Success Stories!

• 1: The Manager's Guide to Org Improvement
• 2: Transition to the Scaled Agile DevOps Maturity Framework

1 - The Manager's Guide to Org Improvement

Contributed by: Alex Herweyer, SAD Accredited Facilitator

Being a people leader in a large company can be exhausting. Often times it seems like the entire system is working against you. There is good news and bad news. The bad news is that, yes, the systems in large organizations are stacked against you. The good news is that these systems can be exploited for your own personal gain!

This guide is intended to help you navigate decision-making and hone your focus to optimize career growth, at the expense of those who work for you and the company itself. Enjoy!

Stamp out variability — standardize, standardize, standardize

Guiding principle: Assuming everything is knowable and hold others accountable to knowing everything up-front

About the Cynefin Framework

The basic premise and world-view you must adopt is that with enough planning and forethought, all risks can be addressed. You also understand the end state of what you are trying to achieve well enough to make a detailed plan to get there.

When you have this mindset, any sort of redundant system is waste. Using economies of scale and cost savings models, you can easily shut down arguments from naysayers. With this principle and mindset, you can drive your organization towards one way of doing thing and then leaning it out.

When considering new ideas, only work on the things you are certain will succeed. The greater the unknowns, the less upfront planning you can do. This means you have no way to estimate the cost of the effort, nor the payback for the work. Avoiding uncertainty makes you look good and is easy to justify to leadership and those reporting to you.

Focus on efficiency — pretend that nothing changes and optimize for the current state

Guiding principle: Efficiency is always good. ALWAYS!

Efficiency and cost reduction are easy to justify, as it has a quick impact on profitability. As a manager, focusing on near-term efficiency is the right move, every time.

The best example of this is the Equifax breach. The upper leadership chose to cut security spending and keep spending low. This improved their profit margin for years. With stock options, these near-term profit improvements paid off. Investmenting in things like cyber security is an investment in resiliency. These sorts of investments negatively impact profit margins, so make sure to avoid them.

If the stock graph above makes anything clear, it’s that ignoring security for years pays off in the end, even if your bet turns sour for a little while.

Another thing to avoid is flexibility in the solutions you build. Building in flexibility allows things to be changed later… after you’ve moved on to another job. The manager replacing you will get all the credit for adapting to market changes, not you. It’s better to build to suit and save money now than to build something that will work in perpetuity. Why build something that lasts more than a few years anyways? Whatever you are putting into place will be replaced, right?

Setting up your team for a death march — managing to initial estimates with 100% capacity utilization baked into the plan

Guiding principle: Use early estimates to guide delivery dates to keep everyone focused

When building software, setting your team up for a death march is the best way to look like a competent leader. The first step is to require estimates for all the work necessary to get things done. Make sure to emphasize that these are only estimates, and people will not be held to them. Once you have estimates for your years-long project in place, create a schedule with a targeted end date. Build-in 20% extra for contingency… DONE! You’ve now set up your team for a death march.

Execution is key though. Make sure that the team is focusing their time on the easy things first. You don’t tell the team that, of course. Rather, ask them for weekly status updates and insist that they stay on schedule. The team will naturally focus on those things with the least amount of unknowns. By doing this, you and the team will be saving the hard things for the end, with good progress in the first two-thirds of the original timeline.

Now comes the death march! With all the low-risk items complete, insist on meeting the original schedule. Using project management techniques, cut scope and reduce quality. Make sure to require overtime, take shortcuts, and hardcode integrations at the end in order to ship.

Once you’ve completed the project, celebrate it. You’ve earned it.

Yes by a thousand cuts — letting the friction in the system stop things

Guiding principle: The system will stop everything that wasn’t supposed to happen

Telling people ’no’ is uncomfortable. Often new and exciting ideas will be presented to you and you’ll need to deal with these somehow. This is when leaning into the bureaucracy comes in handy. Anyone that works in a company that has been around for more than a decade knows that there is a confusing and conflicting maze of rules. These rules make it nearly impossible to get work done, especially when doing something new. What should you do when someone asks for permission to pursue the idea? Just say yes and let the system stop them!

