Happy new year to you all. I hope you had a good Christmas and new year break.
Welcome to the new year. I am resuming my newsletter starting this week.
Over the last couple of weeks, I have collected a lot of interesting articles and will start sharing in the coming weeks.
Interesting Articles
Changing Company Culture Requires a Movement, Not a Mandate
Here are some good snippets from this HBR article
For organizations seeking to become more adaptive and innovative, culture change is often the most challenging part of the transformation. Innovation demands new behaviours from leaders and employees that are often antithetical to corporate cultures, which are historically focused on operational excellence and efficiency.
But culture change can’t be achieved through top-down mandate. It lives in the collective hearts and habits of people and their shared perception of “how things are done around here.” Someone with authority can demand compliance, but they can’t dictate optimism, trust, conviction, or creativity.
In terms of organizational culture change, simply explaining the need for change won’t cut it. Creating a sense of urgency is helpful, but can be short-lived. To harness people’s full, lasting commitment, they must feel a deep desire, and even responsibility, to change. A leader can do this by framing change within the organization’s purpose — the “why we exist” question. A good organizational purpose calls for the pursuit of greatness in service of others. It asks employees to be driven by more than personal gain. It gives meaning to work, conjures individual emotion, and incites collective action. Prasad framed Dr. Reddy’s transformation as the pursuit of “good health can’t wait.”
The dominant culture and structure of today’s organizations are perfectly designed to produce their current behaviors and outcomes, regardless of whether those outcomes are the ones you want. If your hope is for individuals to act differently, it helps to change their surrounding conditions to be more supportive of the new behaviors, particularly when they are antithetical to the dominant culture.
It's Official: Open-Plan Offices Are Now the Dumbest Management Fad of All Time
Over the decades, a lot of really stupid management fads have come and gone, including:
- Six Sigma, where employees wear different colored belts (like in karate) to show they've been trained in the methodology.
- Stack Ranking, where employees are encouraged to rat each other out in order to secure their own advancement and budget.
- Consensus Management, where all decisions must pass through multiple committees before being implemented.
Previous studies of open plan offices have shown that they make people less productive, but most of those studies gave lip service to the notion that open plan offices would increase collaboration, thereby offsetting the damage.
The Harvard study, by contrast, undercuts the entire premise that justifies the fad. And that leaves companies with only one justification for moving to an open plan office: less floor space, and therefore a lower rent.
But even that justification is idiotic because the financial cost of the loss in productivity will be much greater than the money saved in rent. Here's an article where I do the math for you. Even in high-rent districts, the savings have a negative ROI.
Read the rest of the article here
Here is the link to the Harvard article.
Gojko's slides from the Agile Scotland Conference
The slides are downloadable from
this site and here are some of the good snippets
- Agile Coaches hire more Agile Coaches
- If a System at equilibrium experiences change.. will shift in order to minimize the change
- A large system tends to oppose its own its own proper function
- Feedback without correction is just a bad news
- Scaled Astrology Framework :-)
30 minutes Zoom call to discuss about your LeSS implementation experience
I am in the process of collecting information about the challenges being faced in the organisation with LeSS implementation. If you are a LeSS practitioner and interested to share your experience with me for 30 minutes, please reach out.
I am happy to set up 30 minutes Zoom call with you based on availability.
LeSS : Area Product Owner
-
Delivering low-value features is a waste. Lean thinking and Scrum focus on delivering high customer value, and that requires having visibility to overall development. Therefore, every product—no matter its size—needs one Product Owner (PO) and one Product Backlog (PB). But this can lead to
-
the PO dealing with too many teams
-
the PB becoming too large
-
teams working on the whole system
PO dealing with too many teams—With all the tasks the PO needs to do, it seems impossible for him to work with more than a couple of teams. How to solve this? One way is for teams to take over the clarification of Product Backlog Item (PBI) work by including subject matter experts on the team. An alternative is for someone to assist the PO with clarification work. He joins the Product Owner Team but does not make decisions related to prioritization. Using these techniques, one PO can work with up to five or ten teams. More than that will cause information overload for the PO and makes sprint planning difficult.
PB becoming too large—Lean thinking promotes small batches and short cycles. We suggest that each team have at least four PBIs for each iteration that they can complete independently within that iteration. With 50 teams this leads to a PB with 200 PBIs just for one sprint. Prioritizing 200 PBIs per iteration is too much work for one PO.
Teams working on the whole system—Feature teams are good, and so is learning new parts of the system. But too much learning without delivering value is not. This can happen when teams work on completely unfamiliar features. They have no opportunity to specialize and this affects teams’ velocity. How to strike a balance?
Solution: Requirement Areas
Requirement areas are customer-centric categories of PBIs. Example requirement areas: for a digital press printer, color workflow and transaction printing; for an internet portal area, ads and news; for a telecom system, protocols, performance, and network management
The Area Backlog Items are split, clarified, and prioritized independently of the other Area Backlog Items. This is done by a separate person—an Area Product Owner (APO). She specializes in a customer-centric area and acts as PO in relation to the teams for that area
If you like this newsletter, please share it with your friends. You can subscribe to the newsletter here
Upcoming Events
