 Instructions, it's pretty straightforward. If you're sitting next to somebody you already know, please move. And discuss implies collaborative conversation. Okay, everyone who's coming in, look at the screen please and follow the instructions. No, not laptops, mic, mic. The lapel mic. That's all you have. You don't have a laptop. Okay, I can use that. That's fine. Testing. Everybody coming in, please follow the instructions. It's pretty straightforward. Okay. Then you have a second pair of UAV or second pair of the project. At this point it does mean we expect everyone of you to be engaging in a conversation with somebody else. The partner will provide you with the time you have planned for the future. So what are the results that will be coming to you from 40.4 to 45? Yes, probably 10 minutes. Time to take it 10 minutes. Carry it away. You are nothing better than conversations. There are people behind you. Look behind you. It's starting. It's going. It's starting. If you're sitting quietly, you're not in a conversation. We're done. Oh, they've solved all the problems with projects. Cool, you've all been to an agile conference before. Welcome, folks. So who here didn't have any problems with projects in that conversation? One, okay, you can leave. I don't think we have anything to teach you. They've never done a project. Oh, even better. I can leave because I don't think we have anything to teach you. Who wants to share something that they heard or that they told someone else about? The challenges that they've been facing. I will just pick people at random if you don't want to nominate. Is somebody over on the right? So the common problem that we have is regarding budgeting. When we give the quotation based on the problems identified, we are asked, why do you need a product owner? Why do you need a scrum master? Why can't we just have two FTEs for web developers? Why can't we just have half? Why do you need this? So that's the common problem. Oh, yes. Hi, I'm from Shell. And we work with other delivery organizations as well. So we're not alone doing this stuff. So we work with DXC, the U.S. 12 HP. We work with Infosys. We work with various organizations. We're just having that sort of synchronization in the way we deliver and then being able to deliver on time, scope, whatever is a big challenge. For my sins, I used to work for IBM. So I can share that for the other side as well. Hi, my name is Anant. I am from Micro Focus. So our challenges are mainly to always catching up with the customer demands. Always struggling to deliver on time, actually. Basically, expectations are higher. We're always one-quarter behind, you know, meeting expectations. There was trouble in the back. Shout it out. For the camera. For the camera. Okay, so we actually, we have a collaboration with another company and we have a statement of work, a scope of work, an NRE kind of, you know, projects we get. So even if we care for value over, you know, we care for priorities and now we agree that we don't need to worry about deadlines, still there will be leftovers from the, so what do we do with leftovers from NRE? Do we take it to the next one? So these are the challenges about scheduling and scope. My question is, I'm a consultant. So we usually work with clients for certain durations, right? So when it's agile implementation or transformation. So whenever we go to client and give some quotation in as to, this is what the time duration that we're going to work, but it's good that the client will not agree for like, you know, over a year, two years or three years, but they're going to give some duration as it's going to be, okay, we'll get started with three months and then we see the progress and if it's working, then we're going to extend it or whatever the reason it is. My challenge over here is like good grade that it's going to happen for first three months and so and things works and team sees the progress and everything, but we are not sure that it's going to sustain because that's not the time duration that we tell the clients that it's going to be sustained. So how could we make the management or the, the sponsors to realize that it's not going to sustain if you're signing a contract for three months or less. Sadly, if I can answer that one, that'd be a very, very rich person. One more? Okay. So we don't empathize with the customers, right? So when we do projects, we are only focused on scope and this is what it is and we see more of a business than empathizing with the customer trying to understand what the customers are and then trying to build the product for that, right? Very good. I think we can stop at that. I think the conclusion we're coming to, there are some interesting challenges with projects thinking and Evan and I figured out through bitter and painful experience at times that maybe this wasn't a great way of working. So we wrote that book and there's a few copies of it here and you might guess that our premise is that projects suck and there has to be a better way. It's a little subtle. You may not see that there, but yes, we're not the biggest fan of projects. And a culture of continuous value. That's our premise. So this workshop and it is a workshop. A workshop is a collaborative activity in which a group of people do work together. You will be doing work together. You will notice there is paper on the table. There are pens. There are post-it notes and so forth. So if you're not up for workshop, please use the law of two feet. Okay. So everybody is committed. They are going to do work together. This is good. In this workshop, we're going to explore the why, the what and the how of no projects. So a little bit of a history lesson. What exactly is a project? The PMI, the project management institute, defines it as a temporary endeavor undertaken to create a unique product, service or result. Now, what word in there do you think that I take the most umbrage that I have the most problem with? Exactly. And why? Why do we care about the word temporary? Shows lack of commitment. Why does it have to be continuous? Yes, sustainable. What else? They always continue anyway. Yes, absolutely. Now there are some things where projects make sense. If you're building a road, when the road is finished, the people who build the road hand the road over to somebody else to maintain, and they go off and build another road. That makes perfect sense. How many of you builds knowledge worker products in your organization software or services of some sort? Marketing. Yeah. Yep. Anyone here in the road building industry? Or bridges. Bridges? Bridges are good projects. Those are things where a project does make sense. The temporary endeavor that makes perfect sense. You can't add features to a bridge. Once that bridge is complete, it's done. You have to invest money to maintain the value you've already created, but the maximum potential value has been created the minute the bridge is complete. You can add features to a bridge. It's really weird and they normally fall down. In our world, in the world of knowledge