Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
This was part of the culture of the organization at GEAR. The VP had listened
to me. He knew the way this organization ran and what needed to be done for
a project to succeed at GEAR. He knew what I didn't know because I hadn't
worked in this environment. This turned out to be one of the most important
decisions making the process improvement project at GEAR a success.
Optimization B: Facilitating a Process Writing Working Group
Effectively
BOND was one of the first organizations to use the tailored TWG approach
for Agile organizations. The tailoring was based on a streamlining I devel-
oped largely from participating in process working groups in more
traditional development organizations. If you don't have experience facili-
tating a process writing working group, you can quickly find yourself in
trouble. While we avoided a number of the traditional problems, new
lessons always emerge.
One of my biggest frustrations—and this continued at BOND to a degree—is
the amount of thrashing and rehashing of information that is only tangen-
tially relevant to the goals of a process writing working group. I find that
exorbitant amounts of time are often spent in areas that contain little payback
associated with the goals of the effort. We solved some of this at BOND, but I
still felt greater efficiency gains could be made if we had set the context and
the goal for the group more effectively up front.
A significant efficiency was gained at BOND through the roles of SME and
“Doer.”
7
This helped us minimize the time required by valuable SMEs. How-
ever, the way we extracted process information at BOND produced a great
deal of extraneous discussion and data that still needed to be filtered off-line.
Feedback from participants indicated that they didn't feel their time in the
group was always well spent. They felt much of the project-specific discus-
sions weren't relevant to them.
Part of this was caused by the way the task was laid out to the group in start-
ing the working group brainstorming discussions. The discussion was open
to all to describe what they do on their project with respect to the relevant
process area. The process improvement leader at BOND and I had a discus-
sion about this off-line. She had felt it was fine for all to listen to this
project-specific information because it provided some cross-training. My
7. Refer to Chapter 4 for more about “SME” and “Doer” roles in an Agile Technical Working Group.
