improving velocity through better communication

Peet DennyLV= Principal Architect

Velocity Through More Effective

Communicationor ‘How To Make More Awesome In Less Time’

Velocity The ability to turn ideas and funding into reality

at speed

Ideation Funding DesignBuild& Test

Ship Value

Traditional Delivery Pipeline

Many months or years

*Simplified and exaggerated

The Greatest Risk To The Project: It Won’t Ship

You’re Building The Wrong Thing:

• Working on incorrect assumptions

• Don’t understand the customer

• Don’t understand the business stakeholders

• Haven’t considered all of the constraints

• Tricky non-essentials crowd out the MVP

http://amzn.to/1lpAYsZ

Ideation

Funding

Design

BuildShip

Value

Learn

A Few Weeks

Daily Team Interactions

Iterative Delivery Pipeline

How Do We Incentivize Our Teams?

Dev: Incentivized for change

Ops: Incentivized for stability

The Wall Between Departments7

Don’t Underestimate the Beer Effect

Improving Quality Of Communication

Create a safe environment for people to communicate It’s OK to fail and learn

Creating a culture where sharing information

(even about negative things) is desirable

Design and code out in the open Design in confluence – early visibility invites

critique GDS publish most code to public Github

Willingness To Speak About Failure Improves Safety

Gladwell’s Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes

http://on.wsj.com/19NpHdp

Westrum’s “Three Cultures Model”

Pathological(Power-oriented)

Bureaucratic(Rule-oriented)

Generative(Performance-

oriented)

Low cooperation Modest cooperation High cooperation

Messengers shot Messengers neglected Messengers trained

Responsibilities shirked Narrow responsibilities Risks are shared

Bridging discouraged Bridging tolerated Bridging encouraged

Failure leads to scapegoating Failure leads to justice Failure leads to inquiry

Novelty crushed Novelty leads to problems Novelty implemented

From ‘a typology of organizational cultures’ published in the British Medical Journalhttp://bit.ly/1RfpYuw

The Retrospective Prime Directive

Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe

that everyone did the best job they could given what they knew at the time,

their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand

Re-cap

Improve FREQUENCY of communication

Improve QUALITY of communication

Go FASTER over the long term

@peetdenny