work, everything that we do is continuous. It always has been, and this intention, and the expectation or the intention that we can stop is an artifact dating back honestly to about the 1960s. As this sense of we want to create something that is predictable, repeatable, and who here knows what the software crisis was? Okay. History lesson. I apologize. I'm sure you went here for a history lesson, but I'm going to give you one anyway. Chapter one of the book. In the 1960s, there was a conference on software engineering or something like that. It's where the first use of the word software engineering really came about. The premise of this conference and the outcome of this conference was that software was being disrespected. It was not being treated like engineering or the other professions. They wanted to professionalize the software. They took engineering ideas and practices from building a bridge and they applied it to software. Everything that we have done since, we can trace back to that one in our opinion, poor decision. Now, we have a problem because fast forward to today and everything about building a bridge does not apply to building project work. It's a number one. Number one. We focus on the wrong thing. Who here has written a project management plan before? Time, cost, scope. You put them in? Yes? In that plan, was there any mention of customer or value? You might have had benefits. Who measured it at the end? Did anyone measure it? Yeah, build a time sheet. Absolutely. So I can say from personal experience. I spent so much time writing the benefits for a project and the only reason we wrote it was so that finance would release funds. And worse, the funds were already allocated. This was just a checkbox so that finance would release the funds. Not to get them, just to release them. So whose responsibility is it to track value after a project is complete? No, the customer does not... No, not according to any of this. According to PMI, according to Prince II, it is not the project managers or the project responsibility to track value and value realisation. Project sponsor is supposed to be held to account. How many of you have done a benefits realisation on a project? It doesn't happen. There were two. And were the benefits real? No, of course not. Yeah, it looks good. So I used to be a public servant a long time ago and we had what we called the Million Dollar Filing Cabinet. So in Australian Public Service you have these gates. And to get funding to go to the next stage you have to pass this gateway review. And there's all these documents you've got to provide to pass that gateway review and they all got put in the filing cabinet and never taken out again. It's a million dollar filing cabinet because we spent that much money writing those documents. We never got that value back. Problem number two, projects are temporary, products are not. I can keep adding value to any knowledge worker product. No matter who, where, when, anything that you're doing. Now, don't get me wrong, there is an end of life to a product. Products do end. But the point at which we can stop adding value is far in excess of any project that you're running. Lastly, projects fail. No, they don't. They're redefining the definition of success. So I don't know about you, but I have read hundreds of articles, hundreds of scientific papers that look at failure rates. Now depending on which one you read, it's anywhere from 20 to about 70%. And here's, let me flip the equation. Let's say for example the channel tunnel, linking England and France. It was... That's a different matter. It was over time, over price, and over budget. Is that a failure? If you're a project manager it was. How come is that? Yes, they have made a profit. It took a bit longer than they wanted, but they made a profit. Is the project a failure? But time cost scope. What we measure in terms of project success is not necessarily the same. I have actually managed by miracle to release products on time cost and scope and never realized the benefits. And did I get my bonus as a project manager? Yes, because all my responsibility was time cost and scope. Last one, I promise. Let me go get into the meat. Projects are expensive. Overheads. Project managers. Time sheets. All of the things that we do to fulfill some framework, to tick some boxes that... I was going to break into dance. That would have been horrifying. That are done purely because there is a bureaucratic process that says we have to have this. And a lot of the... How many wasted hours in filling in those forms of yours? The million dollar filing cabinet. Overruns. The project goes late and we then spend thousands of person hours or at least hundreds of person hours make it go quicker. We explore. We dig into it. We scrape through the bones of it, really. And look for who we can blame. And what are we not doing? And the other thing about projects is we commit, typically, the full chunk of money at the beginning. Now, Agile has made this a little bit better. But even in the Agile environment with Agile software delivery, it's very, very uncommon that we will stop a project when we realize it's not actually going to deliver the thing that we expected. Because the funds have been allocated. The funds are allocated. They're already assigned. The budget is there. And there's probably somebody's bonus who depends on spending that money. And that somebody has got a level of authority in the organization. So they can just go ahead and continue. Now, are we being cynical? Are we being unfair? How do you feel? Unfair? Well, what are the benefits of projects? That is a very good consulting answer. So here's the thing. It's not about the work. The work that we do is valuable. It's how we wrap the work. It's how we structure and govern the work. Because the work is going to have to be done. So let's go and introduce no projects. This idea that we can have continuous delivery of value to a customer, to an organization. Noting, yes, products end. Noting that value is intangible at the beginning. It is an estimate. So we need a governance system, not a project that allows us to go, are we doing the right thing? Are we doing it in the right way? And what does that look like? And are we still doing the right thing? Or should we stop doing this thing and refocus on something else? That's one of the most important characteristics of the no projects approach, is when we get to the point where we're wasting money, we stop. So we talk about outcomes over outputs. And let me ask you a question. If you're running a team and your business owner, product owner, comes to you and say, we need to achieve this outcome. We need to improve staff satisfaction, let's say. And we're going to run a project. And that project is going to put fruit in every kitchen. Simple. Now, I have a budget. A million dollars for fruit. It's a lot of fruit. Now, a lot of people. If, as a project team, I have a better way of achieving that outcome versus delivering the work that was predefined in this project, should I be allowed or