De-Risky Business: Techniques for Mitigating and Managing Risk

De-Risky BusinessEnterprise Services Planning Summit 2016 @mattphilip

Techniques for Identifying and Mitigating Risk

Fitness Criteria

Blocker Clustering Probabilistic Forecasting

Service-Delivery Review

Techniques

Fitness Criteria

Technique: Fitness Criteria

A metric that enables us to evaluate whether our product, service or service delivery is "fit for purpose" in the eyes of a customer from a given market segment.

-- David J. Anderson

What is a Fitness Criterion?

@mattphilip #kanbanESP



delivery team

customer

exec sponsor

Risk factors, Success criteria

TDD, code coverage,JS framework,

team happiness

Fitness Criteria

coach

WIP


delivery team

customer

Exec sponsor

QualityDelivery timePredictability

coach


business

CIO

PMO able to track progress,No teams falling behind

“Doing Agile,”Estimating well

Fitness Criteria

delivery team

delivery team

delivery team


business

CIO

Value delivery,Reliability

delivery team

delivery team

delivery team

Asking your customers what they value about your service or product

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Agile Manifesto


Fitness criteria are a key to self-organizing teams


Fitness Criteria Metric Health/Improvement MetricMetric that enables us to evaluate whether our product, service or service delivery is "fit for purpose" in the eyes of a customer from a given market segment. Effectively comprise the Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each market segment.

Metric that guides an improvement initiative or indicates the general health of your business, business or product unit or service delivery capability.

Direct Indirect/derivative

Examples: delivery time, functional quality, safety

Examples: flow efficiency, velocity, percent complete and accurate, WIP

Customer-oriented/derived Team-oriented/derived

If it’s not at least derivative of a fitness criterion, it’s at best a vanity metric, and at worst a misguiding metric.

Service-Delivery Review

Technique: Service-Delivery Review



Net Fitness ScoreDelivery Quality

“Did you get what you wanted?”Net Fitness Score (NFS) = % satisfied customers –% dissatisfied customers

Question 1: How "fit for purpose" did you find this delivery?

Question 2: Specifically, why did you give that rating?


1. How "fit for purpose" do you find this facilitation service?

2. Specifically, why did you give that rating?Rating Description Indication

5 Extremely: This facilitation service was everything we needed and more

A satisfied person who felt that the service was fit for purpose

4 Highly: This facilitation service was everything we needed

3 Mostly: This facilitation service was most of what we needed but some of our needs were not met

A neutral person who didn't get everything needed to be delighted with the service but got something

acceptable for his or her time investment

2 Partially: This facilitation service met some of our needs but lacked significant and important elements

A dissatisfied person who felt purpose was unmet by the service

1 Slightly: This facilitation service had some value but most of what we needed was missing

0 Not at all: This facilitation service had no value

Blocker Clustering

Technique: Blocker Clustering


Blocker Clustering

• Leverages a kanban system to identify and quantify the things that block work from flowing

• Helps “trim the tail” in distribution (risk)

• — Photo from Woodland Trust

WHAT IS A BLOCKER?

An abnormal condition that prevents a committed work item from progress


Getting Started• Talk with your team about it• Define “block” for your team • Minimally instrument your

kanban system to gather data, including the block reason and duration


Blocker Analysis


35 Dependent Story blockers


69 days lost to Dependent Story blockers


Learnings

Team 1• internal blockers caused 20 days worth of delay• external blockers caused 147 days worth of delay • the biggest blocker cluster accounted for 86 days of

delayTeam 2• 141 stories in the release• 66 stories were blocked at some point —

nearly half


85th percentile


85th percentile

Probabilistic Forecasting

Technique: Probabilistic Forecasting


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Filters

All filters must be set beforeusing this simulation. You canchange the filter settings onanother chart, then returnhere.

Source Dates

Projected Dates

Relax input validation

More Trials

From 3/11/2016 First

To 4/5/2016 Last

From 4/6/2016 < >

To 7/8/2016 94 days

5 10 15 20 25 30 350

200

400

600

800

1K

1.2K

1.4K

Monte Carlo (13K trials)

Total Items Complete in 94 Days

Occurrences

▾Metadata Services Delivery Time Data.xlsx, 4/6/2016 Monte Carlo: Simulate Completed Items ▼

Copyright 2014 Actionable Agile, Inc. (https://www.actionableagile.com)

20

30%

18

50%

16

70%

14

85%

12

95%


• Have a conversation with your customer to discover fitness criteria

• Ask “What decisions would these affect?”• Make them visible• Use in feedback loop (e.g., service-delivery review)• Try blocker clustering• Forecast using data, not guesses

Risk-MitigationTakeaways for

Tomorrow

• Defining Fitness for Purpose (http://www.djaa.com/defining-fitness-purpose)

• Your KPIs Probably Aren't! But What Are They?

(https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/your-kpis-probably-arent-what-david-anderson)• Klaus Leopold, Troy Magennis, Larry Maccherone• Service-Delivery Review worksheet (mattphilip.wordpress.com)• RAID Bingo (mattphilip.wordpress.com)

References and Further Reading@mattphilip

Leadership & Management

De-Risky Business: Techniques for Mitigating and Managing Risk