@dominicad

Aligning Technical & Business Teams

Dominica DeGrandis

Director, Training & Coaching

Photo by Edmund Lowe Photography on Getty Images @dominicad

Finding peace in the Hoh Rainforest

Listening to an argument offsite

The Red House, Franklin, Tennessee @dominicad

http://wowxwow.com/artist-interview/kevin-sloan-ai

@dominicad

Spark creative tension vs. emotional tension

no progress w/o tension

More flamingo, less wound up tension

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More features please

http://wowxwow.com/artist-interview/kevin-sloan-ai

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Missed the release date

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You did what?

3rd party integration

impacts ITOps

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Commonality? Poor Communication

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No one is trying to be a jerk

I DIDN’T GET THE MEMO

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Webs of interdepedencies à unintended consequences

@dominicad

“Code will be used in ways we cannot anticipate, in ways it was

not designed, and for longer than it was ever intended.”

~Joshua Corman

https://www.ruggedsoftware.org/

“As a lifelong Ops practitioner, I know we need DevOps to make our work

humane.

In the past, I’ve worked every holiday, on my birthday, my spouse’s

birthday, and even on the day my son was born.”

Nathan Shimek

Engineering Manager, New Context

compliments of Gene Kim, Author, IT Revolution @dominicad

Architecture changes or features?

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Architecture Challenges

Mutable state Inefficient rendering Assumptions on availability of data *ONE* code base

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@dominicad

Refactor – take one

“Let’s kaizen the current code base” Assembled long list of “shore-up” style fixes

BUT - things quickly fell apart

List represented a lot of work & risk

Made no clear gains into new web architecture

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Refactor – take two

“Lets rewrite everything.”

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Tested Logged Documented Reviewed

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Refactor – take three

What if we had the audacity to do something incredible? What would that look like?

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Proof-of-Concept

The What Board view in new web stack The Why Validate/invalidate assumptions Will this change •  Enable teams to improve Cycle Time? •  Improve performance for users? •  Improve foundation for next-gen

features?

Cost of Delay compared to PoC - customer OLD NEW

requests per six weeks

seconds per request

total time (hours)

seconds per request

total time (hours)

difference (hours)

Reduction to % value @ 300$/hr

value @ $150/hr

value @ $75/hr

Home 51060 8.26 117.15 2.78 39.43 77.72 33.66% $‎ 23,317.40 $‎ 11,658.70 $‎ 5,829.35

Board (10100058479)

83688 6.93 161.10 2.26 52.54 108.56 32.61% $‎ 32,568.58 $‎ 16,284.29 $‎ 8,142.15

Board (10100071407)

83688 6.40 148.78 1.21 28.13 120.65 18.91% $‎ 36,195.06 $‎ 18,097.53 $‎ 9,048.77

Board (10100619132)

83688 11.26 261.76 1.06 24.64 237.12 9.41% $‎ 71,134.80 $‎ 35,567.40 $‎ 17,783.70

Board (10100063335)

83688 6.97 162.03 0.86 19.99 142.04 12.34% $‎ 42,611.14 $‎ 21,305.57 $‎ 10,652.79

Six Weeks One Year Two Years

Lower Bound $‎ 13,971.50 $‎ 121,132.86 $‎ 242,265.72

$‎ 23,613.05 $‎ 204,725.14 $‎ 409,450.29

Middle $‎ 27,942.99 $‎ 242,265.72 $‎ 484,531.45

$‎ 47,226.10 $‎ 409,450.29 $‎ 818,900.57

Upper Bound $‎ 55,885.98 $‎ 484,531.45 $‎ 969,062.89

$‎ 94,452.20 $‎ 818,900.57 $‎ 1,637,801.15

@dominicad

$‎ 1,637,801

Cost of Delay compared to PoC - prod OLD NEW

requests per six weeks

seconds per request

total time (hours)

seconds per request

total time (hours)

difference (hours)

Reduction to % value @ 300$/hr

value @ $150/hr

value @ $75/hr

Home 349,986 2.41 234.30 0.56 54.44 179.85 23.24% $‎ 53,956.18 $‎ 26,978.09 $‎ 13,489.04

Board (1) 1,168,080 3.28 1064.25 0.82 266.06 798.19 25.00% $‎ 239,456.40 $‎ 119,728.20 $‎ 59,864.10

Board (2) 1,168,080 2.95 957.18 0.91 295.26 661.91 30.85% $‎ 198,573.60 $‎ 99,286.80 $‎ 49,643.40

Board (3) 1,168,080 4.21 1366.00 1.36 441.27 924.73 32.30% $‎ 277,419.00 $‎ 138,709.50 $‎ 69,354.75

Board (4) 1,168,080 2.36 765.74 0.66 214.15 551.59 27.97% $‎ 165,478.00 $‎ 82,739.00 $‎ 41,369.50