in fact encouraged to change what I do to achieve the same outcome? Yes. Do we do that today? No, we don't. We measure the wrong thing. Time cost scope. We need to be measuring the business outcome. We need to be measuring the results continuously. Not just at the end or not at all. What's it worth versus what does it cost? The project accounting only looks at cost. Benefits. Value delivered. So taking the fruit example, the employee satisfaction, what is it worth to us as an organization to increase employee satisfaction, to reduce the attrition rates in the organization, to have more engaged people? Because you know what? We can actually measure the value of engaged employees in terms of higher productivity. We'll go into this in a bit of detail a bit later, but we need to run this maths. We need to know that it's going to cost us... Sorry, we need to know that it's worth a million dollars. And that gives us an ability to go, how much are we willing to spend? Rather than the other way around of, it's going to cost us a million dollars. Is it worth doing? It's the entire wrong way of looking at it. The other one that I do want to call out is this concept of stable versus temporary teams. We all know the value of stable teams. We've seen the studies. We've seen the science behind it. Yet a project is by definition temporary. So the team comes together. They may have vendors and consultants as part of that team, and then they disband. And all that institutional and product knowledge is lost. And so we need a system of governance that allows us to retain that institutional change, retain that product knowledge, and carry it forward in perpetuity. Stable does not mean static. Stable does not mean unchanging. It just means there is continuity. And that links to the cradle to grave accountability. And that gets a little bit hard as the team delivering a product we actually should be held to account for the value of that product in the marketplace. Not just build it and throw it over the wall. We've overcome silo-based thinking and software engineering and software development with agile, cross-functional teams. But now we're saying let's do this on the broader overall product stream. An example. Anyone here from Singapore? Singapore Press Holdings. Are you from Singapore Press Holdings? Yes, good. So their developers made the decision to go down to the MRT station with their latest product and just show people coming off the trains and go, what do you think? Would you use this? Do you like it? Rather than go through this sense of we're just going to build whatever we're told they went, we're going to take ownership of this product and we're going to, we, not the marketing department, not a PR agency, an outsourced agency, we as developers are going to go and talk to people on the street and go, would you use our new product? That kind of accountability you don't see. So, yes? That's it. The people who build it maintain it and they're not throwing it over the wall so quality becomes an imperative from the beginning. And let's be absolutely clear, we do not distinguish build and run. If you have continuous delivery, build is run. The ability to continuously deploy something in the market is that it's out there. We're continuously improving it, but that's that build run, it's all the same thing, it's all the same team. DevOps is an element. DevOps is one implementation of a continuous mindset, but you can do DevOps with services. So, this is our definition of no projects. The alignment and cardinal sin of presenters is going to read off the slide, the alignment of activities to outcomes, activities being work, the stuff that you do to outcomes, the why that you do it. We need to know that what we're doing is for a purpose. Measured by value. Measurement is important. We need to know, if it's going to be aligned to an outcome, we've got to know are we achieving a positive impact on that outcome, be it customer satisfaction or revenue or whatever it happens to be. Constrains by guiding principles. You can't do anything that you want. There's got to be a constraint. And optionally, supported by CD technologies. And this is where the technology side of no projects come in, where if you use a software space, we can deploy very quickly with the DevOps kind of technologies, but it doesn't have to be in that space, so let's just be clear. But if you're not in the software space, what can you do continuously? So the continuous mindset is vitally important. So, who here has control of budgets or finance or at least tracks budgets and finance? One, two, some of you. This is a slide from Biats Voxnes, Beyond Budgeting. This is looking at the fundamental difference between a project-based funding budget and a continuous-based budget. We are looking at the... We need to continuously measure, is our investment worth it? In a project space, we allocate the funds up front. They get assigned to a team, a team gets engaged, they start doing work, and then at the end they deliver. Maybe they're over time, maybe they're over budget. It is a project, so that's probably more likely than not. But the funds are allocated. You don't know if you've got the benefit until a long time after that team has disappeared. The difference is this continuous check. Are we okay? Are we getting a positive ROI? We always expect that the first part of any piece of work is going to have a negative ROI. That's natural. But beyond a certain point, as long as there is a positive value, we can continue to invest in this work. That's where that distinguishing factor comes in. We can stop this project, this product, the development, the team at any point. It does not have to be waiting till the very end. One of the key things about projects is we get to the end and oh shucks, we haven't gotten enough money. Who's had a project over? Who hasn't? What happens at that point? We get into a game of chicken. The project manager goes to the steering committee and says, these are looking good. We have nine months into the 10 month project. Green, green, green, green, red. Yellow, yes, yes, yes. Never yellow. It's always green until red. Watermelon projects. Green on the outside, red on the inside. The conversation is sort of, we're close to the end. Things are looking good. Just the evil testers, they found some bugs. We're going to be a little bit late. So now we've got the $900,000 that we've spent of the million dollar budget. We only need another 300,000. So really, and the choice for the steering committee is give us another 300,000 or write off your total investment. And this is the sunk cost fallacy. So what happens when we get the $300,000 and the project manager goes away and now on month 13, they come back. Now it has gone red. Sorry, the evil testers, they found more bugs. We need another 400,000. The game of chicken continues again because now we are $1.3 million down or give me another $400,000. And we get the $400,000 and the average project is 172% of budget. And it's in the other side as well. What happens? It's October. The CFO asks