Hiring Information Technology professionals is increasingly difficult.
According to data from the Brazilian Association of Information Technology and Communication Companies (Brasscom), by the year 2024, Brazil will need 420 one thousand Information Technology (IT) professionals.
Brasscom also warns that the country trains approximately 46 thousand professionals a year.
With these data, it is clear that the capacity to train professionals will not be enough to supply all the existing positions in the labor market.
In addition, during the pandemic caused by Covid-19, the possibilities expanded as many companies adopted the home office and allowed the hiring of professionals in other cities, states and even same countries.
All this makes attracting talent more difficult. With a heated and constantly evolving market, candidates currently look not only at the salary and benefits package offered, but what the company has to offer in relation to the work environment, culture, flexibility and growth.
And what does this have to do with digital transformation?
During the consultations I’ve been doing, I’ve come to realize that one of the most common motivations among my clients for digital transformation has been the need to have a more digital, agile environment with technologies more recent, because when it comes to hiring or even retaining professionals, this has counted and made a lot of difference.
Phrases like “Is your work model agile?”, “Does the team have a Product Owner and Scrum Master?”, “Do you use DevOps practices?” and “Post pandemic, will the home office continue?” have been constant during interviews with candidates and candidates.
If for most of these questions the answers are “no”, combined with an old technology stack, people prefer to look for an opportunity that brings this type of scenario mentioned in the questions above.
Working in a collaborative environment, where people can bring new ideas and work with cutting edge technology, has been a great motivator for these professionals.
And it is with these pains that technology executives have increasingly used digital transformation as a possible way to address these issues.
Transformation is organizational and cultural
How to build a work model that is collaborative, use the agile culture, engineering practices and digital product management, without losing the essence of the organization, is what our customers have searched.
Where, before, companies that wanted to be agile or digital to be at the forefront of the market, today this is seen as a need to attract and retain their talents, to be there really prepared and ensuring competitive advantage.
Have you seen this scenario too? How has this been in your organization?
During our consulting and coaching processes, we often come across a scenario in which phrases or questions arise such as:
– I want to try to change something, but I don’t know what…
– The way I’m doing it I’m not as effective, but what to change?
– We already consume a lot of content, but is it enough?
– I think I need more people on the team, but how can I convince the board to provide a budget?
– What roles are necessary for me to have a suitable team?
Basically, leaders want to deliver more results, have efficient and effective teams, and there is always the hypothesis that agile methods would help in this productivity. But they don’t know how or in what order: “First contract or do I arrange the process?”; “If I have to have people, what role do I have to hire?”; “Or do I revisit the process before?”; “What comes first?”
So what to do?
There is no ready answer and I will talk in general, because each case is different.
First point is that sometimes it’s pretty clear that there’s a skill missing. The problem is so big, so glaring, that it is not even necessary to review the process, but rather hire someone. See if you have any glaring cases!
Otherwise, when the lack of a person is not so clear:
First, we advise the company to analyze its current process – understand what is happening, if you can do more with the same people. And, only then, analyze the need to hire more people.
Why is revisiting the way you work important?
Companies often do not have a well-defined process and this, in turn, has gaps, bottlenecks, blurriness and waste. Another very common question is: “What if I hire more people and continue to have delivery difficulties?”
Well, if you don’t have the correct and well-defined process, there is a chance to put more people in and amplify or “mask” the problem, for example:
Mask the problem: you put 160h (1 person) more, but in the end you increase your real productivity by 40h. Since the other 120h turns out to be unproductive – this ends up masking the problem
Amplified the problem: you put more people on the team and productivity drops in the end, as the team’s complexity increases and something that wasn’t good gets worse.
In other words, reviewing the way of working consists of having an agile journey for your area, with well-designed and defined agile processes, for your team to deliver more.
How does it normally work?
During the process review, the first point we try to answer is: “Today, is our process clear? Is it well defined?” In other words, it is necessary to be clear about the process and I’m not saying it has to be plastered, but yes, of course for everyone.
Another question we ask is: “Is your process bureaucratic? Is it possible to be more Lean, that is, leaner?”
With these questions, we begin the review itself in order to discover current efficiency with metrics and identify key bottlenecks. In our consultancy, we defined the AS IS model (how it works today) and the TO BE model (what a process should look like in the future, well defined and agile, with a flow more optimized).
