process

The Process pillar consists of the elements that enable a team to achieve the best possible outcome, maximizing results while minimizing the use of resources like time, money and labor.  Teams successful in this area operate at the detail level in complete alignment and support of overarching goals while adapting to changing market needs.

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Is Your PROCESS AI Ready?

Sarah's story continues as she positions the team for a successful transition to AI development...

Sarah’s findings when interviewing team members revealed an underlying culture based on assumptions and beliefs that will greatly inhibit her ability to transform them into an AI leveraged development team.  The team is an “Agile” team, executing the standard Agile steps throughout their development process, but they do not exhibit the Agile mindset of continuous improvement, empowered discussion or innovation.  She’s digging deeper to really understand how the team “gets work done”.

Her initial observations revealed “compliance” to Agile protocols… sprint planning, 30-minute daily standups, retrospective, etc.  Sarah attended every one of these steps in the process and she noticed something; strict enforcement of time limits, minimal discussion and a high rate of after meeting follow-up.  Sarah was puzzled, if she was on this team, when and where will she get her direction on all of these questions?  She immediately begins her hunt for the answers.

Sarah became a “tag along” on one of the open items, clearing her calendar to simply follow anyone and everyone in the path to the answer.  Sam, one of the lead engineers on the team, took the follow-up on this particular item.  Immediately following the stand-up meeting, he called the questioning engineer to better understand the issue.  In that discussion, Sarah quietly observed the discussion on which APIs were to be used to ensure accurate information for a customer detail screen.  The engineer explained that he had already scoured the document repository for technical direction but could not find anything.  Sam also did not know the answer and ended the call explaining he would get back once he had the answer.  This was step 1 in what ended up being a several step process:

1. Sam calling the engineer for clarification
2. Sam calling the lead architect, leaving a message, calling again, then the architect calling him back
3. The architect calling the original engineer to ensure he understood the issue
4. The architect calling Sam back with the answer/direction
5. Sam calling the engineer back with the answer
6. Standup meeting revisiting the question everyday until answer repeated for formal closure.

This sequence of events delayed coding for over 24 hours and distracted 3 others from their work (Sam, the architect and the scrum master), all for an answer that took 2 minutes.  Also…nothing was documented to prevent this delay from happening again.  And this was just one of the open items.  Others went back to business sponsors individually, some went to IT management, some were communicated in the next standup, some were merely sent in an email string.  Oh boy thought Sarah, this has to change.

Sarah knows that the speed of AI will be completely hampered by the grapevine style method of decision making.  Today there was 5 follow-up items from the standup, when Sarah turns on the AI platform there will be 35.  How will the team keep up?  Or, will we just “slow down” AI to sync with the human process?   “For heaven’s sake” Sarah said to herself, “I will not slow down productivity for simple-to-fix ineffective human practices.”  Yes, it will make everyone uncomfortable, but Ai is going to do that anyway.  So, step one will be fix the humans, however what in the world are we trying to accomplish??  Sarah moves her focus to PRODUCT.