for all project proposals for next financial year. You put in that proposal for two million dollars. What does the CFO give you? One million. So it's this chicken and mouse. The CFO knows that your numbers are made up. You know your numbers are made up. There's suddenly a surprise when it doesn't work out the way you expected. So how do you solve this? Go back. From a finance perspective, what's the easiest thing that you can do tomorrow to make just a small difference behind all of this? A capacity-based and working model is great, but that's going to take you some time. Lean budgeting, great. Still going to take you some time. Tomorrow morning, you're going to go to your office. What's one thing that you could do tomorrow just to get started? Start measuring the right thing. Absolutely. But how about this? Go have a conversation with your CFO. Seriously. We kind of have this antagonistic relationship with finance in many cases. This us first them. They hold the purse strings. We're sort of scared of them. We hate them because they're not allowing us to do our job. And yet somehow we forget that they're people. They actually want us to succeed, but that lack of respect goes both ways. So just start by having a conversation. Understand why did you cut our budget by 50% at the beginning. You knew we were going to ask for more money. So just start make friends with the CFO. They will be your biggest ally in anything that you do. Continuous. So that concept of the continuous flow of value rather than these big chunks of delivery. And in the IT space today, DevOps should be a given. It is just this should be the way that we build products. But we can do this concept of continuous marketing. Continuous feedback. Continuous financing and that is this. Small incremental pieces of value that we can validate. We can get feedback. We can change direction. It gives us the opportunity and the courage to change direction. So another question for you. Why do we want a continuous business? It's harder. It's certainly less predictable. Why do we want continuous everything in our organization? Okay. Those are great answers. Let me go. There we go. Great answer, but deeper. One level deeper is because the customer expects us to be continuous now. Our customer expectation of value, our customer's expectation of change, requires us to keep up. If we don't, our competitors will. I'm looking at value versus velocity. How many of you use story points as a way of measuring velocity in the organization? Common thing. Your story point graph looks something like this. The first few iterations, sprints, whatever. We're getting something. Really, now we get to a point where we have the MVP, the minimum viable product, and maybe we've released it and we're starting to get some real value. Actually, no, sorry, that's the story point graph. That's the velocity graph, one by one. But the value, first few iterations, MVP, we're starting to get some return. We're getting the must-haves, should-haves, and things are looking really good. Customers are liking the product, but now we're starting to get into here and value is starting to flatten out. If I've got a budget for the project, I'm going to go to here. If I'm the project manager, incentivized on time, on budget, on scope, I'm going to go to here. On the other hand, if we can look at value and say, you know what, there's a few stories in the backlog, they're really cool, but nobody really actually wants them. What if we stopped here? What if we saved these iterations worth of effort and moved a different stream of work to this team? Or maybe it's now the next release of that product which has a very different backlog? A new S-curve. Our product should be a series of S-curves. The art of product management is knowing when the S-curve is flattening. Customer feedback. Real feedback. We're measuring the impact of the work that we do. I'll come back to this slide because I want to get this in a second. We'll come back to those. That's a very good question. That takes us to the first exercise that we're going to do. There is a concept that you need to understand which is around outcomes over outputs. This means we need to know what is a business outcome. We need to know why we're doing the work that we do. The problem with most projects is the distance between the work and the outcome is very great. What we're going to introduce you to is a little tool that we use called an outcome profile. This is a very simple way of clearly articulating why you're doing something. We are going to build one of these in a group but let's do one together. Who is running a project right now? Fantastic. Tell me what is your project? We are developing a product for merchandise planning domain. Explain. What is the merchandise planning domain? Explain for everybody. It's for the planner and buyer to plan for the merchandise and forecast and do data analytics. Data analytics, planning system, forecasting system for purchasing merchandise. For retail stores. Fantastic. Who here knows the lean concept called 5WISE? 5WISE is usually used for root cause analysis where we have a problem and we want to go, what's the root cause behind this? Why, why, why, why? It's annoying when my 6 year old does it. It's really annoying when an agile coach does it but it's still an important tool. We're going to repurpose 5WISE. We're going to create a root outcome analysis. Sunita, you're building this merchandise planning tool. Why? Because the market is competitive. The customer wants it. It's one of the hot sellers in the market. That's what our product managers say. So it's a hot seller. The customer wants it. Why do they want it? So that they can do their planning better and make money. They can get more business value. So if they can plan better, what's the outcome of that? Making more profit. Making more profit. Let me pause for a second and just talk about outcomes. Why are you in business? Are you in business to make money? You are an amazing person. But he's also right. He's also right. Maybe not so quite so flowery as that. But you are not in business to make money. Let me say that again because it's controversial. Correct. You are in business for your customer. You are in business to create something of value for your customer. We still need to make a profit. And Frederick LaLuce, I think said it best in his book Reinventing Organizations when he said profit is like the air. We do not live to breathe, but we do need to breathe in order to live. So I don't become a doctor to make money. I become a doctor to save lives. At least if I'm a good doctor. However, I still need to make money so I can continue saving lives. So when you're doing your sort of root outcome analysis, when you get to make money, you've gone one step too far. Go back up a step. Because the purpose isn't to make money unless it's like a hedge fund. Your purpose is because your customers need to plan better. That is why. Sorry, I was talking about the customer purpose. No, no, no. Yes. But your customer's purpose is to plan better. If