Key points during the review of a process that make a team produce more:
PRIORIZATION AND DEMAND MANAGEMENT
During the process review, it is common to identify, for example, that at least 50% of the requirements requested by Businesses are not necessary. The correct prioritization of requirements is essential, and then you allocate a team to develop the system. For each requirement, we must have relatively clear the business purpose, what business value is sought, for the development to create the code.
REFINEMENT
The requested items are not in a good granularity, where the DEV has to spend time trying to figure out what it has to do and getting more rework.
QUALITY
“Are there points that I need to improve in my quality policy, so that I have less rework?”; “Does the product end up having a lot of bugs and the correction and support backlog is big?”; Identifying these issues has improved the quality aspect and helps a lot in labor saving.
ARCHITECTURE
“I have architectural problems in my system, what makes me slow to develop something?” This is the famous technical backlog scenario, in which a refractories is so needed.
OPTIMIZATION
Is someone with a high rate of rework, or overloaded, or with unnecessary parts of the process? Do you have stages where the tasks are taking too long? This is also a very important point to review!
Then, look for a contract
Having more control over the process and it being optimized and agile, then the time comes for you to find out how to do more:
– Hire more people, new skills
During this analysis, you can identify that the team needs a non-existent competence to be more productive. For example, having a person QA Engineer or Devops. In this phase, you get to know what roles you need to have a productive multidisciplinary team, with skills that you can’t miss.
– Putting in more people – even skill to gain more air
It happens when you’ve optimized your process and come up with a scenario where the team manages to attack X things per month, but the Business need is more than X. In this case, you hire people with the same skills, to gain more flow.
Team building is also important
Sometimes it is even necessary to change the organizational structure of the company or change the organization of teams… But this is done gradually.
“Have a component team or a feature team?”; “Organize by value stream?”; “Join or separate skills?”; “Does it separate new developments from the support team?”… If your question is any of these (how to structure your team), you need to rethink the formation of your team.
Conclusion
The decision to hire more people or review the process depends a lot from scenario to scenario, but first, we advise you to define your agile journey, revisit your process, and after this optimization, then you think about hiring people.
If you want help with your agile journey, review the process or even have qualified people to have a more efficient team, we can help you!
Understand how agile methods can help different areas and teams to have more productivity and organization
In 90% of cases, the answer is YES.
When we talked a little more with these people, we mentioned some common situations in teams that need to be more agile. Some of these issues are:
Lots of external interference
Things that prevent you from delivering your tasks, and that would often need leadership help
Priority changes – sometimes you get lost not knowing what the next priority is
Little visibility of what is happening in the organization
Poor visibility of peers – sometimes some are quite overloaded, and others not so much
A lot of uncertainties about what the real purpose of the project is, like knowing if what I’m doing is really generating value
Productivity and delivery issues
Sometimes bureaucratic processes
And, sometimes, we even ask the leadership, in addition to the characteristics in the list above, if they have any of these problems:
Low visibility and team transparency;
Difficulty of organizing between teams;
Difficulty in having dates and deadlines;
Complex structure to lead;
Problems for decision making;
Basically, if any of these points above are present in your team’s day-to-day, whatever your area, our answer will be: “YES, agile methods can help you increase control and productivity” .
People often spend too much time on things that don’t generate real value, neither for their deliverables nor for the organization as a whole. As a result, a very large loss of productivity is generated!
It is as if an area or a certain team were a machine, which is not being efficient and is causing various wastes…</p >
How to use Agile methods to be more efficient in any area?
Being agile is not just going through a process to be more efficient and have more results. It is going through a paradigm shift, of mindset, using not only agile methods, but several tools and techniques that make this process a true Agile Transformation.
Essentially, we use the concepts of Scrum, Kanban, Management 3.0 and OKRs to define roles and responsibilities, events and details of this team’s new work processes.
The principles and characteristics of a truly agile team are:
People who have information transparency, with a lot of visual management, escalating problems quickly;
Teams with clear and engaged goals, working in SQUADs;
customer centric product view, mapped to a single backlog;
Have important visible metrics;
They can solve complex problems;
They deliver in short cycles (they are iterative and incremental);
Promote continuous improvement;
Quickly identify and remove impediments.
How we apply it in practice
To help you better visualize this process of change, here are some examples of Agile Transformation in different areas:
Legal Area
A team of a project formed by specialists from the Financial, Logistics, Accountants and Lawyers area, had the challenge of changing the structure of production of consumer goods, with the goal of having fiscal gains reaching millions per year.
