People: First
Everything else follows on from that
When I first started this newsletter (blog by any other name), it was with the intention of trying to explain that delivery is more than just a focus on methodologies.
Nothing I have been involved with, or seen over the last two years has changed that.
Delivering is an act. An art, not a science.
You can have all of the tools and charts at your disposal. All created with a level of detail that stands up to rigour and challenge. But if you can’t work out why a team member is silent, or a message isn’t landing with a stakeholder – then a graph, a pie chart or a RAG rating – will simply be created in waste; or even haste.
I have no beef with evangelists or qualified coaches. People choose their own paths and make work, well, work for them.
Where I do have a concern, is where folk assume the starting point for any piece of work is the methodology, and we work out the people stuff from there. To use a sporting analogy, it’s like putting a team of cricketers into a 4-4-2 formation.
There are times when we don’t have a choice – this is called bidding. Person A asks us how we are going to deliver something. We have to provide an answer based on knowledge and experience. Using the concept of an approach or methodology to help them understand the way we deliver.
That’s your paper based answer. Not how you are definitely going to work.
Very rarely do I see the tender play out fully on the engagement. What is being asked for changes, often between the submission of the tender documents and the first day of onboarding. If we think the ask is still the same on day one, create a Sprint Zero (a label, nothing else) that includes a stakeholder engagement session or two, and you’ll quickly understand that nuances exist. People are claiming to want the same thing, but different – bigger, faster – words you can’t really equate to a burn-down chart.
Even fixed priced waterfall projects come with this risk. No spec ever makes it through to the end. Change always happens. More so if the relationship between supplier and client, team and decision maker is open enough to support it.
Does this mean we should ever give up on assuming we can deliver something using a toolkit or methodology? No, of course not – but it will need to be adapted. Because of the people.
Agile, you know, by the book Agile, is never going to go mainstream. It will often be something with Agile ceremonies that doesn’t quite look, walk or talk like the duck it claims to be.
Contracts, products and relationships rarely support genuine MVPs, with users accepting of the fact that they’re not getting everything they want, let alone the small bit that someone believes they need. Especially if Senior Decision makers want a trouble free existence.
This isn’t putting the boot into Agile. My last “waterfall” project had elements redesigned as we went through testing and integration, because the end result didn’t work for the users, as expected. So we spun something up, using the agility within the team.
So how do you start with the people?
By talking. Ask what people need from an engagement or being part of a team. Some folk like to capture this as part of a Team Charter. Others rely on nods and winks. Whatever works for you, until it doesn’t. Then a more formal, structured document or page you can refer to is always going to help.
From there, you build that same engagement into your working practices. I have encountered a number of DMs who look only to tools to help them. Fancy retro templates, anonymous voting etc – but rarely get to know what it is that make their teams tick. No matter how big your team, you still need to have a consistent method by which to make sure all is well. At the individual level.
The reason for doing this is simple. Everything may be subject to change, even human emotions, but being a supportive Delivery Manager or leader is the one thing that should remain a constant.
If your support waivers, if the team feel as though you’re no longer engaged – or have their best interests at heart – then when you put up a template with smiley faces and ask them to share what mood they are in, don’t be surprised if the answer you get is not what you hope to see.
Remember. It’s people, needs, outcome, work, methodology, end product in that order. You may flip a couple around from needs to end product as you try to find the right fit for the work and team, but if you ever devalue or reprioritise people in that chain, you’ll lose the ability to manage it as best you can.
Talk to your people. Make the work, work through them.
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