Using this approach is pretty straightforward. If the idea is actually compelling and whoever is driving it succeeds, you can claim credit for green-lighting it. The more likely scenario is that the effort will stall out, at which point, you can shrug it off.

The zen of org charts — functions, job roles, and hierarchy are always to blame

Guiding principle: It’s impossible to prove it’s not the org chart causing issues, so change it!

The problem you face is an org chart problem. At some point, a leader before you made decisions about how things should operate and built an org chart to match their vision. These decisions were made using incomplete information and done in great secrecy. Changing things with a re-design will inevitably make some things better.

Because making org changes is very stress-inducing, it’s important to involve as few people as possible and to plan the org re-design in secrecy. Focus on your current problem set to be addressed. Once you have a good vision for how you think things should operate, make the necessary org chart to match your vision.

Voilà! The problems you had been facing will no longer be your highest-order issues.

Focus on what’s wrong with individual performance — allot most of your attention to poor performers

Guiding principle: Problem people are the problem

The bureaucracy in organizations requires annual reviews of individuals. By letting high performers “do their thing”, you are getting out of people’s way. Simply check in with high performers once a year and give them high marks. One caveat is to always listen to high performers when they give suggestions. If a high performer has an idea, make sure to support it.

However, the majority of your time should be spent focusing on low performers. This helps your team’s morale. They will see that you care about low performers and how they are impacting everyone. Make sure to dismiss suggestions from low performers- they haven’t ’earned’ the right to be heard.

Emphasize cost concerns at every opportunity

Guiding principle: Accountants provide the only numbers that matter

Measuring the value your team provides is very difficult. That is why you should stop trying to measure value. Your focus should be on costs: ensure that your actuals ALWAYS hit the forecast.

The main thing that every executive sees each month is the financial reports provided by the finance department. There are three basic elements to the finance report: Budget, forecast, and actuals. The budget is the guess you made at the beginning of the planning period. This was before you knew what your team should focus on. Never admit that! The budget is correct and you were correct when you guessed it. With the little bit of time you have outside focusing on low performers, make sure to keep a close eye on all your costs. No one ever gets in trouble for getting their actuals to align perfectly with budget and forecast.

Conclusion

Using the risk-averse systems within your company is the easiest path to a moderately fulfilling career. Use these 7 principles to skirt responsibility and climb the corporate ladder. Make sure to pass this wisdom to the next generation. By doing so, you ensure the next generation of thought workers will have the same garden to grow in.

1. Assuming everything is knowable and hold others accountable to knowing everything up-front (anti-pattern to avoid)
2. Efficiency is always good. ALWAYS! (anti-pattern to avoid)
3. Use early estimates to guide delivery dates to keeps everyone focused (anti-pattern to avoid)
4. It’s impossible to prove it’s not the org chart causing issues, so change it! (anti-pattern to avoid)
5. Problem people are the problem (anti-pattern 1 and anti-pattern 2 to avoid)
6. Accountants provide the only numbers that matter (anti-pattern to avoid)

2 - Transition to the Scaled Agile DevOps Maturity Framework

Contributed by: Dirk Fabricius, SAD Accredited Facilitator on April 1, 2023

Some companies have steep hierarchies where managers are labeled by letters and numbers. When discussing these positions, it can sound like a game of chess: “F2 to E1.” This case study features one such company that, until recently, was a moderately happy place where development teams even deployed code from time to time. However, according to an article in a management magazine, they were not performing among the top 5% of companies worldwide, such as Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon. As a result, management decided to implement the Scaled Agile Dev Ops Maturity Framework, which, surprisingly, nobody at Google, Apple, Facebook, or Amazon had ever heard of. This article shares their success story, implementation roadmap, and important tips for anyone considering implementing this or any other scaling framework.

• Pix by Vizetelly and Ylanite Koppens at PixaBay

Be Scaled Agile DevOps Maturity Framework

The SAD thought leaders claim that it’s not about doing SAD, but about being SAD. This has no meaning at all, but it is nice for inspiring quotes right at the start of a case study. Place the tokens of all players here.

