally once a month.’ If we’re doing small internal releases of completed features and fixes, we have the option to release externally more often. Maybe when Marketing sees more working features more often, they won’t try to throw everything plus the kitchen sink into every release.”
“That’s a great idea. How do we make ‘release internally once a month’ happen? What steps do we need to take? Here’s an example of what I’m looking for. Say we decide that our main action is ‘Update the build system so we can build every day.’ Because right now, we build once a week, and that won’t get us to internal releases once a month. That’s a big task. Let’s see if we can break this down into smaller steps. What’s the first action you need to take to make that happen?” Sam asked.
Jason said, “Since I own the build system, I can update the build system. I’ll start this week.”
“Wait a minute,” Sam said. “We’re all in this together. Let’s share the work. I’m sure that Ginger, Kevin, and Patty can all take steps to attain this group goal. Kevin, which steps will you take? Ginger? Patty?” The team reviewed their previous lists and translated them all into concrete steps.
By the end of the meeting, Sam’s management team had a list of actions they’d take in the next week, the next month, and the following month (Figure 6, Action plan for update build system). Taken together, the team had a plan they believed would help them reduce rework and therefore improve profits.
Figure 6. Action plan for update build system.