Six Weeks One Year Two Years

Lower Bound $‎ 54,858.54 $‎ 475,623.57 $‎ 951,247.15

$‎ 82,843.79 $‎ 718,255.69 $‎ 1,436,511.38

Middle $‎ 109,717.09 $‎ 951,247.15 $‎ 1,902,494.30

$‎ 165,687.59 $‎ 1,436,511.38

$‎ 2,873,022.77

Upper Bound $‎ 219,434.18 $‎ 1,902,494.30

$‎ 3,804,988.59

$‎ 331,375.18 $‎ 2,873,022.77

$‎ 5,746,045.53

@dominicad

$‎ 5,746,045

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@dominicad

A3 Wall

~30cm x 42cm

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(2 Teams x 2 Sweeps)

Board View Toolbar

Card Edit Home View

Activity Stream Filters

Notifications

Potential A3s delivered within a sweep

Note - not doing anything *new* from a user’s perspective. But! Making app WAY faster

MKT MKT FIN

UX MKT

MKT MKT

SLS DEV UX UX

SLS CSS

QA UX

DEV OPS SLS

SLS

1

2

3

4

6

5

DEV

DEV

OPS

How the A3 is populated

Cost of Delay?

Impact to users? What benefits who?

What does feature do?

Sustainability impact? fine print /misc?

@dominicad

Lightening A3 ; Template last updated June 14, 2016

THEME: Project Lightning

A3: All Boards & Archive (Homescreen) Speed Improvement

SQUAD: Lightning AUTHOR: Jim Cowart DATE: 8/4/2016

PROBLEM STATEMENT What problem do we need to solve for customers and users (either internal or external)? CONSTRAINTS What existing user workflows and technical constraints should Design Studio consider to design a solution?

The home screen in the LeanKit app is very slow to load and interact with, e.g. going from a board back to the home screen requires a long wait that is increased with the growth in the number of boards that are in the account. Additionally, as we continue to build out homescreen capability to house information such as “mycards,” user interaction with that portion of the app will continue to grow.

1.) Thumbnails may not be “rebuilt” as part of this effort and will be replaced by standard board image. Note: try to pull stats on often is board preview/ template preview are used to help inform decision re. removing preview as an option. Data / boards will be served via pagination to support speedy load. Consider setting upper limits as a starting point. Need to consider UX on this.

TARGET USERS Which personas are feeling pain now? What “job” are they “hiring” LeanKit to do? How is it not getting done? NEW USER EXPERIENCE How will the interface (web, mobile, API) and user workflow change?

As a Director of IT Ops, I need a way to quickly navigate from one board to another board via the home screen (via filter or recent boards) so that I can easily interact with information across the many teams that I work with. As IT Ops Otis, I need a way to quickly navigate from home to the boards I use on a daily basis. As PM Pam, I need a way to quickly navigate from one board to another board via the home screen so that I can easily interact with information on our roadmap and team boards.

The workflow remains the same, with the following exceptions: 1.) The page will load faster 2.) Scrolling “All Boards” and “Archive” will be paged, meaning that the first (for example) 25 boards

would be loaded under those sections, and the rest would appear as the user scrolls to see more. The UX improvement that is required doesn’t change the steps in the workflow, rather makes those steps faster.

3.) Recent Boards is now sorted chronologically

COST OF DELAY What is the opportunity cost to users if we don’t solve this next sweep? How should we measure success? MARKETABILITY OR SUSTAINABILITY IMPACT How does Leankit benefit? What edition does it best fit into & why?

The six-week cost of delay for this ranges from $20,649.01 - $127,748.21. Over two years, the range of cost of delay is $179,026.93 - $1,107,577.00. This is calculated at 15% of the total cost of delay related to the theme. We can measure success by running the same comparisons (using the same hardware used to create these numbers) once the updated Home view is in place. Loss of a deal…

Both. It benefits LeanKit customers by increasing the speed of the application, and it benefits LeanKit internally by removing technical debt that is slowing down feature delivery.

@dominicad

Lightening A3 Template last updated June 14, 2016

THEME:

A3: SQUAD: AUTHOR: DATE:

PROBLEM STATEMENT What problem do we need to solve for customers and users (either internal or external)? CONSTRAINTS What existing user workflows and technical constraints should Design Studio consider to design a solution?

TARGET USERS Which personas (and Editions) are feeling pain now? What “job” are they “hiring” LeanKit to do? NEW USER EXPERIENCE How will the interface (web, mobile, API) and user workflow change?

COST OF DELAY What is the opportunity cost to users if we don’t solve this next sweep? How should we measure success? VALIDATION & MEASUREMENT PLAN How do we make sure that we solved the problem?

and this is how

http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/avoiding-the-alignment-trap-in-it/

@dominicad

What’s not working well

Everyone wants to be involved with everything. Decoupling is hard Circling back to check CoD calculation to see how close assumptions were. $ A3’s could be broken down smaller.

@dominicad

The point

http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/avoiding-the-alignment-trap-in-it/

Interdependencies create unintended consequences

Wound up emotional tension puts us in survive mode

Creative tension inspires audacious ideas #GoFlamingo Argument for both depending on context.

Peace & quiet have a place in creative work.

Books: A3’s, Exec Alignment, Tension

Dominica DeGrandis

Director, Training & Coaching

www.ddegrandis.com