Yearly Strategic Very Important Budget Allocation Initiation Committee Session (YSVIBAICS)

Implementing a framework like SAD needs a waterfall initiative — a fancy word for a project. Successful initiatives consist of a title that management will copy and paste into every email, every presentation, and every document during the initiative as some kind of “important” tag. Second, there is a budget that management needs to hire external consultants to create fancy slides and go out for lunch.

In this case, management came up with an innovative title, calling it the “DevOps Initiative.”

Kick-off Deep Dive Purpose Ceremony

Management had to choose some random words to recite when someone asks them what the initiative is about. They crafted these words into a sort of knightly oath to make it sound like they know what they’re talking about and won’t get any further questions: Focus! Alignment! Transparency! They also made sure the words weren’t used in their last initiative and created a fitting mnemonic: FAT!

A word of caution: If you have been measuring effectiveness in your company, it’s best to stop doing so at this point. It’s irresponsible to measure productivity during a change initiative. Instead, you will eventually generate enough metrics, and you can select the ones that make you look good to give to your boss. Never measure beforehand because this would make your work transparent (bad), instead of the work of your resources (good). Change is hard for resources, and since you hired them, you must assume that they might mess everything up. Without any tangible data at the start, you can claim that any recovery is due to your successful initiative.

Transition Transformation Excellence Change Core Center Team (TTECCCT)

According to Sunzi, a manager needs every other manager to frequently swear allegiance to them during an initiative. Not because they need to do any actual work — this will be done by the hired consultants. Management could easily get rid of anyone who hesitates to pledge allegiance during the initiative without anyone else noticing or complaining.

The consultants that were hired were misleadingly called Agile Coaches, despite not being agile nor coaching effectively. The company had a convoluted system for defining job titles and compensation. An Agile Coach was worth less than an Enterprise Agile Coach, but triple the worth of a Senior Scrum Master. The latter was worth two Scrum Masters. And five Junior Scrum Masters were equivalent to one Scrum Master. In this system, the three coaches were worth approximately ninety Junior Scrum Masters.

Management assembled a team with a catchy name, consisting of the three consultants, colleagues who feared them the most, and those who constantly brown-nosed them. These people will take the blame should the initiative fail and are responsible for controlling the narrative during the initiative. The team was given a “core” label so that they can invite other resources for fun and kick them out without any questions asked. This way, the new team can claim that everyone was somehow involved, thereby shifting the blame downwards and further away from management. The decision was made, that TTECCCT internally is referred to as The Team That Everyone Can Count on to Cover Their Tracks which they could memorize better.

Market Evaluation Sync Session (MESS)

Choosing a framework was easy since the consultants only knew about the Scaled Agile DevOps Maturity Framework. For team building purposes, management had the TTECCCT meet and asked them to create a collage of logos from at least five SAD competitors by searching for them on Google.

• All logo rights are reserved by their owners.

Whimsical Tailoring of the Framework (WTF)

Consultants often have short attention spans and only read a few pages of the Scaled Agile DevOps Maturity Framework online. Therefore, they claimed it would be beneficial to “tailor” the framework to the company’s needs by removing everything they didn’t read or understand. As a result, management dropped every principle, practice, and most of the recommended metrics, and focused only on roles and ceremonies.

Setting up Staff (SuS)

The SAD roles were quickly distributed among the TTECCCT. Members also received complete freedom to add additional phrases to their roles to emphasize their immense importance in the transformed organization. They also redefined preexisting roles to ensure that the resources knew their place. After all, transitions are about protecting the fiefdoms.

Ceremonies and Useful Meetings

The SAD MF out-of-the-box comes with thirteen ceremonies, but management believed that they were taking up too much time and wanted the resources to focus on coding instead. Each TTECCCT member had already chosen some of these thirteen ceremonies to serve as their personal mandatory underling mistreatment (mum) meeting. The consultants negotiated a compromise: keep all ceremonies, but reduce their duration to a quarter of the original time while still demanding the same output as before. It was clear, that the quality of plans might suffer by this, so the TTECCCT decided to rename “plan” to “precise but also vague premonitions.” It has also been decided not to whip resources in public should not all parts of their precise but also vague premonitions come true. However, all other management tactics, including death marches and Shturmovshchina, are still fair game.