you sold them a product that let them plan better, have you been successful? Your purpose is ultimately your customer's purpose. So your outcome for your product is better planning. Now this here is what we call a vivid descriptor. It's a paragraph that describes the outcome. So we have a couple of words, right? Better planning. Very good. We want to articulate a little bit more about that. So it's used often in, say, vision statements and mission statements, but we use vivid descriptors here to describe an outcome. I'll give you an example. The Ford Motor Company, back in 1902-1903, set sort of a vision to democratize the automobile. Right? That was their outcome. But then they set these vivid descriptors that explained what they meant. And it was, I'm doing this from memory, so it wasn't these exact words, but along the lines of, we see a future in which no man, this was the 1900s, I'm sorry, on good salary cannot afford a car to enjoy God's green earth, that effect. So the vivid descriptor explains the outcome in a language that allows us to very clearly and emotively understand it. Now, an outcome is useless without a measure. I need to know how are we helping our customers plan better? So for this we have a number of measures. So the first of all, right? This is a slightly old version. So the first of all, how are you going to measure planning better? Well, how do they measure? Okay, so, I'm not sure, maybe like increase sales, let's for example say, reduce inventory. So inventory size is a measure. The baseline. What's their inventory today? Let's say it's 1,000 units for the sake of conversation. Then we have a target. If you can better plan, what should that inventory be? Just in time, zero. Zero is too far, let's say 10 units. You're going to have a little bit of stock. So our goal here as a product is to reduce by 1,000 to 190. So 99% reduction in inventory. That would be a huge success. That doesn't mean version 1 gives us a 99% increase in that. But it means that that's what we're working towards and that's what we're going to measure. Now, how often would you measure that? Every quarter. As needed, no. Good guess. All right. So let me explain about cadence. Cadence is how often you measure something. Now, if you can measure something automatically with no input, then the cadence of measure could be daily. But there is a cost to measurement. For example, the example up here, staff satisfaction. Let's say your customer satisfaction survey was a measure. You can't run a survey every day with people. The active measurement would actually decrease your customer satisfaction. So... Tell me how happy you are now. And tomorrow. And the next day. So, not going to happen. Now, you put a smiley face, sad face like they do in Singapore immigration as you walk out the turnstile to work, I might be able to get daily measurement as they walk out. So there's different ways that you could change the measurement. The question is, if you had an automated information from some sort of CRM or stock control system that said their inventory was today X, then you could measure that on a day-by-day basis. Right? If, however, it was a hey customer X, how's your inventory going? In that case, yes. We are talking about a monthly or quarterly measure. Now, here's the other thing. The longer the measurement cycle, let me go backwards. Sorry. This. The longer the measurement cycle, the slower it is for you to make a decision and to inspect and adapt. So, shorter measurement cycles are better as long as the active measurement does not impede or impact on the work that you're trying to do. Understood? So, in the case of stock control, if it's manual, let's say it was monthly. Right? There's things like dependencies and ownership and all that sort of thing, but we're not going to worry about that for this example. So, do you understand? Five Ys to get to the root outcome, and then we need to know how we're going to measure it. And in fact, we can have multiple measures per outcomes. And also similarly with five Ys, we can have multiple outcomes for any given project. But here's what we're going to do. We need you to break into teams of six ish. So, tables, groups. Each table will have two groups and other groups around. Grab a piece of paper. So, each group, just pause for a second. Don't start just yet. Each group. Pick one person. One project in that group. It doesn't matter which one. And that person is sort of the host. Everyone else's job is to sort of interrogate, to find out, learn about their project. If your project is commercial incompetence, don't volunteer. So, everyone around you, learn about that project and then ask them those five Ys. Why is it? And remembering, if you get some money, you've gone too far. Now, if you find that it's unclear, if it doesn't have a clear outcome, then for the sake of this exercise, skip it and pick another one. In the real world, if the outcome is unclear, you probably don't want to do that project. But for the sake of the exercise, because we do want to go through and build this outcome profile. So, does everyone understand what we're asking them to do? Make sure you have on the big pieces of paper. Pick that topic. We want the outcome. You don't have to write the vivid descriptors if you don't want to. We need the measure. We need the baseline. So, each table will split into two and you might get some of the stragglers, the hangarons around. So, pick one person who is going to be, who's actually doing a project. You can't sit here. You can't sit here. You can't sit here. You can't sit here. You can't sit here. That's the product. It's cost of the work. It's the way you do it. I don't want to do a project. My idea is that I should be healthy. I don't want to go on a rally where I'm not making a dentist to work with that particular person. It's the least amount of money that you can make. So, it was custom-made. We can take some Indian medicine. Do you think we beat the fine bud? No. Okay. She was explaining how to do a service. It's easier to maintain. It's easier to roll out changes. It's a multiple platform. This is one of the seven and you buy it. You buy it. Okay. Okay, so at the back there. Okay. Sorry. In our case, the outcome, the project first. Let's talk about the project. This project is about delivering better customer-made furniture made as per requirements for conservative people. That's the basic description of what it is. We have got a baseline measure that we will be using. NPS or target would be between 9 and 10 that we need to have. Measurement would be with every order and the cadence of keeping track would be monthly. Alright. So, improving the experience when people are buying furniture. Who else? Yeah, so we have done the five vice on the project. So, we are calling this project one. The main outcome of this is to basically reduce time for publishing scientific content. And the first why was basically why are we doing this? So, the answer was increase publications count. And why do we want to increase the publications count to have