Synchronous Product Development

Finding Flow

We held “Finding Flow” workshops with our client’s teams to learn about their specific challenges. Working with Engineering, Manufacturing, and Assembly & Test departments we created detailed product development “vertical value stream maps”.

Stalling After a Fast Start

The programme started with a flourish and a small and highly skilled cross-functional team had selected a preliminary concept in record time. The conclusion from the team was that the scope of change required was large and, based on past capability, the design and development program would likely take twice as long as the customer requirement. This was endorsed by the independent “Audit Team” and, as the pressure for progress grew inside and outside the organisation, more people were joining the team. The good news was that more people meant more available capacity. The bad news was that more capacity meant more integration. In turn, this meant more meetings, less progress, and again, the need for more people. Progress was being made but it was getting more difficult every day.

We were engaged to help break the cycle that was developing and to establish a system of management that would allow work to flow through the programme. In our first Finding Flow workshop, we brought the whole programme leadership team together with the technical specialists. Over the course of two days we developed a deeper and more focused understanding of requirements within the team through “Quality Function Deployment”, before completing a Vertical Value Stream Mapping activity to define the key elements of the Programme Master Schedule.

The team needed to deliver quickly while overcoming challenges and maintaining quality. We distinguished between the “Exploration” and “Realisation” phases in product development due to their fundamentally different natures. In Exploration, with high uncertainty and low knowledge, the speed of learning is key, impacting product quality and programme cost and duration. Our focus was on accelerating delivery by identifying and developing a flow of decisions.

Taming Turbulence

We introduced potential solutions to address the eight key challenges identified in the Finding Flow phase before scaling those across the extended team.

Rapid Risk Removal

We deployed our Rapid Risk Removal solution to create a flow of decisions that would form the critical path of the programme whilst overcoming some of the challenges identified from the Finding Flow phase.

We facilitated the extended programme team to elicit the key decisions that would need to be made to complete the “Exploration” phase of the programme. They identified 25 key decisions, and due to the significant financial implications of making mistakes in the product redesign, concluded that they needed to make them with little or no residual risk. We helped them identify the things that prevented them from making the decisions now and the work that would need to be done to provide the data and information to make the decisions at the required level of quality.

A Cadence for Collaboration

Now that we had a sequence of decisions and the outline of the learning required to make them, we needed to ensure that the teams were organised in a way that would facilitate the faster delivery of the learning and that the accountability for those decisions would reside within a single team.

In the first instance the teams were typically functionally or departmentally aligned, mirroring the organisational structure very closely. We worked with the programme and organisational leadership team to define the team construct into 45 teams across three tiers: Team, Team of Teams and overall Programme and migrate the team members into the structure.

A cadence of 6 weeks was defined for the teams at all levels to Plan together, Deliver together through collaboration, Reflect on their performance and identify Improvements that they would experiment with in the next time box.

Widespread Planning

Given a team structure, a cadence and a sequence of decisions we needed to synchronise the planning activity on the programme to ensure that planned activities were aligned through high quality dialogue and delivery commitments could be made with more confidence. This was done through planning together at a 6 week cadence in what we call “Team Tetris”.

Making Work Transparent

The teams needed a robust mechanism to visualise the progress of the work that they had planned to maintain effective collaboration and the programme leadership team wanted to know as soon as possible of any barriers that might prevent the teams from delivering their commitments.

We defined and implemented a Tiered Visual Performance Management system to make the work and any problems clear and transparent.

Accelerating Flow

After establishing a system of management in Taming Turbulence, we coached the teams to operate the system in a way that would accelerate flow through focused collaboration and continuous improvement.

Sharpening Practice

At this stage, the extended programme team had grown to approximately 450 people working in 45 distinct teams. To accelerate the flow of the programme we needed to help everyone have more good days than bad and our hypothesis was that if they used the systems that had been established we would start to see output increase.

The focus in this phase was in supporting the teams to use the systems effectively at scale, whilst also helping team members to evolve their way of thinking about collaboration in product development through reflective practice, experimentation and continuous improvement.

Over the course of the first few 6 week cycles multiple experiments had been completed and had resulted in new and refined ways of working.

The programme team had strengthened the prioritisation method and enabled more distributed decision making by introducing the concept of “Golden Threads” to identify the critical objectives each 6 weeks, prioritise them and ensure that the teams were directly linking their planned outputs to the objectives.

In order to improve the access to people who weren’t fully allocated to the programme, the teams moved to a Capacity Based Planning approach and were contracting with Resource Managers over specialist capacity and availability each 6 weeks.

Three teams experimented with a Digital Kanban system to provide even more transparency and connectivity of deliverables and this was scaled up to all teams in the next time box.

Keeping Pace

We ensured that the gains were sustained and the system would be continually developed to maintain delivery at pace through extensive coaching of the leaders in the organisation via Process Confirmations.

Process Confirmation

Next, we designed a system of “Process Confirmations” for leaders at all levels to perform small, frequent tasks to confirm that the system was being followed and was leading to the expected results. These covered, amongst other things, the effectiveness of the prioritisation, the team members’ understanding of the objectives in any given time box, the quality of collaboration in the planning events and the efficacy of the daily stand up meetings across the teams.

This encouraged even more transparency and gave leaders permission to go to the place where the work was being done to understand what was happening, to provide feedback and coaching to the teams and leaders based on what they saw. Whilst this felt mechanical and artificial in the early days, it soon developed into the new normal and boosted the sense of one big team learning together even further.

The programme continued running for a further 6 months after our involvement until the client reached a settlement with their customer. During that time they had captured the approach formally in their quality system and introduced the way of working across the other live programmes underway in the organisation.