Training in Teams (TiT)

Regardless of what the SAD MF says, there is no need for training the resources since everything is readily available on the SAD website. Management probably also forgot possible training expenses in their YSVIBAICS.

Value Stream Moping (VSM)

One of the TTECCCT consultants once read a book, article, overheard a conversation on the subway, or dreamed about identifying streams of value in every company before employing the SAD MF convoy on them. Management somehow liked the idea of streams—water that flows quickly in a single direction — without their resources having to lift a finger, rarely changing course, and never needing feedback loops.

Change Management

Movers First - Move it?

Controlling the narrative is hard when every release convoy is exposed to the SAD implementation all at once. It is recommended to only drive a smaller group of resources into madness to start with. Management claimed that the selected few are the best of the best of the best — and thereby all others clearly are not. Since every resource knows that a transformation goal is to get rid of people management doesn’t like, not being in the illustrious company of the movers first puts the living fear into them.

• Adapted from Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, 1969

Respect the PMO

Transformations to the SAD MF — as all other transformations — fail frequently and miserably. One simple reason is that management forgets to let go of some unnecessary resources during, or at the start of, the transformation. Those eventually might begin to notice they aren’t invited to meetings anymore, and possibly gang up on management, making use of their newly found time. Management didn’t fall into this trap and made up additional roles for those resources right from the start.

Second Movers

At some random point, management declared that the Movers First had succeeded and withdrew all supporting consultants working with them. Since the Movers First did not want to admit any failure, no one spoke up against this decision. Management pretended that they had learned a lot from the (repeat this multiple times to the mirror) successful(!) transition and would use these valuable insights to transform the rest of the company’s resources. They didn’t do this of course. No one wants the SAD framework to fit individual teams. Who should maintain this in the end? This is a lot of effort and the resources might forget who serves whom.

Jira for All

This tool is part of any mushroom management initiative and by common law needs to be deployed together with DevOps, Agile, Lean, Digitization, New Work, Industrial Revolution, or any other known or future change project.

• GPT-10 understood Jira and started an all-out war against Atlassian!

Management has made this a multi-level system portfolio enterprise configuration, so no single team has been able to achieve anything on their own, needing a steep hierarchy with approvals and informing management at the top for even going to the restroom. Now management is enabled to tell anyone in the newly defined organization that they are doing “it” wrong at any point in time.

• Exaggeration just for teaching purposes — no one in their right mind would use something like this — source: https://scaledagileframework.com

Metrics for All

Management claimed that nobody has been delivering any real value, but decided not to measure value. Instead, they decided to measure the speed of delivery. The DevOps initiative was declared successful, so there was no risk of metrics making management look bad anymore. They got the consultants to write Jira queries and ordered the teams to provide exactly the same numbers by hand, guaranteeing the four-eyes principle.

• Picture courtesy of BBC News Network

Implementing SAD Practices

Some IT resources didn’t seem to care for the power distribution in the organization at all. They have seen many transformations over the years and managed to emotionally detach completely. This was not really fun for management so they claimed for the SAD MF to work everyone, in addition, had to adhere to new practices annoying even the most resilient IT resources:

• Fixed scope, time, and cost for all projects
• Pert Chart Roadmaps for all projects
• Big Design Up Front
• Upfront Architecture
• Mortgage Driven Design
• Normalizing Story Points and separating testers and developers
• Adding up Story Points for Epics over teams
• Agile Theater once per day
• Brainfuck is the only approved development language
• On-site Innovation Thinktankalab sprintathons every third full moon
• Standardized Definitions of “we really mean it’s done this time”

Last Step — Accelerate

Management bought the e-book “Accelerate,” but didn’t read it. They claimed that the company is now among the top 5% of enterprises according to the new made-up metrics. They went to marketing to brag on Instagram and LinkedIn about their #success and let go of all managers who didn’t give the posts a thumbs up.