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!
