Deliver Conference 2020

In March, just before we went into lockdown the DeliverConf went ahead in Manchester.  Some of our BIMA PM Community attended and here’s a brief write up of key points and lessons learn’t from our PM Community Lead, Rebecca Benson, Digital Project Manager, Angel Solutions.

Once again, an informative and enjoyable community-based event for all those involved in project/delivery management for the digital world. Despite the unwanted arrival of the coronavirus, the event did still go ahead with true gusto! Although physical attendance was reduced and some key speakers were unable to make it, it still felt like a worthwhile day out with lots of useful and creative content.

A variety of interesting talks throughout the day, some in particular with thought-provoking topics which will be discussed back at base with the team so we can start to implement where we see fit…

Creating a Team Culture with Happiness

Key Points:

• Happy people do good work
• Make small changes ie, marginal gains
• Identify thought-leaders (those who speak the loudest)
• Reciprocate those team members with vulnerability to get them onboard
• Promote communication and have honesty with each other
• Identify top issue areas
• Define team purpose (empower the team)
• Advocate changes
• Culture shift – team looks after itself, works more synchronised and cooperative, healthy communication channels
• Hard metrics – retros scores, delivery of roadmap goals, day rate savings (or productivity)

Agile is a dirty word

Key Points –

• Distill the Manifesto – customer focus, collaborative working, delivering value early and often, empower your people, trust your teams, constant improvements, communication is key
• Process improvements – one small change at a time, easier to measure the impact
• Workshop/exercises around the current processes in order to redesign and improve based on findings, have patience with the results and impact
• Steps on the journey – understand agile, use analogies/metaphors to help people understand, be pragmatic/speak their language to get what you need, empower/involve everybody, be prepared to upset people along the way
• Organisational Performance key metrics – lead time, deployment frequency, average time to restore, percentage of changes which result in failures/breaks

 Better Stakeholder Management

Key Points –

• Emotional Intelligence – self-awareness, self-regulation, motivation, empathy, social skills
• Tell me and I forget, Teach me and I remember, Involve me and I learn
• React (emotional) or Respond (rational) to stakeholder engagement?
• Radical Candor’ (Kim Scott) – challenge stakeholders directly and show you care personally
• Criticise behaviour, not the person
• Set expectations upfront
• Prioritise the experience, empathise, self-regulate, get HIPPOs on board, take power

Agile Governance and Continuous Improvement

Key Points –

• With no governance there is no decision-making framework
• Too much governance – too many PMs
• Different types – governance by fear, seagull governance, governance by committee, governance when it’s too late
• Toolkit – bespoke, defined roles and responsibilities, assumption mapping, predictive governance (learning from mistakes), leader-leader culture, inclusion
• ‘Futurespective’ (or premortem) – where are we now? where will we be in/when? we will be a success if? we will have failed if?
• Retrospective (postmortem) – change the format, nominate someone to run each retro, no hierarchy

In Summary…

As an organisation, there are lots of ways we can make improvements to ease the strain for the project management team to give us more focus and control. People are instrumental to our success, or failure, so we need to take them on the journey. If we start small and monitor impact, we can make subtle improvements along the way. If we create key metrics, we can evidence the changes and celebrate the successes. As Project Managers, we need to own the process and don’t be afraid to change it.