Several months passed and this problem was not resolved. With a mini Lean Inception, they created the backlog, set up the Squad and, with visual management and indicators, started running the Sprints . In a short time, problems and impediments appeared and were escalated to the board. Little by little, the situations were resolved, focusing on the objective of that indictment and the benefits began to be achieved.
Marketing Area
Some teams in a marketing area wanted to have more control over demands and processes. With some agility concepts applied – and also agile scaled – a governance process was created, in addition to helping the teams deliver in the operation. Quickly, teams entered a stream of continuous improvement, until they reached the ideal process to really be more efficient and agile as a whole.
Human Resources Area
An HR department needed to make its deliveries more agile, but with more value to the organization. For this, the journey of employees was mapped – since when they entered the company; when they had doubts; when they use the month-to-month process and when they leave the company.
For each part of this user journey – in this case, the collaborator, a Squad was assembled, with a backlog, using Kanban, working with < em>Sprints and OKRs. Week by week, the employee’s journey was improved, aiming at achieving the area’s objectives.
Company-wide training
In this case, the concepts mentioned above need to be applied to the entire company, but not in their entirety. This means that, many times, an organization will not have Squads, Sprints, etc., in every organization, but many of these practices and the paradigm shift are the main points that will help in productivity as a whole. .
For this, training such as Agil Beyond IT is made for the entire company. Each employee will identify what can or cannot be applied – flow visualization techniques, mapping of impediments, daily meetings, sprints, among other topics. It is worth mentioning here that, by empowering your team, it becomes more productive!
We hope that you really can make your team, your area or your company more agile and more efficient with these tips.
Your team releases several features, works hard, but the results don’t show up? Now understand the main causes of all this
By Filipe Machado and Thiago Fregni
In any business, whether it is a digital product or not, one of the main concerns is to meet the needs of the stakeholders and this ends up becoming one of the main goals to be achieved. With this, the team works hard, strives to launch several features, but is leaving aside a very important goal: maximizing the value and return on investment of that initiative.
In other words, even though Agility has been implemented and deliveries are happening more quickly, there are still stakeholders who are super unhappy. “There is nothing so useless as to do with great efficiency, what should not be done.” This quote by Peter Drucker is one of those that can summarize this scenario in a simple way. The team is working well, with a lot of functionality in production, but are they doing something really useful?
Does this sound common to you? Because it really happens in many businesses that are starting a digital transformation and for three main reasons:
Value maximization and Return on Investment
Generally, the Product Owner is very concerned about serving the stakeholders and ends up leaving aside one of their main responsibilities, which is maximizing the return on investment</strong >.
Sense of purpose
It is common for the team (Agilista, PO and Devs) not to know clearly what the objective of the product is or to have no vision as to why they are working on a certain demand. They know what it is, how it should be done, but not why – have no sense of purpose!
Discovery/Ideation/Upstream
Product value maximization, that is, what the customer receives at the end, needs to go through a process of discovery and refinement, before starting development. And that’s not always the case!
But what is the root cause of this problem?
It is possible to identify some signs that cause these situations described above. The main ones are:
Low autonomy for the Product Owner, who depends on other people to make decisions and clarify details;
Product Owner who does not have the correct competence;
PO order taker (Proxy/Scribe PO), which does not have ownership of the product. It takes note of the requests without understanding the reason for the request and what the expected results are;
Time is concerned with filling the capacity. That is, during Planning meetings, there is a greater concern with “fixing” enough backlog to keep everyone occupied, than actually generating value for the customer;
PO that doesn’t know how much each PBI costs and has no idea of the team’s cost, which makes it impossible to make trade-offs based on RoI;
Teams that do not have clear goals, making it impossible for them to make choices and stay focused on what generates the most value;
Does not have Discovery (UX). That is, as soon as the request arrives, it goes straight to the team to develop. There is no process in which the customer is involved and hypotheses are treated as truths;
There is no Customer Centric view, focused on the consumer/user.
When we identify this scenario – which is quite common, we do a very intense job of coaching with the Product Owner, with the Scrum Master and with the stakeholders. For this, we perform techniques such as:
– Create a discovery team: in order to find out which features should be implemented to meet the users’ needs;
– Techniques for sorting the backlog: the backlog must be sorted and these techniques help us sort them according to the goals to be achieved ;
– Create an agile treadmill very clearly using Flight Levels: this technique gives portfolio visibility until reaching the end user’s hand;
– We organize teams by Value Stream linked to the users, with clear objectives, using OKR’s, for example;
– Definition of product objective and make it clear what value (increase sales by 10%, increase conversion rate by 5%, among others) expected to be achieved by that item, plus value of items;
– Roadmap: an overview of the product’s next steps;
– Use data for decision making in backlog items;
– Hypothesis Concept Creation: a great way of working that helps to validate hypotheses is called HDD (Hypothesis Driven Development). This method helps in writing our backlog, aimed at validating hypotheses.
