Mik Kersten on Moving from Projects to Products

Show Notes

• 00:45 Introductions
• 01:35 The problems and challenges of building software at scale
• 01:48 The need for a new approach to how we manage software delivery in the large
• 02:37 The project model of software development is fundamentally broken
• 03:00 Exploring the work of Carlota Perez looking at the economic and societal impact of technological revolutions
• 03:28 The management techniques which were invented in and needed for managing in the era of industrial revolution
• 03:57 Organisations are still applying the same techniques today; the techniques needed for building bridges do not work for building software
• 04:28 Align delivery to what customers pull, and customers pull products
• 04:56 The disconnect is in the management approach, not in the ability to build products effectively
• 05:15 Different vocabulary used by different groups in the organization
• 05:46 We don’t have a common language between business leadership and technology leadership
• 05:56 This isn’t a problem in startups and in the tech-giant organizations because they are driven by the technologists; this doesn’t apply in more traditional organisations
• 06:25 We won’t bring the benefits from the age of software to the world until the traditional businesses become comfortable with the language of software
• 06:58 We can’t afford to wait for the current generation of managers to retire – we must make concrete changes soon
• 07:14 Two phases of technology adoption – phase 1 is the Installation period, which typically runs for around 50 years
• 07:32 The age of software started 60 years ago, so we are coming to the end of that phase
• 07:48 In this period there is an explosion of startups and capital chasing ideas
• 08:18 The second phase is when the focus shifts from financial capital to production capital
• 08:42 Once the shift is made, it is no longer possible for financial capital to compete with production capital
• 09:02 The global economy is in the middle of the turning point from phase 1 to phase 2
• 09:18 Companies that survive the turning point will be successful in the next phase
• 09:38 In order to survive companies need to change their approach to the management of software delivery
• 09:46 Currently there are only really five tech giants who are likely to survive the change
• 10:08 The distance that the giants are ahead of the pack gives them an almost unassailable advantage
• 10:25 It’s time to explore what the tech giants are doing from a people, process and structure perspective that is making them successful
• 10:44 Most organizations’ rate of change in improving how they build software is so slow that they are unable to compete against any of the tech giants who choose to adopt a new market
• 11:10 The new way of thinking has to be one that today’s leaders can apply, we can’t wait for them to retire
• 11:43 There are ways of adapting and the adoption needs to be incremental
• 12:10 The way that software investments are managed needs to start changing now – there is clear evidence that the current approach does not work
• 12:32 By the time you have enough business school case studies showing it doesn’t work, it will have been too late
• 13:07 The way IT organizations have been set up is not related to value delivery, it was about efficiency and utilization
• 13:13 Digital transformation is happening, but they are happening on the wrong foundation
• 13:31 Many of these digital transformations are still fundamentally project structured – it is time to change direction
• 13:42 We are now starting to see some of the carnage of failed digital transformations undertaken on the wrong foundation
• 14:35 The research which went into the book looking at 308 organizations
• 15:02 We need a more direct mapping between the business and building software
• 15:26 The bulk of the book is a framework to bridge the gap between business people and technologists
• 15:35 The technologists have frameworks which work and can be applied to business problems
• 16:03 Agile adoption has been focused on the high-touch software parts of the transformation and often neglected other areas of the value stream
• 16:25 DevOps is an attempt to overcome some of the blockers that agile adoptions ignored
• 16:52 The book recommends ways of structuring to delivering value more effectively
• 17:14 Measuring the wrong things in agile transformation – it’s not about how many people are trained on Scrum
• 17:38 The flow framework is about end-to-end metrics so you can find the real bottlenecks and remove them
• 18:07 The tradeoffs that need to be made when choosing to build new features vs addressing technical debt
• 18:38 The four flow items in the framework are Features, Defects, Risks and Debts and we need to make constant trade-off decisions across all four
• 18:54 You need to look at these things as products from the business perspective and you need to measure how value flows so you can optimize for business outcomes
• 19:56 The need to establish cross-functional teams with end-to-end product responsibility
• 20:52 A digital innovator brings value to the market through digital products
• 21:14 In the continuous flow environment what is being pulled by customers are useable features
• 21:35 In order to achieve this, organizations need to consider product value streams which encompass multiple feature teams
• 21:54 This requires engaging all the roles and areas responsible for value delivery across the whole organization
• 22:25 How this played out when looking at employee engagement at Tasktop across value streams
• 23:50 Advice for influencers who want to bring these ideas into their organizations – prove it in a single product and measure the flow across the whole value stream
• 24:57 Correlate flow metrics to business results
• 26:28 Show the results in ways that are meaningful to the business

Mentioned:

• Carlota Perez
• Book: #NoProjects
• Tasktop
• Book: Project to Product
• Book: Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital
• Flow Framework