an increase in the market share? And why do we want to increase the market share? So, the company is already a market leader in this particular domain. So, it needs to maintain its market leadership. Now, the question is why do we want to maintain the market leadership because it would attract more researchers to come up with their publications, attract more researchers and sustainability is a factor. And at the end of the day, why is this matter? It's basically profits. Right. What's the measure? It's annual. So, it's annual. The number of publications is annual. So, the numbers are huge. So, the measure is number of number of publications. You obviously have a baseline number of thousands and a target number which is two thousands or whatever those numbers happen to be and you're measuring. Now, measuring annually is a bad idea because you can only change annually. So, you'd probably want to measure per publication. Okay. Actually, we were doing in terms of outcome. So, we were actually thinking whether it is an outcome or a goal. So, what is the kind of difference between an outcome and a goal because we wanted to reduce the number of publications or reduce the number of manuscript by 85% or something. So, we were a little confused whether it is a goal or an outcome. Outcome, objective, goal, direction. Benefits. A lot of different words that have very similar meanings. So, to keep it simple for the time being, whether you call it an outcome or something else, whether it is measurable and has a business advantage, then that's what we are consoling an outcome. If it is inspiring, a direction where we want the entire company going in that direction, but we may not necessarily measure what that is, then that's a goal or a vision. So, one is meant for communication and inspiration. One is meant for measurement and decision making. Does that make sense? And arose by any other name. I don't care what you call it. Different organizations call it outcomes or objectives or benefits. It could be a goal. It's different matters. But it's measurable and it is governance decisions made based on this information. That's those are the characteristics, whatever you happen to call it. Okay. So, this is really hard and back in my consulting days we would run these exercises with rooms full of business executives from a company and we could spend an entire day just trying to get them to understand why they were in business. These are the owners of the companies struggling to understand who their customer was and why they existed. And this is part of the problem. We get so sunk into this idea of the work that we do that we lose sight of why we do the work. This is a concept of value over busy. Anyone heard of dude's law before? The late Dave husband was the dude and he gave us this really simple formula which is incredibly difficult to actually apply in organizations. Value is why divided by how. The why is that outcome benefit. The why we are doing this how is what do we need to do to do it. The activities, the some cost of the work to achieve it. And defining value is always hard. But if we don't define value then we have no way of truly setting direction in the products that we are building. And we'll skim over that one and we'll think about how do we break this work down? What are the activities that we need to do? You could use user stories you could use story mapping but I'm going to work on the premise that everyone here is familiar with story mapping, right? And user stories but we're not going to teach you how to do user stories. Some versions of this workshop some audiences we do have to because they haven't come across it. But a tool, a technique that is in the book is the activity canvas. So let's be clear the work that you do the value creating work inside a project or inside any other governance structure is the same. That there's a better way of being a better developer or a better way of selling custom furniture. What we are saying is that the governance structure around it, we can have better, more effective, more efficient. So we work from the premise that technical excellence is your baseline in the way that you do work. So what that work is. Let's think about the work that you do. We have a continuous flow of work, right? Now, here's the challenge. If I'm building a project whether it's an agile project or a non-adjustable project doesn't matter I have a work breakdown structure I have as a scope because it's fixed time, fixed scope I don't define, if it's agile I don't define the user stories up front but I still know what I'm doing the high level scope and the rough order I'm doing it. We now have a continuous flow a stable team that's going to stay together not for 3 months but for 12 months and they're going to work on something and that something is going to achieve an outcome and they're going to achieve the highest value outcome they possibly can and they're going to make decisions on a day by day basis as to which work is going to have the maximal impact on the outcome and if they may when I get started I don't know what that work is all I know is what work am I going to do today? What's the best work I'm going to do today? So, we developed this concept called an activity canvas it is very simple, you've probably seen things like this before in different forms or different structures this is a form of prioritization, a form of value sense making there are it's two axes value and effort quadrant one do these are high value low effort do them as quickly as you can as early as you can defer high value, high effort still important to do but do them later don't do them straight away limit low value low effort if you have time sure, pick one or two of them get them done and actually I'll come back to that and then avoid low value, high effort these are things which honestly you shouldn't be doing now but Evan why would I put anything in a void because this is an active tool something that today is high value sorry that's low value and high effort over time might become more important suddenly the CEO of your customer is asking for this feature suddenly that's a lot more important than it was yesterday or we've built a lot of the underpinning technology so now you know what it's no longer a three month piece of work it's now a two day piece of work so it's now low effort so whatever's in this board is going to change dependencies and reprioritization changes of expectation from the customer whatever changes this is how we're going to track it and let's be clear the status quo not doing anything is the easiest possible thing that you can do there's no value in doing nothing in fact there's negative value in doing nothing but that's a more complicated discussion and it of course takes no effort so the status quo let's be honest is an option and there will come a point when that is the best option and that is the point at which you stop work it's when there is nothing left that is valuable to be done and the status quo is where you want to stay now, yes between defer and limit which