Week Ending 16th December 2022

New This Week

Many more changes this week in the run up to the Christmas and New Year break. In the ideas section we have a new page on X and Y Theory. New practices covering Delivery Validation and Evaluate Realised Value have been added. We hope you find the new and improved material useful.

We are all taking a break for two weeks over Christmas and New Year. We wish everyone who is celebrating at this time of the year a happy and peaceful time.

X and Y theory

Douglas McGregor proposed that a leader has the freedom to choose their approach to leading and managing others. Their choice of approach will be dependent upon how they view the people they need to lead and the context in which they lead. If you see your team as lazy and see the culture of the organisation is very much command and control, you are likely to choose a different management style than if you trust your team and the organisational culture supports decision making at the lowest level of authority.

Delivery Validation

Teams plan work to fill their short-term planning horizon. With a clear understanding of current priorities and the capacity of the team, work items are chosen to satisfy the forthcoming delivery goals. The team elaborates the plan as necessary to ensure that there is a shared understanding of the work that is required.

Evaluate Realised Value

When we deliver features into a product and when we provide the services offered by that product we are making an explicit investment from our available budgets. We need to evaluate the value realised by the product, its features and services so that we can assess the return from our investments. We use the information provided by our evaluation to help guide large scale decisions on where future investments should be directed.

Revised Content

Content of several pages has been improved and updated to be consistent with newly added material.

Collaborating With Customers

There is a huge emphasis in agile thinking on how we collaborate with our customers to ensure we deliver the best possible value to them at all times. Value is reflected in the Rate of Delivery and in the Quality of Service that we are able to provide.

Focus On Commitments

The basis of trust between the customer and team is the making and fulfilling of mutual commitments. The customer commits to open discussion of needs and to accept challenge from the team in order to reach a shared understanding of those needs. The team commits to priorities and to delivery.

Focus On Delivering Priorities

We agree priorities with the customer and work to deliver in alignment with those priorities. Where there are conflicting needs we seek a mutual understanding of the need to change priorities. As the customer’s needs change we adapt our priorities accordingly so that we can still deliver the best value to the customer.

Understanding Performance

Every team should have a clear understanding of its performance. Measuring and analysing performance data makes a key contribution towards the team inspecting and adapting its delivery priorities, ways of working, learning priorities and need for coaching.

Articles

Will Sambrook has published a new article on Theory X and Theory Y. This links to the new content page in the Ideas section.