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)

Review progress by state

• Attitudes
  • Program leaders feel that without up-to-date information on work progress they cannot react to changing circumstances effectively
• Background
  • Programs that have not embraced a continuous refinement process with a good 2-4 iterations/sprints of backlog buffer find it hard to track progress
  • Team structures (component vs. feature teams) as well as team stability and the resulting systemic dependencies have a significant impact on continuous flow and predictability of delivery
  • The constant addition of work and the emergence of unplanned work creates a cone of uncertainty that remains unpredictable throughout the planning period
• Circumstances
  • Teams who spend “just enough time” on refining items (features and epics) to a definition of ready will benefit from more predictable delivery over those who do not
  • Organizations that are able to reduce release batch sizes tend to release more frequently, and those who invest in the ability to reduce the “blast radius“ for feature testing/validation by only releasing to a small number of users find it a lot easier to apply a consistent and transparent view on progress
  • Setting up a “one piece flow” system can help a program identify constraint or parts of the process that batch value for big bang releases

Review progress by burndown

• Attitudes
  • Although work may be progressing well, without visibility into how work is progressing against larger objectives, program leaders may feel the progress they are making is not contributing to the objectives of the organization
• Background
  • More and more, organizations want to shift from tracking output (effort complete) as a measure of progress to tracking outcomes (value delivered) as a measure of progress
  • Sometimes programs find it hard to measure value delivered because they are not able to track complex feature delivery
  • Programs that do not place an emphasis on managing the work in progress at all levels (stories, features, and epics) often find that they have difficulty reducing lead times and increasing throughput
• Circumstances
  • A mindset shift in leadership teams is required to move away from tracking busyness to one that focuses on creating psychologically safe environments for teams to operate in
  • Problems in the flow of work can be observed in feature and epic burndowns that tend to show progress in large steps late in the planning period

Review progress by guardrail

• Attitudes
  • Program leaders feel that if they cannot show how work is lining up against strategic guardrails, investment in the future could change in negative ways
• Background
  • Sometimes organizations will look at how planned work compares to estimate work for specific strategic guardrails, but do not look how actuals compare throughout a planning period
• Circumstances
  • As priorities shift throughout a planning period, reassessing how new priorities impact strategic guardrails will ensure that there are no “surprises” for organization leadership, customers, and stakeholders at the end of the planning period

References

• Work tree report views
• Program increment progress drill down
• Objectives tree

Congratulations!