Large organisations struggle with numerous blocking dependencies between Product and Platform Teams, resulting in excessive meetings, waiting times, and frustrations on a daily basis. This wasted time translates into monetary losses and missed opportunities for delivering value quickly and consistently.

Drawing from observed patterns across clients, we will collectively explore strategies for early detection of these blocking dependencies across teams. We'll delve into identifying a "sniff test" to uncover which blocking dependency holds the greatest potential for improvement.

Takeaways:
1. Gain a basic understanding of how to deploy work visualisation in manufacturing and technology contexts where workflows intersect.
2. Learn how to apply fast flow principles to identify opportunities across teams, unlocking value in their work improvement hotspots.
3. Prioritise blocking dependencies that align with leadership's business goals and are within their sphere of influence.
4. Obtain ideas on showcasing quick wins in these improvements, laying the groundwork for scalability across teams.

Talk plan for the session:

00:00 Introduction: Platform teams in large manufacturing companies work with a mixture of platforms - commercial off the shelf (COTS), data platforms, customised, etc. In large organisations, however, there is a high chance that they have a slow flow of work.

00:02 Problem: The story is about a healthcare company with a team of about 200 people in technology. There were about 10 platform teams responsible for all types of platforms. These were connected to manufacturing operations and provided vital technology to successfully manufacture healthcare products. However, this team was struggling with its flow of work with some changes taking 2 years to deliver.

00:05 Visualisation and fast flow principles: Team Topologies book by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais is to help business and technology teams organise for fast flow.

Team Topologies provides:
Language for dealing with flow, boundaries, architecture, dynamics
Heuristics (clues) for organising teams and software
A focus on fast flow as a key driver

The "flow of change" is the work/changes needed for a product or service on an ongoing basis.

A fast flow aims for the following:
Untangle business concepts
Adjust team and system boundaries for flow
Minimise hand-offs
Remove blocking dependencies
Move decision-making to teams

We also followed the book “Making Work Visible” by Dominica Degrandis to help this team. The key time thieves she looks for improvement opportunities are:

​Too Much Work-in-Progress (WIP)—work that has started, but is not yet finished, sometimes referred to as partially completed work.
​Unknown Dependencies—something you weren’t aware of that needs to happen before you can finish.
​Unplanned Work—interruptions that prevent you from finishing something or from stopping at a better breaking point.
​Conflicting Priorities—projects and tasks that compete with each other; this is exacerbated when you are uncertain about what the most important thing is to do.
​Neglected Work—partially completed work that sits idle on the bench.

00:10 Developing a hypothesis based on these principles to our team’s context: We worked with 4 platform teams to find improvement opportunities. These were very different - 1 team was a data integration platform team, 2 teams with COTS platform teams, 1 team was data visualisation platform team.

Our hypothesis was if we visualise their flow of work we could find the following opportunities::

They were dependent on skills outside of their platform teams to test their software changes which were very manual
They had too much work at any given time because it wasn’t clear what were their strategic priorities

00:15 Validating the hypothesis: We mapped the flow of work for each of the 4 platforms from idea generation of any software change, incidents or other urgent changes to the actual production deployment of these changes.

This experience was patchy because to deliver a change to a platform, sometimes multiple teams were involved. These teams were from different functions who held different budgets and reporting lines.

Each time we found that there was a flavour of dependencies with other teams for:
prioritisation decisions
testing changes
installing new technology on manufacturing equipment
Etc.

We also found that testing was very manual and delivery of changes required more than 20 manual checks and steps.

00:20 What did they do next: The leadership recognised that there were common themes that were impacting flow for every team. They identified 2 platform teams to pilot improvements based on applicability to the number of teams and improvements they could collaborate with teams on.

Better prioritisation decisions for the platform teams with some decision making transferred to the platform team
Automation of testing for a platform to improve continuous delivery practices
Visualise work across all the other platforms (beyond the first 4) to continue to find improvement hotspots

00:25 Conclusion: The talk highlighted issues in the flow of work within a healthcare company's technology team. By utilising frameworks like Team Topologies and "Making Work Visible," they identified key improvement areas, including dependencies on external skills, unclear priorities, and manual testing processes. Pilot improvements focused on better prioritisation, automation of testing, and ongoing visualisation of work. Collaboration was emphasised to address common flow issues across teams with different functions and reporting lines.