VMO/ Product Office ways of working

Welcome to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock discuss the complexities of adopting new ways of working at scale. Hello and welcome to another exciting episode of Definitely Maybe Agile with your hosts, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock. How are you today, Dave?

I'm doing fantastically well. So it sounds like, well, spring is in the air, right? So we're we're enjoying uh getting outside and beginning to move away from winter thinking.

Yes, yes, which I like because it means I've got a chance to get out and get some runs in and realize just uh how out of shape I got over the uh window.

So over the yes, exactly. Well, maybe uh let's uh try and pick up a little bit where we left off the last time we chatted, which was we talked about that value management office, or we often refer to as the product office. And uh we promised to kind of dig into a few things. And I wanted in particular to start off with understanding how the ways of working around a value management office differ from those that we might associate with a project management office.

Yeah, and I think this is a a good topic because there's some very key elements that the value management office is uh bringing into the organization. And there's pieces that uh and behaviors that they're looking to uh get the organization to adopt. Things like we're not gonna try and boil the ocean, we're gonna start small and iterate, we're gonna look for like continual delivery of increments of value versus um multi-year complex plans, which we uh all know are absolutely worthless the moment you start. Uh all of this kind of thing.

Well, it's that shift from project thinking of it's a big piece of change, we're going to plan everything out and then work the plan, to product thinking, which is we're going to be working in this environment, this product value stream, if you like, for X years. So, how do we set things up so that we can we can build it incrementally, we can steer as we get feedback and so on. And it's a different mindset. If we all come together for a project and then we all leave again, versus we're building a team that this is going to be our home for a while and we need to kind of look after it and grow it. And we don't necessarily know where it's going to end up, right?

Right, exactly. And so building teams that are able to learn as they go along, adapt to what happens, and uh start to and do those do small increments which are delivering value, which they can then learn from is the is the critical part of this. And the value management office is a a key area where you can that can help with adopting these practices and building these teams in your organization.

As you're mentioning that, this is I'm almost imagining the key that opens the door to the value management office or to that idea of product versus project thinking, maybe the start of it is understanding the the shift, like the the move away from resource management as your primary way of getting work done. So, what I'm familiar with, what I often experience when we work with organizations which have a strong project management office, that PMO structure, a big uh kind of lever that is often relied on to move things across whatever milestone, whatever finishing lines they have to move across, is the concept of being able to go in and move resources around, get people who you trust effectively and pull them together to actually get one part of your portfolio across the line. And I think the shift away from resource management to dedicated teams where now it's a hands-off, we're not going to go in and start moving people around, we're going to stabilize those teams and we have to now rethink how we get problems solved and how we succeed as a value management office is a huge, it's that first key that opens it. It's one of the critical things. If you don't have it, it ain't gonna happen.

Are you trying to say that um having 10% of many different people's time uh brought together for a very temporary period to actually deliver on something doesn't work? But but we do this all the time. Doesn't that work?

Well, I I think the thing to watch for is it works in the sense that it has worked in the paradigms we've worked in in the past. It's been good enough. But as we get stronger and stronger, really, that there's big drivers, and a lot of those drivers are around speed, and speed comes at a cost, and it comes at an efficiency cost, if you like. I can be super efficient in order to use my super highly expensive developer DBA, whatever that role is. And if I have that the biggest impact on my cost is the the skill set that I'm paying for, then yes, I need to be able to manage their time percent by percent. And let's not talk about the adding it all up and and finding it comes over 100% all the time. But there's a problem with it, right?

So I was gonna say, sorry, wait, so so when doing that, do you slice horizontally or vertically?

I know I know we're trying to dig in there, but I'm trying to just recognize. I mean, of course, yes, we we have been working in this field long enough, if you like, uh, don't have much truck with this whole idea of um slicing and dicing people's time. We don't like that. Put them on a team, get them surrounded by teammates that are there for the long haul. They're going to outperform any sort of resource-managed effort that you can do in most of the context that we're looking at.

Yes, I completely agree. And I've I've seen this time and time again in organizations. It's uh uh it is one of the key elements, uh, but it takes some time and then takes some effort because there's a lot of uh ingrained thinking that says that this isn't the way that we should do things. And what about my um my initiative? What about my project? What about my thing that I want to get done? Okay, I just need I just need uh a few days of your time to get this done, and then all of a sudden uh you find everything's fragmented all over the place again.

And uh and I mean I think once you have that, then the next piece that you have. So now that we've looked at the people in the organization and how we, you know, we stop resource managing in the sense of moving people around, we start looking at the work, this now turns our attention to that work. And one of the things that we need to recognize here is that we're wanting to deliver in short timelines. And this is the this outcomes over output or activity. We focus on outcomes, but if we're focusing on outcomes, let's say over 18 months, well, you're going to end up focusing on the activity because that time frame is way too long. I can't go to my stakeholders and say we're still on track for this 18-month delivery of outcomes, but if we're measuring outcomes, it's zero, zero, zero, zero for 18 months until we we get all of the outcome at one point. So we need to kind of break that work down into short, deliverable chunks of value of outcome that we can kind of corral all the work around. And now then we're replacing resource management with work management because we're now looking at these shorter periods of time in the outcomes delivered there. And our goal is we better deliver that outcome in that period of time so we can now kind of coordinate that work. And I think this is a bit that's often missed is is even if we're working on you know 18-month programs with significant investment behind it, we still need to think of that in sort of two months or three-month chunks of outcome of delivery that makes sense.

Yeah, and uh that's uh actually one of my favorite workshops to run is uh outcome mapping exercises where we we do exactly that, work out what are the outcomes and then break it down into the small outcomes and the impediments. Uh, that's uh it's uh a favorite of mine. I enjoy that. Uh so how would you sum this up in uh in three points for our listeners?

Well, I think we uh great point. First of all, we we talked a little bit about the key to getting into the value management office is the the need to work towards dedicated teams and and that whole shift, like stop resource managing. How do you get to the point where resource management is really not your de facto way of solving problems? Um the second bit we just ended up talking about is this idea of being outcome product versus project and outcome-based, but outcome in the short term. So we can't just wait 18 months, but how do we get an outcome that's that's maybe three months, two months, one month, whatever it is, but a short period. And I think that the other piece that we touched on right at the outset is small and iterate, start small. And this is that, you know, even if we know the program we're on, there's a two or a three or a four-year time frame on this, which is still possible in all of this. We still need to have a good idea of where we're going, but we've got to focus on the small stuff that we're doing now, right? Rather than worrying about where we're going to have to be in 12 months, 15 months, 18 months time. I think there's those three things really stand out in my mind.

I'd I'd agree. I think they're uh there are critical pieces that uh I think every uh value management office uh from a ways of working perspective should be looking at for sure. Uh so with that, we'll wrap up for this conversation today. And if you uh wish to reach out to us, you can at feedback@definitely maybeagile.com. And I'll uh look forward to the conversation next time. Great. Thanks again, Peter. You've been listening to Definitely Maybe Agile, the podcast where your hosts, Peter Maddison and Dave Sharrock, focus on the art and science of digital, agile, and DevOps at scale.