- So, that management review typically happens the evening
and the first day.
I attend all of my own,
cause last time it was really smooth.
The time before that, we were there till,
I think 8:30 or 9:00
and we had some really interesting conversations.
What do I mean by interesting,
is they were intense and animated.
There were many opinions at play,
such as the nature of the beast.
And it's when the collective opinions
become a common opinion
as what needs to be achieved
and when individual opinions are outweighed
by the collective group consensus
that true alignment is achieved
and that can happen only if you do it purposely.
It has to happen every so often,
like I showed in that cadence-based cycle
and you get to this point of alignment.
We're gonna do that at night.
We're gonna come back the next day
and we're gonna talk about that.
We're gonna talk about the planning adjustments.
Whose gonna talk about the planning adjustments?
Not the RTE.
If I'm the RTE,
I'm gonna say,
Hmm, this project,
this major initiative,
we're gonna postpone that,
and somebody is gonna go crazy,
so I want the person whose
responsible for that to say,
We are hereby postponing our project
for the following reasons:
I want the data center guy to say,
I know I gave you a strong lecture yesterday
about the fact that we sometimes lack sufficient
tools to clean the data.
I lobbied for that.
We're gonna get this set of tools that causes Jim
to have to back off a little bit.
He's gonna do those tools rather than the other thing.
By the way, it's not all the tools that we needed.
I would say realistically this is about a 1/3
of the tooling we needed.
I'm gonna go back to my teams
in the data center and say,
We got a lot of great tools.
Did we get everything we want?
No.
And I'm gonna defend that
and I'm gonna tell them that in the organization's
larger context,
that's the right investment
and I'll come back the next PI
and ask for more tools
and they'll understand that.
So those are the trade-offs that happen
and they can only happen when everybody is together.
So we'll go through the priorities
and the adjustments,
the plan, the changes of scope
and movement of people.
Gosh, don't we keep people long-lived
and consistent from team to team?
Yeah, long live-ish,
but if indeed,
I need a certain skill area
on my team for this period,
and a team member on another team has the skill,
but we're gonna depend on that team
as a dependency,
why can't they just join my team?
It's only for an iteration or two.
So what you see is something that is...
art is long-lived
and teams are relatively long-lived,
but you see a lot of movement.
People flex to the work.
So here's a bunch of work that fits that team,
they need a DBA.
Okay, let's have a DBA work on that team
for that period of time.
So the planning adjustments now make team breakout two
even more meaningful
because now we can really say,
Okay, we've gone through it,
we've slept on the thing a little bit,
we've got new ideas
and we can start to commit
and we can go through
and assign business value.
Now this is a poorly understood thing
because we probably poorly explain it.
I'll try to do a better job.
These are the things that the team is doing.
Feature stories, milestones, don't care.
They're there objectives.
They're the things they've agreed to do.
You saw it before.
You said, speed up indexing by 50%.
They're committed to do that.
They're going to do that.
We talked about fuzzy search.
They have planned for that.
It's in the plan.
Here's fuzzy search,
but they can't commit to that
and the reason is they need some capacity margin
in their planning.
These are the things we can commit to.
Now let's have a separate discussion with
our business owners.
What's the value of this?
Well, it's the top of the list.
It's the 10.
No, actually, look at this.
I would rather get more production out of this system
than I would add locations and validational location.
Oh! I didn't understand that.
I thought for sure that the number one feature
was structured locations.
It is the number one feature when I compare that
to these others,
it's only a seven.
10 and 10.
Scale is one to 10, okay?
They can't all be 10's.
If a business owner wants to kind of game the system
and say they're all 10's,
then you just said,
Well, then there are no priorities.
They should work on whatever they want, right?
There's always a 10.
There's always a priority.
And these are not Fibonacci series.
There's not one, three, five and eight and 13.
There's just one through 10.
Tell me on a scale of one to 10 what's most important.
And they needn't be the same from team to team.
They can be,
but your 10 might be only for you.
That same thing could be less important for
somebody else because they have a much higher priority.
So, that's how we align.
We align by communicating the objectives back
to the business owners and they set value.
What good is that?
Well, I'm gonna show you a couple things.
Number one.
Primary values in the conversation.
I just had a business owner who said,
Whoa, if we could get this done,
I think we're gonna be demonstrably better off.
I think we have a much better chance to enter this market
or to illustrate to an outside stakeholder
what we're trying to do
or raise money
or show up at the trade show
with a very competitive product.
This is absolutely important.
We have to have it,
but at least in this next PI,
I need this worse.
That's really valuable.
It didn't say this didn't matter.
It said that this frankly is even more important.
Those two together are three times as important
as the other one.
That's the conversation we're also gonna use those
to measure our ability to plan and commit
and we'll use this to have our PI predictability measure.
It'll give us an idea of how are we doing?
Was that a good PI?
Did we do most of what we said we were gonna do or not?