Sooner Safer Happier by Jonathan Smart

Author:Jonathan Smart
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: IT Revolution Press

Figure 5.11: Business Outcome Canvas

4: Rolling Roadmaps and Fixed Dates

To recap, quarterly business outcomes inherently have a date built in, which is once a quarter. Within that, there are monthly experiments and daily stories, ideally with daily releases of value into the hands of a customer. Here the focus shifts from a date in a plan to the ongoing outcomes and what to do next. Planning is done continuously at the multiple nested cadences. To quote Eisenhower, “Planning is indispensable and plans are useless.”

A successful pattern here is a twelve-month rolling roadmap of quarterly outcomes, working backward from the multi-year and annual outcomes. The near term is more fine-grained; outcomes for future quarters are more coarse-grained, as the further into the future the more uncertainty there is. When the British government was planning its GOV.UK online services development, a curved glass partition was intentionally picked to roadmap their work. The future was always out of view; they literally couldn’t see what was around the corner.13

Don’t artificially lock in a fixed date if the date doesn’t need to be fixed. Don’t back yourself into a corner unnecessarily. I’ve seen many cases of leaders insisting on fixed output with fixed dates, limiting the organization’s ability to respond to learning and thus limiting value. Instead focus on early and often value and learning.

There are cases that need fixed scope and fixed dates, such as mandatory regulatory change like GDPR and the Dodd-Frank legislation after the 2008 credit crisis. I have implemented many mandatory regulatory initiatives. All were fixed date and fixed scope and had a high cost of delay, in that business activities would need to stop if they were not implemented. All of them were implemented with agile principles, and all were completed early. I have found that even if you think the scope is fixed, legislation is usually written in a way that enables near-infinite ways to implement it. Also, even if you think the rule-writing is fixed, it may not be.

For example, around 2012, within a value stream I was leading we implemented the riskiest, least-understood bit of the UK version of the US Dodd-Frank financial legislation. The team tested it with production data and picked up insights within the first month that showed that the legislation would have put the UK at a competitive disadvantage to other financial centers globally. We took those insights to the Bank of England, which updated the legislation.

A waterfall approach with learning and value delayed to the very end, with a focus on the milestone and the output instead of the outcome, is far too risky an approach for fixed-date, fixed-scope work where the implications are stopping business activities. Everything should be done to remove ignorance, to minimize time to learning, and with the most time to act that learning.

5: From PMO to VET

The role of the traditional Project Management Office (PMO) changes when we pivot from temporal projects to long-lived products with long-lived teams on long-lived value streams and a rolling cadence of

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