one should go first, give me a second I will answer that question the upcoming box we put on the side because this is an active tool everything that's in these quadrants you could take any one of these and start working on it today upcoming are things that we need to plan for in the future but we can't do so think of it in terms of your definition of ready anything that meets your definition of ready sits on the board anything that's not ready because it's got a critical dependency or because from a time we need to wait until after the financial year or after some particular point in time before we can do it sits, we don't want to lose it so it sits in the upcoming box now two other characteristics to be aware of can we go next next, there we go order the ideal order is top left down to bottom right now we're going to weave back and forth across there two things which are equal flip a coin it doesn't matter it really doesn't matter which one you do first two things if something is not equal then it tells you where to go which one to go first now this requires an architecture for your system whether it's technological or not that allows for that modular design but if we're talking DevOps, if we're talking services we've already got the architecture we have those patterns in place we're not going to go into those details if we're talking say marketing and a marketing series of campaigns then we have systems in place agile marketing practices that allow us to do continuous marketing versus the project based marketing so it doesn't really matter what work you're doing as long as you've got the business architecture in place to do the highest value effort work first but we don't always because this is business and sometimes we have to do things that aren't optimum first we have a key resource because of course we don't call them people in business we call a key person a key piece of talent that we've only got for two weeks so we're going to do anything with that person that we need to in those two weeks they may not be the most valuable but we're still going to do it because common sense tells us we're going to do it first or it might be a due date it's got to be done by the end of the financial year or it's got to be done before some key milestone so we do that one first so we can break and go we're going to do this and then we're going to go top left to bottom right so common this is a way of checking and validating the work that you're doing without losing common sense make sense simple so let's do this ah, sorry that's a very good question business value let's talk about effort for a second who estimates effort anyone disagree with that good good yes the team estimates effort who estimates value and remember this is an estimate of value we don't know for sure how much value until after it's done not the team customer at the end it's the customer or the product owner as the customer's proxy okay so we want during sort of regular planning whatever engagement let's say we're using scrum as a wrapper for some of this then during that planning session during the product backlog is being built the customer or the product owner estimates the value the team estimates the effort and I'm going to challenge that those are not customer centric as a customer I care about security I care about performance as the customer surrogate the product owner must be able to say yeah I can distinguish between the value to the organization of putting in a security framework versus a performance performance elements of the product and if truly it has no customer value don't do it the question is like whether the business value gets re-scoped or the scope gets widened whether it is from the product owner or from the customer side then the impact will be on the estimated effort yeah so I mean how do we manage that first question and second where do we put this I mean in the do differ we move it around so we thought it was low effort high business value oh shucks we've done a little bit of exploration that's really high effort business value is still high so now we've got to have the conversation do we do this next or do we do that one next and doing the only decision I need to make with this tool is what do I do next and top left that's what I do next obviously common sense applies this is around how do we when we're tracking every day we're going what's the next thing we do who's going to do it as an active tool put this on the board, post it notes track it regularly and there's going to be things on there that will come off as an idea that is on the board and never gets done and that's okay because we are a real stable team we're going to keep working on these activities towards an outcome we're going to measure that outcome in the case of better planning every month and every single one of these activities will have an imperceptible value so here's the thing we don't measure value per activity we say this is more valuable than this by the way it's all relative estimation I don't say this has X value all I care about is it's more valuable that's really all I care about so in the case of better planning every month how are we what's the inventory is it less than it was last month great we are on trend I don't even care about numbers I care about trends so every month I want the inventory to go down down down down that's my goal in the case of the work if the trend starts going up then as a team I have a decision to make do I change the direction take all the stuff off and go strategic plan we have an outcome of reducing inventory we're not doing that let's change or two do we change team maybe we don't have the right skills in the team maybe we need some supply chain expert in the team as well so we'll evolve the team option three maybe we've actually reached an end the target of 99% was never achievable in any imagination maybe we hit 80% and then plateaued let's leave it there is that good enough great now let's repurpose and let's build the next product or the next thing and that's the end so we're always tracking that trend we're always this is just to go what's next make sense yes so how often do we update or refine this canvas constantly as often as is needed like with all governance any governance that you have will have an imposition of time and effort so if your work operates on a daily basis this could replace your Kanban board or the backlog column on your Kanban board and it's just something you update on a during a daily stand up or a planning session on a week or at the beginning of a sprint hang on him first very good so a lot of it will be in here and these are the sorry these aren't stories these are epics at that level think of it in terms of when you're doing measurements so every you have a weekly sprint for example you know you're going to do 10 different your velocity says I can do 10 story points per sprint or 100 story points per sprint whatever number it happens to be right doesn't matter if you're not measuring the impact on the outcome until the end of the sprint and that doesn't matter