Weeknotes 436
I did:
Unassailable good
This week has involved a lot of challenging assumptions about whether something is really a good thing to do and what unintended consequences might arise, and also I…
- Learned more about how product, insights and finance can work together, especially around high-quality hypotheses and crunching the numbers to understand the benefits our work delivers. I’m going to write it up for other product managers to use.
- Went a talk about what is product management by Pippa Peasland, head of product at Vypr. It was really good, and everyone I spoke to afterwards thought so too.
- Presented our approach to reporting the financial benefits we expect to achieve to our steering group.
- Led another product manager development session where we talked about how product managers can create a balanced definition of product success.
- Talked (too much) about delivery management, what problems in solves in an organisation, and why it’s essential when teams are tackling complicated problems.
- Went to our product communities of practice session. It was really good to get so many product people together. I know from my chats with people that we have so much product knowledge, experience and expertise, but it’s spread out and hard to share and learn from.
- Looked at future (like, twenty years future, not next six months) opportunities for our product to grow and provide more value. I have to keep my critical thinking hat on and stop myself from assuming things like centralising a function, having a single source of reporting data, and building capability around a single piece of tech are inherently good things.
- I learned that the proof is not in the pudding, it’s in the eating.
What’s the difference between delivery managers, project managers and scrum masters
I tried to organise some of my thoughts on the difference between delivery managers, project managers and scrum master roles. I think it’s probably my most read in the first week post ever with over a hundred views.
I read/watched:
Conceptualising the interrelation between individual and collaborative work
The insight I took from this study is that collaborative time is best used for shaping and creating a shared understanding about the work (what they call maturation), and individual time is used more for doing the work (what they call execution). It also talks about some of the problems that come up between these two types of work; not having enough time for individual work and that time being too fragmented, because individual time is often not actively planned for, and the hidden work of “unanticipated volumes of coordination and rework” from poorly facilitated collaborative sessions and how understanding complicated things relies on people taking the time to think and reflect to come up with questions. They conclude that “Teams need to reach common ground concerning when, where and how work gets done.”, which fits the team autonomy narrative but doesn’t recognise the need for an enabling environment.
Also, any product managers building calendar or collaborative working tools (Notion, Trello, Jira -type tools) should be considering how to differentiate between these different types of work.
A project with no meetings
I watched a webinar about how Atlassian ran a project without any meetings. They basically said everyone made videos instead. Personally, I think the talk I did ages ago for DigiScot was better.
I do not think it means what you think it means
Who could resist a Princess Bride themed article about team performance? “…if they did the things that actually drove and supported high performance, it wouldn’t be called a new performance initiative in the first place. It would be called good management.”
A timeline of Earth’s temperature
I thought about:
Service and product are the same thing
When someone in an organisation tries to define the difference between a product and service it almost always turns into a show of power with whoever is doing the defining making their thing the more important of the two. That’s why we should always question who is doing the defining and why those things need to be defined.
In days gone by, there was a clearer distinction between a service and a product, but nowadays they are the same thing. And so it’s useful for product managers and service designers to work together equally (not where one has more organisational power than the other) so that the different perspectives overlap and work together to create a better product/service.
Small world
A friend of mine mentioned that a friend of hers had worked on introducing some new software where I work on the same day that I was unknowingly talking to the person that manages that software for us. Maybe small world theory should inform how we build social networks in our organisations. Be more Kevin Bacon.
Having a voice
Some people and some teams have a louder voice within any organisation than others, that’s the nature of hierarchies and getting things done. But if you want a more egalitarian organisation, then how the quieter voices get heard matters.
Questions for leaders
This week, did you…
- Listen more than speak?
- Ask more than tell?
- Encourage more than correct?
- Connect more than divide?
- Give power more than hoard it?
And if you didn’t, are you going to create more opportunities for you to next week?
What’s the difference between a delivery manager, a project manager and a scrum master
Delivery manager, project manager and scrum master are three quite distinct roles, but with a lot in common. Although each role is a valuable in it’s own right, for either of the roles to provide value, and for a person in a role to be successful, it’s important that the right role is selected for the circumstances. Exploring the commonalities and differences can help with matching the role to the working environment.
What the roles have in common
Delivery manager, project manager and scrum master are all non-authoritative. They don’t direct people or assign work. They exist to support teams to focus on the value-driving work by taking on the meta-work – the work that makes work possible – including things like planning, coaching and reporting. With so much overlap between the three, a Venn diagram helps us see some of the activities and responsibilities the roles take on.
What makes the roles unique
Delivery manager
Purpose: Enabling team health.
Responsibility: Creating an enabling environment by removing impediments, facilitation and coaching.
Method: Agnostic. Delivery management doesn’t follow any specific methodologies and can work equally well whatever methodology a team is using.
Best environment: Cross-functional teams tackling ambiguous problems.
Success measures: Individual’s purpose, autonomy and mastery.
Project manager
Purpose: Monitoring unplanned deviations.
Responsibility: Managing the day-to-day progress of a project to ensure it follows the plan.
Method: Predictive. Project methodologies (sometimes called waterfall) that involve upfront planning, reporting against the plan, and triggering corrective actions.
Best environment: Established project teams working on delivering known solutions.
Success measures: Project scope, schedule, budget.
Scrum master
Purpose: Improving team workflow.
Responsibility: Establishing Scrum and helping the team inspect and adapt their practice to become more effective.
Method: Adaptive, and Scrum specifically.
Best environment: Scrum team.
Success measures: Team velocity, throughput, sprint burndown.
Which role fits where
A delivery manager fits best as a part of a multi-disciplinary team tackling novel and ambiguous problems, where the organisational environment contains challenges for the team, and the team is open to being supported to tackling the challenges and removing impediments.
A project manager fits well in a team and organisation that is working on things that can be well-defined upfront, usually because they’ve been done many times before. Although project management has started to adopt adaptive methodologies, it still works best with pre-defined scope, budget and schedule.
A scrum master only works in a scrum team. That’s the only setting where a scrum master can be successful. Scrum master isn’t a profession in the same way delivery management and project management are, in that there is no career progression path of scrum master, senior scrum master, head of scrum mastery.
References
Association for project management. What does a project manager do?
Atlassian. What is a project manager? Responsibilities and best practices explained.
Everyday Agile. 2023. What Is Agile Delivery Management?
Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework. 2022. Delivery manager.
Project management institute. What is a Project Manager?
Metz, T. The 10 Most Helpful Agile Metrics According to Experts.
The 2020 Scrum Guide. 2020. Scrum master.
Webber, E. 2016. Explaining the role of a Delivery Manager.
Williams. J. 2021. What’s wrong with delivery management?
Lots of little theories
Matt Ballantine mentioned lots of little theories. Little theories are a great way of holding onto a questions while you look for signals to prove or disprove them, so I thought I’d make a note of some of mine.
- The number of conversations leaders have with people below their pay grade and outside their reporting line is a leading indicator of organisational culture change.
- Organisational self-image explains culture better than the behaviours of individuals.
- Four day working weeks reverses Brook’s Law. It isn’t (only) less time at work that creates the benefits, it’s that everyone spending less time reduces the coordination challenge by 20% which is a massive efficiency/effectiveness gain.