Enhancing Productivity

Today’s corporate world is characterized by increasing pressure to deliver more but of uncompromising quality at a better rate. Increasing efficiency of production using just in time production is not new followed by build-on-demand concepts where value add to a customer takes on the focus in agile software development.  Regardless of the industry and product built, how can today’s projects still deliver increasing value maintaining the strict adherence to quality?

The fundamentals of iron-triangle of quality by managing the levers of scope, schedule and cost is still present but timelines are requested sometimes without clear scope, schedule then is accelerated to meet customer’s demands, and still cost is allowed not to increase both in operational and capital expenses. Keeping the focus on operational expenses, the question often evolves: How to measure and enhance productivity?

I believe the basics of productivity are in clarity, duration, and customer management. For projects that have somewhat known scope, such as extending a product installation in a different client site that can leverage past lessons learned, the clarity is not an issue. But, for new initiatives, the product scope may be evolving, and this is where delivering to what is known using agile concepts may be beneficial.

But the basics of duration management are differentiating the type of hours that go into the project. Productivity losses come from two types of hours that derail the project because productive time is taken out of the duration because the “right” people are not on the “right” job at the “right” time.  These types of hours are as follows.

1. Non-Project Hours – Delivering no value to project but time for internal process enhances, functional department meetings, training, company meetings
2. Non-Productive Hours – Time lost due to ambiguous work, lost work requests, unnecessary meetings, doing other’s work, assumption about roles, lack of accountability, etc.

The basics of project management differentiate duration from estimate in addressing the first component which is often misunderstood. Agile concepts address these by using ideal time to ensure that the story points are properly incorporating enough time to develop value. But the second part is the difficult one that the management needs to spend additional time in ensuring that properly motivated and trained people are present, tools are sufficient, and collaboration is cohesive.

In terms of the customer management (remember client is both internal and external), the productivity goal should be to maximize hours charged to a project, establish a baseline for products of similar nature and use appropriate time entry/approval methods to evaluate against the baseline, forecast and promote predictability of workload and hold everyone accountable. The principles of stakeholder management are no wonder a newly added separate dimension in the Project Management Book of Knowledge (2013).

In summary, productivity measure is rooted in people, process, and tools that allow the job to be defined in adequate detail, breakdown accountability by increasing collocation, introduce distribution tools for effective collaboration, lead instead of managing the clients more effectively, and use process as a key vehicle to integrate the whole in a virtual distributed environment.

Thoughts? 

References

Project Management Institute (2013). Project Management Book of Knowledge. Fifth Edition. New Town Square, PA: Project Management Institute.

Execution as a Strategy in Acquisition – Relevance to Agile Transformation

In one of the networking events on effective agile transformation that I facilitated, one of the learners asked a question about how agile did not measure well in an organization that the learner’s organization acquired. The learner reasoned that the acquired company was a smaller organization that claimed financial profit in a niche market but has been bleeding after acquisition when adopting agile. While the specifics of the details have to be left out in this blog, the discussion made me realize some of the pitfalls in agile adoption in mergers & acquisition prior to shifting responsibility of failure on agile practices.

This quest for executing mergers & acquisitions (M&A) successfully led me to pursue several articles and books which made me feel that “Execution” itself should be “strategically” thought through by leaders within an organization and particularly with M&A.  Paul Burmeister, who has executed in the capacity of COO and CFO in many industries, quotes multiple ideas to ensure that the M&A activity becomes successful, emphasizing critical importance of the leaders’ synergy from both the organizations to establish success factors to measure the efficiency of integration.

Among these stands out an important point on whether the M&A focuses on products, processes, and intellectual capital (Dahl, 2012). While M&A accelerates the acquiring organization’s competitive advantage by leveraging the new product line or the intellectual capital that leads to quicker access to additional markets horizontally or vertically, the reference to processes differentiated how clash of various processes (waterfall versus agile) may have to carefully weighed.

I think here is where organizational leaders may be failing to adopt asking “what would have to be true for the” execution to continue to be a fantastic choice? (Lafley & Martin, 2013, p. 204) If leaders failed to understand the twelve principles behind agile and scale them appropriately, then, they have created an organizational impediment for agile to fail their organizational success. Rationalizing on how the acquired company has always functioned differently and seeing no need to change fails to take advantage of the additional capabilities that come with the acquisition, reasons Jeff Sutherland, one of the contributors to the Agile Manifesto, who attributed the organization’s failure to remove impediments for Agile to fail (Larman & Vodde, 2011).

Once we come to terms that we have to review the processes in place, there are a couple of additional areas to look at for successful integration of agile in M&A. These include identification of proper product owners and tools for interaction. Unleashing properly spaced-out adoption of skilled people to work as product owners that understand the agile principles of establishing a good risk adjusted product and sprint backlog, prioritizing the backlog to build trust and maintaining a cadence balancing team’s commitment in distributed and virtual teams that have to be embraced, and recalibrating on the tools of communication is vital. Charlie Rudd, CEO of SolutionsIQ, underscores how organizations fail to implement agile without building the product owner capability (2013, para 5). Firms should give importance to training in such a way that time is made for people to get trained, says Larman & Vodde (2011, para 4).            

Given these observations, what other execution specific strategies should one consider for agile to succeed with M&A activities? Should there be a standardized M&A integration checklist put together for agile success and if so, what are some pointers to definitely consider? Please share your thoughts.

References

Dahl, D. (2012). 7 steps to a successful company merger or acquisition. Retrieved Oct 10, 2013, from, https://www.openforum.com/articles/7-steps-to-a-successful-ma-a-small-business-guide/

Larman, C. & Vodde, B. (2011, February 9). Top ten organizational impediments. Retrieved Oct 11, 2013, from http://scrumedge.blogspot.com/2011/02/top-ten-organizational-impediments.html