In general, we try to give the correct purpose to the team as a whole, linked to value for the customer or business… Because when you don’t know where you want to go, any path will do. And so work becomes efficient, but not really effective!
More value delivered, with less investment
Solving these flaws during the product development process with an agile team, it is possible to have several benefits, including:
Be able to work in the empirical process, always focusing on the desired objective;
It makes it easier to manage stakeholder anxiety about results;
The stakeholder is happier with the delivery, as it is linked to the purpose, with a focus on really generating value with the initiative;
The stakeholder’s trust with the team improves;
In short, more value delivered, with less investment and a focus on maximizing the initiative’s value and return on investment.
We hope you can apply these suggestions in your daily life. Any questions, we are available to help… Just contact us!
During the day-to-day work, a team can present some dysfunctions, whether due to internal fights, mistrust, lack of commitment or even dispute of position. These problems are common, but they can become impediments for the team to act in an engaged way and with high performance.
But if you’re reading this text, you might be thinking: how to demand that a team composed of people with different backgrounds, personalities and motivations work together towards the same goal?
It was under this perspective that Patrick Lencioni wrote the book “The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team“, which brings a pyramidal model with these five dysfunctions: Lack of Trust, Fear of Conflict, Lack of Commitment, Lack of Liability and Lack of Result.
Trust
Lack of trust is the base of the pyramid of the 5 dysfunctions of a team. Without trust between members there is no way to sustain the other 4 dysfunctions. When a team is in formation, individuals protect themselves inside a shell so they don’t become vulnerable. They are unable to demonstrate their weaknesses and open up to each other. They are reluctant to ask for help or be willing to help each other. Lack of trust is a huge waste of energy and time for team members.
However, to have confidence it is necessary to break this shell and show your deficiencies, weaknesses, needs… Not every day is perfect and team members need to trust each other to expose and understand such situations. A good deal of empathy goes a long way toward building a solid foundation of trust. In addition, the team needs to have the necessary skills and trust that they are capable of solving a certain business problem.
Conflicts
Teams without trust are unable to face conflicts the way they need to be faced, causing a certain artificial harmony. Fear of conflict creates intrigue and thinly veiled discussions that are unhealthy when the team should be committed and focused toward a single purpose. After all, when it comes to the team, everyone wins and everyone loses. For this reason, conflicts must be faced head-on, with transparency and respect.
Commitment
When conflicts are faced head-on, the team starts to demand more internal commitment so that everyone can speak and be heard. It is necessary that team members are open to express their ideas and that everyone has respect for each other. However, not everything that is said will be accepted.
It is necessary to find a point where a decision is made so that everyone is in agreement, that the purpose is clear to everyone. In this way, everyone will be engaged and committed to the same goal.
No Liability
Teams that are not committed have no responsibility. Once the team is committed, it needs to be aware and not hide from its responsibilities. Responsibility is more about action than reaction, that is, in a responsible team, moving in the same direction, there should be no delegations.
Preferably, members should be auto-organized and proactive in creating solutions. A responsible team does not find the culprits, on the contrary, it seeks solutions together because they know that they are involved in the same objective and that success or failure depends on everyone.
Lack of Result
When individuals are not held accountable, team members naturally tend to pursue their own interests and not the interests of the team. However, when there is responsibilityity and commitment, conflicts are faced openly and trust is full, team members naturally focus their efforts in favor of results, thinking of the collective good at the expense of personal achievements.
Removing these flaws
In order for a team to reach high performance and deliver more and more, For better results, effectively and efficiently, you will naturally need to treat these 5 dysfunctions.
The benefits of this process for the team are:
Recognize your weaknesses and limitations and feel more comfortable asking for help;
Sharing skills;
Focus on problem solving, thinking collectively;
Make decisions faster;
Tackling critical issues head-on;
Always be aligned and focused on the same goal;
Increase people engagement.
Finally, understand that all dysfunctions are connected. The key is to start by building a solid foundation of trust and then encourage healthy conflict, maintain accountability, and set clear goals, ensuring the team communicates clearly at all times.
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