Conclusion

Job drivers

Categories of job drivers

• Attitudes - personality traits that affect behavior and decision-making (e.g. social pressure, corporate culture, personality, expectations of others)
• Background - long-term context that affects behavior and decision-making (e.g. geographic/cultural dynamics)
• Circumstances - immediate or near-term factors that affect behavior and decision-making (e.g. environmental factors, work schedule, unexpected events)

Update vision

• Attitudes
  • Program leaders want to be able to explain to the organization why they are making the decisions they are making
• Background
  • Sometimes a programs wants to track how much they are spending on activities such as technical debt, new features, and production issues in order to determine how to properly forecast future work allocations (e.g. we always spend 10% of our time on production issues, so we should ensure we allocate at least that much time in the future)
• Circumstances
  • The vision of senior leadership in the organization can shift (e.g. changes in leadership), which can result in the vision for a program shifting

Review strategic intent and guardrails

• Attitudes
  • Program leaders want to be able to influence the plans that emerge from the teams, without handing them a plan (i.e. without command and control behaviors)
• Background
  • Some organizations traditionally build roadmaps that cover the next 1-2 years
  • With greater business agility, organizations see that a roadmap beyond the next year is not worth building and showing
• Circumstances
  • Programs are often “drowning” in emergent work like defect repair and “hot” customer enhancement requests, which compete with strategic needs

Align teams to mission

• Attitudes
  • Program leaders are accountable for ensuring that teams are moving together and allocating time to strategic needs
• Background
  • Sometimes teams don’t think about how their work rolls up and where they are investing their time, instead just working on any item in the backlog
  • Sometimes teams have team members that are not 100% allocated to the team, so we need to account for this in iteration/sprint capacity and allocation
• Circumstances
  • Team members may be needed to support other teams during a planning period due to aspects like skill expertise

References

• Strategic Intent
• Manage Uncertainty with Commander’s Intent
• Lean Budget Guardrails - Scaled Agile Framework

Congratulations!