Improved Visualisation Provides Eye-Opening Results

One Agile Coach’s Journey to Improve a Product Organisation

I started at Nexmo in July 2016 as an Agile coach, eager to roll up my sleeves and help the organisation adopt more agile ways of working. I was greeted by a great team of enthusiastic, fun and clever people. Nexmo had grown fast and had just been acquired by Vonage and there was a lot of opportunity to make a big impact.

I started working at the team level to help development teams understand and adopt more agile ways of working. Various people mentioned that they would like to understand better what other teams were working on. So, when I had hired other Agile facilitators to help at the team level, I started with helping the team of product managers to provide them with better transparency and ultimately deliver better results for our customers.

What are we doing now?

I wanted to establish a baseline of the current situation. I therefore ran the Agendashift survey, across our Product and Engineering teams. It became clear also from those results that the top item we needed to improve was the transparency of our delivery process and the work items currently in progress as well as clearly identifying dependencies. There was a lot of great work being done, but not everybody had visibility into what was happening.

Improving our visualisation was the first place we looked. We wanted to provide a visualisation of all of the work that each of the development teams for each product area was doing or planning to do.

We decided to use a Kanban style format, which helped us avoid committing to timelines that would set the wrong expectations for the complex environment in which we worked. Moving the conversation away from dates to working on solutions produced immediate results and relieved some of the pressure on our development teams.

This is what one of the first visualisations looked like. We started using this board in the weekly Product Team meetings.

Slowly, we all started to get a better overview of what everyone was working on and where people needed to start working together. This visualisation was working and our transparency was improving. It was a good start, but updating the board proved hard and dependencies were still tricky to manage. The teams all used Jira and the Product Managers preferred a digital version over a physical one as Jira was easier to update and visible to people working remotely. So we eventually abandoned the physical board in search for a better solution.

Understanding why

So, why visualise the work in the first place? We wanted people in the Product and Engineering teams to be part of the change. We wanted everyone to be able to start making changes in their own team and to understand the rationale behind the changes being implemented by the Product Team. Helping people understand why Agility (mindset) can help us, was going to be key for changes to stick.

I therefore organised training on Agility, explaining why it is needed for complex knowledge work. I also arranged an introduction to Kanban, explaining the basics and the need for visualisation and limiting work in progress. Everyone in the Product and Engineering organisation attended as well as key stakeholders in the Nexmo Leadership team. Thank you Actineo for providing the training.

The training was well received. It generated discussion and exposed a wide range of backgrounds and views. People commented that they now had a much better understanding and we started generating a more common language. It was also clear to everyone who attended that this was relevant for everyone in the organisation and not just Product and Engineering as we all work together to deliver value to our customers.

Visualisation, take 2

After some internal discussions, we started to build our next visualisation in Jira, the tool already used by development teams. It initially had the same set up as the physical version, showing the bigger work items owned by each of the teams per product area. We called this overview the Product Portfolio. We also connected the board to the downstream flow of idea creation and linked the work to the higher level Product Goals.

This all helped, but these larger work items owned by the teams were not connected to the smaller stories and tasks in the teams. So the big picture was there, but the meaningful details and tasks were getting lost. It was still hard to keep everything up to date and to make it meaningful.

When the 2018 plans had been approved, we entered the new year with a renewed drive to visualise all the work. We built the missing link between the Product Portfolio and the lower-level team boards with Team Epics and stories, creating a clear line of sight. Jira was going to be the single source of truth. We were determined to move away from spreadsheets, which tended to spawn many versions of the “truth.”

The Product Managers all put their work into Jira, and we informed the Leadership team that we now had a clear Kanban Roadmap and full line of sight. But as soon as we had a clear roadmap, we would uncover another spreadsheet with a different view. We were persistent though, and mapped all the items we uncovered back into Jira to maintain one source of the truth. We could now start informing senior stakeholders and the Leadership team regularly with a Kanban style roadmap, including changes and issues, to provide them visibility and to improve alignment and decision making.

A-HA moment

We had provided visibility into what Product Development was working on and what was planned, but team members still felt they were doing too much, but that wasn’t apparent just by glancing through Jira on a computer screen. To improve things we needed to prioritise our work, but what initiatives would we stop? All of it seemed so critical.

To help with this, we organised a workshop and I printed out all the product initiatives on A4 pages and we put those on the walls in the large room where we had the workshop. All four walls were covered.

Everyone in the room had a big A-HA moment when they saw this; it was quite eye-opening to see what we were all working on all at once. They all then also understood the real benefit of physical visualisation.

We knew we had to stop some of the work and focus our efforts. To do this we created a prioritisation framework on the walls, using the Innovation Games 20/20 vision game. We arranged the work in order of impact from left (lowest) to right (highest) and we ordered the work in terms of effort up and down. This resulted in an Impact-Effort matrix, with 7 impact levels and 4 effort levels. We then created cells with tape, 28 in total, and allocated one of the 5 focus levels to each cell, where level 1 meant ‘must-do’ and level 5 was more of a nice-to-have. There was lots of discussion between the product managers and tickets were moved back and forth. We all agreed to move forward with a focus on the work in levels 1 and 2.

Next steps in physical visualisation

Following the workshop, everyone in the Product Team became an advocate for physical visualisation. So soon after the whole team cleaned up our big board and built a physical Product Portfolio wall.

This is what the board on the wall in the London office looked like. It showed the prioritisation framework (left) as well as the Kanban Portfolio board (right). It was approximately 6 by 2 meters and we had definitely gone for the colourful stickies.

This board was a big change for the organisation. Suddenly, everyone could really see how work was prioritised and its status at a glance. It also provided people with a better understanding of the Product workflow. People stopped in front of the board, had conversations, asked questions and it started to take on a life of its own. It built trust in the organisation and allowed for people to have better conversations.

Results so far

We built visibility, we established more trust, we got data, we have achieved a more refined system and increased focus on finishing. We have more insights into timings and which initiatives are at risk, enabling us to take action to improve the situation.

Reducing the amount of work in progress is still proving more difficult. There are, however, better conversations now about splitting work and delivering in smaller scope increments. We have also agreed to finish what we had started and not to take on more work until we reduced the number of initiatives in progress below an agreed level. That is the first step in creating a more stable, predictable system.

We have stand-ups with all the Product Managers together about the work and we have reduced barriers for working together. We also host monthly retrospectives to focus on continually improving the system. The next step will be to work more closely with the other teams involved in the product delivery outside Product and Engineering and improve the visualisation of their work.  

Ultimately the objective is to deliver more value for our customers. Improving the understanding of where we are now and what we are working on, will help with the conversations that will lead us there.

You can find more details on the boards and structure built in this blog post.