what order you do the stuff in that sprint no so overloading your prioritization in the sprint it's more effort than it's worth even before the sprint because the order of which you do it in the sprint doesn't matter that's true but that's why we're doing it at the higher level if it makes sense in your context to do it in the sprint or before the sprint go ahead but in my experience doing it that frequently is actually more effort than the value of that governance just a timing point folks we have been told we can carry on in this space until 5 o'clock because the talk that was going to come after it has been cancelled that's because wife is ill and they've had to leave so up to you if we want to carry on until 5 o'clock and do the next activity otherwise we've got 5 minutes left one last question so trying to understand your rationale about values very clearly why are we bringing estimated effort with respect to time even is there anything like a sprint more or something because even Scrumtide doesn't say any descriptive approach to the estimation in the first place and no point are we saying how to estimate so some of these conversations I think we can take it a little bit afterwards but I will say all we need to know is the order highest value, lowest effort first I don't need to know how much effort I don't need to estimate I don't need to know if it's going to take one day or one week so there's always some number to begin with that in itself is not a great starting point so when you do your forecasting just with that bigger number just trying to understand so these efforts are relative to whatever items that are coming so it will take care of those different so let's take a pause too many questions for a second sorry I will come back so let's do this in 5 minutes I want you just on that paper take this outcome on the poster notes in front of you I want you to create 10 activities make them up just 10 epic big picture things that you're going to create put them just on a sheet of paper don't order them yet once you've got the 10 draw this quadrant effort and value the person whose project it is estimate base and this is purely for the sake of practice so it's not perfect look at how much you think it's going to take relative to everything else which are the easiest and which are the most valuable and put them on that quadrant really is just that relative to yeah yeah it's within it's within the bounds of a single stream of work one activity canvas per outcome whichever works for you put them in the axis if you got 6 use 6 wait how easy is this how easy is this How easy is this how easy is this how easy is this how easy is this how easy is this how easy is this deciding on the business value is hard deciding on the effort is hard you know what it's hard and that's one of the and it generates the discussion a lot of discussion and that's exactly what we want yeah and that exactly what we want because what is happening is we're exposing uncertainties and unknowns and we're forcing us to go and explore deeper and get answers so if something is up in the high business value high car high effort we're saying defer but we really want to do that what can we do to slice it meant to move it to lower effort for instance what's the smallest piece there's what likely to be a lot of uncertainty in that and so it goes on yeah yeah yeah then do it first then do it that's where the common sense comes in so so okay let me close this off all right so what do we have we have not a project we have a continuous flow a continuous delivery of value which means we have a stable team one team seven plus or minus two people or two teams or ten teams doesn't matter let's say let's say it's one team we have a team they stay together the membership might change new people might come in right but the knowledge of that product stays we have a product right we have an outcome we know that this team is accountable for an outcome that team is accountable to achieve a reduction in inventory they are accountable to achieve improved nps in terms of buying furniture right they have a reason for existing and that reason isn't to do work that reason is to achieve an outcome the team we measure the outcome monthly daily not yearly that's a bad example per publication doesn't really matter how but we measure the outcome we have a CFO who is looking at those measurements and and there is a leadership team in conjunction with this team going are you doing the right thing is the trend of that outcome positive is inventory going down month on month is nps going up delivery by delivery is publication numbers going up month by month right we're checking and if the answer is no right we make a decision change stop continue and that and we're looking at that measure all the time are we making an impact and remember the s-curve you're not going to make an impact on the outcome at the beginning we know this the CFO knows this but at a certain point that's when we go are you still doing the right thing and then as a team we need to decide what is the right thing what is the next thing we need to do what is the thing we do after that and after that and after that and then at a certain point we have built a governance system that allows us to create value continuously with limited management inputs I have the decision and authority rights to go or stop depending on how the business outcome is going and at no point have I created a project management plan at no point am I measuring time cost or scope and at no point do I stop because an arbitrary budget point has been reached right I stop when the value is ended I continue while there is value I deliver the most valuable work that I possibly can regardless of what I thought was valuable 12 months ago and our customer is happy it's our customer who will come back because it's who we're doing this for we're going to stop this here thank you very much we have time for some questions but we'll we'll shut this down and if you have any questions please come and have a conversation what was the toughest question we got today oh yes oh who that that was a that was definitely worth what was the toughest question and and I think was an excellent and Raj for society a good answer so thank you very much everyone feel free to come and I'll send questions later if you need yes we want to treat the vendor as part of a team so the relationship changes from a confrontational to a collaborative team and and one of the things that I wanted my vendor engagement thank you I want this the vendor people to be as stable as the customer people and now you and then you're setting yourself up to lose a huge amount of institutional knowledge and that's the realities so the the behaviors that we see in the marketplace drive value out of businesses and maybe it's time we stop chatting stop behaving like that yeah and treat your vendor as people who are part of your stable team and if you and what we do see there are contracting models and procurement models that that do result in better alignment it does happen