As we move through our key stanchions of agility in governance, we start to contemplate a different way of generating information from teams that are working differently. Projects get measured on that old favourite, the iron triangle (time, cost, scope and quality) or even extend to add in other elements such as customer satisfaction, or even heaven forbid, team engagement or happiness. These first four are useful where we have a governance model that relies on intermittent status reporting, presented most likely monthly, with the information gently massaged to produce the right messaging - to suit the narrative of the day. Do we need more money - cost is blowing out. Do we need more time - schedules are being pushed. You get the picture. Watermelon reporting is rife in this field - everything is green until you slice it open and the core is red. In fact a few years back Phil  wrote an article proposing that every project should start red and stay red until it delivered, to users, its first real increment. 

“Every new project or program is an assumption. It's an informed, educated bet. However it's still a bet. Full of risk assumptions and untested ideas.”

                                                                                                   (C) Gadzinski and Ponton, 2020

That's a topic for another day though.

Now we are working with agile methods that require different ways of understanding where teams are in terms of their predictability, delivery and improvement over time. It is also critical to see where agile and non agile teams integrate when they are working towards common outcomes and objectives as we no longer have the stage gates of moving artefacts through a process and project “end dates”, to drive reporting and set up elaborate plans and schedules that take weeks and months to construct, and are out of date as soon as they are published. 

Work is in a constant state of flow. Using data dynamically from source systems to form insights and enable decisioning based at speed becomes essential. We need to move away from 100 page static status reports and go to the gemba - which in knowledge work is presented to us in our workflow management system or information radiator and kanban board, rather than a physical manufacturing floor or construction site.  

We seek four key elements in this new way of using data to drive our decision making:

 Digital Tools Rule

In the modern workplace, even before Covid-19 moved most of us in technology to remote first, digital workflow management systems had become the critical enabler to shared knowledge on progress and what's next and the development of complex and complicated systems.

Anywhere there are more than two people working on one outcome, we need to collaborate and share what we are working on and the progress of that work. Scale that to large teams in multiple locations, then the modern workflow stack takes on critical importance for reliability, planning, predictability, alignment and traceability of progress. It visualises the unseen and supports the move to digitality. We could not work remotely without digital tools - if you don't believe it just check the share price of Atlassian today. Like selling pickaxes to the miners. 

 Data Trumps Opinion 

Now we have the data, we replace the status report. No longer do we need to craft endless powerpoint slides to show the progress against the outcome and the backlog of work. At any point in time we have visibility into the work - the backlog, the wip, the delivered work, the flow, the lead  time and our predictability amongst many more. The data is endless -  the challenge is how we use it to make decisions 

 Improve Constantly and Forever  - Visibly 

W Edward Deming's 14 points of Total Quality Management include the 5th Principle which is “Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.”  You need data to do this. In fact Deming follows this up with a few key quotes attributed to him: 

“In God we trust, all others bring data”. 

“Without data, you're just another person with an opinion.”

The system of work we have adopted, accompanied by the digital toolset, gives us data we never had before from the performance and delivery of creative work. This allows us to have more meaningful conversation from a position of truth - which then builds trust.  We have talked previously about transparency being a double edged sword and in fact total transparency is conflicting and might even stifle innovation and progress. What we need is enough transparency using the process of work to build confidence and give us the ability to forecast better. 

 Directional Decisions Informed by Instrumentation

So now we have the data. What do we do with it? We use it to guide decisions. Speed of execution is governed by the flow of information - the flow of information is required to make fast decisions. The more open, accessible, real time and accurate our data is, the better decision making we have. Our system instrumentation is what we should be using to make these decisions - not the old plan, best guesses or biased intuition. We drive a car by paying attention to the speedo, the fuel gauge, the temp gauge and the real time indicators of the system at play. We have a map to tell us where to go; however it's the dashboard that tells us how we're getting there and makes sure we do. So often we have worked with teams who have access to this data, however they don't use it for planning - relying on judgement and experience and essentially getting it wrong. 

To bring our thoughts to a conclusion: You may notice we are big believers in the Philosophy of Deming - what was written in 1982 still holds today. Not much has changed, we just have to collectively as an industry adapt to this way of thinking and working. The last ten years has seen an explosion in the availability and use of digital tools. We now have access to data and information we never had before. The ability to get system instrumentation from your teams and use it for decision making is no longer nice to have - its table stakes, entry level thinking. As we move more towards persistent teams, with no project gates to manage and develop opaque reports for, this information accelerates in need.

Remember the clear principle “To make Data Driven Decisioning you need the right data and to have right data that is useful, you need to measure the right things.  “

                                                                                                                                                                                    (C) Gadzinski and Ponton, 2020

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